I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Joe
Baumann. Joe is the author of three collections of short fiction, Sing With Me
at the Edge of Paradise, The Plagues, and Hot Lips. His
fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom
Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the
University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow
in Fiction. His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is
available from Deep Hearts YA. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
What made you start writing?
The origin question is always a fun one,
and this has particularly been on my mind because I’ve been working on an essay
about that. One early memory that I come
to is that there was this high-seas adventure animated TV show that I never got
to see the end of because my family moved halfway across the country, so in
second grade I decided to come up with the rest of the story myself! I think that’s what made me, at a young age,
realize that just about anyone could tell a story, and that’s where my interest
in writing and creating started.
What’s something that’s true about you
but no one believes?
For some reason, no one ever believes, when
I play “two truths and a lie” with creative writing students, that I was born
in New York. No one ever believes that
I’m very good at math, either, but I think that’s because of the stereotypes
about English teachers and creative types being horrible at those sorts of
things—despite the fact that I think great writers are actually usually really
good at those sorts of analytical things!
I took calculus in college and people look at me bug-eyed when I tell
them that.
What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as
a writer?
This is probably a controversial answer,
but although I rarely pay to submit to things (I’m not militantly anti-fee, but
I see why people can be), I did enter a contest in 2021 for a First Book of
Short Prose and found myself, rather unexpectedly, the winner. That has had some seriously positive effects
for me as a writer. A more traditional
answer might be a pair of informative writing texts: Matt Bell’s Refuse to
Be Done has helped me rethink how I approach long-form projects and Matthew
Salesses’ book Craft in the Real World has helped me in thinking about
writing as a teaching tool.
Describe your book in three words.
At the risk of making readers uninterested
in something of a possible downer of a book, I’ll say “surreal queer
discontent.”
Describe your book poorly.
Weird stuff happens to unhappy people.
If you could spend the day with another
author, who would you choose and why?
Oh gosh—so many people I would choose for
this question! But if I’m forced to
select only one, I would go with Kristen Arnett, simply because she seems super
cool on Twitter and also she seems like she knows how to have a good time
(once, at AWP, we happened to be in the same restaurant and her table all
appeared to be having a blast).
What genres won’t you read?
I guess if I had to choose, I would say I
don’t really read what’s often marketed as straight-up ‘romance’ (no offense to
her, but I’ll use Danielle Steele as an example). But really, if I discover that a book I’m
reading is primarily driven by a romance, that doesn’t make me stop
reading. I think it’s valuable and
important as a writer to read lots of different things, both the kind of stuff
you want to write and that which you don’t tend to write, because even the
latter can teach you some important things.
What’s the single best line you’ve ever
read?
I think, for me, it’s the opening sentence
of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the
firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice.”
First of all, that book really showed me how inventive and WEIRD stories
could be without feeling the need to explain themselves. Also, it’s a great opening line! There’s so much to unpack, and so much of a
world waiting to be cracked open from those three lines.
What’s the one thing you wish you knew
when you were younger?
I hope it’s okay to say two things
here. First, I wish I’d discovered surreal/fabulist/magic
realist writing much, much sooner, or at least had had more exposure to some of
the great writers—like Aimee Bender, Jeanette Winterson, Jorge Luis Borges—who
work in that genre much sooner. I was
mostly exposed to ‘literary’ realism in high school and college, so that’s what
I tried to write. But I’m so much better
at the wacky and weird. The other thing
is that I wish I’d known it was okay to be myself and to write about things
that mattered to me in particular. I was
a queer kid growing up, though I didn’t have the terminology for it until
college, and I didn’t come out until after college, and it wasn’t until
I leaned into that part of who I was, channeled in my writing, that I started
to see my writing really and truly become what it is now. I wish I’d known that it was okay to lean
into that, to be myself and thus the real version of who I was as a writer,
much, much sooner.
Are you a book hoarder or a book
unhauler?
I am 100% a book hoarder. I think I’ve ‘given away’ like three books,
ever? Even ones I haven’t really liked I
pretty much keep. But! In my defense, I am a very good reader in
that although I have a “to be read” stack, I’m pretty good about actually
getting through it. When I bought my
house, the room that became my office/library had a single high built-in shelf,
and I put all of my ‘to be read’ books there, and then—because I’m a weirdo—I
use a random number generator to decide what I read next, so even if I’m crazy
excited about something I’ve bought, I only read it when random chance
allows! So although I keep my books, I
don’t have a bunch that I’ve failed to read because I keep buying too many
others.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The sixteen stories in this collection
surround queer men of various ages—teenagers, young adults, men in middle
age—trying to temper their expectations of the world with their lived
experience. Using the lens of the bizarre and fantastic, these stories explore
discontent, discomfort, and discovery.
In “Melt With You,” a twenty-something learns
that his boyfriend can slip into walls, a trick that becomes a sticking point
during tumultuous, challenging moments in their relationship; the main
character in “Shearing” is a barber who can read the minds of his clients but
must sacrifice his own bits of memory to do so; “There Won’t Be Questions”
features a young man who can summon lost animals to a shoebox, but suffers for
it, both via physical illness and the crumbling of his relationship with his
closest friend.
In the title story, the Garden of Eden starts
to appear in various places around the world, and the narrator, looking down at
the Trees of Life and Knowledge, must make an impossible decision regarding the
most important relationship he’s ever had.
https://www.ttupress.org/9781682831601/sing-with-me-at-the-edge-of-paradise/
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