10E 0.3: Aaron Burch and How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself New

by bl pawelek

(an FMC original)

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe “How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself New”.

AB: Collection of instructional prose poems about dads, growing up, girls.

Five Questions Here

1 - The book is dedicated to your dad. Tell me your best dad memory.

AB: Hm. This is going to sound lame, but no single memory jumps to mind. But it’s dedicated to my dad because what does jump to mind is basically all the little moments that come up or are hinted at in the book – going fishing together, camping, baseball games. All that stuff.

2 - (p10) If you ever had to perform an autopsy, where would be your first cut?

AB: If not, like the short, at the “front of the scalp,” then probably just right in the middle of the chest. Which seems the most obvious, right? Cut right in, splay the body open, see what’s in there? An obvious starting place, but I’m a kind of obvious guy.

3 - (p12) What dream are you currently injecting?

AB: Whatever I think, right before falling asleep, will help me write something good when I wake.

4 - (p14) Describe yourself as a complicated math equation.

AB: Hell. One of the reasons I started writing was so I no longer had to deal with math, as much as I liked it. Recently, while having a conversation with someone about what we write, and the stuff we write over and over again, I said something like “dads and clouds and bible stories and paper cranes and malaise.” So, maybe something like:

X = (N(F + C + B) + M)/SD + PC

Or something like that.

5 - What is your favorite line in this book?

AB: I know you aren’t really supposed to admit this about your own stuff, but I feel like I like a good number of lines in this book. I’m pretty proud of the lines and, as someone who doesn’t really think of himself as a language or line writer, I find myself surprised by a decent amount of the stuff in there. Lame, I know. That said, I like “There, there.”

Five Questions There

6 - Your favorite folded piece of paper would be a …

AB: Folded checks are nice. Or love notes. Maybe my “favorite” would be, like, a junior high love note or something, with hearts and spirals and everything, back in those heady days when everything was so innocent and new. OK, OK… the “N” in the equation above is nostalgia.

7 - (p34) What is the best ‘piece of trash’ you have ever found?

AB: Hm. I’m actually not much of a trash collector, or even picker-upper. I’ve got this great, old Paul Bunyan book here on my desk that I’m not sure where I got, but I think grabbed for free at some garage sale giveaway or something.

8 - (p48) On the last piece of paper you have eaten, what was written?

AB: If I told you that, I wouldn’t have needed to eat it, now would I have?

9 - When you become a father, what is the one thing you will teach your son “How To” do?

AB: Is “take himself apart, make himself anew” two things? Is it a cop-out answer?

10 - What was the hardest part of this book?

AB: Organizing it. I wrote all the pieces pretty quickly, never once thinking of them as a collection, or a whole of any sort. But… the odd side benefit to only being able to write one or two things, over and over again, is that when you collect them, if you put the puzzle pieces together just right they can, hopefully, feel like they were meant to be like that all along. A kind of whole greater than the sum of its parts. So the hardest part was definitely deciding what fit, what didn’t, and how (if it was possible) to arrange them for best presentation.

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe your next project.

AB: My cheating preamble and so too-long answer is that I have two “next” projects – a book from Keyhole in September, and then what I am actually writing right now:

a) Novella made from shorts about clouds and a relationship.
b) Cliché roadtrip novel with religion, video games, and more.