Tuning In, Making Use of Layover Hours, and Building a Writing Community that Endures with Tom Altreuter
by Rochelle Robinson
Picking favorites is a terrible idea. I know this. And while I could not, as an equally devoted editor, name a favorite HamLit contributor, I can easily say that Tom Altreuter is my favorite writer. Has been for a freaking long time. And he owns this title for the simplest (and possibly most lauded) reason: everything Tom writes is 1000% him. Tom lives so authentically on and off the page that anyone who comes to know him, and read him, understands how inescapably individual his mind and craft truly are.
The way he bends and breaks rules, blending approaches, how he uses slant analysis to illuminate aspects often overlooked — it’s like Tom peddles in pigment, not color; dashes of bitter and salt and umami, not flavor. My long time friend sees the essence, the vapor, and teases it out in long streams of consciousness, all while confronting the very shape of language by saying, “Here’s the idea, no a comma will ruin it. The words you’re forcing me to use barely convey it. I type on.”
So, obviously, I’m a fan. Here’s a chance for you to become one, too.
RR: So, friend, how did you originally hear about HamLit?
[RR: I’m giggling to myself, because Tom was one of the first people to know about HamLit…]
TA: It really started at Village Books with this really varied community of writers who just got a kick out of finding like minded people to hang out with and workshop and it went beyond official weekly meetings to informal free writes with various people in the group. Everyone was writing wildly different things but it was just exciting to share and talk and just so much talent still passes through that group.
HamLit was bound to happen in such an environment. Such an amazing group of people. Rochelle, David, Joe (among other guides) all with such skills beyond only writing, a devotion to the whole process from soup to nuts. Kind of marvelous to think they saw the richness of tapping into new voices and took the dare.
It’s fun to see names of contributor’s from the group in the pages and a bit of a thrill when my own same shows up with theirs. I never feel worthy.
RR: You’ve been published in three HamLit issues, V01, V02, and V05. Thinking back, do you have a favorite theme? Favorite story you wrote? Why?
TA: I’m not prolific, nor can I tailor a tale to a theme in any specific way but sometimes whatever I’m doing fits in. Second Place, where “Lock Down” appears works under that umbrella as does “Nowhere at the End” (Life Expectancy). That one is more personal, the bones were written on a long layover at O’hare in Chicago. I get some of my best ideas scrubbing away hours in airport terminals. I rarely tune out in such places. So many seething stories surround me unless it’s a red eye and then I’ll slip on the headphones while I wonder what I’m doing, suspended in trapped air all day, whether on the ground or aloft.
As far as a favorite, “Long Gone” (Winter Issue) just poured out of me after a few drinks post-work on Christmas day with a few co-workers with no where else to be but in a boisterous Bellingham bar picked from the few open that day, solely for it’s dark notoriety in local lore. Felt like Dostoevsky in a fit with Denis Johnson buying rounds, Bukowski pissing in a corner muttering while Henry Miller coughs up a lung and Billie Holiday and Louise Brooks sit in fade out.
The scene that day was nothing like that and I’m still grateful that story told itself but there was a real person behind the dark invocation of their name but I don’t know what happened to them, long time ago in a different city. Probably the first story I set specifically in Bellingham. HamLit let me settle in I guess.
[RR: To this day “Long Gone” is an apex piece for me. The unveiling, the movement, the gritty, grim holiday lore. Highly recommend!]
RR: Have any of the other published stories stuck out to you in a particular way?
TA: Ok, anytime I show up in the same table of contents as Alexandrea M Lucas is a win. Jamie Good, I hope for more, and this is what HamLit does well in their selections. Rather fond of Leslie Edens’ works and know two of the three from the VB group but sooo many to choose from!
RR: What’s on the horizon for you–upcoming projects, publications, writing goals, etc.?
TA: Have one finished as in it goes from “The” to “The End” but it’s an unwieldy beast in need of some major trimming of hair and claws. It’s about growing weed in the last days before it became legal (that’s a very short synopsis). The second is about an environmental cult bent on destroying Monsanto written from multiple points of view inside and outside the cult. Shelved due to too much heartbreak over a major character’s fate and the technical difficulties of not using gendered pronouns (it’s very busy in structure, too).
Currently wrestling with an attempt at a Covid noir involving white supremacists selling prepper time shares or something which leads to…
RR: You often work with grittier material and language in your short fiction. Any advice for writers wanting to explore darker themes?
TA: I work in restaurants. Truly a scurvy group of people entrusted to making grandma’s birthday special. Trench warfare, gallows humor and stories I steal with permission (technically not stealing since I run the ones use before submitting by the teller, so far all have been approved). I’m a cook, try to blend simple ingredients and make a pretty plate out of what you might pass by strolling life’s buffet. There’s always a story and the hero might just win, for a day, scoring a fix or finding a bad friend. Redemption is elusive.
RR: Any final thoughts?
TA: Just to get back to the idea of themes, sometimes they work because it becomes a “why not”? It’s wonderful to read such a selection of stories in HamLit that range from narrative daily existence to new worlds popping out from directions far beyond ordinary. Write a ghost story? Why thank you! Never gave it much thought but a challenge is something one should accept. I am ever thankful for the opportunity to wonder over all the ways to tell a story. Some are easier to pen and most don’t work but gotta love it when one hits it’s mark.
Tom’s work has been featured in three HamLit season/solstice issues: “Long Gone” in Winter Issue: No Man’s Land, “Lockdown” in Summer Issue: Second Place, and “Nowhere at the End” in Summer Solstice: Life Expectancy.
Keep your eyes peeled for Tom’s short story “Dog Walker” in the forthcoming The Writers Corner Anthology 2024, available at Village Books in December.
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