Native son and author Rafael Alvarez returns to Baltimore this weekend for the Baltimore Book Festival. His crime drama, “Life,” premiered Wednesday onNBC.
Alvarez, a Baltimore Sun reporter for 23 years and a writer for HBO?s “The Wire,” said Charm City is never far from his thoughts. It permeates two collections of his newspaper stories,
“Hometown Boy” and “Storyteller”; his book “The Wire: Truth Be Told”; and his fiction, including “The Fountain of Highlandtown: Stories.”
How did newspaper work shape your fiction?
It allowed me to be a student of the great subject of my life, Baltimore. I was invited into the kitchens of families whose loved ones had been murdered. I?d go to Mrs. Smith?s house for an interview for 10 or 12 hours and end up writing 12 paragraphs but had all this stuff left over.
What?s it like to return home this weekend?
My parents still live in Baltimore. I still own the house my father grew up in Highlandtown. Reading at the festival is the cherry on top. I get to eat a home-cooked meal with my parents. I like to say that I work in L.A. but I live in Baltimore.
Tell me about your new projects.
My new TV show, “Life,” premiered [Wednesday] night. It was a red-carpet gig. Here I am, a Highlandtown boy on the red carpet! My daughter, Amelia, was my date. She is the Oscar Mayer wiener girl. We are the Highlandtown Coppolas. If you would have told me when I was 25, hanging around East Baltimore, drinking beer at the Elvis Bar, that my daughter and I would be walking down the red carpet at the premiere for a prime-time show I wrote, I would have said you must be out of your mind.
