I wrote the pieces here and there, usually in between larger projects, so most of them are shorter. There’s a couple longer essays, but most of them are flash essays under a thousand words. They were usually written when I was frustrated with the novel, or in-between longer essays, or needed the ego boost of maybe getting a piece published. Sometimes I just needed the satisfaction of writing the end of something. One of the joys of writing a novel is that you’re just working on it forever, but on the flip side, it makes you wonder if you can complete something. 

The structure came about as I was looking at all of these one-off flashes. It felt like an accident that they all ultimately work together, but maybe that’s because they all came from me, and this is the shit that I’m obsessed with and think about. 

I really liked everything Autofocus was doing, and it almost started with me wanting an Autofocus book before I had a book. I retroactively looked at all these short shorts and thought, If I put them together, there might be a project here. The actual structure of the book itself was a conversation with myself and the Autofocus editor, Michael Wheaton. I sent him a bunch of pieces and asked, “Is there a book here? If so, how?” And he sent it back and said, “I think so—what about this order?” And we kind of played with it, back and forth. 

FP: That’s really neat! I feel like when we write things, we tend to feel possessive of them and want to stay in control of it, instead of having that outside perspective and space to say, “Here’s what I have. What do you think about it?” 

AB: Yeah, I think for different projects, I may be stubborn or authoritative or self-confident, but I really like to be edited. 

With the novel, when I gave it to the editor, he had a suggestion of moving maybe Chapter 8 to Chapter 1. It took a couple of tweaks, but it worked. My knee-jerk reaction was defensive, but ultimately, I ended up taking the suggestion, and it made it work best. 

Whereas with something like A Kind of In-Between, I was much more like, “I would really love some help finding the book here.” In part, I think about collections different than I think about a sustained whole. I also sometimes think about nonfiction a little differently than I think about fiction. 

FP: I’m really interested in how your thought process differs when writing fiction and nonfiction. We frequently hear the idea that writers tend to be more protective over nonfiction because it’s an extension of you, while fiction is something that you’re coming up with. The idea that nonfiction can be a collection of stuff that happened to you, to be taken as the reader wants, is really intriguing. Going into a piece, as someone who writes both, how do you decide if it’s going to be fiction or nonfiction? 

AB: Almost all of my fiction starts from a place of something that happened. There’s almost always some kernel of nonfiction that I start with, and then it becomes fictionalized and becomes its own thing. I started as a fiction writer; my MFA is in fiction. For a long time, it was primarily, and maybe even almost exclusively, what I read. And then I came to nonfiction, largely because I teach it, and I started thinking, Here are some lessons that go well in the classroom. I wonder if I can do them myself instead of just preaching them?

At first, one of my uncertainties was deciding if something would be nonfiction or fiction. For a while, that was almost debilitating. I think now, I’ve been doing both genres long enough that it’s kind of just instinct. I’ll think of something, and I’ll just kind of know. 

This isn’t really conscious, but I often come back to this idea of curiosity and a driving question. With a personal essay, I’ll aim it at myself and think, Why did I do that? Why did I respond the way that I did? (The why did I respond the way that I did often makes for a really great essay.) Working backwards a little bit, my distinction was reflecting on whether I was curious about what an event said about me or if I thought it just made an interesting scene, or visual, or character. 

Here’s a road trip: I’m curious about why I decided to go out of my way to meet this bio-sister. Similarly, here’s a crazy thing that happened on the trip: I’m not really curious about what it meant to me, but it feels like a fun scene for a story or a novel. 

FP: Thinking about ourselves as a character in nonfiction, and the impact that our experiences have on them, highlights what’s at stake in different moments—and, by extension, what that says about us as a narrator and as a character.

AB: One of the essays in A Kind of In-Between was the dead deer essay—me and a buddy go on a bike ride, we find a deer, and we try to save it. This is something that I talk about when I teach, when thinking about the idea of that question. The dead deer story is a good bar anecdote story. Why I, as someone who is a more passive, reactive person, decided in this moment to try to save the deer, is what brings it from story to essay. It was funny—while I had my hands on the antlers, trying to save this deer, some part of my writer brain was immediately thinking about it as an essay. 

Fast forward about a month. I had written that essay, and the buddy that I was on the bike ride with, who is also a writer, had a dead deer scene in his novel. Both of us knew that that moment felt so visual and interesting. He fictionalized it, and I wrote the essay.  

FP: It’s always funny to see the different aspects of real life on the page. Sometimes it’s a bit scary too, seeing the different ways that someone else perceived a moment where everyone was together. 

AB: Totally! I sent the essay to him and asked, “Is this how it went? What do you think of how I portrayed you?” It was interesting because I could get that feedback. I mean, I’ve been a character in other people’s short stories a couple times, and it is like, “Oh, huh! That’s how you see me? Hmm! All right.” 

FP: Does that ever impact whether or not you decide to make an experience either fiction or nonfiction? 

AB: Maybe a little. I think my nonfiction is most interested in and curious about myself, and I focus less on wondering, Why did this person do this thing to me, and more on, why did I react the way that I did?

So, I don’t think I have that much, if any, nonfiction that makes me feel like I’m questionably presenting someone else, but I also feel kind of weird and sometimes uninterested in writing about my ex. Sometimes that pops up in nonfiction in the background, but just as often, sometimes that’s a version that will become fiction because I don’t want to write that essay. 

FP: That makes complete sense! In thinking about the different ways that you approach writing—you recently edited the craft anthology How to Write a Novel. Throughout this process, did any aspect of your personal craft, or your outlook towards writing, shift? 

AB: This is kind of a longy, loopy answer, but that book got born out of a joke. I was thinking that it would be interesting to write a craft book about writing that never really mentions writing. 

Most of my friends are writers, but we often talk about other shit, mostly through the lens of writing. That’s also how I talk about writing in the classroom a lot of the time. The book is kind of like, here’s this basketball idea, here’s the transference of it to us. Sometimes looking at it a little sideways helps make the point in the way that craft too on the nose can feel a little too on the nose. 

I’m not sure if working on the book made me think about craft differently so much as it made me even more aware that being a writer, and being an artist, is how I see the world. It reminded me that there are parallels everywhere, and that I’m often looking at the world through the eyes of creativity—wondering, How does that work? Is there a way that I can borrow that and do it myself? How can I be inspired by that? I often come back to thinking, how do I write an essay that feels as exciting to a reader as being at this metal show felt to me? If I can set that as a goal, it feels more interesting as a goal than just writing a great essay. I want the reader to feel what I felt in that moment. 

FP: Thinking more about the impact of the writing versus getting hung up on what makes a “good essay.”

AB: Yeah! Just this morning in my fiction class, I had them do an exercise where they wrote the ideal reader response to the story they’re working on right now, so they could think about how to steer the reader into that, rather than thinking about Freytag’s Pyramid and the rising and falling action. What would make you most stoked if a reader read it and reacted a certain way? 

It’s not often how we talk about writing, and maybe not even how we think about it. Yet when that reader response happens, it means so much to us. Like with my novel—Kevin Wilson gave me this blurb about how “open hearted” the novel felt, and how it made him feel more alive, or more like a human, or something. That just meant the world to me. One because I love Kevin’s writing, but also because I don’t know if that was ever my goal until he said it. Then retroactively, I was like “Fuck yeah! That feels like I did it right!” 

So much when I was younger, I wished I was a different kind of writer. I wished I was a different kind of person—I wished I was cooler. I wished I was edgier. I wished I was more experimental. I thought my general dorky enthusiasm and earnestness was a negative, but the more that I’ve steered into those, the more confident I’ve become as a person, and the better my writing has become. The more I’ve embraced being an earnest dork on the page, the better the essays and fiction have gotten. 

FP: So much of writing nonfiction is wanting the version of yourself that you’re portraying on the page to be the best, coolest version of you, but sometimes that isn’t what the essay needs. It’s really interesting to hear the progression of wanting to present yourself a certain way then realizing that the way you are itself is enough and works for the essay.

AB: The actual writing itself and me as a person often go hand in hand, too. I think a lot of that is the best version of myself. I thought the best version was the coolest, but really the best is just the one that is chasing joy and what that means. 

FP: That kind of relates back to our earlier conversation about structure. One of the reasons why the different pieces in the memoir work together so well is because they’re all from the same narrator. 

AB: Yeah! In A Kind of In-Between, some of the essays have some kind of constraint. There’s this quote that “constraints breed creativity.” Sometimes I would grab ahold of that. In some essays, I wanted to box myself in more. What would it look like for this essay to only be one long sentence, or for it to be in all questions? I think there’s something about working within constraints that takes you to especially interesting places. 

There’s another version of that too. In my Art of the Essay class right now, we’re writing personal pop culture essays that blend object essays, something external from self, with the personal. Because I’m a pop culture obsessed Gen X dude, I make them all think about pop culture for a couple of months, and it’s crazy how often those essays for my students turn into the best thing that they wrote. By writing about something outside themselves, it unlocks something within themselves that they maybe couldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s like because I’m writing about Mario Kart, I actually got somewhere even deeper about my relationship with my brother, who I used to play Mario Kart with, that I never would have by just trying to write about him. 

I think a lot of writing is tricking yourself to find those things and then go to those places. Sometimes it’s by thinking about something external. Sometimes it’s by giving some kind of constraint. 

FP: That reminds me of the different calls for submission that’ll go out through HAD. It’s always really fun to see writers try to scramble trying to quickly write something very specific, and oftentimes they’re super excited about what they wrote after. 

AB: On this end of those HAD calls, that’s been one of the most fun and exciting parts of them, and I think, with all things HAD, and maybe with all the things in my life, the best stuff happens when it wasn’t intended but was a little sideways. At some point it just seemed fun to maybe do some themed calls for HAD. We often get responses on social media of somebody who either wrote something specifically for the call, but then missed the call, or got a rejection, but the piece turned into something that they’re really proud of that got accepted elsewhere. I think that’s awesome! Anything that gives that prompting can feel so exciting, right? It’s been such a cool side effect of themed calls. 

FP: You’ve mentioned a bit about teaching, a bit about HAD, and a lot about writing. How do you strike a healthy balance? 

AB: I think I’m happiest when I’m busy, to some degree. It makes me feel like I’m being a human. There’s a sweet spot—I don’t know, I can be pretty lazy. I’m not a workaholic, but when I go too long without doing something, I feel kind of blah. So having all these projects means that I always have one that I can grab hold of and work on. Sometimes it means avoiding the others. Sometimes I do a HAD call or work on Short Story, Long to avoid my own writing or to avoid grading. Sometimes grading takes the place of writing, and I don’t get that much writing done through the semester. 

I think of the three, the teaching, the writing, and the editing, I’m usually pretty good at consistently doing two of the three. When you add family life, then maybe I’m pretty good at doing two or three of the four. I usually feel like I’m dropping the ball on one but that the others are doing pretty well. 

If I weren’t doing the journals, maybe I would be able to get more writing done, but when I don’t have the energy for writing, or when I feel stuck, I can still feel like I’m being literary and productive in this other way. Ultimately, I take great joy in all of them, like I get a lot of joy out of writing. I get a lot of joy out of editing journals, and I love being in the classroom. 

I think it’s important to try out a bunch of different things to find what feels right and brings you joy—then lean in and keep doing it.