Aaron Burch Returns
[GS-INT-029]
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.
When reading Tacoma, it feels like one continuous shot, or maybe, it's the way one chapter lusciously & beautifully smears into the next. I just took so much pleasure in reading it. So firstly, thanks for letting me read it, & do you think the way I just described it feels like what you were going for?
Oh man, that’s so nice to hear! That definitely captures some of what I was going for. It was reverse engineered though, and I’m glad that was the experience of reading it.
The book started because I had this really productive summer in Tacoma. I finished the novel manuscript I’d been working on (THE LAST LOCK-IN; which my 2026 goal is to push myself to send out more); I wrote a couple essays (which might at some point grow into a longer project); I co-wrote a third of a goofy, fun book with D.T. Robbins and Kevin Maloney (Kettlebell Friends Forever, which D.T. printed 50 copies of and we sold at AWP last year); and mostly with spillover energy from writing with D.T. and Kevin, I wrote a handful of (often kinda goofy, fun) short-shorts.
At the end of the summer, driving back across the country to Michigan, I was thinking about those short-shorts, and thinking about my summer in Tacoma as a whole. I realized maybe half of them kinda worked together as a fantastical capturing of said summer, and I had the idea of trying to pull them together and then build it out into a singular cohesive narrative.
So writing it started as patchworking and collaging together maybe half a dozen previously unrelated short stories. I tried to find an order for them that would make sense, and then I edited them to actually fit (changing up tenses and POVs to be consistent, getting rid of stuff that was specific to it working as a story but maybe unnecessary or didn’t make sense for a larger narrative, etc.). Then writing chapters to fill in the blanks, and then more chapters to build it out and turn it into a whole narrative.
That process seems almost contradictory to it feeling like one continuous shot, or at least it does to me, thinking back on how it came together, but I did always want it to feel like that. Not like a collection of shorts, but more a singular narrative. I actually love the way you put it, “the way one chapter lusciously & beautifully smears into the next.”
What do you read leisurely?
Oh man. A LOT of my reading is submissions (for both HAD and Short Story, Long) and student work. For leisure/pleasure... a few years ago, I actually started reading a short story every morning. It became a really great little ritual and way to start my day — I'd have my coffee, and before getting online on my laptop or phone or anything, I'd have this quiet little meditative half an hour or whatever with a story. It's really wonderful! I fell out of that habit here in the back half of 2025 but I'd love to get back to it.
And outside of reading or writing how else do you perform the action of leisure?
I watch a lot of TV with my girlfriend. I run, which kinda both is and isn't an act of leisure? Here in the winter in the Midwest, it gets too cold to run (not for hardcore runners, but for me!) and so I go to the gym; I got into swimming last year and am about to do so again here this winter. I started drawing and painting a lot during the pandemic and kept that up for a few years though have let that slide this last year too. I started doing puzzles this year, and got pretty into them! It's a fun thing to do while watching TV with my girlfriend that I can kinda only half pay attention to — a lot of "dumb" cooking shows, Love is Blind, sometimes standup specials.
The opening story of Tacoma begins with a promise. A reassurance that everything will be alright. Did you do that intentionally to help orient the reader's mind?
I guess. Maybe. Kinda?
The first chapter is a description of the house Aaron and Amber are going to be housesitting for the summer. It is huge and beautiful and kinda “too good to be true.” The narrative understanding of something that is “too good to be true” is that it is going to turn out not being true. I realized that basically as soon as I wrote those over-the-top descriptions in that first chapter, but then also pretty immediately realized that that wasn’t really what I was interested in.
So I ended the chapter with this “promise,” this reminder and guiding light and reassurance, more for myself than the readier, but also I liked what it did for the book:
I guess I’ll tell you now too, because I’m afraid starting with these too-good-to-be-true descriptions is setting up an expectation that it all went to shit. That the house was haunted or cursed. That we somehow ruined it, or over the course of the summer, it ruined us. That any story that starts with a feeling like living inside a dream has to turn into a nightmare.
That isn’t this story though.
This is a story about magic and beauty and wonder.
It was this fun little moment of discovery of what the book could be. It could talk directly to the reader! It could tell the reader what it is and isn’t. It didn’t have to be about conflict, it could just try to chase, and be about, “magic and beauty and wonder”!
Did you have any influences that you can think of that may have influenced the final arrangement of the book?
I think, to some degree, it was me trying to write my version of Kevin Maloney’s Cult of Loretta. And, probably even more than that, a book that would make my reader feel the excitement that I felt when first reading that. I did eventually reread Loretta, but a lot of it was being inspired and influenced by my memory of that book? In my memory, Kevin talked about how he had a bunch of unrelated stories that at some point he realized maybe were actually related and so he put them together into one book. That was definitely an initial inspiration for thinking I could collect some of my short shorts and edit them together and build them out into one narrative. Is that actually how Kevin wrote LorettaI? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.
I’m reminded here of Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Annihilation. If I am remembering right, he read the novel once, and then basically adapted his memory of the novel. I love that. Less straight-up adaptation, and more like adaptation of vibes? Which is maybe one version of what influence and inspiration is? Or at least can be?
Which, too, reminds me of the above question. The move reminds me a little of the opening of Slaughterhouse Five. I haven’t reread that in like 20 years, and never thought of the connection before now. But Kevin loves that novel, and often mentions the inspiration of that opening move. And maybe that was bouncing around in my brain somewhere too?
It's Christmas. Do you have traditions? What are they?
I got this email last night, Christmas Eve, after just having gotten home from a walk that Amber and I have done the last handful of years. We walk to, and then past, the cute small downtown where we live, and through this neighborhood that has a bunch of lights. It's kinda a great little walk, and has become something of a tradition.
Merry Christmas, Aaron. You feel good?
I do. Feeling good. Merry Christmas!