Aaron Burch is the author of an essay collection, A Kind of In-Between, and a novel, Year of the Buffalo, among others. He is currently the editor of Short Story, Long and HAD. He grew up in Tacoma, lives in metro Detroit, and his next book, TACOMA, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books. He is bad about updating it but does have a website here.
There's this weird moment that happens when writers are introduced to literature that is alternative to the mainstream, outside of major cities (and even within them) it still seems you have to be shown it exists. So, for me, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips told me about this dude in NY who had a workshop and that I should call him, turns out to be Bud Smith, and from there it was like a new section of the world opened up for me. Truly changed my life. Now...I'm not trying to make you out as a dinosaur, but was that even a scene back when you started Hobart? Or did you create it out of the lack of awareness of emerging writers in 2001?
Ha! There was definitely a scene then. I think, in some ways, it could be argued that there was an even bigger scene than now?
I think many artists, of all mediums, have this moment where you're first exposed to something outside the mainstream (sometimes it is even in the mainstream, but for various reasons outside of your sphere of awareness!) that you didn't even know exists but that opens up the world for you. Even changes your life!
I tell versions of this often, and so sometimes just feel like I have a few stories that I repeat over and over and over, while at the same time am never totally hubristic enough to assume people have heard me tell it before. In college, I worked at Barnes & Noble, and often specifically in magazines. One day we were unboxing new issues of, like, New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and Cosmo and Cat Fancy, and just all of those kinds of magazine rack mags, and then we opened a box and it was full of maybe just 12 or 16 copies of McSweeney's #4. I'd never seen anything like it! It was a small box, inside of which was a bunch of individual stories, each as its own pamphlet. I thought it was just so cool and interesting and weird. I was pretty immediately intrigued and interested and won over. This would have been 2000.
From there, I found the McSweeney's website, and I bought every single one of the first 4 or 5 or 10 books McSweeney's published. And it just opened up this world of contemporary writing that felt new and exciting and often playful and funny and cool. I think, for people around my age, if you got into writing, McSweeney's was probably incredibly important to that.
And then, from there, I discovered other early online literary journals, like Pindeldyboz and eyeshot and Opium and Sweet Fancy Moses. Again, if you've been doing this as long as I have, those names probably also mean a lot. If you're younger, they probably mean nothing at all. Which opens up another whole side discussion about the difficulty in sustainability in lit journals and indie publishing.
When I started Hobart, I think I kinda wanted to be a part of that scene, and also I equal parts was just trying to find my way in life. I was 23/24, working at a bank, had moved away from home, and didn't really know what to do with my life. Starting a website seemed easy enough to be doable and so I just started doing it... and it turned out I really loved it, so I just kept doing it.
You are a writer with an editor's edge (a rare quality). What do you get out of arranging anthologies and configuring other people's work? Is there an art to it, and how does it differ from your own writing?
I think one of the biggest things editing has done for me has just been helping me figure out and understand my tastes. Reading submissions and editing stories and prose for so long kinda couldn't help but to hone my reader eye, getting better and better at "seeing" what I like, what works for me, what excites me. I think, in so far as I have any editing skills, it is just by reading so much for so many years. And not just reading "so much" by way of published work, like most readers, but reading so many submissions, reading through the lens of whether or not I want to publish something and try to help it find an audience.
Something else it does is it gets me out of my own head a little. Makes me less precious! It can be so hard to cut something in your own writing, but so easy to suggest it to someone else.
I've been putting together (what I hope will be?) my next story collection, and going a little crazy trying to decide what to include, what to cut, what order feels strongest. I think it is a really fun part of the process... but crazy-making, too! But I've done versions of that a ton, with issues of print journals and anthologies, and sometimes helping friends with their manuscripts. And, when it isn't my own work, it can be so much easier to see what does and doesn't "fit," what piece interesting leads into or follows up another, etc. So then, the idea is to try to turn that back on yourself.
In your work I've noticed a running theme of starting anew and beginning again, which is a beautiful and important thing. Why do you feel like this area of life means so much to you?
Interesting question, and great observation! It's funny, I'm not sure I've explicitly noticed this before, or, if asked about my own themes or obsessions, I'm not sure I'd name "starting anew and beginning again" among them... but, then again, the title of my very first chapbook was How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew, so I guess I must have at least kinda known?
I think that's often true about writing. It certainly has been for me. I don't always know my own themes or obsessions (brothers, dads/sons, masculinity, nostalgia, male friendship, storytelling...) until I notice them repeating in my work, and even then sometimes not until someone else actually points them out.
A lot of my writing for the last few years has circled divorce in one way or another, and "starting anew and beginning again" is of course an element to that... but that was also there (and I think a lot of what you've read) in my writing from long before I got divorced. I think, from a relatively young age, I was pretty hung up on wishing I was cooler, on wanting to be cooler, on wanting to be some less dorky, less shy, more attractive, cooler version of himself. That idea of getting to start anew or begin again felt is maybe probably related to that? On the one hand, one of my prime themes — in my writing, and also just my personality in general — is nostalgia, but also I'm a pretty optimistic, cheerful dude who tries to really appreciate the now as much as possible, and I think in a way that might be related to this idea that, rather than looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses and getting hung up on that in a way that nostalgia can lend itself to, I believe in this idea that you can maybe always start anew or begin again, even if in only really small, tiny ways, but ways that can be exciting and fun and full of joy?
You beat me to my next question. I was going to point out a distinction in focus from Backswing to A Kind Of In-Between. You said that you don't really know what you're obsessed with while you're in the process of writing. So if you think about it right now, what spurs you to start writing something new, what can you observe happening around you in life when things came to you if you look back?
Right now, I'm really into storytelling. And, specifically, dissecting it, taking a story apart and putting it back together, just generally playing with it? Like, I've got a story that Pithead Chapel just accepted that ends with the narrator explaining how everything that had happened in the story itself is one of his favorite stories to tell, and he tells it differently depending on his audience. I've also got one that X-R-A-Y just took where, halfway through, it kinda pauses and goes meta, with "me" (or, at least, the fictional author of that story me) explaining my own writing process of the first half of the story and what actually happened and what didn't and how I'd changed one thing or another?
This isn't always the case, and I'm thinking this through in real time here while answering these questions, but I think the way "themes" or common ideas or whatever often work in my writing is they pop up here and there subconsciously, without me noticing, and then I start to notice (or someone points it out) and so I kinda doubledown and start to wrestle with and address that theme a little more consciously and with purpose, and then I maybe triple down and start trying to not just lean in but complicate it or subvert it or go a little meta or whatever? After I've exhausted all that, I want to say it maybe goes away, and maybe sometimes it does, but probably it more just drifts back into the background?
I think I went a little sideways in answer there and am not sure I actually answered the question intended though?
Again, you are correct. The reference to starting anew, from my view, was throughout Backswing (especially in "Fair & Square" where it was stated outright), and was also implied in the mention of your divorce in the opening of A Kind Of In-Between while the rest of that collection lies heavily on nostalgia--an emotional side effect of leaving a place physically or psychically. What I wanted to know is what do you think nostalgia is good for?
My kneejerk response is that I'm not sure nostalgia is good for anything?
There are literal definitions, that feel related to but also not quite exactly the same as how we mostly use it, about a longing to return to one's home, and there were probably biological reasons for that. But I think, in its sense of sentimentality for the past, it probably has been more bad, at least in more recent times, as exemplified by MAGA and other holdings onto for a rose-tinted past that isn't true?
I think, too, of Tony Soprano saying, "'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," which feels almost aimed at me but also I agree. I see social media posts that will just be like, "real ones know" and it’s a picture of an 8-bit Nintendo controller or a cassette tape next to a pencil or whatever, and it does always strike me as a kind of the lowest form of engagement.
That said... I love sharing "remember when" stories with friends. I wrestle with that contradiction sometimes. I think with friends it is a kind of bonding while hanging out. I took the long way to get here, but maybe that's what it is good for? I think it can sometimes be used as a cheat or a shortcut for bonding, and that usually feels cheap to me, whereas with the right people and as one part of a larger hanging out and telling stories and jokes and goofing around and having fun, it is bonding.
I think one takeaway from this long, rambling answer is an example of why it is so present in my writing — there's a lot there to play with and think about and wrestle with, and have fun with, and push back against, and all of it.
Speaking of nostalgia, I feel my questions are lingering in the past, but I really want to know your thoughts on this. In the circles we frequent in terms of literature I would say most people have gone through or have seen Hobart. A true touchstone for an entire scene. Which is not a common thing at all. I'm sorry if this is cheesy, but, how does it feel to know you were part of creating something like that?
It — honestly, earnestly — feels really cool.
I like to brag and boast and joke through this lens of having a big ego (and I do have an ego; you kind of have to be a writer; and an editor, for that matter), but it also feels awkward and I don't really know how to react when someone really earnestly says something about how meaningful or important Hobart (or HAD, or SSL) was to them.
But it does feel really cool, and special. I think a lot of it has just been sticking with it. Which was made possible because I don't have a lot of other hobbies or even responsibilities, and it certainly was all buoyed by Elizabeth having money. And I mostly started Hobart, and became an editor, as an accident. But it turned out I just really loved doing it. And I don't know that I was great at it to start, but I've been doing it for so long, I kinda couldn't help but to get better at it, and doing because I so love it has made me better at it too.
It's cool, and means a lot, to hear that it has meant a lot to others. Doing it has meant so much to me.
Now that you run HAD, what do you get out of it that you might have not gotten out of Hobart? What knowledge did you come in with when creating HAD after that experience?
I think there's a chaos to HAD that has been really exciting. And just fun.
I first started doing these pop-up calls for Hobart. They were always super fun. I probably did them here and there for two or three years before I had any idea of them becoming their own entire thing, which would become HAD. So, it wasn't really a response to anything about Hobart so much as it was an outgrowth. And a lesson or reminder or whatever in following what is fun. I was having so much fun doing the popup calls, and people seemed to be having fun when I would do one, that I just kind of chased that right into HAD's existence.