I met
at the start of my Substack journey, the first fiction warrior to answer his battle call—and the first to face him in the ring. He was victorious, of course. But I’m honored to have been there at the beginning of his Rap Fiction Battles, and even more honored to call him a dear friend.Okay, so I know Andrew appreciated this ten-minute ramble I made, but I have a feeling he might’ve been just slightly disappointed that I didn’t talk more about Beef. And fair. Because Beef is… well, it’s the opus.
But what I was circling around in this little shabby podcast is how his newest, shorter piece—I Am Everything You Think I Am—spoke directly to what Beef has always done for me, underneath the surface.
Because for me, Andrew—the person, the voice, the writer—is inseparable from Andrew the work. There’s a thing writers struggle with, especially early on—not just finding a voice, but learning how to write like yourself. And it’s surprisingly hard. But Andrew doesn’t just have a voice—he is it. Especially in Beef, which feels like more than a story. It’s a saga. A street fight. A sweaty, blood-slicked brawl over the soul of literature itself.
Beef is mythic in that way. But the young writer doesn’t go to war—he goes to literature. Beef is about a young man who loves literature so fiercely that it becomes inseparable from his ego, his pride, his will to live and to fight. And so yes, it’s autofiction. But it also reads like myth. It gives context to Andrew’s whole ethos—even some of his chaos. For him, writing isn’t a quiet intellectual pursuit. It’s not a chess match. It’s a battle.
Beef was Drew with his arm slung over your shoulder, walking you through his block, his story, his obsessions. But this new work? It fractures that voice, splinters it into characters. It steps away from the journal, from the memoir voice, into something stranger, more complex.
And honestly, I’m all in. Because Beef made me understand the man. And this new work is making me wonder where he’ll go next.
Here is an excellent essay and interview of ARC with Peter Shull:
An Interview with Andrew Robert Colom
The links:
The latest:
Beef: The Opus:
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