Saul Fussiner will be reading at the Difficult to Name Reading Series in New Haven on Feb. 18. 

Saul Fussiner will be reading at the Difficult to Name Reading Series in New Haven on Feb. 18

You do a lot of great work in the community surrounding education in addition to your creative endeavors with writing. How do you balance those two passions with the rest of your life?

I am unable to balance it anymore. Imagine my life as an apple cart. The wheels have come loose and the cart is lying still in the street. The apples are all over the place, bruised and mushy. I would not advise you to eat them.

Can you recommend a place in New Haven people should check out?

Besides the wonderful and mysterious Institute Library? I think people should cross the town line into Hamden and discover the wide range of performances and the incredible video archive at Best Video. Like the Institute Library, it's a cultural and community gem, unsullied by the corporate chain store feel of so much else in America today. These places are like celebrations of the human spirit to me now, the last authentic things standing. And I also recommend the upstart pizza places Da Legna and One6Three.

What can people expect from your reading?

A few years ago, Chris Arnott called my writing "scintillatingly self-aware." I aspire to live up to that phrase. I hope that I do.