Tom Busillo's story "Soup Line" launches the reader directly into its amusing little world and doesn't leave any time for doubt. We absolutely love its absurdity, its humor, and its voice. We also loved hearing from the author in the interview responses below!
What makes you keep writing, even when it's hard?
Obsession. I’m lucky to currently be in a fugue state where I feel compelled to wake up early in the morning around 3 or 4 (I honestly can’t sleep) and write. After not writing for ten years due to the birth of my son, I just woke up early one morning back in August and started writing again. Also, my son’s birth did not take ten years, although thinking of it now, that could be a story. When it’s hard, I try not to press too much, try to shut off my self-censor, and just keep trying to get words down.
What other creative activities do you like to do?
My first love is music. I play bass in a cover band that plays in local bars, but my favorite thing is just sitting with an acoustic guitar and singing Leonard Cohen and Magnetic Fields songs, as well as random songs transposed into a baritone. I do a very tender and touching “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” by the Dead Kennedys.
What's your favorite thing to clean?
Definitely dishes, but only in a certain kind of way. I like to go free-form and just pick up an individual piece from the sink, pour some dishwashing liquid on it, wash it, and then move on to the next one. I find it very therapeutic and rewarding. It’s like you’re helping dishes get right and move on. Do I waste a lot of Dawn doing it this way? Sure. But it’s for a good cause. I hate soaking piles of them in a big dishwater-filled bowl first and THEN washing them. For some reason, that feels like actual work instead of a labor of love.
What's your favorite treeThere’s a tree in the backyard of my childhood home that’s special to me. When I was a kid, in the summer I’d spend hours sitting under it reading the likes of Ray Bradbury or Illustrated Children’s Bible stories. I don’t know why I was so fascinated with the latter, I think it was the pictures. That tree and I sort of grew up together. It’s much taller than I am.
Does your day job affect your writing topic or approach?
I just changed jobs and now work at a university. So I’m sure there are a number of stories with campus settings on the horizon. Prior to that, I worked as a marketing copywriter, and a lot of my humor writing tends to be satires of marketing pitches and consumer culture. I like writing marketing copy that I could never possibly use on the job, but that I always wanted to write for bizarre products I wanted to be pitching.
What is your least favorite word?
Right now it’s “lyrical.” I see so many publications looking for lyrical prose where the stories are more prose poems focused on expanding out a moment in time in a deeply meditative fashion. As you can see by this story, right now, that’s not quite my style. Then again, maybe I’m just jealous of people who can do that.
What's your favorite obscure novel or short story (a work you never hear anyone else talking about)?
I’m not sure how obscure it is in certain circles, but it would have to be “Today I Wrote Nothing,” a collection of short stories by the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, who’s in my personal Mount Rushmore of writers. I find a story about going to kiss someone and having their head pop out in your hands has a lot more to say about real life than someone thinking back on baking cookies with their mother and how the kitchen would smell and anticipating the sweetness of that first bite, etc., etc., etc.
What's your least preferred afterlife scenario?
I would hate it if our brains somehow had enough electricity for us to still be conscious after we were dead. In a way, you’d be buried alive IN YOUR OWN BODY! That would be suboptimal.
If you took the soup line, 1: Where would you take it? and 2: What kind of soup do you think you'd be?
1: I’m an Anglophile with cousins in Rome who hates flying. So I’d have to say London followed by Rome. As with many things, aside from space travel, I think Europe would be way ahead of us in constructing their soup system. But I’m not sure if the transatlantic pipes would have been laid yet. I hope so. 2: I’d probably be Pho. I’m a combination of very straightforward noodles and broth and then a whole host of things you can never quite properly identify.
Do you consider yourself an organized or chaotic writer?
I’m a chaotic neutral writer. I have a lot of files that are sort of sketchbooks and I just try to keep adding to them. If something is working after a certain point, it gets moved to its own file. I’ll go back through my sketchbooks and if I see something that catches my eye I’ll try to add to it. This means I often write things, leave them, and then forget which sketchbook it's in. I’m so glad Google Drive lets you search through files.
What was your favorite children’s book?
This is going to sound crazy to people who know me, but the Bible. Not the real Bible, but an illustrated children’s version of Bible stories. There’s some very dark stuff in the Old Testament that makes for great illustrations. Abraham and Issac for instance. What young child wouldn’t be fascinated by a father about to stab his son with a knife? I also remember an illustration of the Maccabees that showed people walking around with their tongues cut out and bleeding from the mouth. That picture fascinated me to no end.
What's your editing process? Do you have a first or beta reader, or a workshop group?
I consider myself still very much an “apprentice writer,” so my editing process is still being edited. I’m getting better. When I started, I thought editing a story was proofreading it, particularly because my stories are mostly flash and rarely are over 2,000 words. Now, I tend to try to follow Stephen King’s dictum that the first draft is “the writer’s draft” intended for the writer only. I try to leave things alone for a couple of days and then come back to a story with fresh eyes. A lot of my writing is very plot-driven as opposed to character-driven. So with some stories, I’m trying to take an initial plot-driven draft and spend more time world-building and fleshing out the characters in subsequent revisions. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the kind of writer who uses dense, “lyrical” language to describe an interior monologue someone has after seeing a brand of ketchup they haven’t seen since they were a girl and having it bring back memories of a traumatic incident involving their mother (although, now I may challenge myself). I have a very good friend who writes literary fiction that I will occasionally run pieces by, but I don’t want to overburden him.
Advice on creating that you’ve learned by trial and error?
You can’t force creativity. When things are forced, they’re painful and feel like a chore. Creativity doesn’t follow a to-do list. I’ve learned that you have to be loose and set yourself up in conditions that allow things to come out that you didn’t know were there. Give yourself the freedom to fail. Be terrible. Write anything and don’t worry about it making sense or tying anything together or thinking if it’s “publishable.” Granted, this is probably not what they teach in MFA programs. My best writing sketchbook is called “Terrible Openings to Terrible Novels Vol. 3” and I try to force myself every day to just get down three openings to stories without any filter whatsoever. My best stories have come that way—riffing off of an opening sentence or two. This may be terrible advice—and definitely is when it comes to writing a novel. I still don’t understand how novels can even exist, but I’m glad they do.
Tom Busillo’s writing has appeared on McSweeney’s, PANK, and Apiary and is forthcoming in Calliope (Fall 2025). He’s also the author of the 2,624-page, unpublishable, book-length conceptual poem “Lists Poem: Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Lists (11,111 Lists).” He is now focusing on shorter works. Much shorter. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.