2025 week 7 in reading, blurbing, & writing
Tyler McAndrew, Ben Shattuck, Miranda July, Brian Evenson, Jensen Beach, Mary Gaitskill, Josh Denslow, & Emily Fridlund + some notes on my novel-in-progress...
A fun week in reading! I finished one of my fave collections I’ve read in a long time (maybe up there in the “ever” tier??), (re)read a bunch of a collection by a friend to blurb it, read the first third of a novel by another friend toward blurbing it, published a banger of a story on Short Story, Long, and hosted another “That Was Awesome” short story club on Zoom last night, where 12-15 or so of us hung out on Zoom and chatted about Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place” and just kinda geeked out over writing and short stories.
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If you’re reading this and haven’t yet read the new story on SSL, I can’t recommend it highly enough! It’s a blast.
echoed my sentiments, saying “Oh man Aaron wasn't exaggerating. This story hooks you and takes you for a ride!”
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Over the summer, I traded story collection manuscripts with a handful of writers, because I’d put together what I hope is gonna be my next collection, NOSTALGIA TOURS, and was curious if others thought it felt like a complete collection or if any stories felt out of place or not up to par (and, indeed, I’ve since cut a couple (and added 3 or 4 newer, shorter pieces in their place)) or what. One of those writers was Tyler McAndrew, who sent me his manuscript, My Prisoner and Other Stories. My feedback to him was basically: this is great!!
It turned out Ohio State University Press agreed, as it won their 2024 Non / Fiction Prize a handful of months later.
Tyler sent me one of the kindest emails I’ve ever received asking if I’d blurb the book, and so I spent some time this week rereading a chunk of it, and wrote this for it. Definitely going to be reminding and bugging you all to preorder it when you can! It’s a gem.
These stories often orbit misunderstandings, mishaps, miscommunications, each shining a spotlight on a character reaching and seeking and aching for some kind of connection. An echo of the very thing I desire from a short story, from art — to be pulled into its orbit, to be made to feel a connection. If you're reading this now, I'm excited for and jealous of you getting to read this beautiful collection.
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I also spent a chunk of the week sending out queries for my novel, THE LAST LOCK-IN. I’m so proud of this book. I have self-doubts and uncertainties about it, but also think it’s super fun, and interesting, pretty unique, and a leveling-up from everything I’ve written before it.
Would it be interesting to share the synopsis? Dumb? Maybe. A little. A lot. I don’t know! This whole blog is an experiment in showing your work, so whatever, here goes:
Set during the twenty-six hours of a youth group sleepover, THE LAST LOCK-IN is the hour-by-hour account of a long, strange night where everything and nothing go as planned.
Narrated by an unnamed protagonist looking back on his life, we follow the story of what happened that night (and why he believes it to have been such a turning point in his life, a demarcation between the Before and the After), and piece-by-piece, reveal-by-reveal, discover who the narrator was as a 15-year-old in the mid-90s but also who he became as an adult, now reflecting back on his youth.
Part “locked room” mystery, part coming-of-age novel, part coming-of-middle-age novel, THE LAST LOCK-IN comes to life through the narrator’s specific funny, curious, digressive, looping, intimate voice to investigate questions of belief, friendship, sexuality, secrets, relationships, and what it means to be both a teenager and a human in the world.
In voice and way of looking at the world, together with its themes of nostalgia, growing up, and religion, THE LAST-LOCK-IN is in the tradition of and in conversation with Chris Bachelder’s Throwback Special, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Stewart O'Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, among others, and, I believe, literary/commercial appeal of recent novels by Kevin Wilson, Emily St. Mandel, Ernest Cline, and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
the stories I read this week:
Sat. 2/15: “Introduction to The Dietzens: Search for Eternity In the North American Wilderness” & “Origin Stories” by Ben Shattuck
I think “The Dietzens,” and its sister story, “The Children of New Eden,” which I read last week, were probably my least favorites in the book. But even still, they’re good! It’s only that pretty much every other story in the collection is out-of-my-price-range top-shelf short story wonders.
Reading both of these finished the book for me. Sad to be done with it. I checked it out from the library, and it’s still only available in hardcover, but as soon as there’s a paperback, I’m going to be picking it up and adding it to my shelf of all-timers, and revisiting it often, I already know.
My faves were often whatever I’d read most recently, but looking back at the table of contents, the ones that feel most burned in my memory are “The History of Sound,” “Tundra Swan,” and “Origin Stories.” Neither “Radiolab: ‘Singularities’” nor “The Auk” were quite a fave on their own, but they might be the pair that most stuck with me. And pretty much all of those early stories especially knocked me out.
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Sun. 2/16: “The Swim Team” by Miranda July
This is the story I most remember from reading the collection when it came out, in 2007. An odd revisiting. I still remember it, coming up on almost 20 years later, though it was also quite a bit different than I’d remembered. In my mind, I pictured this narrator at the pool with her students. (Because that seems natural, of course, but also maybe at least a little because I joined the gym near me a couple months ago and have been swimming 2-3/week.)
Alas, the story is set in a small town where there isn’t any water anywhere nearby, pools included. And so the narrator teaches them to “swim” in her apartment. A really interesting, fun, super Miranda July-y premise. It also reminded me a bit of Davy Rothbart’s story, “The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas,” which I haven’t reread in forever, but I remember loving. Unforch, another book we either gave away or I left behind when I moved out. Gonna have to pick up another copy!
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Mon. 2/17: N/A :(
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Tues. 2/18: “The Cabin” by Brian Evenson
I’m reading my way through Evenson’s newest, Good Night, Sleep Tight, and I kinda can’t imagine I’ll have something new to say every week. I foresee a repeated mantra of “what a gem… what a master… another banger!”
Evenson’s stories get inside you. They feel familiar, like you’ve read them before, like you’ve thought them before, like they’ve always just kinda existed… and also surprising at every turn and unlike anything else.
I’m looking forward to reading the whole, and curious, as I (slowly) make my way through it, which stories will stand out, and the cumulative effect of the whole.
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Wed. 2/19: “Kino” by Jensen Beach
Jensen is one of my favorite writers. One of my favorite people. I think this book is so great, and it should be mentioned more often. It’s been a joy already to dip back into and revisit these stories!
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Thur. 2/20: “The Other Place” by Mary Gaitskill
Reread for “That Was Awesome” short story club. Have read this story half a dozen times, at least, since first reading it in Best American Short Stories 2012, and it knocks me out every time.
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“Keening” & “Bingo” by Josh Denslow
The first two stories in Denslow’s Magic Can’t Save Us, coming in May. The third story is “Infinite Possibilities Outside the Screen,” which I was lucky enough to get to publish on Short Story, Long. I’m going to be interviewing Josh sometime soon, before it comes out, and will surely hype that when it drops. Really looking forward to reading more of the book and chatting with him!!
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Fri. 2/21: “Time Difference” by Emily Fridlund
This story was “good” but I feel like is getting penalized for coming at the end of a week of giant faves, and I knew even while reading that it just didn’t have its hooks in me.
Here’s something I wrote/revised this week:
I wrote this last week, and the exact same was true today, so I am gonna leave it:
I went to the cafe this morning and wrote for a few hours, as has become my weekly Friday schedule this semester.
Today was the first time in a while that I was solely working longhand, generating new stuff, so no actual typed up words today. A couple quick thoughts though, while I’m “in in”:
I spent the first 30-60 minutes making notes for myself for what to change or add to past chapters. It’s so early, the book is constantly in flux, changing while I’m working on it. I’ve decided I wanted a missing mother in an earlier chapter to actually be a missing father. I’d had the idea for one of the primary characters to smash his phone with his beer glass the bar, but then didn’t write it, probably mostly because I was lazy but also I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to follow through on the idea; now, though, I want that character’s brother (and/or mother? we’ll see!) to be reaching out and not hearing back, so I want to go back in and write that scene after all. It would be relatively easy to go back and actually make those additions and changes… but I don’t want to get hung up on that. Forward progress! But I also don’t want to forget. So I jotted down some notes, and now I’m continuing to push into new territory, writing new chapters, as if those changes were implemented.
This novel is pretty unlike anything I’ve written before. The voice is almost the polar opposite of what I leaned into with THE LAST LOCK-IN, but also it’s way more genre-y than anything I’ve tried before. One of the storylines is following a couple of detectives, and I’m leaning into and trying to play with that, and there’s also a… horror/fantasy/folklore element. These genre-y elements are super fun, and the very fact that it feels so different is a big part of that fun.
At the same time, it is a contemporary retelling of a Bible story (last novel was set at a youth group lock-in, putting this very much in the region of “like what I’ve written before”) and at its core it is about two brothers with a complicated relationship, and whose parents are getting older. And, oof, that is all familiar writing territory. Familiar life territory. Last week I wrote a fun “monster sex scene”; today I was getting kinda emotional writing about a son and a mother having a conversation about her and the father/husband getting older and what that means. Man. Life can be hard. But beautiful, too. All of it!
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Thanks!
—Aaron
I was happy to read Sheldon’s short story. I have his collection - Where the Pavement Turns to Sand - published by Malarkey. The title reminds me of a childhood fav - Where the Sidewalk Ends. Sheldon’s stories have a little of that Shel Silverstein magic.
I just saw Josh in Barcelona. Can't wait to read his collection!