Thursday, October 1, 2026
An inconvenient suicide disrupts a first date; an alcoholic negotiates with the demon riding shotgun in his car; and a man writes a 66-point addendum to be read at his own funeral. These are but a taste of the wonderfully offbeat and unflinchingly dark and funny tales in “Songs for the Visitor Upon Leaving,” written by tenth grade Central High English teacher, Adam Bjelland. Told in punchy, lean, and wildly inventive prose, Bjelland’s compilation of short stories, memoirs, flash fiction, and vignettes are a thrill ride that run the gamut from the absurdly profound to the amusingly sentimental. His literary “mixtape” is a great traveling companion for the long ride home.
Bjelland spoke with the Herald about his book. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Herald: How’d you come up with the various situations and observations found in your stories, and why would you say your collection is a so-called “mixtape” of stories?
Bjelland: Music always was and is a huge part of my life, and growing up, making mixtapes was a part of your identity. Unlike today where you can bring your entire catalogue of music on your phone, you only had one sleeve of a cassette holder, and you had to choose those tapes wisely. The types of songs that someone carried around in their mixtapes gave you a sense of who that person was. For my mixtapes, they were very eclectic: Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, rap, Broadway tunes. Whereas an album is one type of music the whole way through, those mix tapes had a little bit of everything, and I thought that was a fitting comparison for these stories because some stories in the collection are really sincere and realistic while others are kind of absurd. But, taken together, it’s representative of who I am as a writer. I don’t really stick to one genre; my mind is always trying different styles and genres. There is not one through line for this collection except perhaps trying to shed light on the little parts of our lives that people don’t talk much about.
H: Where did the inspiration for the title come from?
B: I remember on all my road trips we would always bring road trip music on our way there, but going home, it was usually quiet. When going someplace, we’re looking forward to the journey, looking forward to all the possibilities and what lays ahead. But on the ride home, we’re kind of reflecting upon about what happened; what we learned: both the good times we had and the times that didn’t go as planned. I’m reflecting on things that have happened in my life and reporting back through this collection. Each story can stand on its own, but taken as a whole, it builds up to a big picture.
H: How should one approach reading your collection?
B: Some of these stories work well for people who don’t necessarily have time to sit and read chapters at a time. Just like a cassette tape, you can listen to a couple songs or listen to one side of the cassette tape all the way through or flip the tape and play the music on the other side of the tape. Some of the stories are just a page long, so you can get a couple quick hits. You would think that if a story is short, the person didn’t put as much effort into it, when in fact, there was a great amount of care, time, and effort put in being as concise as possible and having every word in that sentence count. There’s a great quote that comes to mind: brevity is the byproduct of vigor. And that approach of boiling a story down to its purest essence really opened the floodgates for my writing.
The book is available in paperback at amazon.com
