Interview with Aaron Burch
fun, earnest, Tacoma!
Aaron Burch has lived in many places, but it all started in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington. His writing has appeared all kinds of places, HAD, Joyland, X-R-A-Y, and so on, and he’s also published a number of works of fiction and nonfiction.
I was grateful to read an ARC of Aaron Burch’s exhilarating upcoming novel Tacoma! And I've never read anything like this. It's a glorious experiment, a novel of total freedom and optimism. It was very refreshing to read a novel about a writer who is enjoying himself in all these surreal and life-affirming ways. I need to go to Tacoma! We all do.
I love the idea of a celebratory novel that doesn’t rely on conflict or pain to drive the story. Did you set out to write that sort of experiment, or did it just happen?
It just kinda happened, is the short answer. I’ll try to tackle the longer answer together with the next question...
I have sort of a rebellious attitude about writing, and I wonder if you do as well. This is such a kind and positive story, but it flies in the face of so much writing advice and conventional wisdom.
I started to answer that I don’t know that I have a rebellious attitude about writing, but then immediately remembered how much of my writing has been inspired by being told not to do something/that someone doesn’t like something (a “Noah’s Ark” story written in 39 numbered pieces in the first person plural because of my MFAmate who didn’t like Biblical allegories, or stories written in numbered sections, or “weird” POVs; the novel manuscript in second person POV because people have weird feelings about that; the story that changes POV/introduces the first person narrator halfway through the story; the multiple short shorts about characters waking up from dreams...). One of my favorite pieces of craft advice is that anything you’re told you should not (or should) do should just be taken as a challenge rather than a rule.
Maybe even more than a rebellious attitude about writing though, I def have a rebellious attitude against the cliche and stigma of the “tortured artist.”
The narrator in Tacoma specifically says (a handful of times!), “Each time, I set out to write something fun and stupid and inventive but each just ended up being earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted.”
I think versions of this have been noted about my writing on and off... maybe always, but a few years ago, I was getting blurbs for Year of the Buffalo, and they kept calling me and the novel “large-hearted” and “tender” and “earnest” and I realized how much those adjectives meant to me. I spent a lot of my younger writing life wishing I was weirder, more experimental, edgier, etc. but, in fact, I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky, earnest dork. And I think realizing, and accepting, and leaning into that, actually made me a better writer.
Which is all to kinda say, I don’t think I set out to write a “celebratory novel that doesn’t rely on conflict or pain to drive the story” or a “kind and positive story... flies in the face of so much writing advice and conventional wisdom,” it all just kind of happened, but I think I’m often, albeit more subconsciously, thinking about how to write about fun and joy and give it the same narrative propulsiveness as conflict or trauma or struggle.
In the book, the protagonist’s friend Kevin keeps saying nothing is real. Do you agree with him? Do you have the friend equivalents of DT and Kevin in real life?
The easiest answer is, my real life friend equivalents of D.T. and Kevin are D.T. Robbins and Kevin Maloney. And, kinda circling back to ideas of the above, I think there’s often the question in memoir, and sometimes also in autofiction, about writing about other people. What may or may not be “off limits,” how to portray them, etc. The actual questions of all that gets complicated and murky, and I’m not that interested in them. But I liked the idea of writing about friends as characters through this real fun, goofy, but also loving lens. I guess that goes for Amber, too. To use your own language above, there’s maybe this “conventional wisdom” that you should be as honest as possible, and often what that can mean is being as raw and/or messy as possible. At least/especially for this book, that wasn’t really the point. I wanted it to be as celebratory as possible.
As far as what is or isn’t “real”... Kevin is a fan of saying stuff isn’t real in the groupchat, usually in response to D.T. complaining about something (money, jobs, etc.). I mean, those things are real. But also, taking Kevin’s advice is a nice reminder of priorities. Within Tacoma, Kevin saying that was at first just a fun capturing of that on the page, but then it became another way into the novel’s idea of the real vs. fictional, “realism” v. the speculative, and just what might be possible
You actually mention some stories and music and shows that seem to have inspired you while you were writing. Would you like to share some of your known and unknown inspirations?
You’ve been doing this as an ongoing Bsky thread for your novella The Cellar Below the Cellar and I think it’s so fun!
I guess I kept talking around it above, but its MOST specific inspiration is probably the novel Kevin, D.T., and I co-wrote together, Kettlebell Friends Forever. The energy, and the absurd autofiction-ness of Tacoma really grows out of that. We were working on that together during the summer Amber and I were in Tacoma, and we were taking turns cycling through chapters, and so after I’d written my chapter and was waiting for it to cycle back to me, is when I wrote the earliest pieces of Tacoma, with this spillover energy, and voice, and joy for writing. It is surely, too, why it is autofiction-y, and why Kevin and D.T. both make appearances.
After that, my two most specific and direct inspirations are Kevin’s Cult of Loretta and Mike Nagel’s Duplex. I’m a big Dave Housley fan, and his collection, Massive Cleansing Fire, gets an explicit mention in the book; his writing, and just him in general and our years of chatting about making our writing weird and following through on dumb ideas, was definitely influential. The time-traveling tunnel is probably at least a little borrowed from Being John Malkovich.
A few years ago now, Wayne’s World was on TV, and I remember watching it and tweeting something like, “I wish more books had Wayne’s World energy.” I don’t remember, but I don’t think I ever explicitly had that in mind while writing, but I think that’s there! There’s a scene where Wayne opens a door in a diner and there’s just this weird action scene happening. “I just always wanted to open a door to a room where people are being trained like in James Bond movies,” Wayne says. It makes no sense, doesn’t have anything to do with the movie, and is just so FUN. That is basically the kind of moment I was chasing with this book.
What’s your writing story? How did you get here? Do you have links to any work online where people can get to know your work?
I need to update it, but there’s a whole bunch of stories (and essays, and other stuff) linked to here:
The book plays around with the idea of a quest. Does your life have a quest?
Not really. I don’t think? Though as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more and more what is important to me, which is the people in my life, art, and having fun. And so I guess my quest is basically to chase those things. And Tacoma started as something of a goof, mostly to entertain myself, and it ended up capturing those very things.
Why should we all visit Tacoma? Do you think you’ll ever live there again (assuming you don’t already live there now)?
Some of this is hometown pride, which is tied to nostalgia, but I really think Tacoma is something of an undersung gem of the Pacific Northwest. I’d love to live there again some day, though it’s gem-ness becomes a little more and more sung every year, and it gets more and more expensive, and I’m an artist who makes very little money, and the academic job market is a wasteland, and I don’t know how to do anything else. I’m probably just planted here in Midwest now.
What would you like to be asked? Please answer!
I don’t know. Nothing really? This is kinda gauche to say, but I love talking about myself, and writing, and my writing. I don’t ever really have any questions I’d like to be asked, so much as I love to be asked anything at all! :)