Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Short Story, Long’ founder Aaron Burch

You might call Aaron Burch a serial literary magazine founder.

His journey into the litmag world began in 2001, when he founded Hobart. He spent over two decades editing that journal, and toward the end of his tenure there he co-founded HAD, an online journal focused on publishing microfiction. Soon after that, he founded Words & Sports Quarterly, a sports-oriented literary magazine that is currently on hiatus.

Two years ago this spring, he launched his latest literary project, Short Story, Long, as a place for longer fiction — stories in the 2,000- to 8,000-word range, although stories of 3,000 to 5,000 words hit the publication’s “sweet spot.” (Read more about the publication and submission guidelines.)

When not editing Short Story, Long or HAD, Burch stays busy writing his own stuff — he’s the author of five books — the memoirs A Kind of In-Between and Stephen King’s The Body, the novel Year of the Buffalo, the short story collection Backswing, and a novella titled How to Predict the Weather — and editor of the essay collection How to Write a Novel. He’s also written a slew of fiction and nonfiction, much of it available to read on his website.

Oh, yeah, he also teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

In today’s Friday Five, Burch discusses literary publishing, writing, and his ongoing reading project.

1 – You’ve been involved in literary magazine publishing for some time now, starting with Hobart, then HAD, WAS, and most recently Short Story, Long. What first inspired you to enter the litmag publishing/editing world, and why do you keep at it? 

I’ve told longer versions of this plenty — in part for interview reasons and part because I think of it as such a pivotal piece of my “origin story” (as everything I am today — writer, editor, teacher, human) — so will try to keep it brief and focused.

What first inspired me was just a desire to entertain myself and to do something productive with my time. I’d recently graduated college and moved, with my college girlfriend, away from home. I was working at a bank and not really knowing what I was doing with my life; still very much trying to find myself and my path. Though I didn’t really think of it in that clear or big picture of a way. Mostly I was just trying to figure out what to do on any given day. I’d taken a class in college that taught me basic website design (in ’99/2000, long before most “easy” web templates) and I’d always had some interest in visual arts and I also liked things that were a little more analytical or like puzzles, and designing and building a website really lent itself to both of those interests/pleasures. And so, not knowing how else to spend my hours, I decided to build a website. I’d also come to a love for reading probably somewhere midway through college. I wasn’t interested in English classes, but loved reading contemporary writers who I found and felt exciting to me. So, those two things — website design, reading — basically led to start an online web journal, almost by accident.

I’ve kept at it because I just really love it. And also probably because I never found anything else to do instead. I think I’m pretty good at it, and it feels really fulfilling. To go pretty big picture, it does feel like it helps me make sense of the world and life. I often feel happiest and most fulfilled when I read a submission and fall in love with it, when I get to share that submission with others, when I get more hands-on with editing and feel like I helped a piece becomes an even better version of itself, when I hear from a reader how much they loved a story I published and how much it means to them, when I hear from a writer how encouraging or exciting or meaningful it was when I accepted a story, published it, helped it find readers.

2 – Why did you decide to launch Short Story, Long a couple of years ago?

For reasons too personal and complicated (and also incredibly simple) to get into, I left Hobart a few years ago, after having edited it for 20, almost 21 years. When I left, I assumed I would start a new thing. Hobart was such a big and important and meaningful part of my life, of me, I kinda wasn’t sure what I would do without it. Though I did also find the opportunity to do something else or start something new or whatever to be exciting. I didn’t want to rush into anything though. And around that same time, my first novel, Year of the Buffalo, came out. And it turned out the respite from all the work I’d put into Hobart felt relaxing and nice, and I also really liked, for maybe the first real time, being thought of as a writer first, rather than an editor, known for Hobart, who also wrote. I was like, Maybe I don’t have to start a new thing? And also I was doing HAD, with Crow Jonah Norlander, and that was doing so well, and felt so easy and exciting and just fun.

That said, as time passed, I kept thinking about how I missed working with longer stories. (HAD really focuses on micros.) I love reading a longer story, I love writing non-flash short stories, and as I looked around, and as you get at here in the next question, I saw a plethora of really great journals that were publishing amazing, exciting short short work, but there weren’t too many journals publishing longer form fiction that I found exciting. After months and months and months of not being able to stop thinking about it, I sent a handful of queries out to some of my current favorite writers, pitching the idea, and basically all of them gave me a story, and so now I was committed, lol. 

3 – It seems a lot of litmags focus on flash or micro fiction these days. How can a project like Short Story, Long compete with the trend toward shorter stories?

I’m not that interested in trends, to be honest. Which is probably bad for my bank account and the sustainability of a project and readership (of my journal, but also my own writing). But, so goes both my hope and earnest belief, is good for art. I could probably do more to promote the site and journal, but it’s all a labor of love and that isn’t really how I want to spend my time and energy. And so I just accept and publish and promote stories that I fall in love with as a reader and get excited to share with other readers, and if there are enough others who enjoy and appreciate my tastes, then the journal thrives and lives on that. So far, there has been enough encouragement to make it feel exciting and fulfilling and worth it, and there’s almost enough to pay for itself. (I pay writers $100 for accepted stories, and also commission original art for each story, and pay the artist $100. SS,L almost has enough paying subscribers to break even, and I make enough from my day job and don’t have many other hobbies I spend money on, so don’t mind putting money into it. If the number of paid subscribers at some point skyrockets, I’ll pay writers and artists more; if the number of paid subscribers plummets, at some point I’ll probably just have to retire it.)   

4 – What are you looking for when reviewing short story submissions to Short Story, Long?

I’m really just looking for a story that I fall in love with as a reader. Whether or not I accept something is almost entirely dependent on how excited I get while reading it to want to share it with other readers.

5 – What advice do you have for writers who are trying to their works published in literary magazines?

Read a bunch. This is the most basic advice, but also probably the truest and most helpful. I’m not totally sure there even really is any other advice. When you edit journals, at some point you realize, frustratingly, there is a surprisingly large number of submitters who don’t really read. Who think of lit journals primarily (maybe solely) as a vehicle for themselves, and they seem either unaware or uninterested or even sometimes dismissive of the ecosystem of it all. Which, you don’t really have to know or think about the ecosystem of it all, that isn’t really your job as a writer, but I will say, stories by that kind of writer, are never very good. Or, maybe a little less qualitatively judgmental, they’re never anywhere close to a fit for the journal. And so, as an editor reading submissions, those are always a little baffling. But also, purely on a writing level, reading a lot (and, furthermore, hopefully curiously and deeply and thoughtfully and excitedly) is only ever going to make your writing better.

Bonus question: You’ve been trying to read a short story a day, as you chronicle on Burch Blog, Reading Log. How is this practice helping you as both a writer and editor?

This question isn’t why I wrote the above, but the segue feels important. I’m not even totally sure HOW it is helping, but it is 100% making me a better writer and editor. Something about consuming that much good work means I can’t help but be inspired by it and encouraged by it and learn from it. It makes me understand a little more deeply my own interests and tastes — what excites me about a story, what makes one “stick” with me more than another, why I might or might not fall in love with this story or that — in ways that definitely feed my own writing. And, too, it makes me want to try to write a story as good as one I fall in love with. It makes me want to write a story better! It makes me want to try to write stories that a reader might love as much as the stories I love. 

But, too, something about reading one every day has just felt like a great practice. I started last December, doing a short story advent calendar, and I’d so enjoyed I just kept doing it through all of 2024. And now I’m continuing it into 2025, and this year I started a reading log to chronicle it. The blog is kinda an experiment. See how it goes, see if readers care enough to follow along, see if it changes how I read or think about what I read or how I remember them all, see if it feels worth it. Most days, I read a short story first thing in the morning, with my coffee. I think it all “helps me as a writer and editor” but even more than that, it feels like it helps me as a human. It just feels like a nice way to start my day — before I get on screens, before I start thinking about work, before I get busy with life, I sit in a big comfy chair, drink my morning coffee, and read a short story.