A Conversation with Featured Author Tom Busillo

Tom Busillo's "Extraction" has delighted our readers with its timeless story infused with absurdity and humor. I hope you enjoy our conversation about his writing career, music influences, and affinity for the bizarre.

You’ve been a busy guy this year, Tom! Lots of short stories and poems published, two stories with us. But there was a big gap between your McSweeney’s and PANK stuff and the recent glut. I know you kept a poetry blog in there but for the most part you were pretty quiet in the publishing world. What made you return? Did you miss the rejections? Are you some kind of masochist?

It’s funny you mention that about rejection. At the time I gave up my poetry blog, my wife and I had a son come into our lives. Writing can be somewhat selfish, and if you’re an obsessive like I am, ridiculously selfish. So, I decided to put writing aside and concentrate on being a dad or my best approximation of one. Now that he’s old enough to talk smack to me—he’s really a great kid—I thought, “Hmm, maybe I can try that again?” I also had been laid off from a job I had for twenty-five years and was in a real trough. Job hunting is so depleting. I needed something positive to help recharge the batteries so I got back into writing and I stupidly got it in my head that submitting to publications would be great for my self-esteem. You can stop laughing now. It is the most humbling experience I can possibly think of. Putting yourself in a position where you’re basically being told, “This isn’t good enough” over and over again. But you get over it pretty quickly. You have to.

Absolutely. I think after my fiftieth rejection, I stopped letting it affect me for longer than two minutes. Now it’s like, hey, those assholes finally got back to me. So, two Mays ago, eh? I think that lay-off coincides with your self-described fugue state of being productive at three in the morning. Damn, is that what it takes?

It was a real low point, but I was really lucky in that that fall one of my best friends from high school got back in touch with me after many years. He was the heart and soul of our gang (not in the tire iron and bike chain sense of the word. We were in Catholic school). But he drifted off to another city. Suddenly, he wrote from out of the blue, and it turned out that he went on to University of Michigan to study creative writing with Charles Baxter and was a writer. He’s the one who really pushed me to start submitting. So, all of a sudden, I had one of my best friends going through the same struggles as I was, dealing with the same “Oh man! Today was a triple!” experience in terms of rejections. So we kind of fed off of each other. He writes serious literary fiction and nonfiction. I do whatever it is that I’m doing. So being in different pews in the same church was kind of cool. We submit to the same places and curse the same editors out without really being in competition with each other. Without him, Sean, I don’t know where I’d be.

What a good pal to have. In an interview with Heavy Feather, you mentioned that you’re trying to write more “serious" poetry. Can you talk a little about what you mean by that? I’ve found some of your earlier works when you were writing flarf or “quasi-flarf” as you put it, and I can see connections between it and your more recent stories in terms of absurdity and playfulness. Do you find more satisfaction in one kind of writing over another (serious vs. non/less serious)? What is satisfaction? Can we bait a trap for it? 

In terms of satisfaction, I think the most satisfying writing, to me, is the kind where you know you’re onto something that’s going to have you going “WTF was I thinking?” while you’re writing it. Like, you just have to keep following the thread hoping it leads somewhere. Which you can’t plan for. It either happens or it doesn’t. Maybe that’s not the way to write.

I’m always amazed at the multiplicity of “the self,” because looking back on the me who wrote that, he was either profoundly lying—which I can’t do—or profoundly confused. I think it was the latter. There’s something about serious poetry that involves an earnestness, a buy-in, if you will, to reality, that I’m constitutionally ill-equipped to handle. I think people, poets, I  really admire—and my lodestar is Charles Bernstein—can write incredibly serious, complex poetry that maybe on some level winks at itself. Bernstein is my favorite, but that whole group of Language poets is amazing. Someone like Rae Armontrout who’s earnest but also very good, I can relate to. But maybe there’s just a level of maturity and a shuffling off of immaturity that I can’t handle. It’s not that serious poetry is bad—it’s that I’m defective. 

I mean, preaching to the choir here. I struggle to take literally anything seriously, and have paid fines on that, hoo boy.

Really?

Oh yeah! I laugh at everything because I find life so absurd. And bosses don’t like that, generally. Once, in a big important meeting, the outside presenter said, “And this new program is called U Do It,” and I could not stop giggling. Had to tell my boss later that that’s some stupid thing my husband and I say to each other around the house when we don’t want to do a chore or whatever, like pointing and saying, “Youuuuu do it.”

It sounds like a very proactive program.

At any rate, I need to upgrade my electrical panel. In my house. Soon. So I’ve been thinking about wattage lately. Especially after reading “Extraction.” It’s a measurement of the power drawn by a device, more or less, but it’s got a second definition: “dynamic or mental energy or appeal” which certainly applies to the character of Henry. What’s your big idea on the teeth and lightbulbs and the cityslicker/farm folk dynamics in this story? How do you feel about wattage? Electrical systems in general?

In a way, Henry is me. Sort of. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in the sense that I had a dream about living in some kind of forced commune and not being able to grow teeth before I had the story. Without Weird Lit, that’s maybe a just case of “that’s a weird dream” that goes nowhere, but I was looking for something weird, like extra weird, to submit to you, and it was like manna from heaven. I would definitely not take any electrical repair tips from anything in the story, as I am SO NOT a man of science. But having it start as a dream sort of shaped the feel of “this is something that has its internal dream logic going on, and if you can’t get on board the train, well, this is going to be completely nonsensical.” Which, I guess, is par for the course in a lot of my writing. I had a short piece accepted fairly recently about a man who has a persistent headache, and his daughter pops out of his head like Athena, fully formed. A TON of places passed on that one. Like, 25+. It eventually found a home. But that’s sort of another example of “If you get this, cool. If you don’t, I won’t complain if you want to read Daniel Steele.” Is she even a thing anymore?

She’s still at it.

I guess that’s very fortunate for her and her fans.

It’s funny your dream was anxiety about growing teeth. Did you know that in America (and most of the English-speaking world) the most common dream is about losing teeth? Check this out: https://brilliantmaps.com/the-most-common-dreams-by-country/

That’s so crazy! One of my favorite bands is Of Montreal and Kevin Barnes has a lyric about a woman who gives him “teeth falling out of my head nightmares.” That would be bad thing. Wait, I think the song itself it called “Bad Thing.” The chorus goes “You’re a bad thing! Bad thing! Awful! Go away!” Something like that. I’m going to kick myself if I got that wrong. But it’s such a great song. My dream, like a lot of my dreams, is sort of a recurring theme of “Why are you unable to live up to these standards of measurement everyone else seems perfectly capable of living up to?” I should have gone to journalism school for graduate school instead of going to b-school. Can you imagine me in b-school? I did it. I have an MBA, believe it or not. So close to an MFA, and yet so far. Only one letter away.

About that disappointment thing. “Extraction” and “The Plan” have similar themes of not wanting to disappoint a father figure while mixing in elements of the absurd. Which comes first to you, the emotional through-line or the absurdity? Or are they coeval?

I would have to say the absurdity. I think absurdity is a way to retreat from the realities of the world while also shining a light on them. It’s also just fun. The Grapes of Wrath is a tremendous work of literature, but I don’t think that was a very fun book to write. My dad was an incredible dad, so it’s weird that I have this theme of never living up to society’s (Daddy’s) idea of what constitutes “correct behavior” in my writing.  There are people who buy in to what constitutes “normal life,” but never stop wishing they had run off and joined the circus. Maybe I’m one of those. I guess for my generation, it was being a rock star. I’ve played music all my life and it’s my number one passion and even though time has passed me by, there’s this little part of me that somehow still thinks that I can be a rock star—even though one could make the argument that rock is dead (it’s not…like Spinal Tap it just has a much more selective audience). I play in a '90s cover band, and that’s about the best I’m going to do…unless lightning strikes. Then again, I never would have believed I’d be ever be interviewed by a literary journal when I started submitting, so you never know. I’m sure if my wife were reading this she’d say, “No, honey. Sometimes you do know.” She balances me out. 

That’s good. That’s what a good marriage is all about. Your answer also combines a few questions I had about music. One is what is your favorite song to cover in your band that you play bass in, and the next is from September. She always wants to know what her writers are listening to. So what’s been in your recent rotation? Does it affect your writing in any way? I’ve been listening to basically nothing but jazz all year until a few weeks ago when I found a cassette tape I’d made of the local alternative rock station in the mid-90s and man, it’s been a lot of Butthole Surfers and Portishead in my house lately. (Have you guys ever covered “Pepper”?)

Oh, great bands! Never covered that one. 

It would be very difficult to cover.

My favorite song is “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit. I love it because it’s just, well, it’s an anthem of that time period, the '90s. It’s a great song to rock out on and pull out your best jumps (I have a vertical jump of just under three inches). The song reminds me of a lot that was going on in my twenties when I was wild and reckless. I’ve been listening to a ton of Geese lately. Geese made the incredibly dumb year that was 2025 (your mileage may vary) almost worth living through. Getting Killed is a mind-blowing album. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s almost impossible to describe. There’s post-punk and maybe post-post-punk—and then there’s what Geese is doing. Just totally breaking down the normal conventions of everything that constitutes a rock song in terms of expectations and just shattering them. Like, who starts the vocals on a song with a sustained note that lasts over four measures? The vocals sort of remind me of Tom Waits via Julian Casablancas in a certain way, and the emotional punch of these really sparse, really off-kilter lyrics—wow! Just an amazing band. Here's a link to a video I’ve been bothering Nick and Carol with on our TV. They’re not big Geese fans, although my son appreciates a grown man wanting to just climb into a baby crib and curl up. I always wished I were into jazz. I never got past the jazz-fusion stuff of people like Return to Forever, Al DiMeola, Pat Methany and into the more serious stuff. Maybe someday! 

You’re the third person to recommend Geese to me this month. Alright already! (haha) As for jazz fusion, I absolutely hate it. I love cosmic jazz like Pharaoh Sanders and the Coltranes and so many others. Hilarious—as we’re typing, KMHD just put on Pharaoh Sanders. It’s this one. It’s amazing.

As we wind down here, I’d like to ask you real quick about this 11,111 Lists poem thing. It’s been a near-constant on your bios throughout the years. Are you still working on it? What’s the big idea here? Why do you think people are obsessed with lists?

It was when I wasn’t working and before I really started writing. There’s the conceptual

branch of poetry where, as Kenny Goldsmith, one of the most notable practitioners, sort of puts it, the dumber the idea, the better the poem. He is famous for re-typing an issue of the entire New York Times, transcribing a day of traffic reports in NYC, wearing a mic and transcribing everything he said over a 24-hour period. I got it in my head to do a Top 10 list of Top 10 lists of Top 10 lists of Top 10 lists. So, you ended up with this ginormous nested list poem—the ultimate list poem. For some reason at the time, I thought it would be groundbreaking. It ends up not being groundbreaking. It was just a two-and-a-half month fever dream of someone looking to grasp onto something. But maybe that’s what a certain kind of art or writing is—a fever dream of someone looking to grasp onto something. I think people like the order lists seem to impose on things. They're also sort of a quick entry point into a topic. And then maybe in another sense, wanting to be told what’s good in some easily digestible pre-packaged version without all the pain of having to do the research yourself. They’re also about this notion that it all matters. Does it really matter that Led Zeppelin is the fifth greatest band of all time and not the fourth? I do know that I never wanted to see another list again. And some of the lists were extremely obscure. Top 10 Tuvan Throat Music Albums of All-Time? It’s in there.

Lists are curation of sorts, which is what we do at the mag, of course. It’s quite an undertaking, but always worth the effort. Thanks so much for chatting with me today, Tom.

Thank you and everyone at Weird Lit for the support and for doing what you do. Also, keep laughing. It’s the only way to get through things sometimes!

Tom Busillo's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, The Pinch, and The Baltimore Review. He is a Best Short Fictions, Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646 page conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA. All drawings featured here are his own.