Los Angeles Review of Books Interview for CLS&OE

I talked with my talented, generous, and smart friend and fellow fiction writer, classmate, colleague, and Midwesterner writer in exile, Bryan Hurt about a ton of shit: Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, grad school, living and studying in LA, workshop at USC, exploring the counterfactual reality of Los Angeles, nostalgia, mixed-race identity in the Midwest, writing from the outside, the role and mission of experimental writing, and the value of pyrotechnical syntax on the page, among other things, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you have a second, please read this interview, which will definitely be one of the most interesting ones you’ll read this month. I promise.

Two Interviews for Two Versions of the World

In the past couple weeks, I’ve done a bunch of interviews—all of which I loved, all of them for different reasons—and the ones I did with Gauraa at No Contact Magazine and with Peter at ZYZZYVA are very close to my heart. My interview in ZYZZYVA was a joy because Peter was a smart and insightful reader who noticed things I really wanted readers to notice, like for example, that “Sola’s Asterisk” is in the middle of the collection because that short story is essentially the heart of this collection in so many ways, both as microcosm and macrostructure. Beyond that, I love and respect ZYZZYVA so much, so having an interview in that journal about my debut short story collection is a huge fucking deal for me. And my interview in No Contact was a joy because Gauraa brought critical and cultural theory into a really smart conversation while focusing exactly where I wanted her to, the discussion of small presses, BIPOC identity and characterization, nonlinearity, and a sustained conversation about the interludes in this book. Beyond that, I loved the medium for our interview done completely with Instagram DMs. So, I got to enjoy both old school and new school interviews using different media while have some dope conversations in the process. Life is good!

So Now I'm a LA Writer

LB & I decided to move back to LA back in January of 2021 after she was offered an amazing job opportunity at CHLA, a decision that was difficult for me because of how much I’ve loved (working with) my BFA & MFA students & how much I valued my colleagues at BG, but also easy in other ways since we’ve lived in LA for over ten years, always coming back here over & over again. At some point, & I’m not quite sure where the timeline lands exactly, LA & not Chicago became our home even though we’re both from Chicago & even though we met each other in Chicago with a little help from MySpace. But that’s another story.

During the last pandemic wave in the winter of 2019/2020, I was completely stuck in Ann Arbor, constantly fighting depression, immobility, anxiety, fear, & hopelessness. Much of that was the pandemic, obviously, but much of that was also A2 too. After a while, LB & I ended up eating out at the same 3-4 restaurants, we did the exact same walk around the neighborhood 3-4 times a week, even my classes felt redundant, I found myself saying the same shit over & over again in response to workshopped manuscripts. I felt like I was stuck in a perpetual loop in Michigan & I wanted desperately to come back to LA, not only because this city was always the space before we tried to start a family, the space before the Covid-19 pandemic hit (because of when we left in June 2019), the place where I got my PhD before the job search, but also because this city shaped me. I became a doctor here. I became an agented writer here. I sold my first novel here. I revised my memoir here, which I sold in Michigan. I published a piece of flash nonfiction in the New York Times here. I got my half sleeve here. I got my first lectureship here. I visited my homeland from LA. I met my Japanese family while in LA. I fully developed my style here (half street style, half urban Asian preppy). LB became a supervisor here. We adopted Gogo! here. IOW, LA made me the person I am today & I kinda like that person. I relate to that person. I understand that person.

So coming back here felt like the most normal thing in the world & also the most surreal too since the time dilation I’d experienced back in the Midwest during the collapse of the world distorted my sense of how much time had passed & how slowly it was passing. Now, I’m a LA writer, I’m starting to schedule a remote tour with indie bookstores across the country, I’m working on ways to promote Counterfactual Love Stories, but I don’t fully know yet what that means. It’s something I can only understand after a couple years. Yes, I have three books coming out in the next 12 months, which I’m really grateful for (& have worked so hard for). But I don’t know yet where I’m headed, what the next step in my writing career is, whether I’ll end up writing screenplays, scoring a gig at Buzzfeed, working as an extra for Central Casting (because why the fuck not), doing freelance work as a copy editor, selling new post-rock & electronic music & tour merchandise from my Love, Amnesia, & Dream Tour, or something completely unrelated to writing & art.

TBH, I have no idea, but I have this (probably naive, definitely irrational) hope that everything is going to work out. It might be the beautiful weather that I just can’t take for granted after two winters locked in Michigan. It might be the superabundance of artists, writers, screenwriters, yoga fanatics, juice drinkers, Prius & Tesla drivers, actors, models, & influencers here. It might be the panoply of vegan restaurants, sushi joints, & cafés that serve perfect vanilla oat lattés here, but whatever it is, LA has become the place where I belong, where I thrive, where my partner can thrive, where it feels not only acceptable to not have kids or a typical nuclear family, but sometimes even necessary!

I’m happy we came back to LA. I’m happy to be here and see what my future holds for me now that I’ve centered LB for once & begun the next phase of my writing career as someone whose work is coming to a theater near you very soon.

2nd Piece Accepted in 2017

My short story about class/race in Humboldt Park, "Guide to the Other Side of the Universe," which is part of my short story collection, Geography of Desire, was accepted yesterday in the Angel City Review, an awesome LA-based literary journal.  Stay tuned for more deetz!

6th Piece Accepted in 2016

Today I got an email telling me that my personal essay, "When Words Make You Real," was accepted in the mixed-race anthology The Beiging of America, which is awesome.  I'm happy, proud even, to be part of such a groundbreaking but also crucial anthology exploring what it means to be mixed race (in my case, hapa) in America.

5th Piece Accepted in 2016

Today, I got the great news that a chapter from my novella, The Laws of Rhetoric and Drowning, was accepted by Hobart, which publishes fantastic fiction and interviews, among other things.  I'm really happy to see this piece put in the public eye!  Stay tuned for more deetz.

4th Piece Accepted in 2016

I just got the awesome news today that my lyrical essay "Obāsan in a Cup," which is part of my experimental memoir Dream Pop Origami, was accepted in the always-awesome Guernica Magazine.  Even more shocking, it will be published tomorrow.  Many thanks to the smart, perceptive, and insightful suggestions from Raluca Albu, the CNF editor at Guernica.  Stay tuned!

3rd Piece Accepted in 2016

"Castaways and Worry Dolls," one of my self-contained chapters from my novella The Laws of Rhetoric and Drowning was accepted today by Joyland magazine and will be published in October 2016. While you're there, check out my friend Bonnie Nadzam's piece "4 Ghost Stories."

2nd Piece Accepted in 2016

Matthew Salesses runs and directs an awesome column at Pleiades about workshop craft and workshop pedagogy and I'm happy to say that my essay "The Velocity of Flying Objects" about my own workshop methodology will be published soon on the magazine's website.  Stay tuned.

1st Piece Accepted in 2016

I got the good news recently that my flash fiction piece "Living in the Future," which is part of my short story collection Atlas of Tiny American Desires, was accepted in the literary journal Arts & Letters and will be appearing in either the Fall 2016 or Spring 2017 issue.  Nothing like a short story acceptance to keep my spirits up.

AWP Conference 2016 (LA)

Remarkably, it's been ten fucking years since I've been back at AWP.  The last time was in Atlanta in 2006, back when I was a confident, driven, ambitious, but also paradoxically naive, trusting, and hyperidealistic MFA student whose only aspiration at the time was to publish short stories and essays in the best literary journals possible.  The idea of publishing novels was fundamentally foreign to me for the simple reason that I hadn't written a novel yet, nor a collection of short stories.  There was no lofty expectation because there was no product.

Ten years later, I'm both amazed, horrified, and also humbled by how differently I look at the publishing industry in general and at my literary ambitions in particular.  Unlike ten years ago, I have a bunch of stories and essays published in a number of legit literary journals, but it's no longer enough for me anymore.  Also, unlike ten years ago, I have several manuscripts that are ready for publication.  I have more than a few realistic publishing possibilities with several awesome indie presses (though they remain merely possibilities until those manuscripts become material objects of art for public consumption).  I have--I always seem to have--several agents and a senior agent at a major New York publishing house reading my novels.  I have two rad lecturer positions at UCI and CSUN teaching literature, writing, rhetoric, research, and creative writing.  I have probably too many advanced degrees now, but whatevs.  I have a network and a community of friends (many of them APIA writers, but certainly not all of them).  I have some fans who follow me on Twitter because of the things I've written.  Most importantly, I feel--possibly irrationally, possibly delusionally--that I finally have momemtum in my writing career.  So, I apologize for this self-indulgent recollection, but the point I'm making here is that I see this conference in such a different way than I did before because I bring a different emotional and professional technology than before.  I feel like I can almost touch my future, as absurd as that sounds.

Among other things I did at this year's AWP, I got to:

1.  Attend readings from Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, my friend and mentor Percival Everett, Shonda Buchanan, Judy Grahn, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Ho Davies, which were all pretty amazing.

2.  Attend a fascinating (and inditing!) panel by Adam Atkinson, Lillian Yvonne-Betram, and Sarah Vap (an SC student) that presented the results of its survey and data collection about race and racial representation within PhD programs in Creative Writing.

3.  Talk to editors of several of my favorite indie presses and do a tiny bit of politicking (almost all of it unplanned and unintentional)

4.  Make new writing friends and also do some networking (which never hurts in this business)

5.  Most importantly, meet up with and reconnect with former professors and old friends from my MFA and PhD years, many of whom I haven't seen in years and whom I've missed, sometimes terribly, including Steve Tomasula, Marc Irwin, Joshua Bernstein, Chris Santiago, Lily Hoang, Gwendolyn Oxenham, Casey and Denise Hill, Heather Dundas, David St. John, and Percival Everett (who hugged me and then said, "What's going on, brother?")

6.  Buy a shitload of books and literary journals from indie presses

7.  Remember again why I'm a writer, a writer before I'm anything else in the professional and artistic domains