A Short Interview w/ Gemma Kaneko

"Bonus material" for Kaneko's short story, “Girl Meets Bird,” published on Tuesday, 2/4.

A few quick notes, mostly personal promotion (apologies) before we get to the real stuff:.

• My next book was announced! A speculative, sometimes absurdist, autofiction novella about magic and beauty and wonder, set during a summer in Tacoma. Out from Autofiction Books next February!

  

• The amazing

  Cassie Mannes Murray
  posted an interview with me yesterday. Mostly about editing, and so about this very site (in addition to some of my other projects, past and current):

  THREE QUESTIONS WITH AARON BURCH

• “That Was Awesome” short story club #6:
  Thursday, February. 20, 8pm ET. Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”
  
  I started hosting these short story clubs last year, which basically just means a bunch of us hop on Zoom and chat about a story I picked. (There’s usually anywhere from 10-40 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! It’s super informal, open to anyone interested. I think they’ve been super fun!

• 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?

Gemma Kaneko: The idea for this story comes from such a literal place! A friend of mine in Michigan really did shelter a baby bird in her yard during a storm, though as far as I know she never had any enigmatic dreams featuring said bird. In real life, one of her neighbors wrote her a rude note complaining about how loud the bird was! She told this story in the group chat and said she thought it would make a good jumping-off point for a short story and that I could use it if I wanted. I wrote an early draft that was more like "witch next door" with the mean note and a possible haunted house, but I couldn't really get it to work. Sometimes when I get stuck I like to write conversations between characters, and in one of those exercises I realized Ava and the neighbor felt haunted by time, not evil spirits or whatever I'd been messing with before. Perhaps obviously, I was writing this during the weird shapeless post-immediate panic COVID era, when measuring days was so meaningless and hard. That all filtered into Ava's world, too.

Also I should say my friend (hi Gracie) is not like Ava at all, except in that she also has a lot of beautiful vintage tableware.

I love this note here that "Sometimes when I get stuck I like to write conversations between characters, and in one of those exercises I realized Ava and the neighbor felt haunted by time, not evil spirits or whatever I'd been messing with before."

I touched on this in my intro, but I really love the amount or level of "magic" in this story. I think it is rendered and utilized so perfectly. Can you talk about that some? Finding that mix, if it was tricky, how you identified when it felt "right"? And I'm curious, is that common across your stories or does this feel like a bit of an outlier?