A Short Interview w/ Joe Baumann

If you haven’t already, read the story now… then read our short interview about the story:

Aaron Burch: I’m kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

Joe Baumann: So this story actually spins out of a larger project, a novel about a family of five brothers and their father and what happens after, as is retained in the story, their mother dies unexpectedly. In its first iteration, the story was actually a pretty traditionally-oriented novel (in terms of structure, chronology, etc.), but I figured out pretty early that trying to contain the experiences of each of five siblings as they processed their mom’s death didn’t work. In that original project, each brother experienced a uniquely surreal event or series of events in the aftermath of the mom’s death. I shelved the project after I’d made pretty serious headway--about thirty thousand words--when I finally knew it was beyond salvaging, at least in that iteration. I tried again about a year later with the same concept(s) but a slightly different structure, and that was actually worse; I only made it about half as far through before it fell apart. Then, a little over a year ago, I was working on building a course on writing interconnected stories as part of my teaching job, and had a realization: I could probably, with far greater success, tell this family’s story in a sequence of vaguely-connected short stories.

It all kind of fell weirdly into place, structurally, once I recalibrated. So this story is part of a collection of fifteen stories (each brother is the central character in three of them). For this particular story, I had started with the image of someone waking up to see their arm floating near their ceiling, and I immediately thought the story would fit the character Peter from this family (I’d already written one of his other stories), and that’s how I got started.

I think a lot of us have probably scavenged or repurposed pieces of novels that didn’t work into stories!

This is kind of vague, and pretty open-ended, but can you talk some about that process? Was this story already a single chapter, and so you were reworking that to work as its own story, or was there more collaging together from different pieces of the whole? And maybe just even more generally, how did that go?

I’m also curious, when this was a piece of the novel, did it not then have that speculative element? Maybe I’m misreading, but if that’s the case, I’m wondering about what it was like grafting this more magical premise onto something that was maybe originally more realist?

Read more