A Short Interview w/ Brandon Forinash +

+ a few other Short Story, Long announcements!

A couple real quick notes, before we get to the real stuff:.

• If you’re reading this site, you probably like (love?) short stories, and so a little cross self-promotion for anyone curious:
  I started a little side project/offshoot Substack to keep something of a reading log of my daily short story reading:

• “That Was Awesome” short story club #5:
  Thursday, Jan. 16, 8pm ET. Amy Stuber’s “Cinema”
  
  In 2024, I started hosting these short story clubs, which basically just means a bunch of us hop on Zoom and chat about a story I picked. Something I love and want to chat about. It’s a fun hang! Open to anyone who is interested (there’s usually anywhere from 15-40 of us, and main “chat” usually lasts about an hour, but a few of us stragglers often keep going into a second hour). If you’re interested, just let me know! Happy to share a PDF of the story, if you need (though would highly recommend picking up Stuber’s collection, Sad Grownups!)
  

• Reminder that stories are always free; interviews with authors are an added bonus for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions help me pay writers and artists!

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Aaron Burch: I’m kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

Brandon Forinash: The UK and US versions of Kitchen Nightmares were a COVID binge-watch for me. I’d seen episodes here and there. Watching them back-to-back, though, you see how the shows are very different animals. The UK version is focused so much more on the practical business of running a restaurant, and in many of the US episodes it seems like Chef Ramsay is trying to solve the psychological and interpersonal problems of these people who probably shouldn’t be running a restaurant. In the US version, the restaurant is more of a setting than a feature, is sometimes the least interesting part of the episode.

I was also into the idea of story-telling as therapy. There’s this story, “Fable” by Charles Yu, about a man who is asked during his therapy session to relate his life through the fairy-tale trope of ‘Once upon a time.’ That 2019-2020 school year a pair of my Speech students were performing “Fable” for State and National competitions. We spent all that season, from August to June cutting the story into a script, blocking it, rehearsing it, taking it to competition. I just fell in love with the way Yu used the character’s adversarial relationship to story-telling as a way to gain the reader’s trust in the emotional honesty of the story.

So I had these thoughts and also in those COVID days I had all this time and unspent creative energy, because school was shut down. Not knowing anything about sourdough bread, I picked up writing again after almost a decade, and found it surprisingly fun. I was taking every weird idea I had and trying it out. In 2020 this story began with this exact title and then soon after I wrote a pretty close version of the first scene, and most of the last scene. I was really excited about the idea, the direction; I felt like I had all this momentum.

And then nothing about the story worked for a long time.

When I mentioned the idea “bonus material,” instead of or in addition to a short interview, you seemed to kind of jump at that idea, thinking it was interesting and appealing... and then landed on this idea of having some “deleted scenes.” Can you talk some about where that idea came from, and also what it meant to revisit the story in that way and through that lens?

Don’t judge me. I had the thought for “deleted scenes” as my wife and I were watching the reunion episode of a recent season of Married at First Sight.

They’re always the same. The cast argues, the moderators attempt to shape the discussion, they air footage that didn’t make it into the show. Everyone is trying to position themselves as the authority of that season’s story.

As a writer, I’m not really into authoring anything. I love to write. I love to follow a thought as far as I can go. I like arranging things. I love to share the work and have it read. I feel really uncomfortable with the this-is-it of publishing.

I liked the idea of deleted scenes because it resists the impulse to say there is one story, says instead that this is one telling of the story among many.

Going back into the story like this I felt a lot of what-ifs. I felt a need to cross-examine the choices I made. But I was really grateful for the chance to grieve the things that didn’t make it into the final draft and affirm that parts that did.

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Deleted Scenes
from “Perhaps Even Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay Cannot Save My Marriage”

Not everything can make the final cut, all the mundane everyday life that is unusable, the evenings of grading I have to do throughout filming, the quiet hours of innocuous conversation between my wife and me about our days and, you know, the most recent meme my wife sent me on Instagram.

There are also the parts of reality that don’t serve the episode or they contradict it - that despite how I’m depicted, I am a grown-ass human who knows my way around the kitchen enough to put together a respectable variety of decent meals (including a really delicious Pollo Verde I do in the pressure cooker). And the scene in which Gordon asks me to rate myself in bed, afterwards I ask my wife the question and she rates me a ten out of ten and then is annoyed at the question, “Why are you asking?”

Chef Gordon Ramsay and his production team are trying to tell one story about me.

“I don’t understand the rating,” my wife says to me, “Why are you giving it a rating?” and I am trying to tell another.

Which would have been a lot easier, would have saved me a lot of time, if I’d always known what the story was.

<continue reading Deleted Scenes from “Perhaps Even Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay Cannot Save My Marriage” & the rest of the interview…>