Jacob Budenz is a queer author, multi-disciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University. The author of Tea Leaves (Amble, Bywater Books 2023) and Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press Summer Chapbook Series 2018), Budenz has fiction and poetry in print journals including Slipstream and Assaracus, zeitgeisty online journals such as Taco Bell Quarterly and Wussy Mag, and anthologies by Mason Jar Press and Unbound Edition, among others. In 2019, Jake received a Baker Innovative Projects Grant to stage their original play, Simaetha: a Dreambaby Cabaret at the historic Carroll Mansion in downtown Baltimore to sold out crowds, and their original adaptation of The Master and Margarita appeared in Baltimore City Paper’s Top Ten Staged Productions of 2016. You can follow Jake on Instagram (@dreambabycabaret) or at www.jakebeearts.com.
Jen Michalski: Congratulations on your debut fiction collection, Tea Leaves. Can you give us a bit of the book’s history and how you ended up working with Amble Press?
Jacob Budenz: Tea Leaves is ostensibly a ten-year body of work, in the sense that I wrote a lot of these stories not with the original goal of making a collection but with the broad goal of becoming a writer, publishing, and developing a sort of CV that would impress publishers by the time I was ready to release a book. The oldest story in the collection is “Houseguest,” which was also my first cool writer credit —I was awarded “honorable mention” in a Writer’s Digest contest in 2013, which isn’t a huge deal but made me feel like a real writer at the time—and the title story “Tea Leaves” is the next oldest. I wrote, polished, and published most of the lengthier and meatier pieces in this collection during or after my MFA program at University of New Orleans, but I revised and kept a couple of those older, more bite-sized pieces around for the collection because I still stand by them and because I think it’s kind of a relief to have some lighter, simpler, more lyrical work alongside of darker pieces like “Trial.” In this way, the collection feels almost autobiographical, not only because some of the scenes or characters or quotes came from the strange and marvelous people I’ve met over the last ten years as an artist, but because it’s kind of a chaotic map of my aesthetic or of the ideas I’ve been toying with over the last decade. While writing these stories, I’ve lived a lot of lives: I’ve been a resident actor for an experimental theater company, a college administrator and advisor, a Yiddish folk singer, a performance artist, a street Tarot reader, a person in love and a person who didn’t believe in love. Most of the pieces with underpinnings of climate anxiety definitely appear toward the end of the work intentionally to reflect that shift in a lot of my creative work, and even though plenty of the pieces in the early half of the collection like “Of the Air and Land” are much newer as well, I do think those last few stories in here represent a lot of the heavier themes that pervade my creative consciousness now even if some of them have whimsical or absurdist or hopeful edges. When I decided to compile my work into a short story collection, it was during the first year and a half of the pandemic when I was performing a lot less and revisiting a lot of old projects and kind of taking stock of my body of work. With these stories, it was kind of a numbers game at first: I’ve written X number of stories I stand by, Y percentage of them have been published, Z number of them have enough aesthetic unity to compile into something that feels cohesive. I tried not to throw the entire kitchen sink of my body of work as a writer into this—there was a world in which I compiled a hybrid work of poetry and fiction, a world in which a number of stories I love were in here—but it just didn’t quite fit. Once I had something that felt unified and that I’d felt I could do all I could to revise the work, I thought, OK, I guess I should try to publish this.
As for publishing with Amble, I knew I wanted to publish a short story collection with a smaller press for a couple of reasons. One, I know my work is pretty weird and niche and maybe represents a few different “hard sells” matched together. It’s queer in a way that’s (hopefully) pushing against the literary and cinematic tropes queer characters get trapped in, it’s heavily fantasy sci-fi, but I’m also really influenced by psychological realism just because of the nature of most of the people who do MFAs, so I know my work can be a little too queer or too fantastical for a lot of mainstream presses but maybe too obsessed with the mind and the inner world for what a lot of fantasy readers look for. Two, during the decade I’ve been writing this, I’ve also been hustling a lot as an artist, performer, and events organizer, doing my best to be a “good neighbor” in the local arts scene and help people out when I can, and I realized when I was ready to publish that I now had this network in and out of Baltimore. I wanted to work with a small press because they’re often more willing to take risks, and if you’re willing to do a lot of the legwork to tour and promote the work through your own channels, you can really do things your own way. My hope with this book was to publish something bizarre and singular on my own terms, that I’m very proud of, and to demonstrate to myself and hopefully to bigger publishers—when I’m ready to query for novels and novellas—that there’s an audience for the kind of work I want to make. Amble is an imprint of Bywater Books, which is a lesbian-owned press that’s been around since 2004. In terms of the average shelf-life of a queer owned press, that was extremely impressive to me, which is a sad reality, but for me a sign that I’d be in good hands. Plus, I used to live in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, and if you can’t tell from the content of this book, I can be kind of superstitious about signs like that. Michael Nava, my editor, gave me some really helpful feedback for my final global revision of the work, which was particularly instrumental in revising one of the stories I was most nervous about, “Mask for Mask.” Then, he retired earlier this spring, which initially scared me but ultimately meant that I got to push this book through to the finish line with the editor-in-chief of the entire press, Salem West, so it ultimately felt like I got the best of both worlds in terms of support.
To put it concisely—not my strong suit, as you can probably also tell from this collection—I didn’t originally craft these stories with the intent to release a collection. As with all of my work as a writer, musician, singer, and performer, I try my best just to allow whatever I’m working on to be what it is, to help it be that thing, and to zoom out at the end and decide whether it needs to go out into the world and how. Ultimately, I think these stories wanted to be in a collection together, but I didn’t know that when I set out writing them.
JM: There’s a line from the first story, “Seen,” that I love, that I think sets the tone for the rest of the collection: “I guess even the fairies want to be seen, huh?” As you said, there’s a strong relationship between the queerness and magical realism in a lot of these stories, a lot of creatures—werewolves, fairies—sort of hidden in plain sight, the same way queer people have existed very vibrantly in society and yet are deliberately closeted—or ignored. Was this a conscious pairing, or did it surprise you?
JB: Ah, you’ve definitely clocked something of a thesis statement for the book. In different ways throughout the collection, I’m thinking a lot about what can feel really surreal when you live life as a queer person and how that could transfer into these actual supernatural manifestations in a story. I think one of the main things on my mind in these stories is the kind of invisible barriers queer people can encounter—true for a lot of marginalized people in very different ways, of course—where you’re sort of told the world is supposed to be one way and relationships are supposed to be one way, and for a lot of people the world is that way and mainstream media reinforces it, but everything is just different for you and people like you. I try not to be too one-to-one about the metaphors in here, but for example “Seen” on a basic level is about somebody realizing something different about the way they see and experience the world, and this fact confuses and alienates them from others while exposing them to an entire community of possible connections they never knew existed. It’s not exactly a coming out story, but a lot of queer people have the experience of simultaneously being alienated for accepting something about themselves and then finding an unimaginably beautiful community. In “And Then Again to the Next” I think a lot about how queer relationships can feel doomed from the start, of course, but also how there’s this character experiencing a kind of relationship dynamic (meeting across multiple reincarnations), that they can’t talk to anyone about because there’s nobody around them who seems to have that experience. Being queer can feel that way—a lot of queer people are lacking a sense of elders or people who can give them advice and context about what queer relationships are like, or just people who can give them relationship advice in general because they can’t tell anyone around them about their desire. The stories are about other things, too, and the supernatural or fantastical elements represent other things or are just themselves with no intense metaphoric intention depending on the story, but through the whole book I tried to render both the obstacles and the joys of queer life that are invisible to other people both as realistically as possible in some cases and, in others, with these fun, wacky archetypes or magical conventions. I could go on about this; I think along with a lot of queer people I’m attracted to esoteric imagery and spirituality because it’s a choose-your-own-adventure spiritual framework that’s as “other” to mainstream Western religion as queer people can be to those who practice it.
JM: You mentioned that the stories span a range of your writing career–did you find yourself revising some of the earlier stories for the collection, or did you let them remain as they were, as sort of a time capsule of your process and growth? Are there things you learned writing those earlier stories that helped with writing the later ones?
JB: I’d say a little bit of both. I’m a bona fide child of the academic creative writing workshop, so every piece in the collection has gone through some kind of overhaul at some point. For some of the older pieces, a cool part of the process was realizing years later what I was trying to say or what I was working through on a subconscious level and kind of drawing that out. For example, “Houseguest” was originally just a straight up campy horror story, but I reflected much later about how all kids, especially queer kids, can be dealing with really dark and ugly stuff that nobody else in their family is willing to acknowledge or help them with, like statistically higher rates of life-threatening mental health problems due to bullying or alienation. In a later revision, I tried to draw that element out a little bit more without overstating it, making occasional and oblique references to the narrator’s sexuality and so forth. On the other hand, I tried to preserve the manic spirit of the story as well as I could. I don’t really write like that anymore, and I only selected probably two stories from my early writing life to include and to revise to match the quality of other stories – the ones where I was like, “You know what? There was a really good nugget in there. Let’s see if we can draw it out.”
These earlier pursuits for sure helped with the later stories, on a craft level and in terms of developing my voice and aesthetic. I’m grateful to have had a couple of years between undergrad and my MFA, because I felt like I went into my program with a strong sense of my artistic identity, and while I incorporated as much feedback as I could into revising, these early stories helped me discern between what feedback was truly motivated by craft or improvement vs. what feedback was motivated by, say, that inherent academic bias against speculative work or that much more insidious bias against experiences that are less “default” (straight, cis, white, male, etc.). It helped a lot to have started young-ish, because like many writers I had to wade through a lot of bad and clichéd writing to get to what I really wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.
JM: You make an interesting point about MFAs and their emphasis on literary fiction. It seems, though, that speculative fiction is growing as a respected offshoot of literary, or “speculative literary fiction,” in the vein of, say, N.K. Jemisin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, (Baltimore’s own) Sarah Pinsker. Are there any writers that are currently influencing your work?
JB: To answer your question, N.K. Jemisin and to a lesser extent Jeff VanderMeer are on my mind a lot lately. In 2020, I was working on a book that might be turning into a series about climate change and the death of myth—”The Age of Oceanus” in Tea Leaves was originally written as a prologue for that work—and then I listened to Jemisin’s Broken Earth books. The trilogy was so beautiful; I’ve never read anything that so brilliantly and inventively captures that connection between exploitation of people and exploitation of the planet, and then it’s also just such a powerful story about motherhood and passing down trauma. Really a shining example of the rich tapestry of metaphor that, for the right story, can be speculative fiction’s crown jewel. Anyway, I thought about shelving my own project about climate change entirely because I was like, “That’s it, nobody else really needs to write a speculative story about climate change now¾Jemisin’s done it!” Of course, everyone should write about climate change or whatever issues they care about regardless of who’s written about it and how well; I laughed that shower thought off pretty quickly. Now, she and Jeff VanderMeer and a couple others have been helpful examples of the different ways speculative fiction can handle this issue—a little more oblique in VanderMeer’s work, perhaps, and a little more fantastical in Jemisin’s. Reckoning is great for that too, and I’m not just saying that because I have a poem in there, although that’s how I first got into them. If you have any recommendations for more great speculative fiction writers tackling the environment in a non-’70s hippie way, I’m all ears! It’s always on the brain.
JM: Was there anything difficult about the publishing process for which you weren’t prepared, for instance, either in the submission process, or now the marketing process? What advice do you have for other debut authors?
JB: Oh, man, so much advice for other debut authors and for my past self. The biggest one is start everything way earlier than you think you’re going to need to. For personal reasons, I really couldn’t hit the ground running with booking my tour and doing initial review requests and so forth until early in the summer, and even then it took me a while to figure out what I was doing and getting into the flow of it. I wish I’d known ahead of time how long everything was going to take and plan accordingly. When it comes to sending your work out for reviews or trying to reach venues or collaborators for events in other cities, it’s sort of like the submission process¾expect a lot of no responses or things that take way longer than you’re expecting it to. A lot of stuff has miraculously come together at the 11th hour, which feels very connected to my experimental theater roots, where a week or two before the production you’re praying for a miracle that makes it all happen by opening night. If I could go back and do it again, I would’ve made more room in my life earlier in the year and gotten the ball rolling sooner. We’re all just doing the best that we can, of course! And unlike theater, when the curtains go down on the “show”—pub day, the release party, the tour—a lot of times the run has just begun. These early events can generate a lot of luck and buzz and word of mouth about the book, and the more you have the more you hedge your bets that the book will get into the right hands, but there are so many more opportunities to keep promoting and getting the word out or the work into the right hands. Still, it’s WAY more stressful than you’d think. Obviously the book isn’t done when you finish writing and revising it, but it’s also not done after you submit it and work on it with an editor. A publishing deal is not a get rich quick scheme for most people—if you play your cards right, it’s the key to a lot of new doors, and the work begins when you open them.
As for challenges, I think even with a large press, there’s a lot of work only the author can do or that contributes to the long life of a book regardless, like the kinds of personal contacts the author has garnered over the years for reviews, blurbs, or touring events. I feel like hearing from the author for smaller bookstores can help a lot too. A lot of those details really add up, and it kind of takes over your life, hah. I wanted to do things pretty ambitiously because that’s how I produce work, like plotting out a tour that tapped into a lot of different corners of my artistic and academic network, and doing some multi-disciplinary or music events along the way to find alternative paths to getting the work out there. Still, it’s been so much more work between the last revision and the launch that I’m kind of reeling from it. Beyond that, the biggest unanticipated challenge was honestly how stressed and anxious I’ve been leading up to launch. I don’t know why I thought I’d just be so zen through all this, and while I haven’t let the anxiety debilitate me or keep me from moving forward or getting what needs to happen done, God, I have to imagine every author makes themselves as sick with worry as I have leading up to this—worry that people won’t read it or care about it, worried that they will read it and hate it, worried about the kinds of opinions people will form of the writer or their worldview from a bunch of fiction… I really can dream up every possible thing that could go wrong. I just really want people to get something meaningful or enjoyable out of it, and while I’ve put major work out into the world with other people—plays, performance pieces, music—I’ve never put something of this scale out there that’s just me and all the weird ghosts of my friends I’ve collected in my brain along the way. My biggest challenge has been how scary this all feels, hah!
JM: I hear you! Congrats on your baby being out in the world? Not to move on too quickly, but obviously as writers we kind of have to—What are you working on now?
JB: After I come back from tour, I’m hoping to finish the first complete draft of a manuscript that’s probably going to be a short novel. It’s a sort of ghost story that takes place in Seattle about the specters of abuse that haunt arts scenes—it’s kind of bleak, but told with a healthy sense of black humor, and it’s been really fun to write a lot about performance because I’ve spent so much time in those spaces. Far less fantastical than the pieces in this collection. After that, I want to return to my “colorful dystopian” about climate change and the death of myth which began with “The Age of Oceanus” and will probably be at least two books, as much as I hate to admit it! Outside of writing, my band has been working toward our second big release—an EP—and I want to record a single for my solo project that I wrote earlier this year and performed a few times called “Goth Bitch.” Really excited about that one, kind of want to make a music video for it. But my biggest winter project, even though those creative projects are joyfully on the horizon, is to adopt a kitten and develop healthier sleep habits. I’d like to get my stamina back up for all the work I want to make and enjoy the next big project even more instead of racing to the finish like I feel like I’ve done with a lot of projects and shows lately. It’s been quite a year!
Jen Michalski is the author of three novels, The Tide King and Summer She Was Under Water (both Black Lawrence Press) and You’ll Be Fine (NineStar Press), a couplet of novellas, Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books), and three collections of fiction, her latest of which is The Company of Strangers, which was published January 2023 by Braddock Avenue Books. She’s also the editor in chief of jmww.
JMWW 