A Short Interview w/ Russell Brakefield
"Bonus material" for Brakefield's short story, "Weatherball Blue," published on Tuesday, 2/6.
A few quick notes:
Going to open submissions for a month in March!
(Apologies if you’ve submitted and are still waiting to hear back. I bit off a bit more than I could chew these last few months, but am close to getting caught up!)
I am going to host an informal Zoom chat about one of my favorite stories, Denis Johnson’s “The largesse of the Sea Maiden. If it goes well, maybe we’ll turn it into a fun monthly chat about a short story! First one: Thursday, Feb. 22, 8pm ET.
Interested? Message me here or DM me on Twitter or IG or wherever you want and can find me!
Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.
Read “Weatherball Blue” now if you haven’t already!
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?
The news station in my hometown actually did have a weatherball, and I've always wanted to write something about it. And as in the story, I did spend a lot of time kicking around under the weatherball in my teenage years. Many of these images are lifted from my life. I didn't think of it as that strange at the time, the weatherball. I maybe even thought most towns had some version of a weatherball of their own. But when I started telling people about it later in life, I realized that was not the case. We used to make fun of it, how cheesy it was, but we also really loved it. It was our thing, our place. Some of my best friendships were cemented there, but I also have memories of being there with other people too, people who passed through my life pretty briefly. As I started writing, I realized I was thinking about the places and people that have outsized impacts on our lives, the stuff that sticks with us even though it maybe shouldn't.
The other image that came to me very early on was of these kids hanging out by the payphone outside the gas station, another thing we did a lot of in junior high and high school. When I leaned into that scene, these characters emerged. Specifically, I liked this idea of Darrell as an outsider, someone who moves into the narrator's orbit only briefly but has a big impact, challenges his worldview. And it felt right to me that Darrell would be carrying something heavy, would be quietly dealing with some real trauma. I knew a lot of people who lost friends and family members during that time in my life. To drugs, to illness, to incarceration, to the other forces that we didn't really know about yet. It was the first time I really started to understand loss. These weren't grandparents or people on television dying, these were people I knew, people in my community. It was also around that age that I first started to think about my hometown as a specific place with specific maladies connected to it. And I had this idea that Darrell's appearance maybe coincided with or was catalyst for the narrator coming to terms with some of the heavier parts of being a person in the world. Once I found Darrell, the rest began to click into place.
Love this answer! As a follow-up... something I've noticed and thought about, and sometimes talk about—and maybe even we've talked about this—is how so much of what I thought was kinda boring about my childhood is exactly the stuff that has become the material that I so often write about. Some part of that is probably my inclination toward nostalgia, but also it's getting older and better understanding what makes me (and my writing) me and being able to see the potential in all that. I'm not 100% sure if there's a question here, other than wondering if that rings true for you as well? And maybe if we can throw some theories around about if that's just a part of getting older, or maybe if there's something about being a writer that helps us reframe and contextualize and see what's interesting about all that stuff?
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