microfine
interview with
fiction writer
Joe Baumann

Grace Hopps: The worlds of your stories range across speculative fiction, spanning from whimsical improbability in “Holey Moley” (TELL ME) to magical realism in “Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go” (from the collection of the same name) to specific subgenres like in “Twilight in Heroland” (A THING IS ONLY KNOWN WHEN IT IS GONE). Do you find yourself actively pairing ideas with genres as you generate them, or do you feel genre develops as you write?
Joe Baumann: Generally, genre develops as I go, partly because I rarely know much about an idea when I get started (I usually have a sharp first line that’s marinated in my head for a while, but that’s about it). But I suppose I’ll say that I tend to lean into the surreal/magic realism as my default—most ideas I pursue have some baseline strangeness to them. Once I have that first line, which often includes reference to the strangeness that will be present in the story, I then start writing and see what happens. That said, I’m not ever too concerned over genre distinctions—whether a story is, say, hard science fiction, slipstream, etc., isn’t something I consciously concern myself with as I’m writing. The story will become what it will become, depending on what ends up on the page (and what of that I keep and what I set aside, because there’s always more raw material than I can end up making good use of). I really only think about the possible label I might put on a particular story when I’m sending it out to magazines and am attending to what genres they identify as those they’re willing to consider.
GH: In your 2023 interview with peculiar, you described the revision process as identifying a story’s center and carving around it, “…making everything point and echo toward that center,” which is a beautiful description. Do you have an example of a time you had trouble identifying a story’s heart? If you eventually completed it, how did you push through to do so?
JB: Let me start by saying I have struggled with that many times—I have an entire ‘graveyard’ of unfinished ideas on my computer. But in terms of managing to find my way through that struggle, two particular stories come to mind in different ways. Years ago, I was working on a story about a pair of sisters who, at a state fair, find themselves trapped on a Ferris wheel that will only cycle them back to its top (other weird things start happening, but that’s the focal point). I rewrote the story probably—no exaggeration—a dozen times, slashing plot points, eliminating characters, adding them back in, changing points of view, etc. There was, probably, a total of about 20,000 words that went into and out of that story. Eventually, I managed to discover what each of the sisters was struggling with—they were, it turned out, jealous of each other’s station in the world as well as relationship with their parents—and that helped me get things into place. The other story was part of a project in which I wrote a series of ten stories, each one reimagining the one of the plagues of Egypt. I had a pretty easy time coming up with a concept for each of them—except for the plague of darkness. I tried a whole host of things, and then eventually settled on a narrator discovering/learning that his boyfriend, a demon, is going through puberty and causing darkness to settle in southern Louisiana. I began that story with a whole extra thread about a neighbor girl who has been abandoned, but the whole thing blossomed into a messy disaster. I eventually decided that a narrower scope—no abandoned neighbor—and a slightly less complicated backstory for the demon boyfriend than I had initially crafted helped bring the story into focus and helped me find the story’s heart.
GH: One of the things I appreciate about your writing is that, whether queerness is one of the main themes of a story, your work includes queer characters as a default, representing a variety of queer male experiences. What’s your favorite allegory for queerness, overt or not, that you’ve read in someone else’s work? And what’s your current favorite that you’ve written?
JB: Ooh—good question. I’m not sure a whole lot of allegorical examples come to mind (or are easy for me to extract from a scan of my bookshelves). Perhaps close would be Jandy Nelson’s wonderful I’ll Give You the Sun, which squashes one character’s discovery of how she relates to art with her brother’s discovery of his sexual identity. Genevieve Hudson’s vastly underappreciated Boys of Alabama also uses a conceit of a boy who can bring dead animals back to life to parallel certain parts of coming of age/coming out to really gorgeous effect. In my own work, I’m not sure how frequently the surreal/strange/etc. serves as a direct allegory for queerness (as you mention, queerness is often simply a default part of who characters are rather than the central focus), though I do have a story called “The Vanisher” about a bisexual man who is able to quite literally disappear when he wears a specific bandana that is pretty overtly about bisexual erasure (in real life, in literature, in all media). Another story of mine of that sort is called “A River In Your Chest,” in which some people are born with water instead of blood in their veins that works in a similar capacity regarding tokenization, etc., of, well, just about any minoritized population.
GH: You came out with TELL ME through Northwestern University Press in July of last year, and you have another collection, A THING IS ONLY KNOWN WHEN IT IS GONE, forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in April. Do you have any advice for writers submitting manuscripts to academic presses?
JB: I don’t know that I found the process of submitting to those presses much different than one might experience submitting to independent presses or even agents (though that’s its own ball game), but what I will say is that you should be prepared to have to ‘impress’ more than just an acquisitions editor, meaning that there’s usually an extra step or two: either getting approval from a board of directors or receiving a thumbs up from one or two outside reviewers, or both. So the process of getting under contract ends up being a little longer (or at least involving a few more steps) than it might with other presses. That said, I do think academic presses, because they aren’t nearly as concerned with profitability or fitting projects into particular marketing categories, are often more open to unusual or off-the-beaten-path projects (which is why I found seeking publication of my weird short story collections with them more fruitful than other routes).
GH: Do you listen to anything (music, ambient noise, whale song, etc.) while writing?
JB: Sometimes I’ll listen to music as I’m producing new material or addressing revision notes I’ve made; it just depends on the day, my mood, the work, etc. One thing I never do, though, is listen to anything or have background noise when I’m reading a draft to make notes for revision—I really can’t focus on the words on the page with any distractions.
Joe Baumann possesses a PhD in English, with an emphasis in Fiction Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2014). While there, he served as the editor-in-chief of Rougarou: An Online Literary Journal as well as The Southwestern Review, the university’s student literary journal. He completed his B.A. and M.A. in English at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri.
Interviewer: Grace Hopps