A Future of Resilient Hope: An Interview with Jaime Balboa

Jaime Balboa’s debut collection of short stories, Missing Possibilities (Atmosphere, 2023), transports readers into a future whose characters confront the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Their futures bring about speculation on what isn’t right. A lot isn’t right—Balboa is articulate about the gritty disappointments of the world, especially for young people who are too often abused, unhoused, or misunderstood.

As Executive Director of 826LA, today Balboa can be found training staff, teaching an after-school writing course, or meeting with community foundations that fund the organization worth $2 million a year. Through avant-garde, storefront centers in two Los Angeles neighborhoods and inside classrooms of Los Angeles public schools, Balboa and his teams of 826LA staff and volunteers provide literacy and academic services for students in grades three to twelve. Last year they served 6,000 students.

Helping students to succeed is a long-time project for Balboa, a former assistant dean of Undergraduate Education at UCLA—think tutoring and finding snags that derail students in their quest for graduation into better prospects. He also worked providing services to youth living on the streets of San Francisco.

Balboa spoke with me by video conference in September, while the waters of the Pacific were still calling him, a committed open-water swimmer. A former editor at Flash Fiction Magazine, Balboa fathers a teenager, cooks daily for his family, and writes fiction.

His next project is set in the ancient world among well-known narratives but explores the cruxes of our contemporary world. Balboa admires the work of Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles (2012) and Circe (2018). What follows is an excerpt of our long and rich conversation.

Scott LaMascus: What advice as a writer do you have for others who seek to write poetry, short fiction, or other creative work? What practices do you use or recommend? What helps a writer who may have reached a dry place or a time when writing does not seem to flow?

Jaime Balboa: One of the signature pieces of mine at 826LA is to integrate mindfulness into our pedagogy, because the world has been traumatized over the last five years, particularly. You don’t have to look far to see what we’ve been through as a country, with COVID-19, with the racial reckoning, a failed coup, and everything else. People are traumatized. And writing can be a way to express and to find some way of healing. But in those dark moments, there can be times when you don’t write at all.

SL: How did you begin as a writer?

JB: When I was an undergrad, my favorite genre of writing was poetry. My mother fell ill and died when I was twenty-six and I wrote maybe three or four more poems and the well just dried up. And I went a very long period of time without writing. And then it wasn’t until my son was born, fourteen years later, that the spark sort of reignited. In hindsight, I could have paid more attention to what was going on with my grieving and why that was impacting my creative output.

Today, I try to integrate mindfulness into my daily practice, including ocean swims or simple breathing exercises. I don’t shy away from really heavy things like the death of my mother or societal upheaval. It’s the same way we approach teaching writing at 826LA. You can create something beautiful with words when you’re aware. Mindfulness is simply an awareness of the present with the stated intention of kindness. These two together open avenues for creativity.

You can create something beautiful with words when you’re aware. Mindfulness is simply an awareness of the present with the stated intention of kindness. These two together open avenues for creativity.

Kindness can be to yourself. It can be expressing outrage about something that’s happening through poetry, or narratively, or in creative nonfiction. I don’t know if that’s the recipe for success for everyone and in every situation, but I think it could speak to most everyone. Most people could use mindfulness in some way to benefit their creative output. I’m trying to. And I think enough about it that I think it’s worth teaching to the next generation of students.

SL: How is that “stated intention of kindness” related to the hope that seems to emerge, in a complex way in your endings, for example, of the stories in Missing Possibilities? What is the connection there, as you reflect on it?

JB: I think about hope and optimism. When you travel or study abroad, you realize that Americans are an optimistic people. You might not always notice it until someone calls it out. “There you go with that optimism! There you go with that hope.” But I think that might locate me as a writer among American authors. It’s a good question, one I’d want to examine further. I do write a lot of my stories to try to correct something that went wrong. Or fix something. For example, “Raziel’s Last Enchantment,” the last story in this collection, was motivated by a real boy that I read about in the Los Angeles Times who had been subject to abuse and neglect, allegedly at the hands of his parents. He died. I wrote a story about if that kiddo was going to die, could I give him a friend until the very end? It was a magical friend that readers can learn about in the book. In that way, hope is a form of catharsis for me, and I think that’s the connection to mindfulness. Thank you for making me think about it.

SL: In each of these stories, if hope arises, it seems to come through the worst possible circumstances. Or in the story from which the collection takes its title,  “Missing Possibilities,” the protagonist starts in such a dark place. I found the turn toward hope in this story to be robust, nuanced, and resilient. Can you please talk about hope in these short fictions?

JB: In that nuance, I hope you will find an indictment, too. What’s going on in a world where thousands of adolescents find that their only hope is to run away from home? That home is not a safe place. In many cases, those characters who run away are those who are most resilient. In this particular fiction, “Missing Possibilities,” I put in a plug for a place where I used to work, Larkin Youth Services in San Francisco. Those services are for young people who run away because the streets are a more viable option than staying at home. I left question marks about how that story resolves.

SL: As a former dean at UCLA and now as Executive Director of 826LA’s youth writing programs, you have written in so many modes—including poetry—I wonder where short fiction fits into what you enjoy writing and why it appeals to you. Please talk more about your life as a writer now.

JB: Life as an assistant dean was quite different. UCLA is monstrous, it’s huge. And I was one of many assistant deans. I had my portfolio of international education, summer school, and entrepreneurship. I was also co-chair of a campus-wide task force for student success where we looked at different strategies, mostly using data analysis, to find where students might get a certain grade in a certain class, for example, that would raise the likelihood that they would take five years or longer to graduate. Or maybe not graduate at all. So, we would be asking “How do we intervene to help students in those particular classes?

It all came down to building community with students where they would ask questions and have their questions answered by people who care and understand and can show them that whatever hurdle they’re facing, countless others have faced it before.

It all came down to building community with students where they would ask questions and have their questions answered by people who care and understand and can show them that whatever hurdle they’re facing, countless others have faced it before. And this is how you manage it going forward. It was a special day when I got to interact with students because it was an administrative job.

Contrasted with where I am now, working with a younger student population, in some ways, I thought of it as swimming upstream. At 826LA, we work with young people in public schools, mostly third-grade to twelfth grade, who are working with essays, college admissions,writing assignments for school and everything in between.

SL: What was it about growing up, your education, perhaps your family or culture of origin, that caused you to seek this really unique mission in education through 826LA?

JB: I think it starts with how I was raised and the first place where our family spent time socially was the YMCA, a non-profit. My mother and father took turns being on the board and volunteering in various ways. I got my first job at the YMCA lifeguarding and teaching swimming there. So, I was always at home in that sort of environment. The YMCA has a different mission….but there’s a commonality in most non-profits. You see the world the way it is and in some ways refuse to accept it. And that’s also the mandate of education. We see the world as it is and insist that it can be different, it can be better. And that’s probably a little bit of what motivates me as a non-profit executive director.

SL: When did the writing come in? What brought you to creative writing, in particular?

If you have a flash of creativity and the muses give you something to write, I always encourage people to pay attention to that. Whether or not it’s a novel, novella, or short fiction, just get it down.

JB: I wasn’t uniformly successful as a student when I was a kid. I was soul-searching, in Catholic schools, as a closeted, gay kid filtering all kinds of messages that could erode my self-worth if I would let them. But I can point to a couple of relationships with teachers and a couple of moments in writing where I experienced great success as a student writer.

SL: Did you plan the variety of story types or narrative models in Missing Possibilities?

JB: I didn’t set out to plan a voice. If you have a flash of creativity and the muses give you something to write, I always encourage people to pay attention to that. Whether or not it’s a novel, novella, or short fiction, just get it down. Because if you don’t, it’s like dreams, they will escape to wherever they go and it will become an untold story. With these, I would take my writing workshops at UCLA and they gave short story prompts. Otherwise, I was editing for a number of years at Flash Fiction Magazine, where I read scores of flash fiction every week and worked with writers on their stories. What you read is going to shape what you write.

SL:  If you were in charge of displaying your collection of stories prominently in the prime window of your favorite bookstore, and were given freedom to pick any other titles to go with it, which might you choose to place there? Why?

JB: Because it’s a collection of short stories, I’d probably pick short stories. Madeline Miller and Dave Eggers might be there. Some of the short story collections I might stick in there are probably out of print. But in real life, I’d probably let the owner of the store or an editor help pick what to put there.