Pub Crawl: Hobart

Anyone who has donned a plastic apron and gloves and spent time in the back room of an establishment that serves food has a love/hate relationship with the name Hobart. You love the steam that washes into your face when it's done and you've lifted up the panels of the dishwasher. You hate how the forks always get stuck in the bottom, and you have to swim your hand around the murky water to find them. You love that you can fit the enormous mixing bowl inside. You hate the fact that you have to get into awkward yoga positions to try and find a way to make the panels fully close on it.

No conflicted feelings for the literary journal, Hobart, however.  Only love for their fine print and web literary journal, growing collection of minibooks, and—of course—the hilarious likes and dislikes. Many thanks for Aaron Burch, editor, for taking the time to answer a few questions for us.

RM: Tell us how Hobart got started.

AB: I started Hobart in my year or so after undergrad, when I'd moved from Seattle to California. It started mostly just as a "fun" web site, something I thought I could do with my college buddies wherein we could entertain ourselves with funny/goofy humor pieces, and maybe a couple people would randomly stumble onto it and enjoy it, and it would maybe be a way of staying connected to all the friends I had just moved away from. I was also working at a bank and generally kind of bored, and had just discovered things like McSweeney's. It turned out most of said buddies were too busy doing their own shit and, over time, I found the thing I was most interested in was short fiction. The one remnant of those days is the online (dis)likes. Over time it grew into a print journal and then we also started publishing books. Here and there I enrolled friends to help out, and it grew from something I basically did out of my bedroom to something with multiple arms that a handful of people did out of their respective bedrooms and/or extra corners in their apartments (Jensen Beach and Andrea Kneeland currently run the web site, and Elizabeth Ellen is the mastermind behind the minibooks).

RM: Where to you see the American short story headed in the next decade? Are their any writers out their you might consider "ahead of their time?"

AB: Not to sound too flip, but I really don't spend much, if any, time thinking about the future of short stories. Maybe this will be to the detriment of Hobart, but I'm really most interested in what I think is good and fun and interesting and entertaining right now, which is ideally ignoring any current "trends" or the like, while also not worrying too much about predictions. I don't want to overgeneralize, or overpraise myself via Hobart, but I honestly believe every single Ho' contributor is part of the collective writing group that is pushing writing ahead, helping take writing wherever it is going/headed/etc.

RM: Tell us a little bit about Hobart's current lineup of writers.

AB: Our two most recent minibook authors are Mary Miller and Adam Novy. Mary writes maybe the baddest ass stories around right now—in fact, I suck at this type of thing, but here's something Elizabeth wrote for promo for the book, which I think hits the nail pretty hard and square:

"Mary Miller's writing is unapologetically honest and efficient and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's stories were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke."

And Novy's book is maybe the most ambitious thing we've published yet—this weird, amazing, crazy, apocalyptic (?) novel where a city is cursed by a plague of birds, and it's like part Biblical allegory, part romance, part suspense, part violent destruction.

RM: Some literary journals seem to be idea driven, others seem to be emotion driven. I realize that dichotomy isn't quite fair, but where would you see Hobart on that spectrum, or do you have something entirely different that drives you?

AB: Hm. I'm tempted to say the former (idea-driven), but if those ideas aren't dealt with in a way that causes a strong emotion in me as a reader, it's pointless, of course. Dan Wickett (arguably Hobart fan #1) asked a similar question and, as part of his question, kind of answered it himself:

"Are you looking more at the writing and how the author pulls off what they're trying to do, than at the story and plot/characters? As a reader, I see Hobart as a great mixing of the two—the writing is always great, but it seems that as an editor you're also looking for something kind of badass to happen within the great writing, or to find a great character to latch onto."

I think he seemed to nail it. I like when, describing a story to someone, I'm able to sum it up in a sentence or two in a way that makes it sound kind of badass. "This one's about a fishing trip and a dude gets mauled by a bear." "A post-apocalyptic love story where the male has lost the ability to speak and expresses himself only in grunts." "A dude wants to hunt the biggest deer he's ever seen, and then guts it in front of everyone in town, to prove his love to his ex." Of course, these simple summaries are never what the story is really "about" but they pull you in, no? If not... I don't know. Go read Glimmer Train or Ploughshares, maybe.

RM: Do you have any advice for us submitters?

AB: Nothing that every editor doesn't say: read the journal. Submit your best work. Submit stories you believe in. Submit a story you 1) really, really love yourself, and 2) would be excited to see in the pages of Hobart, as opposed to just whatever you have that's done. The biggest thing we look for is really just a story that excites us as readers. Keep writing, keep reading. I don't know. All those cliches. They're all true. All of them. Every single cliche you've ever heard is 100% true. Ha.

Hobart is currently accepting submissions of short fiction. For submission info, visit hobartpulp.com.

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