Conversation with Thomas Behan

Thomas Behan is a writer living in Northern Virginia. His work has been published in Isele Magazine, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, and in The George Washington University Press. His literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” was published in Secant Publishing's anthology titled Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change, and that story was nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. He has also published a short story collection through Alien Buddha Press.

Thomas is the author of “Important Enough to Bomb” from Issue 10.

Q: Your poem Important Enough to Bomb subverts warfare’s conventional connotations. How do themes of hope and resilience factor into your writing?

I think they usually appear as a reaction to dark themes that also appear a lot in my writing. I don’t think you can feel hope if you don’t have a realistic picture of how bad things can sometimes be. I don’t like the term “unearned,” which I see a lot in commercial publishing discussions, but I think I would use it to say that I don’t like “unearned” hope in stories.

I am an optimist and also pretty sentimental, so those things usually show up in my work, which I admit can be otherwise dark. But optimism without a clear understanding of reality isn’t effective or admirable in my opinion. It’s actually dangerous.

Q: Your short story “Symbiosis” has been getting some exciting recognition—how has it felt to watch this story really resonate and gain traction? Has the response changed how you think about the piece?

It feels great! I wasn’t sure it would work, and for some people it definitely didn’t! I received feedback that was viscerally negative but also a lot of positive. Many readers made assumptions about my politics that were not accurate and I was surprised to see others imprint themselves into my story in this way.

The responses always change how I think about what I write. It often becomes a different story in someone else’s head and I think “Is this story what I intended, or what the reader experienced?”

In the case of “Symbiosis” I realized that it is not possible to write about a topic as emotionally charged as environmental degradation and expect people to read it without a lot of their own emotions through which they filter the story.

Q: Can you tell us about your novel that’s currently out on submission?

Two of them actually. Though one of them may hopefully be sold by the time this goes to print.

THROUGHLINE is concerned with the inherited legacies of a violent and dysfunctional family of criminals, and the ambivalence of an adult struggling to forge an independent identity after surviving an abusive childhood with a domineering father. Some of my own life is in there, including setting it in the town my ancestors mined coal in when they first arrived in the US, where one of them eventually set up a tavern for the miners. It also focuses a lot on the opioid epidemic—why, how, and who benefits, which are all things I learned much about after my own brother’s death from Oxycontin.

THE EMIGRANT, set in the lead-up to the 1998 Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, is an upmarket historical thriller about an Irish Republican Army volunteer haunted by a violent past and an unrealized musical dream, reborn as a star soon after arriving in the US but pursued by powerful enemies after an earlier bombing gone wrong. It also includes a hard look at the histories of discrimination in the US and Ireland.

Q: You shared that one preexisting work you wish you’d written is Breaking Bad—does this offer any hints at what we can expect from your novel? Perhaps a morally ambiguous, gritty, character-driven drama?

I am interested in the interior life of people who become evil and that was why I loved Breaking Bad. That comes through in how I write my main characters. Decent people are preferred in life, but rarely as interesting. We’re taught to be good, and even when we remember sometimes, we do bad anyway. The creativity and energy that goes into navigating the contradiction within an individual is something I am very interested in.

Q: How would you say your MA in American History shapes your authorial perspective and general creative projects?

Not much honestly. I planned to be a historian, but decided to listen to many advisors in the field and eventually got an adult job because the universities continued to reduce tenured positions. Graduate school, especially the debates in seminars, made me much smarter and exposed me to resources I didn’t have before. It made my brain a stronger muscle and in that respect helped me enormously in everything I have done since. But the field of study specifically didn’t factor in much as far as how I approach writing or creativity.

Q: What was your previous experience working with university presses?

I published my first historical work through the press at my university. But it was a very academic press, not concerned as much with making money (at least back then) as the presses I deal with now.

Q: Do you prefer submitting to journals or competitions for your writing?

Journals. It’s cheaper to get rejected by a journal than to pay an entry fee to lose a contest (wink).

But apart from that, I think journals care more about writing. Contests are first about raising money for whomever is sponsoring and the writing second. I was very happy when I won or came close, but usually I lost, of course.

Journals, the ones run by people who care enough about writing to subordinate the money, are among my favorite things in the world. Besides forests. Without them and their often free feedback, I could not have gotten better. Or read more seasoned writers and realized that I had much farther still to go as far as my capability. For example, Radon’s model of back and forth between editor and writer prior to publication is one I liked a lot and it made my work you published better too.

Q: For your published short story collection, did you write its stories exclusively to meld together in a single book, or was it built organically from your repertoire?

Organically. A publisher liked them, but they were not originally intended to go together. It sold poorly so far, performing less well than many did alone. I have only been writing for two years so my approach to publishing is that I have to make mistakes to learn. That collection was one of them. I should have had a unifying theme or some way to relate the stories to make a whole rather than several distinct fragments.

Q: What is next for you?

I am 27K words into a third novel, but not rushing it. It is about a young man who starts life in terrible circumstances and goes on to become a successful writer in NYC. I will finish it eventually, but I tend to jump around. I will continue to write in all formats, and right now the novel is suffering in favor of the short stories and poems which I feel like writing at the moment.

I have been in a critique group that was very helpful but I think I would probably benefit from more direct advice/editing/coaching/mentoring by someone at this point. Someone with more experience to push me to do my best work. How to find that person, I have no idea. How to find that person and not get scammed on the internet looking for them I have even less idea. Just getting started.

Plus a trip to New Mexico. I have a goal to visit all the states I subjectively feel are worth visiting, and I love a desert.