2025 week 6 in reading, teaching, writing

Rita Bullwinkel, Brian Evenson, Alex Higley, Miranda July, David Rabe, Ben Shattuck + some more "show your work" novel drafting...

short stories I read this week

Last week, I noted, “I’m gonna have some fun personal writing stuff to share next week!” And, indeed, here’s a bunch of fun personal writing news!

• My next book got announced!

  

  On their IG, Autofocus Books described it thus:

  This is Aaron Burch at, quite possibly, his burchiest, i.e. most affable/big hearted and playful/spontaneous. Basically, a whole lot of fun to read. An autofiction novella about going home and revisiting the past while enjoying the present, mixed up with a bit of the fantastical. It’s kind of an upward spiral of joyous surprise. When I first read it, I just kept smiling. Exactly one year from today, we’ll see if TACOMA has the same effect on you (I declare it will!).

• New essay! On new site, The Apologist, from the amazing

  Katie Darby Mullins
  , which I can’t wait to see what all she publishes next. This one’s about Ross Gay, and beauty & joy & The National & Griffey and Edgar & art & joy & love & sports & more joy.

  

• New story! On another new journal, Pool Party, this one run by Kevin Maloney and Ryan-Ashley Anderson. Excited for more from them.
  
  ”Almost every store is different, but also everything looks exactly the same. A copy of a copy. The Mall of Theseus.

  One part time machine, one part panic attack. Panic attack because shopping always gave me a panic attack; panic attack because teleporting through time gives everyone at least a little bit of a panic attack. I assume. How could it not? Defying the laws of time and space and all that.”
  — “The Mall” in Pool Party
  

• New interview! I just ran the gamut of genre this week. There’s no way anyone is gonna read all these, nor should they, but also… maybe you should? Ha! The amazing

  Cassie Mannes Murray
  asked me three questions (plus a bonus fourth!) and I went a little long on each, mostly about my life as an editor, and just a bunch of stuff on lit journals and editing and writing and all of it.

  

  
  

• Finally…
  “That Was Awesome” short story club #6:
  Thursday, Feb. 20, 8pm ET. Mary Gaitskill’s "The Other Place"
  
  I started hosting these short story clubs last year, which basically just means a bunch of us hop on Zoom and chat about a story. It’s a fun hang! Open to anyone who is interested (there’s usually anywhere from 10-40 of us, and main “chat” usually lasts about an hour, but a few of us stragglers often keep going into a second hour). If you’re interested, just let me know!

the stories I read this week:

Sat. 2/8: “Phylum” by Rita Bullwinkel

The form of this was interesting, and fun, but I didn’t love it. I liked the first story in the collection (“Harp”) a lot better.

That said, I also finished Bullwinkel’s Headshot and that I really loved. Have been describing it as, like, Bachelder’s Throwback Special + John McPhee’s Levels of the Game + Kerry Howley’s Thrown… but also it’s own cool unique thing.

I got news this week that I get to teach a “sports novels” lit class this summer, which I’m super excited for, and I’m excited to teach Headshot as part of it.

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Sun. 2/9: “The Sequence” by Brian Evenson

Evenson is one of my favorite writers. On any given day I might say my favorite writer.

That said, I hadn’t picked up one of his new books in a minute. So I grabbed this one, and it turns out I’m all but sure I’d read this first story before. I probably had the Conjunctions issue it was in? I maybe even picked up that issue of Conjunctions *because* it had an Evenson story.

Or maybe I hadn’t read this story before but it just felt like I had. Which is often the feeling of reading an Evenson story; which is often a version of what the story itself is about. What’s real vs. what isn’t; perception vs. reality; the reality of perception; the falsenesses of “reality”… all of that.

Evenson’s best stories (which, to be honest, is many of them) have this element of getting inside you, haunting you from the inside out, turning your expectations and understandings upside down. There’s maybe nothing else quite like them. Legit feel lucky to have him and his stories and his writing in my world, contemporary with me.

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Mon. 2/3: “Banking” by Alex Higley

I have a big chunk in between classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and so on this Monday, I got lunch with a friend who was in town, and we dipped into the bookstore and I bought Higley’s new one.

I was running late in the morning, before class, and so didn’t read my daily story in the morning like I typically like to, but I have Higley’s collection in my office, and so having just picked up his novel, it felt fitting.

This story is great. There’s a simple, to-the-point, off-kilterness to many of his stories that’s really unique, and just really wonderful.

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Tues. 2/11: “My Friend Pinocchio” by David Rabe

I said on bluesky, upon reading the story, “almost annoying how good the ending of this story is, because I didn't much care for the story itself.’

So, anyway, Kenny died. I knew him a long time, and then he died. I have other friends who are still alive. Some of them are older than Kenny was. I’m older, too.

But Kenny’s gone. ♦

Someone replied, “Spoiler alert!” Which, I guess. Sure. Sorry. I just spoiled the story for you. Kinda. But also, even that we’re told halfway through the story, which they touch on in the accompanying interview, which is kinda interesting:

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Wed. 2/12: N/A

:(

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Thur. 2/13: “The Children of New Eden” by Ben Shattuck

Maybe my least favorite story in the collection yet. And even still, it’s a solid story! I just love almost all the others and, for me, this one never took that leap to the next level or found an extra or whatever that all the others did at one point or another.

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Fri. 2/14: “The Shared Patio” by Miranda July

With so many talking about it, I’ve been curious to read All Fours, so requested it from my library. They didn’t have it, but while I was there in the system, I thought maybe I’d do a No One Belongs Here More Than You reread.

This first story is pretty great. This perfect amount of Miranda July oddity that turns the story just sideways enough to feel both totally recognizable and also unlike anything else. There’s a moment ~halfway through that is a whole page of imagined conversation with the neighbor’s neighbor that is so wonderful. We also get these occasional italicized paragraphs throughout that the ending kinda reveals what they are, and I love them a lot. I love them for what they are, and I love them as story “move,” which I will definitely be keeping in the back of my mind to try my version of at some point…

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Here’s something I wrote/revised this week:

I went to the cafe this morning and wrote for a few hours, as has become my weekly Friday schedule this semester.

Today I wrote a sex scene chapter. Within the context of the book, I think it works. And I’m excited about it. It’s kinda out of my comfort zone, and I’m excited about that.

That chapter got me up over 10k words on the project so far. It’s early still, but I’m excited about it. It feels like the most ambitious thing I’ve tried yet — big and sprawling, with rotating POVs! a mystery/detective story thread! a sex scene! some horror elements! Having a lot of fun with it.

Outside the context of the book though, I’m too shy to share even a peek at the scene, lol, so here’s a few paragraphs from a chapter I wrote earlier this week:

Ishaan knew as soon as the guy walked in, he was here to drink. A bar, everyone came in to drink. Still. There was a distinction between coming in and having a drink and coming in to drink.

The guy had been before, but Ishaan made no indication at recognition.

Something else Ishaan knew was the difference between a customer who liked being remembered and those who didn’t.

These were the kinds of knowings that made Ishaan a great bartender.

A group of women were in the back corner, girls-night-out’ing at three tables pushed together. They liked innocently flirting with Ishaan, liked the way he flirted back. They loved Ishaan’s remembering and recognition.

The guy at the bar held his pint glass between his two giant paws of hands, spinning it in place. One way, the other. Reminded Ishaan of Boy Scouts, learning you could start a fire by spinning a stick in your hand as fast as possible, on top of a pile of moss or some other kind of tinder. In theory anyway. Ishaan never saw anyone actually do it successfully.

There were the guys who shuffled their glass back and forth, hand to hand. Guys who fingertapped the brim, like a drum. Guys who held their glasses like a mug of hot coffee or cocoa; guys who only ever touched the glass to drink from it, like a challenge to touch it as little as possible. Guys who asked for a bottle because they liked to pick at the label. Guys who put their glass down in different places, making little shapes and designs with the rings of condensation. Lately, there’d been something of a game where guys would put a coaster atop their glass, flip it off, try to catch it in midair.

This guy’s patient, slow motion fire-starting was a variation he’d never quite seen before.

I had a pretty rough, pretty different version of this chapter drafted where the POV was close 3rd to the guy who comes in to drink. At some point — I want to say it was lying in bed, as I was starting to drift off to sleep — I had the idea to shift the POV to the bartender. I’m excited with how it turned out. Totally changed the chapter. And, in fact, kinda totally opened up the possibilities for the novel as a while. What a great, exciting feeling when that happens!

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Thanks!

—Aaron

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