Literary Citizenship Looks Like Aaron Burch

Aaron Burch is the Rick Rubin of online literary publishing. Over the last two plus decades, he’s helped hundreds of writers jumpstart their careers, whether it was through Hobart, the online literary magazine he edited for 20 years; the micro prose journal HAD; or his latest project, Short Story, Long on Substack. Burch is also a lecturer at the University of Michigan and a successful writer in his own right, having published an essay collection, a craft book, a novel, a memoir, a short story collection, and now a new novella, Tacoma. 

If there’s a shared thread in his work, it’s his playfulness, an underlying punk essence and dedication to absurdity that seems absent from some crustier tiers of the literary world. Tacoma is no exception. Though ostensibly about an ordinary couple enjoying their friend’s vacation house for the summer, Tacoma quickly dips its toes into the speculative waters of the Puget Sound when the couple discovers their neighborhood is full of portals that transcend space and time. They are forced to navigate this beautiful and strange world that threatens to pull them away from the present and each other. 

What I’ve always loved and admired about Burch’s writing is its earnestness: he writes, as my professor Lee Martin always said, quoting Isak Dinesen, “without hope, without despair.” Whenever I read Burch’s work, I feel almost no separation between my enjoyment of the text and his delight in creating it. I had the pleasure of speaking with Burch over Zoom about his writerly obsessions, the evolution of the online literary scene over the past 20 years, and what it means to be a model literary citizen today.

Sophie Newman: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is the title, Tacoma. Why does it capture your literary imagination?

Aaron Burch: I grew up there. It’s that mysterious, curious magic of childhood. In high school and college, I loved hardcore music, and I got really into this band Botch. There was a pretty good hardcore scene in Seattle, but then, being an hour south of Seattle, it always felt like Tacoma was both part of Seattle and not. They would start every show by saying, “We’re Botch, and we’re from Tacoma.” As somebody who knew them, somebody who felt a part of Seattle but also not, that felt really exciting and welcoming. At some point, I’d written a handful of chapters which at that point were stories. When I had the idea of pulling them together and making one unified narrative out of them, I was like, oh, I could call it Tacoma. It just made me laugh, the idea of calling it Tacoma.

SN: While we’re talking about constructing this book, I’m curious about the decision to name the chapters. Was this concept there from the start?

AB: The titles are because I was titling short stories. Me and my girlfriend spent a summer in Tacoma, and I was writing these stories in our Airbnb. Sometimes they were literally capturing versions of our day-to-day and other times they had nothing explicitly to do with place. At the end of the summer, I collected a bunch that felt most like they could be woven and collaged together. But at some point, I was like, I don’t really want it to just feel like a bunch of short stories. I want it to feel like a narrative. So, how do I force that upon this thing that started as unconnected stories? And also, how do I play with chapter titles [in a way] that lends them to feeling like chapter titles and also does something for the book? 

SN: Your narrator shares a lot of biographical details with you. At one point he tells his friend that he’s writing “exaggerated autofiction about us and writing and friendship and telling stories and life and seeing art and magic and beauty everywhere you look.” Do you consider this “autofiction”?

AB: I do think of it as autofiction. Before this book, I wasn’t that interested in writing autofiction. I don’t read that much autofiction, which, counter-intuitively, was part of what was fun about this for me. How do I write into it, but make it my favorite book? How do I play with it? Anyone who reads [Tacoma] knows me to varying degrees. Some readers might not know anything about me. Some might be like: I’ve read a couple of things by you online, and I’m vaguely aware of your presence. My best friends probably notice things that aren’t important, but that are all over the book. Maybe part of the appeal is playing and bending and making stuff up but blending it with the stuff that isn’t [made up]. On top of calling it Tacoma, I knew I wanted to play with this summer that we spent in this place. But I didn’t want the impetus for the book to be, oh, the couple rents an Airbnb and goes and stays there. I wanted it to be a little more heightened, a little bit more magical, a little bit more fun.

SN: The inclusion of speculative elements plays with the expectations around autofiction. Some autofiction could literally be memoir. Instead, at times, you almost dip into horror, but always keep it very funny.

AB: Maybe there is a tradition of that silly, fun, magical element in autofiction, more than I’m even aware of. A lot of what I’m aware of is the, how do I most realistically capture my life on the page? Looking back, part of what all speculative writing is capturing with the magic are the feelings that feel true. I guess I was doing that.

SN: At the beginning of your first chapter, your narrator explicitly says, “this is a story about magic and beauty and wonder.” I was curious if you find these concepts harder to write about than, you know, crushing despair.

AB: I find them easier to write about, but I am something of a happy-go-lucky dork in general. Sentiment and earnestness have always been there in my writing. But, especially earlier on, I battled with it. It doesn’t seem as cool as writing about despair, right? The more I’ve embraced it, the better of a writer I’ve become. But it’s tricky. When it works, it lands so hard and lands so well and is so appreciated because it is a little less common. But then when you don’t land it, it’s so quickly and easily eye-rolly and easy to make fun of or groan at. That’s the tightrope.

SN: I think people shy away from it because there’s a vulnerability there. If you don’t stick the landing, you’re going to be exposed, versus if you’re writing about despair, you’re almost guarding yourself against those potential criticisms.

AB: It’s such an interesting contradiction, or two sides of the same coin, too. So much of the writing about despair or trauma is often celebrated for its vulnerability, and yet the flip side of that is we’ve been rewarding this kind of vulnerability while hiding or shying away from another kind of vulnerability.

SN: The novella seems to be about the tension between the past and the present. Your narrator is almost literally lost to the past. I understand Year of the Buffalo, your first novel, explores similar themes. Is this one of your writerly obsessions, or am I reading too much into it?

AB: No, it for sure is. As a human, I am generally a very nostalgic person and maybe often more nostalgic than is “cool.” I think both my reading and writing interests are books that deal with coming-of-age, growing up, nostalgia, wrestling with the past. That’s mirrored by when and where I grew up. Maybe I would have been like this no matter what, but Seattle in the 90s was so cool and so close, but also when you’re 16, an hour up the freeway is so far. I think I was at that age where, on the one hand, I was kind of perfect for being in the radius of grunge, but also, I was slightly too young to have gone to any of those shows. That idea of having grown up in a time and a place that felt so alive but often just barely out of reach definitely imprinted on me. All of my books are wrestling with the past to varying degrees and thinking about what that means.

SN: I wonder if we could transition to talking about some of your other literary projects. I know you started editing Hobart over 20 years ago. What’s your perspective on how the literary magazine landscape has changed since then, either for the worse or the better?

AB: At the time, websites with short shorts or flash fiction were not that common and were often looked down on like a little sibling or something. I’ve never made this connection before, but maybe there’s something interesting about thinking of Tacoma in relation to Seattle and websites in relation to print journals. Now, most writers I know would almost rather have something published online than in a print journal, because it’s going to get read more. 

When I started Hobart, we were kind of in this boom of indie lit seeming really cool. We were all just riding the McSweeney’s/Dave Eggers coattails. I mean, maybe it was just me because I was a writer, but a lot of those people seemed like rock stars. I don’t think that’s the case now, right? I don’t think there is that cool aura around this scene outside of a pretty small group.

SN Is it just that there’s an over-saturation of journals, or do you think people have actually changed their mind about what’s cool?

AB: It’s a little bit of everything. There’s always fads. The grumpy old man on his porch perception is: People are reading less and spending more time on social media and scrolling and watching TikTok and reels. When I was in my early 20s and a new graduate, in the early years of Hobart, I was working at a bank, and in my downtime between customers, I would alt-tab over and read the new piece on McSweeney’s. I didn’t have a smartphone yet, and there wasn’t social media. Now, if I need to kill two minutes or five minutes and I’m waiting in line somewhere, I’m just doomscrolling.

In the past few years, it’s been interesting to hear from my students about their awareness of their own online-ness and their desire to be a little less so. For a while, I was like, oh, it’s just me as somebody your parents’ age being like, you’re looking at your phones too much. And then at some point they were like, we are looking at our phones too much, and I wish we weren’t. Hearing a student say, “part of what I enjoy about golfing is leaving my phone somewhere, and I’m just golfing with friends for four hours.” I hadn’t thought about that with golf, but that’s an interesting take and cool to hear from an 18-year-old.

SN: On the topic of social media, tell me about your decision to start Short Story, Long on Substack versus a more traditional platform.

AB: A few years ago, I stepped away from Hobart. Immediately when I stepped away, I was like, I’ll probably start a new thing. At this point, it’s just such a part of my life. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Although I was still editing HAD, we built a pretty well-oiled machine that takes a lot of time once or twice a month and then otherwise not very much, if any. One of the things that I liked at Hobart, that I thought I was pretty good at, was editing and publishing longer fiction. 

There’re a bunch of websites that I love publishing short shorts and there aren’t many that excite me publishing a 4,000-word story. At the time, there hadn’t really been any literary journals using Substack, but it seemed to lend itself to it really well. It’s built in that you can subscribe as a paying subscriber, which meant I could pay contributors. It also meant not having to build a website myself or hire someone. Here’s this template, it’s set up, I can just plug and play, and I’ll borrow this One Story model of publishing one long story at a time and doing it once a month.

SN: I’m wondering how you split your time between teaching, writing, and editing. Do you have a schedule? Do you just organize by priority and deadline?

AB: I think some combo of priority and deadline and what feels exciting or where my own energy is. Sometimes those things align and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, I really need to get this stack of papers graded. I’m not the most organized person—teaching, my own writing, editing, family life—I think I’m usually dropping one of those balls, and sometimes two. I think the journals take away time overall from my own writing. But the flip side of that is, I’m not always the most dedicated writer. It allows me to not be writing for a while but still feel like I’m being productive and living this literary life.

SN: Do you feel like teaching also feeds into your writing and editorial work?

AB: It all feels related and connected for sure. Obviously, it feels more like a job than writing or editing because it pays me and the other two arms don’t. Sometimes, it does feel a little bit more like a responsibility or a burden. Burden is kind of both too strong of a word and also true.

SN: I think a lot of people, myself included, see you as a model literary citizen who’s doing your own work, but you’re also dedicating a lot of time to championing other writers and building platforms for them. If a young writer asked you where they could plug themselves into the literary community, what would you say?

AB: For a long time, my answer was: Be on literary Twitter and interact with other writers. If you’re on Bluesky or if you are on Substack or if you are following the right journals and other writers and starting to interact with them, I do think there can be fulfillment there. I think every writer should be a reader for a journal for probably at least three to six months. I think if you just want to start a journal, then start a journal. In the publishing aspect, and also in our own writing, an under-appreciated element is just trying. Whether you’re like: What if I just try to be more earnest, and then don’t show anybody, and it turns out cheesy, but I tried? What if I just try to start a journal, and it turns out I don’t like it, and I fold it? But maybe it turns out I love it and it takes off.