If we leave the city where we grew up, can we ever return to that place as adults and experience it in the exact same way? No, but why the hell would you want to, Aaron Burch seems to say, when there are so many new and cool things to discover? In Burch’s new novel, Tacoma, his characters return to the city where the author spent his formative years, and where the scrim of the Pacific Northwest now pulls open onto the fantastical and the uncanny.
An absolute champion of the literary community, Burch’s previous books include: the novel, Year of the Buffalo (American Buffalo Books); the essay collection, A Kind of In-Between (Autofocus); the story collection, Backswing (Queen’s Ferry Press); and the memoir/literary analysis, Stephen King’s The Body (Ig Publishing). He also edited the craft essay anthology, How to Write a Novel: an Anthology of 20 Craft Essays, None of Which Ever Mention Writing (Autofocus), and he’s the founder and current editor of both HAD and Short Story, Long.
Burch and I hopped on Zoom recently to talk about road trips, 1980s movie nostalgia, fanny-pack drugs, and the time-travel capabilities of Spencer’s Gifts. This interview has been edited for clarity.
The Rumpus: Before anything else, I wanted to say that I loved the hell out of the last sentence of your opening chapter: “This is a story about magic and beauty and wonder.” It’s this perfect jumping-off point to ask: how did the trajectory and scope of the book first start to form for you?
Aaron Burch: So the book itself is kind of autofiction-y in that some of what it describes is true, and then some of it isn’t. Two summers ago, my girlfriend Amber and I spent the summer in Tacoma, which is where I grew up. I’m fortunate in that I’m a teacher and I have the summers off, and she has a work-from-home job, and we asked ourselves: “What if we go places and take advantage of this?” So we saved up and got two different Airbnbs for a month each. My childhood best friends still live there, my parents still live there. We had a great vacation, but we were also there long enough it kind of just felt like we lived there? So that was all part of the impetus. But then, too, I was in the middle of co-writing this book with D.T. Robbins and Kevin Maloney called Kettlebell Friends Forever.
Rumpus: You three read from that at AWP in Los Angeles, at the Silverlake Lounge, right?
Burch: Yup, and it was just such a fun experience. Our process was that we rotated writing chapters on this shared Google doc. One person would write a chapter and then mention to the next person in the group chat, “Okay, mine’s done. It’s your turn.” And from the outset, D.T. said that he wanted to print just 50 copies of the book to sell at AWP. So there was that expectation that we knew the work was going to come out, which was fulfilling, but we also weren’t going to have to try and pitch it elsewhere. This was just this fun, little side project with very little at stake.
Each of us kind of realized on our own that our sole motivation when writing individual chapters was to crack the other two up. We had this very specific audience of two, and my entire goal was to make up a thousand words for each chapter that would have my friends text me back with lines that they loved. I was able to focus just on making Kevin and D.T. laugh, and so I was able to write some of the best work I’d ever done.
But there was also all of this spillover energy. At the end of the summer, I had a bunch of these stories that weren’t originally intended to go together. A lot of them had a similar voice and similar energy, though, which made me think about pulling them together, under this summer of me and Amber vacationing in Tacoma.
Rumpus: I had a follow-up about that, too, but it’s kind of a chicken-or-egg situation. I know that individual chapters like “The Mall” and “Orcas” and “The Zoo” appear in places like Pool Party Magazine, X-R-A-Y, and Bluestem, respectively, albeit in wildly different forms. With individual chapters like those, I was curious about which versions came first and how you created new forms out of them before/afterwards.
Burch: The individual chapters as stories happened first. I know that I wrote “Orcas” by itself, for example, and then included it in Tacoma, and then went back after that and rewrote the story. In “The Mall,” too, when I wrote it as a story, the fictional couple in it is having troubles, and they’ve gone to the local mall to re-establish what their relationship could be. But when I adapted it for the book, that wasn’t the situation that the couple had found themselves in, nor what their real-life counterparts were up to. So I stripped off the problems with their relationship from the adapted chapter, and versions of those individual stories were how I configured them as part of the plot of Tacoma.
In “The Zoo,” too, what happens in the original story is this fictionalized version of Kevin Maloney appears out of nowhere, and he’s brought drugs with him to Tacoma in his fanny pack. He and the characters of Aaron and Amber take them, and the story becomes this drug-hallucination sequence. I remember thinking that having the characters do drugs in the story was me trying to loosen up my writing. But when I refitted it and talked to some early readers of the manuscript, they made me realize that the book already had so much magic that I didn’t need to include the additional magic of the characters being on drugs, so that got stripped away, too. But looking back, I needed to write the version first where the characters did drugs in order to loosen it up.
Rumpus: Sticking with this thread on craft, can you talk about Tacoma’s relationship to autofiction (or however we want to conceive autofiction to be)?
Burch: This relationship definitely stemmed from the book I wrote with Kevin and D.T. I know they write a lot more autofiction than I do, and their characters are often versions of themselves. Prior to this, I don’t think I’d ever written a story where the character was “Aaron.” But then the process itself was so much fun that it wound up spilling over into Tacoma. It was fun to write about this “Aaron” character who had a girlfriend named “Amber,” and that they were in Tacoma for the summer. So much of the book, then, was capturing things we did that summer, and the manuscript served as kind of a record of our time there. We did, for example, go to the mall one day, and we often went on walks, and I did run along the waterfront. We did a lot of those things, but it turns out there isn’t actually a time-traveling tunnel located in the mall’s Spencer Gifts store. (Although, you know, malls are kind of time-traveling spaces in their own right.)
So much of this was our exact summer, but I wanted to infuse this period with actual magic. I mean, I left Tacoma for the midwest more than twenty years ago, and, when I go back to visit this place where I grew up, there is this sense of magic and time travel. In Tacoma, I wanted to find out if I could literalize that magic. Going back to what we were talking about before, adding in that last sentence in the first chapter allowed me to shape what the book could be.
Rumpus: It’s such a bold line to put in front of the reader, but it’s absolutely correct. I also wanted to get a little geeky here and mention that I loved how you referenced in the book what’s possibly your favorite film, Stand by Me. But I also love the touchpoints you made to another 1980s hit, Labyrinth, what with referencing Hoggle and these nostalgia-laden oubliettes. I was curious, then, about how films from the 80s have helped shape your perspectives as an adult. Or more specifically, as a writer?
Burch: There are probably two layers to this, the first one being the movies themselves. There’s that great sense of magic to them—to the Amblin movies, for example—that are filled with nostalgia and magic and beauty and childhood. Those are my themes that I write about and obsess over, too, and they’re so often the themes that are so present in those 80s movies. Do I especially love so many of those movies because I’m a nostalgic dork who’s fascinated with growing up, or am I nostalgic and so rooted in these stories of growing up in part because movies like The Goonies and Labyrinth and Stand by Me and Gremlins did these themes so well?
The second layer, then, is that movies in general were so important to me growing up: My family and I made constant trips to Blockbuster. My dad worked at a library and was often bringing media home. And then, we were also going to the movies every other weekend. Now, being in middle age and having become an artist and a creative person, I realize nostalgically that my parents bred within me this appreciation for art and creativity. When I think about movies—the experience of going to them, of watching them—I think of joy, of course, but then there are those handful of movies that were formative because I saw them when I was young and they imprinted on me. But what was imprinted there was wrestling with those themes and ideas and topics my own work keeps circling back to.
Rumpus: You also make several mentions in the book to popular video games (also from the ’80s), like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, et cetera. And I loved that “Aaron” and characters like “Kevin” and “Amber” make references to the idea of “quests” in the work. Have video games also been influential on your writing? And do you still play them?
Burch: I don’t, and that means my experience with video games is entirely nostalgic. I don’t think I’ve actually played a full video game in 25 years. For me, video games are solely rooted in growing up and nostalgia, with memories of the 8-bit Nintendo and the Super Nintendo and a little bit of the N64, and then that’s it. The inclusion of the videogame-styled mapping, though, came about because of a Mike Meginnis story called “Navigators” I published in Hobart fourteen years ago. It wound up being featured in that year’s Best American Short Stories, and it was this amazing story about a young kid playing video games with his dad. They’re playing this fictional game that’s very Metroid-like, and they’re drawing maps on the wall to track their progress, which I very much borrowed and fictionalized for Tacoma. Narratively, it works for the book, but it’s just this very fun, meta moment for me, too.
In Tacoma, the book version of “Aaron” is childhood friends with this character who’s a fictionalized version of this character in this story I published. What started off as a throwaway line was something I turned into a story called “Maps,” which was basically the beginning and end of that idea. When I was thinking about using it in Tacoma, I wanted to connect the idea to this sense of quest and questing, and of beating a video game, and that wound up giving me a sense of plot to the book, which was originally a plotless, hanging-out novel (or at least, that’s how I thought of it). While I wasn’t interested in that particular quest or plotting, I just wanted my readers to smile and laugh somewhere on every page.
Rumpus: The nostalgia component is definitely there, but you don’t approach it from this sense of sadness and melancholy.
Burch: I’d say that the book is as obsessed with nostalgia and growing up as my other books are, but in different ways. At the end of our summer together in Tacoma, Amber flew back and I drove back on this week-long, country roadtrip with my two childhood best friends, whom I’ve known for 30 or 40 years. Early in the drive, I was thinking about the writing I’d done and some of the stories I’d been working on, and, in the quiet hours of those freeway miles, I thought that I could maybe connect them together and fill in the blanks.
I also had the idea early on of calling the book Tacoma, which I thought was funny and would be super fun for me to write. I knew early on, too, that it would force me to focus on what it meant to spend this summer living near friends who I hadn’t lived near for decades, and what it meant to be able to see them again. It also meant I got to see my parents frequently, who, in normal life, I would only get to see about once a year. But it also forced me to reckon with this place that I had once lived in for so long, to experience this place from a couple of Airbnbs that Amber and I rented, in neighborhoods I couldn’t afford to live in otherwise.
That Tacoma, then, felt very different from the Tacoma I grew up in, which had pawn shops and strip clubs nearby. This Tacoma of twenty-plus years later had sections to it that I had never even visited, with a brewery right down the road and these views of the waterfront that seemed unreal. I knew, then, that I wanted to focus on this new version I hadn’t really experienced before.
Rumpus: You mention that conflict early in the book, don’t you? “Versions of this would keep happening for the rest of the summer, but that Tacoma—the Tacoma of my family and my friends and a metaphorical magic of childhood and memories and nostalgia—and this Tacoma—the temporary summer Tacoma of fantasy houses with mysterious locked doors and fictional versions of friends coming to visit and a possible literal magic of changing landscapes and wormholes and time travel—are different, and this story is really about the latter.”
Burch: It goes back to that question of original intent versus what a story has to become. The real magic of a piece comes out when you let a work become what it needs to become, and when you let go of original intent. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: a lot of short stories don’t work because they’re not able to let go of that initially great idea, and the authors never let themselves be surprised by that magic and wonder that’s happening just off the page from them.
Rumpus: We’ve been talking about this incredible sense of joy that Tacoma exhibits throughout—whether it’s the excitement of finding a new place you hadn’t seen before, or eating oysters, or trying a new tiki drink, or making out and having sex with someone you love. How did you mold or shape or change your sense of style (or voice, or both) to create and sustain that sense of joy in the book?
Burch: To some degree, this is all my personality. I’m a happy-go-lucky dork for the most part, which is not always common and seems sometimes weird in the writer/artist world. For me, every project and every story is turning dials, whether it’s up or down, so I’d say there’s a sense of joy in everything I write. In Tacoma, though, I was trying to turn it up to 11. Going back to that final line of the first chapter, it was more of a reminder to me than it was anything else. Regarding the style and voice, I know a lot of it is really loose, like it’s coming from an oral, storytelling position, or there’s a narrator telling someone a story and being excited. When we do this, we’re piling on details and we’re out of breath, and I was trying to capture that sense of excitement on the page and in individual sentences.
Rumpus: Oh, absolutely. You have this great line in the book, where the character of Aaron is talking about Amber: “There is something about sharing a moment of wonder with someone you love. Being next to them. Being able to not just witness the moment with them but through their eyes.” And that line alone works so well as a stand-in for the audience, too. It’s a “come here, I want to show you something cool” moment.
And then this doesn’t have to be explicitly related to joy, but I was also really curious about which authors and/or books you had to read in order to figure out how to construct Tacoma.
Burch: I know I keep coming back to them, but D.T. Robbins and Kevin Maloney were really present in the book, both literally and influentially. This was all borne out of spillover energy and outtakes from Kettlebell Friends Forever, and there’s this wonderful, loose style that both D.T. and Kevin have that I borrowed from here. I used it here and realized that this style made it so that anything really could happen in the book.
I’ve said this elsewhere, too, but I think a lot about Kevin’s Cult of Loretta. I know he had a bunch of individual stories that he realized were related and connected, and he figured out that he could edit them together into a book. So, in some part of my mind, knowing this gave me permission to reverse-engineer my work and try something similar in Tacoma.
Also, Mike Nagel’s Duplex was pretty important for me, and maybe he wrote it similarly? Amber and I were in Tacoma for the holidays, and I remember reading it on the plane, on the flight back to Michigan from Washington. I loved how excellent and focused and short it was, and that I could just sit there and read 100 pages of such excellence in one plane ride, and that’s something that I wanted to try with Tacoma, too.
