Interview with Aaron Burch about TACOMA

Aaron Burch is known to many people as a fictionist and essayist, founding editor of Hobart, current editor of Short Story, Long. He is known to me as all these things and also as my office neighbor. His most recent novel is Tacoma, a lightly surreal autofiction about a writer on vacation; it’s the kind of thing that is incredibly easy to do badly but which Aaron, somehow, does well. He seems to experiment with how much (or rather, how little) plot or character you actually need to generate momentum—and it turns out, very little! The novel actually is charming and poignant and winsome even as it jokes about being those things.

The way the book reads is almost as though it were an Oulipo project conceived under the following constraints: it takes place in one summer, there’s a mysteriously beautiful house the narrator and his girlfriend are housesitting in and the action can’t go far from here, the narrator can’t seem to be pursuing a major objective of any kind, and the “plot” consists of stuff he ambles into in his vacationer’s avoidance of any major objectives. He seems to whip together a plot out of stuff that’s just lying around, like a very good chef making a meal out of scraps. You seem to do the same thing in writing the book. How planned was this novel? What did you start out with, and how much did you incorporate weird surprises along the way? Was the process of its composition similar to the way the narrator whips together a series of happenings?

The process was actually pretty similar to the way the narrator whips together a series of happenings! It really started with a handful of the chapters being individual, standalone short-shorts. During the actual summer that Amber and I spent in Tacoma, which gets autofictionalized as a summer that Aaron and Amber spend in Tacoma in the book, I had a pretty exciting, inspired, productive couple of months. In our first few weeks there, I finished a novel manuscript, and through some combo of feeling excited and inspired coming out of that but also maybe in response to having just finished something I’d been working on for years, I found myself writing a lot of fun short shorts. At the end of the summer, I looked back at all these short pieces I’d written and a handful (maybe something like 6 of the ~15 I’d written?) were more autofictional and also rooted in Tacoma. In ways that at first felt a little redundant... until I had the idea of puzzling them together and building up a larger narrative around them. So what started as more of a bug (these stories feel kinda repetitive) turned into a feature (oh, maybe their very overlappingness actually lends them to becoming something bigger!)

This novel feels influenced by taking walks and playing video games—which are both about the joys of triumphing over arbitrary constraints. Who or what are some of its other influences?

I’ve mentioned both Mike Nagel’s Duplex and Kevin Maloney’s Cult of Loretta often, but those were def both pretty big influences. I also think something like Wayne’s World or Hot Rod was in my mind, in how fun they are, and also how part of their very construction is a kind of “anything can happen” attitude.

Nostalgia is often seen as an aesthetically and politically bad emotion—something that can only lead to sentimentality or reaction. In this novel you don’t run from it—the narrator is unashamed about his wish for it to be 1983, 1994, or even 2005 again—and even discovers a way to make that happen. And yet I think you avoid both of those bad outcomes—the novel has the death-in-Arcadia feeling of Ashbery’s poem “The Instruction Manual” instead. Instead of avoiding nostalgia, you go all the way into it and come out of it with something. How did you decide to do that?

I’ve had a handful of readers comment on how me the book is. Jim Ruland just a couple of days ago wrote, “Did I just say that Aaron Burch just wrote his Aaron Burchiest book?” I think some of that, for both reader but maybe even moreso for myself, in the writing of it, is borne up out of it being (kinda?) autofiction. Writing the narrator as literally myself, albeit a fictionalized version of, meant leaning in to making it my most “me” book yet, and that meant double- and triple-down’ing on some of my favorite and most common themes — coming of age, home, friendship, storytelling, and maybe most of all, nostalgia.

I think an aspect of my project of being a writer is being aware of the traps and downsides and negatives of nostalgia—and also writing about and with joy and happiness—and leaning in but trying to make it interesting and complicated and multi-dimensional. I think a big part of that is so often remembering and thinking fondly about 1983 and 1994 and 2005, etc., but never really wishing for it to be those times again. That often means, in various ways, leaning into nostalgia (and sentiment! and joy!) but acknowledging that elements of the past sucked too, that it was complicated, and also that there’s so much to enjoy and appreciate now. There’s probably more to it than that, but that’s a part of it, and where it all starts?

How did the novel end up with Autofocus? Feels like a good match for what they do; was that always the plan?

Autofocus published my previous book, a collection of essays, A Kind of In-Between.

There was no real plan while working on Tacoma, but pretty soon after completing it, it felt like Autofocus would be a great home for it. In part just because of its size — they tend to focus on short books, ~100 pages, and Tacoma is ~20k words, and there aren’t a ton of things you can do with a book that size! But also, they focus on “artful autobiographical writing” and Tacoma isn’t exactly “autobiographical,” but it is close. I don’t think they’d published a book of fiction before, but this book feels so me, and feels autobiographical-adjacent enough that I thought it could be a really fun fit. And, luckily, Michael Wheaton agreed!

What are your tricks for cramming writing into a teacher’s life?

Summers! My writing time and discipline comes and goes during the semester — sometimes I’m great at the balance, other semesters I barely write at all. I’m usually pretty good at using my summers to relax and have fun and vacation and travel, but also to be productive. Tacoma was written almost entirely during my summer off, in 2024!

Did you buy that adjustable height desk or nah?

No yet! Though I was really eyeing it last time we went to Costco. Still didn’t pull the trigger and just treat myself though.