Strength or Crutch, Depending on Your Tastes and Point of View, I Guess: Barrelhousing with Aaron Burch

Aaron Burch is many things: literary magazine founder, editor, publisher, teacher, all around literary Mister Peanutbutter, inventor of the “we’re open right now and will be responding in real time” method of taking submissions. Now he can add novelist to the impressive range of titles. I sat down with Aaron around a Google document to talk about most of those things, but mostly his new novel Year of the Buffalo.

Dave Housley: I know this book had a kind of long and winding road to publication. Do you mind sharing a little bit of that with us? When you started, how long it took to write the book, how it wound up as the inaugural title for Buffalo Books, anything else you think might be interesting about the process of going from a word file to an actual book that’s sitting on my desk right now. 

Maybe I’ll start a little at the end and work backwards… 

Dan Hoyt reached out to me in something like summer 2020, I think it was. I can’t remember how much he said right off the bat. I think it was something simple and a little mysterious — just saying he was pretty sure I had a manuscript and what ever happened to that, and also how Midwest-y was it? I was like, well, I do have an old manuscript, but I’ve pretty much given up on it and moved on and have been working on new stuff, and also it isn’t really that Midwest-y… but you’re welcome to look at it if you want!

Before that, I’d spent a couple of years—2016 and 2017, I think, give or take—shopping it around, and I think pretty much every agent who ever existed passed. I spent those years sending it out, tweaking, playing with it, sending it out some more. I bet you read some chunk of this during that time? Before that, I probably wrote the bulk of the book from 2013-2016? (I’m pretty slow. Or, well, I’m not actually that slow of a writer, but I’m lazy.) Even that gets a little complicated though. I wrote 100 pages or so of these two brothers on the farm, giving them some backstory, building out their characters and relationships and all of that… and then realized what I really wanted to do was set these two brothers off on a road trip together. At which point I started scavenging parts from an old roadtrip novel manuscript that I’d written in 2010/2011 for my MFA thesis, then spent 2011/2012 working on and sending out? All that stuff got reworked—the POV, characters themselves, some of the writing style is all different—but the bones were there. 

So at some point, fastforward back to 2020 now, Dan liked the book and gave me the larger context: he was starting a press through and kind of under the umbrella of the Kansas State English Department, where the idea was to focus on “midwest novels.” They were gonna have a contest every year, but he was excited about this being their first book. He was teaching a Literary Publishing course, so this book basically became their class project. They read and talked about it all semester, kind of collectively wrote the back cover copy, and offered a lot of really great editing suggestions, which I worked on throughout 2021. Some smaller cleanup stuff, but some bigger changes too—deleted two or three chapters, wrote two or three new ones, moved what had been a chapter later in the book up to being the opening chapter. 

So, there’s a way of looking at it where it took me 2010-2021 to write it? Which is kinda depressing, there is probably nothing about it that needed 10 years of work, but like you said, “long and winding.”

Dave Housley: Long and winding is the only way to go. Were there times in that ten year period when you had written off Year of the Buffalo? I know in that same period of time you were writing a lot of other things, including your Bookmarked book about Stephen King’s The Body, and if I’m remembering correctly you were writing and publishing a fair amount of essays in that time period as well. Did you always have Year of the Buffalo in the back of your mind, or had you mentally kind of tucked it away in a virtual drawer? 

Oh, for sure. Probably lots of smaller moments along the way of writing it off, and then, by the time Hoyt reached out, I’d completely tucked it away and moved on. There was a lot about it I liked but I also just didn’t know what else to do with it. And I had other projects I was more excited about and I’d pretty much come to peace with it being that early book in the drawer that you always hear about writers having one of, if not multiple.

It’s funny, there’s a chapter early on in BUFFALO where Holly is a high school teacher and she’s teaching Stephen King’s “The Body” and is showing Stand By Me in class, near the end of the year. It seems a lot like a retread of my Bookmarked book… but I’d actually written that chapter before the Bookmarked thing even happened! When I revisited the book after Hoyt said he was into it, I thought about cutting it or changing the book/movie or something? Whatever I was trying to think through about my love for that novella and movie I’d more than thought through in the interim. I had a whole book now that did that work! But ultimately I decided to leave it as is — I kinda like when authors have images or themes or ideas that they return to again and again, and so decided I liked the idea of Stand By Me becoming one of those echoes throughout my work.

Dave Housley: Finally a chance to talk about me! I love it when writers work in some easter eggs and sneak in references and themes throughout their work. I think Craig Finn from the band The Hold Steady was the first time I noticed a writer doing this and it’s something I do a lot in my work, as you know. I loved the reference to “Mr. Burch from Grantland” and that scene where she’s teaching The Body in Year of the Buffalo, and some of the other places where I thought I could see or hear you coming through the work. Everybody should do this. It’s fun. 

Backing up a little, what was the process like working with the Kansas State students? In my limited experience it’s always a little freaky to be getting edited on something you put so much time into, so was it extra freaky to have so many editors? In general how did that process work? 

First, briefly: it IS fun, right! You know I so loved The Other Ones — I loved everything about it, and am sure I would have loved it if we weren’t friends, it’s a really great book… but an added pleasure was seeing and recognizing those kinds of little easter eggs. I just read Kevin Wilson’s new novel and we’re friendly and I’ve published him a few stories over the years, and there’s a character in it named Hobart. I’m in a writer group with a couple of friends, and I think we’ve all started throwing in dumb little things like story-specific brands of beer or cigarettes or whatever with each other’s last names. It’s kinda dumb… but also the best! Why not have as much fun as possible doing all of this, right?

As far as working with Hoyt’s students, it was great! I love getting feedback and being edited. It maybe helped that Dan was always, from the get-go, like, “I love the book, I’m happy to publish it as-is if you disagree with all of this, but here’s some things to think about…” It maybe takes the pressure off? And then I did a Zoom visit with the class but for the most part all of my interactions with them were filtered through Dan. He would give them a class assignment like, “ask Aaron two questions” or “suggest three edits” and then he’d compile them, distill them down to the smartest and most helpful, and then send me those. And… you probably know how it is: almost across the board, I disagreed or rolled my eyes or scoffed at all of them, at first. But then I sat with them, and ended up taking most, if not all of them. Sometimes their specific suggestions; sometimes they would have a note and a suggestion and I would agree with the note but then would find a different solution to whatever had spurred the suggestion? I think it all made it a wayyyy better note. To be honest, I’m a little curious how this version of the book would have fared with an agent! It definitely made me way more proud of the book, and excited for it to come out… and also feel like I much more deeply understood why the previous version had been passed on by so many. 

Dave Housley: You’ve been an editor for a long time now, about as long as I’ve been writing and that’s something like twenty years? Do you think having so much experience editing and publishing gave you a different perspective on that process? 

I don’t know. Maybe? I started Hobart more or less at the same time as I started writing, so editing and writing have been so interconnected from the beginning, I have trouble thinking about how one even influences the other. The two are such equal parts of who I am as a literary person, I couldn’t even begin to separate one from the other. I think one thing it did was demystify both and make it so I never really took any of all of this that seriously? I mean, I care deeply about all things writing and it is present in almost all aspects of my life — writing itself, reading, editing, publishing, teaching, being friends with writers… — but also, circling back to both of our above notes about having fun, it’s all a goof! I appreciate and take to heart any and all editing suggestions maybe in part because I’ve been on that end of suggesting them and knowing that I’m trying my best to help the story be the best it can be. But also, at the same time, I don’t take rejections or any of it that seriously, because I know what it means to be on the editor side and I’m just some dummy who is an “Editor” primarily because I built a website when I was in my early 20s and bored and one page on that website had my name on it, after which I wrote “comma Editor” and that was apparently all it took? I also think, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to let go of a lot of aspects of ego? Lots of pushback against or rejection of editorial suggestions often start from that place of ego, of feeling like you know best, and lots of suggestions should be ignored or discarded, but it never hurts and is usually only for the best to at least sit with and consider them? 

Dave Housley: Totally agree! I think the best part of working on a literary magazine and reading submissions and editing other people’s work is you immediately understand how subjective everything is, and it really helps when you’re getting rejected or dealing with editorial suggestions and publishing deadlines. 

I want to dig into the book a little bit, I guess from a big picture down to a more granular level. So big picture: I thought the structure of the book was interesting in that there are four parts, and then within the narrative chapters there are these occasional little pieces that break them up. I think there are 8 of them and most are formatted as “How To” but not all. Thanks, by the way, I feel like I learned a lot about punching and taking a punch by reading this book, and I hope I never have to apply that knowledge. Anyway, I wanted to ask about that structure: did you write the book in parts, or is that structure something that came about in the revision process? And how did those “How To” pieces come to be in the book in this way? 

I just clicked through a bunch of old drafts, trying to figure out and remember when (and maybe also how/why/where) the structure happened.

Pretty early on, it was in two parts: before they head out on the road trip, and then the road trip itself. I can’t remember how purposeful this was, if it was intentional from the outset or the reasoning happened a little later, but I remember thinking about songs that change drastically midway through. Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and The Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun” are always the two songs that first jump to mind that do this, and I think often about them often, the way the first half is one kind of song and then it changes and kind of becomes an entirely different song. I doubt BUFFALO feels like that to a reader, plot changes are just how novels work, but in my mind, I liked the idea of the first half being more of a domestic novel set on a farm and then, when you think that is the kind of novel it is, it changes directions and becomes a road trip novel. So, in the drafting process itself, it was always “Part I” and “Part II.” And then at some point, those bigger sections got subdivided and so now there’s four parts. I’m not totally sure why, or even the effect they have on reading the novel, but like most things when writing, I’m sure it started as a way to help myself figure out how the novel was working. Dividing it into pieces helped me think about the goal of each smaller chunk of the novel, which made it feel more manageable and focused?

The “How To” sections happened in a relatively similar “part intentional, part happy accident” stumbling part of drafting. They happened kind of late. I had most of (a draft of) the book written and I’m not sure if I had gotten some of the cliche “there’s no stakes” notes or if I just knew those were the notes that I would likely get, so I played with adding a prologue that was basically an early version of both “How to Punch” and “How to Take a Punch.” I was trying to foreshadow for the reader some kind of violence, something that (hopefully!) would linger in the reader’s mind a little while reading that first domestic farm half of the novel enough so that there would be some sense of that hanging over it all. 

At one point while drafting, I had an interstitial chapter that was something like “Holly’s Notes” that was just a bunch of facts about buffalo that was really just an excuse for me to include a bunch of interesting trivia tidbits I’d found while researching and reading buffalo books. And that led to an idea that it would be fun and interesting to have someone write one or two interstitial “Holly” chapters, like the novel version of a guest feature on a rap track. I’m not sure I’ve quite seen that before, and it seemed super fun? I asked a couple writer friends and Jac Jemc seemed into the idea but also was either too busy or couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. So it ultimately didn’t come to fruition… but maybe with a future project?

That initial prologue wasn’t called “How To” but it was more or less written in that style, and at some other point, it got pulled apart and became those two different sections and I thought they were fun and so I wrote a few more in that same style. I wasn’t sure why they existed or what purpose they served, but I liked them and thought they added an interesting element to the book. Finally—and this all seems kind of obvious now, but took a long time to occur to me—I realized they could serve a similar purpose to that “Holly’s Notes” interstitial chapter and they could all basically be notes that she was writing.

I might be misremembering, but I’m reminded here again of The Other Ones. I think the ghost chapters were a really late addition to that, yeah? And you weren’t sure if they’d work, but ultimately they felt, at least to me, like they’re what really bring the novel, and it feels impossible to imagine the book without them. I think about these interstitial chapters like that—they happened pretty late in the drafting and construction of the book, but, at least for me, really brought the book together. They helped me figure out who Holly was, and something about her and Scott’s relationship, all of which ultimately helped me figure out one or two of the main themes and arcs of the novel!

Dave Housley: The part that came in late to The Other Ones was the character of Gibbons. How To Not Get An Agent: When an agent reads the full manuscript and gracefully turns it down but provides notes that include something along the lines of “I think there’s a little too much office stuff in this book about people who only know each other through working in the same office and for whom the primary conflict is going to be around continuing to work in that office,” write in a character who only exists in that office, mostly at his desk, and who mostly thinks about lunch and coffee frothers and fantasy football. 

Themes! One of the themes or recurring things that I thought was really interesting was interiority. I also think a recent reviewer kind of missed the point about this, the point being that interiority is kind of the point, or one of the points, or things that you’re interested in playing around with in Year of the Buffalo. I knew we were going to be doing this interview when I was reading and I marked a few that I thought were particularly interesting, or good examples of the way interiority works in this book. Here’s one from the road trip:

“Then the radio went to commercial, and Ernie cycled through the presets again, found nothing. He hit the scan button, let the numbers tick by until they grabbed a station, paused for a few seconds, then went ticking forward again until the next signal. He watched Scott watching the radio and could tell he was thinking. Trying to work out what he wanted to say before he started. The way the numbers clicked through reminded Ernie of watching a pledge drive, and then he thought of high scores and collecting coins in Mario and The Legend of Zelda, going to the fairy pond when low on energy and getting your hearts filled. He got nostalgic thinking about the game, all the time he’d spent playing it as a kid, and suddenly he was back in Benjamin’s basement, working their way through Hyrule toward Gannon, still too young to be interested in girls or much else non-video-game. 

     “What about…” Ernie started…

That’s just one example but there’s a lot of thinking in this book. A lot of characters in their own heads, considering how they are presenting themselves and interacting and what they might do or say next, a lot of ranging thoughts, like the example above, which I think is pretty realistic for a lot of us. I’m trying to type my way into a good question about this, so I guess something like, how does that kind of interiority work in the book, or what kind of role does interiority play in the project of this book? 

I think interiority is just one of my writer strengths. Strength or crutch, depending on your tastes and point of view, I guess. So, on the one hand, I think it’s there just because I can’t help myself. It’s how I write. For me, I often end up working backwards. Kind of like having and liking the interstitial chapters and then trying to figure out how and why they were there, I tried to, a bit retroactively, think about this much interiority purposeful. I think one thing I figured out about these brothers is, to varying degrees, each thinks they understand who they themselves are but don’t get the other. Ernie is definitely much more in his own head and goes through his life more passively, whereas Scott is kind of all physical embodiment. Of course, they actually understand themselves less than they think and the other more than they’re aware, and Scott thinks things through more than it might at first seem and Ernie makes more active decisions at least a couple of times in the book. One of the other themes throughout—and this really blossomed out from those interstitial chapters—was the idea of storytelling and mythmaking. The stories we tell about ourselves and who we are, to ourselves and to others. How we see ourselves, how we want others to see us. That’s one of the other themes, but feels like a mirror, or at least working in tandem with, interiority. So, hopefully, it isn’t just there because it’s my writer tendency and I’m a lazy literary fiction writer who doesn’t know how plot works and struggles to make action happen on the page (though that is all true, too), but is in fact what the book, at least to a degree, is about. 

All that also speaks to this being one of my favorite ways that a novel (or movie, or TV show, or whatever works). These stories where the plot is primarily there as a clothesline to pin onto all of these actually interesting small little moments or characters or observations. One of my favorite books of all time is Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special — I barely care at all about the actual football play recreation that it culminates in, but it is a great excuse to get all these characters together and then just have 200 pages of amazingly smart and interesting and funny and surprising moments and observations. 

Dave Housley: Are we all trying to just rewrite The Throwback Special? I had it in mind very specifically when I was writing The Other Ones, too. 

I love the description of plot as a clothesline to pin all of this other stuff onto. That’s going to stay with me for awhile. You caught me trying to be Smart Writer Guy Who Understands How Things Work but that description is so spot on and I’m also a pretty intuitive or lazy writer who tends to lean into the things I’m interested in and can do well. I always think about writing like basketball. When my feet worked and I was playing, what was the overall strategy that led me to shoot a lot from the left hash about twenty feet out? I was just good at that. So it makes sense that your writing has a lot of interiority and thoughtfulness and thinking. I think that’s a thing you’re good at and interested in, but it really does work here in terms of the brothers and that one of the key aspects of the book is their relationship and what they know about the other and what they think they know about them. 

You invented the "we're opening for submissions right now and responding immediately" method of taking literary magazine submissions. I've seen it called "Burchburst," which I wish was catchier. Anyway, how did that come about, and what do you think is different about that way of reading submissions? Also, are you worried that Twitter getting (more) fucked up might affect your ability to do things that way for HAD?

It started when I was home alone one night and , for whatever insane reason, I thought it would be fun to read a bunch of submissions and get through as many as I could, as fast as possible. That felt unfair to the subs sitting in the Hobart submission queue at the time though. Felt kinda like, that wasn't really what they signed up for when they submitted, you know? But I figured if I was just up front about it, then people would know what they were getting themselves into. So I tweeted something about how I was a couple drinks in and was gonna spend a couple hours reading submissions and responding as fast as possible, making kneejerk decisions. I got something like 30 submissions and it basically livetweeted through it and then went to bed. It was fun though, and at some point, months later, I did it again. It became a thing I'd do here and there when home alone and I wanted to be a little productive while also just goofing around and having fun on Twitter. Every time I did it, response was a little bigger, and at some point, I'd done too many + accepted too many and so I had a backlog of acceptances from these calls. I was reading stuff immediately, replying within hours or even minutes, but then there would be like 4 months between acceptance and publication. Then, during that first year of the pandemic, when we were all home alone all the time and didn't know what to do with ourselves and many of us starting new projects, I asked Crow about the possibility of building a new site — how much work that might take, if that was something he might be interested in helping out with, what he thought about the project. And basically that turned into HAD.

It is SUCH a Twitter-centric model and vibe and, often, submission-announcement-venue, that it is a bummer if it gets more and more fucked up. But we do have a mailing list, and just started an Instagram, and... I don't know. We'll see? It's a bummer, but also I'm a big believer in constraints breeding creativity and so if we have to adapt, there's maybe something exciting in that too?

I guess we better wrap things up soon, so let me ask a lightning round of random questions:

Cast Year of the Buffalo. Who plays Scott, Holly, and Ernie in the movie?

Who’s the guy who played Reacher in the recent TV show? Alan Ritchson. He’s Scott. Starting from there, Ernie is a few years older, so… Joaquin, maybe? Casey Affleck? Oh! What about Bill Hader, maybe? What about Kirsten Dunst as Holly? I don’t know if that works or not.

In honor of our friend the famous airport bar beer aficionado Matt Bell, top 5 situational beers?

Airport beer’s a top beer, for sure. Yardwork beer, ballpark beer, shotgunned beer (that feels more delivery system than situational, but I’m gonna count it), boat beer. Honorable mentions: museum beer, botanical garden beer (rare but I had a couple this summer!), beer while cooking dinner…

Top 5 Paranoid Thrillers in order? 

The Conversation is top. And then maybe something like Parallax View, Michael Clayton, Blow Out, and then let’s say Enemy of the State, just as the dumb fun 90s bookend to The Convo. All the President’s Men should probably be in there, but we’ve been saving it and I haven’t rewatched it in so long, I feel weird including something I don’t remember that well. I also kinda wanted to include JFK because it’s so bonkers, but I’m not sure I’d quite count it as a Paranoid Thriller? More PT-adjacent?

What’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? 

When Barrelhouse asked me years ago, I said Point Break, but I think I’ve rewatched Dirty Dancing at Writer Camp so many times which is such a fun experience and now that movie is so connected to how great Writer Camp is that I’ve gotta say that.

GET MORE AARON BURCH!

Buy Year of the Buffalo at Buffalo Books!

Listen to Aaron talking with Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister of Book Fight! about a lot of this same stuff!