Writer Michael Chin on finding the Title Track for a Story Collection
Sydney Mabry, a second-year MFA student in fiction and the prose editor for Pinch, had the opportunity to interview Michael Chin. The interview took place in October 2025 across email. Chin’s seventh book This Year’s Ghost was published this year by Jackleg Press and is available for purchase.
This Year's Ghost is a haunting experience, not only due to the ghosts in the realities created on the page, but also the lingering contemplation of existence it leaves behind, long after reading the last page. Lives just off from our own reality featuring gambling with one's remaining lifetime, the extinction of dogs, and even clown college; portray humanity with startling accuracy.
The Pinch published your titular story “This Year's Ghost” in 2019. What did that mean for you as a writer? Did having that acceptance help push you towards publishing the rest of the book?
I was so honored to publish “This Year’s Ghost” with the Pinch. I consider that story the first thing I wrote after I completed my own MFA at Oregon State that I really liked and believed in. Placing it with the Pinch was a great affirmation that I could write good material removed from the MFA community that had meant so much to me.
When I started thinking about this book, placing this story with the Pinch was a good signal this story was not only a viable choice to include in a collection, but a worthy choice to place as the “title track.”
We have our own interpretations at the Pinch, but we were wondering: How would you define Pinchy?
I think of the Pinch as hitting a sweet spot as a journal that’s super selective but also down-to-earth—a little gritty, a little weird, and I’ve never left an issue and found the work pretentious or over my head. It’s a great space to occupy in celebrating a range of work that’s all functioning on its own terms but doesn’t require its readers be too deep in the weeds of literary theory or canon to be along for the ride.
How do you feel being a creative, specifically a writer, in the age of generative A.I.? Does it worry you? Are you unbothered by the implications?
I’m not enthused about A.I. in art, though I’m also not overly concerned at this point. In the short-term, I am concerned would-be creatives are going to lean into use of A.I. to make their art for them which, to borrow an image from one of my teaching colleagues, is like sending a robot to lift weights for oneself at the gym.
There may be a larger concern about A.I. taking the place of real artists in different capacities down the line as the technology evolves. We’re not there yet, and I think it’s some ways off, if it occurs in my lifetime at all, but it is worrisome to think about that in the larger scope of humanity.
What do you think about tigers?
The first place my head goes on this one is my favorite pop culture tiger, Hobbes from “Calvin and Hobbes”. Big fan of him; I can’t say I’ve had any real-life interactions with the animals, though, and I suspect I’m better off for it.
Have you ever been to Memphis? If you have, how was it?
I stopped in Memphis on a cross-country road trip in 2016. I’m a huge pro wrestling nerd and have always been fascinated by the mythology around wrestling in that area. I’m not sure if it’s as vibrant as it once was, but I remembered reading about it in magazines when I was a kid and always wishing I could check it out. Anyway, I had lunch at King Jerry Lawler's Hall of Fame Bar & Grille on Beale Street, including indulging in the delicacy of deep-fried ribs. I’m not sure my cholesterol levels have ever been the same. It was a fun, quirky place to eat, though, and I took a lot of pictures. I’ve always hoped I might have the chance to come through again and also engage with more of the musical history anchored in Memphis.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Was there a specific time or event that pushed you towards writing?
My father taught me to read, and I discovered a love of writing years before my love for reading. I started writing stories based on Nintendo characters around the age of six before moving on to fantasy-oriented stories—riffing off the knights and princesses and dragons that showed up in a lot of the stories I consumed at the time. I started writing (quite bad) novels in middle and high school. I had a novel I drafted at sixteen that I wound coming back to and spending a lot of my twenties reworking and trying to sell, before ultimately accepting it wasn’t meant to be and that the lessons learned from that project were more valuable than that book itself was ever going to be as a finished creative work. I think everything escalated in my late twenties and early thirties—after I let that book go and then when I started my MFA at Oregon State in 2014.
I was a quiet kid for a lot of my youth and have considered myself socially awkward in most contexts, most of my life. I think that’s a big part of what drew me to writing, where the words come out right and I can best communicate what I want to say.
What was getting your most recent book published like? How did that process work for This Year's Ghost?
It was quite a journey for this book. I first drafted a couple of the stories in it as far back as 2011-2012. I distinctly remember thinking I had a collection in 2018 and starting to send out that earliest version that fall. This Year's Ghost is the seventh book I've published; I think it's telling that the first book hadn't even been picked up yet when I started shopping a version of this one around.
The collection got shortlisted for a couple contests and had some notes of encouragement, but I had trouble finding a home for it. In the meantime, I switched up the order of stories, transitioned some out altogether, and added some in—some new material, some repurposed from other, larger projects that hadn’t panned out. The last two stories, which I now think of as pretty essential in tying the book together, were not a part of the project until the last couple rounds of sorting things.
Of the ten stories in the final version of the book, six were included (in some form) straight through the process. I think the biggest version of the book had around 15-16 stories.
In any event, the great Juan Martinez selected the book for JackLeg Press in 2023; Juan, Jennifer Harris, and the rest of the team there were fantastic to work with, including being super collaborative around editing and cover design. On the cover, I think it was a real testament that after I pushed back on the first option they ran past me, their team came back with five new mock-ups, three of which I really loved, so then I had the nice problem having to pick just one from that bunch.
Are there any writers that you look toward that were influences for your creative process?
I read super diversely, and I think everything I read has some influence on my work, consciously or not. For this specific book, I can directly trace the DNA of some stories back to reading Kevin Brockmeier, Joe Hill, and Shirley Jackson in particular. Maybe even more so than reading them, teaching their stories really pushed me to figure out the mechanics of how their writing works and helped me borrow strategies that I could make my own in this collection.
I noticed while reading, the stories in This Year's Ghost mostly have a sort of introduction into the concept of the story, very clearly, at the beginning. You don't spell it out, but you give the reader some idea of what exactly in the world of your story is different than the real world. Do have a sort of formula you use to do that, or does it naturally happen when you're building the story? Do you actively consider reader understanding when setting up your concepts?
I don’t have a formula per se, but I am sensitive to the point that a story with a speculative premise demands helping out the reader to understand the world we’re operating in. My best friend since childhood is an adamant realist who doesn’t really do genre. We’ve never seen eye-to-eye on that, but I think that friendship has helped me keep a critical eye toward what a reader like him must understand to enter the world of a story. That perspective also helps me see when it’s a good idea to rein things in to not alienate the kind of reader who prioritizes keeping one foot in the realism half of magical realism.
Is there anything you are willing to tell us about what you have planned next? Do you have any projects in progress?
I have so many—probably too many!—projects. I don’t like to get into particulars before things are really in motion, but I can say I have pretty complete drafts of four new books that are in different stages of revision or editing; I’ve started testing the waters on sending out some of this stuff the last few months. I’ve learned to trust the process and that it’s hard to predict if, when, how, or in what form a project will actually make it into readers’ hands. I’m cautiously optimistic folks will hear more from me before too long, though.
