An Interview with Paul Anderson
Several years ago, Regan Schaeffer and Paul Anderson were classmates in a fiction seminar. Recently, they sat down to talk about Model Citizens, Paul’s story collection, published by Wordpool Press. A description of Model Citizens can be found on its Amazon page:
Model Citizens features seven stories navigating the part of the human psyche that attempts to reason and process logical conclusions in the midst of difficult and frightening situations. As these characters struggle with vices and dangerous relationships, readers will come to learn about why we become addicted, why we attach ourselves to people that hurt us, and why we can’t let go, even when we know we should. |
Regan: one of my responsibilities at Temenos is the physical layout of the pages and the pieces in each edition, so I noticed, and I really like the layout of these stories in your book Model Citizens. Did you make the decisions on the order of these pieces? And what can you tell us about that?
Paul: I did order these in my own way. I feel like “I Must be God” packs a punch—it's a shocking story. I wanted that as the beginning, because I think the hook isn't always just the first line, it's the first few pages. I really wanted to end with “Advent” because I like to pack a punch at the beginning and then leave you with a kind of catharsis at the end.
Regan: That's exactly the progression that I noticed. And I recognized “I Must be God,” and thought, whoa: to open with this intense story…and then as I kept reading, “The Name,” that story is great, hilarious, postmodern. It's also really thought-provoking, but it's a little lighter… so, this goes to another question: all these characters in these stories are kind of operating in this limbo, a balance that’s either emotional or behavioral. The reader can watch them as they’re thinking and interacting with people, you can watch them, but you don't exactly know where they're going to go. This must be an idea that you think about, so tell me more about that sense of conflict your characters have.
Paul: I love character driven stories. Good plots matter too, but I think character, more than anything, builds the plot. So I have this fascination with characters who are stuck with a binary decision: I either have to do the right thing, or I'm going to end up doing the wrong thing. Part of the picture I try to paint is that, while they're so worried about what's the wrong thing and what's the right thing to do, and they may be falling into either direction, they’re actually caught up in this gray space in between. And they don't realize that they’re there. The order of the stories mirrors that, in a way.
I have this fascination with the way that people think and the way that we get stuck. This came from a struggle that I had in the past. I used to keep a MySpace blog. I was actually featured on MySpace’s Top Bloggers. I used to write a lot of “there’s hope for you, no matter what dark path you’re on, there’s still hope,” because that's what I was going through at the time. I needed to remind myself. I happen to write this one… and I don't really remember what I wrote in it, but I remember my mom commented on it. I was probably in my mid-20s. She was really the first one who kind of opened my eyes to this idea that we really do think in this absolute kind of way. She wrote, “stop worrying about doing the “right” thing. If you make a bad decision, that doesn't mean you’re a bad person, or that you've made the wrong choice in life.” So, I like to write about the dark stuff, because it's fun to see where my mind goes and it’s fun to see these characters as they come to life, to see where they go and the decisions they make. But more than that, I’m trying to reflect the idea that these characters are having some sort of small epiphany, not necessarily the epiphany, if that makes sense?
Regan: It does. And not everybody can do what you’ve done, which is to show the reader this internal action. Your characters say and do things and respond to other people, and we, as the readers, watch them and think: oh, no, but the character doesn’t realize what he’s doing—that he’s on some kind of pathway. Sometimes, he’s not paying attention, or, some of these characters are really emotionally isolated.
Paul: And he always reasons with himself, too, because, deep down, he's feeling a certain sort of guilt for what kind of life he’s choosing…
Regan: First of all, I want to compliment you on doing that so well, and also observe that it’s clear to the reader that most of these guys are good guys; almost all of them have the potential to be good guys.
There’s a spiritual component to what your characters are grappling with, whether they recognize that, or not. And it’s not necessarily what's the right thing, or what’s the wrong thing, or what God wants me to do, or what my mother wants me to do. But even if the characters don't realize it, the reader realizes that these people are shaping their lives with their decisions. In “As For Me,” Geoff spends a lot of time thinking about how he really does have his life together. There are some wonderful moments in that story. At one point, he says, (and this is hilarious) "this is the defining moment of my life” and then, there are, like, four more defining moments after that!
Paul: I think that everybody in their own way, in their psychology, is spiritual, in some way, and each one of these characters represents a different part of my psychology and a different way that I reason with my own spirituality. I think it’s interesting that you bring up spirituality, because it doesn't come through as straightforwardly as I was hoping.
Regan: I was interested in this inner growth when I asked my first question about the order of stories in the book. It's interesting to me that the characters in the first story are so far outside of any ability to bring themselves back into any sense of wholeness, while the character in the final story—it’s deliberate that there is a church involved. (P: very much so), although it's not an overtly religious story.
Paul: That's as straightforward as I can be with that.
Regan: But there is a sense that this character is going to be able to find some kind of balance, to do what he wants to do. I loved the moments in “As For Me” which illustrate what we’ve been talking about, that as a reader, you don't really know what decision is going to get made. It's almost funny, because: ahhhhh, stop stop stop!
Paul: I'm glad you picked up on the dark humor.
R: I definitely did. As the characters swing back and forth, the reader really has to swing with them.
Paul: That's interesting, thank you. Because, that whole story is about Geoff going back and forth: I'm going to do it, I'm not going to do it, I'm gonna do it and feel really bad about it…
Regan: I'm going to stop him, I'm not going to stop him, and, oh shit, I wasn't able to stop him…
Paul: And he reasons with himself that, I'm doing everything I can…that's the struggle of the character of Geoff. It's a roller coaster, that story.
Regan: Yeah, I agree, but in a really entertaining way… It’s not overtly funny, but it is. You can just imagine the young Bill Paxton playing one of these roles…
Paul: I can see that, yes, definitely
Regan: It's not that it’s slapstick, but it's that these guys don't know what they're doing.
Paul: Well, it's like, everybody does this, hopefully not to this extreme, but you get into these awkward situations that you might and up reflecting back on and laughing, but in the moment it's, what am I gonna do? This is terrible! I hate this, I have to get away right now, this has to end. An outsider would watch and chuckle at us. So, when I read that story, that's kind of the reaction I have. I was fascinated by the way that Boyd came to life. He was just going to be the burnout friend, then as I was writing the story he does that one unexpected thing and I thought, there, I have my story. That's how that story was born: a free-write about a guy who has his life together, and his burned-out friend lives with him. Where do we go from there? I mean, it's the same kind of story we see all the time.
Regan: I wouldn't want to have to pick a favorite of these stories, but I think that “Spiral” is quite a ride. If I were to characterize the psychic movement your characters have been going through, I would describe it as balancing on a tippy plate, but I think a spiral is a perfect description of this particular piece. It really does have some centrifugal force. There’s a sense of a spiral going down the drain, but there's also things that happen in this story that push this character away from the center. This is maybe the saddest piece in the collection.
Paul: As a reader, I think “Spiral” is my favorite.
Regan: I think it probably is mine, too. As happens in life, most of your characters are presented with a cascading series of decisions they have to make. Each decision forces the next decision. But the character in “Spiral” is so reactionary. It's not like you think, oh this is a bad guy. It's not that you want this guy to spiral down the drain—you can see by the intensity of his emotional reactions to things that with each revolution he's flinging himself further, unable to get back to some kind of center.
Paul: The narrator in “Spiral,” in a lot of ways, is like Geoff in “As For Me.” He's a different kind of projection of the same idea, mostly, in that, he has this really comfortable life that he doesn't want to give up: I have this stability in my life, this is how I want things to be, and here are all these things in my way.
Regan: And it's not that it's funny, (P: it is!), but it is! It's funny because all of this awful stuff is going on with other people, and he's just half listening, talking to them on the telephone (P: Oh, the conversation with Pike, I was laughing the whole time I wrote it!) These characters are blind to any other point of view. It just doesn't exist for them. And the character in “Spiral” is one of the best examples of that. He has such a strong worldview and he twists everyone else's behavior to fit his own world.
Paul: Yeah, for him, it's all about me. He's the center of the universe, and the whole story is about people breaking off of his universe. It's interesting to me when I write that kind of thing, to see what he ends up doing in the end, that he makes the most predictable choice at the end. And the challenge, for me, was to frame that in an unpredictable way.
Regan: I'll give you another specific complement: I did not see that coming, that ending. I'm a good reader, but I was so caught up in this guy's head…
Paul: I'm glad that I was sneaky.
Regan: I hadn't been anticipating anything, but then, of course! Of course.
Paul: That's a big reason why “Spiral” is my favorite. I don't know if it's my favorite because of the experience of writing it, or as a reader. One thing I like to do in fiction is to have an object that appears early in the story and then reappears later playing a really vital role. This first occurred to me in sixth grade. Early on in this little sixth-grade story I wrote, a girl had bobby pins in her hair, and then later on, those bobby pins ended up playing a huge role. Like, somebody picked a lock with a bobby pin, or something… and that was my first experience with playing around with an object in a story. So maybe it's because I've been practicing utilizing objects that I was able to pull a fast one on you, and hopefully, other readers too.
Regan: Okay, here's a writer-to-writer question: a lot of times, when I think of an action that involves an object, I'll go back and think of how to insert that object. Do you do the opposite?
Paul: Yeah.
Regan: So, you start out with the object?
Paul: I start out with the object. Seriously, this is how I write. I think of a character and write a character description—not too extensive. And then I think about what situation can I put this character in, because I like to see what happens, I like to see what people do when they're stressed. So that's part of what's going on in this collection. And a lot of times, when I make that character description, there's an object that's associated with that person. So I have to make a writer's choice: is this object going to be integral to the story? Or is it just a secondary object?
Regan: Somebody's got a lighter that they flick.
Paul: Yep, “21 Seconds.”
Regan: Oh, and it is really important.
Paul: Yeah, that's the object that…yeah, another spoiler…
Regan: We didn't even talk about that story. That's an intense one…
Paul: That one has gotten the best reception. I've heard that from the publisher, as well as anyone that's mentioned the book to me. That might mean that Burnham is the easiest character to read. And maybe the easiest one to empathize with.
Regan: I'm not surprised by that, and honestly the power of that story, for me, is the way you write the end—you really push that into another dimension, on purpose. It's very poetic, and deep, and shocking, and sort of, not predictable. You can feel the build-up to that moment. So for me, the reader, that's the power. Also, it's an accessible story. This story has more straightforward, dramatic, emotional stuff.
Paul, you have such beautiful language in these stories. There are so many great lines, like, “My nerves rang in my ears like sleigh bells, and I wondered, ridiculously, if it was really the sound of my mom earning her wings.” (both laugh). It's tactile, it's sensory, you hear it, you feel it, and it's an idea. And it's all in one sentence.
Is there anything else that you want to be sure that we explore?
Paul: I like to think that the way this collection progresses mirrors my own progression—the layers and layers of healing, the difficult decisions we all have to make in life: about love and friendships and occupational stuff. Of course I haven’t dealt with murder or a lot of the really dark stuff that pops up here and there in this collection, but a lot of the emotions and the dramatic impact is there—I felt that. I think of it almost like an album, if that makes sense. If you have a particular album you love, you don’t just love it because of the individual songs on there. You love it because of the order of the songs. Your listening experience wouldn’t be the same if the songs were ordered differently. I’m thinking of a few albums that played a role in healing after loss, or were kind of friends during dark times: Days of the New’s “Green” album; Metallica’s Load; Counting Crows’s August and Everything After; Cold’s Thirteen Ways to Bleed On Stage. There are more, but the thing about these albums is that they’re so different—different genres of music, which represent different ways of mirroring where my heart might’ve been at that time. Sure, there are individual songs I like more than others, but for me, the real experience is the album as a whole. If Model Citizens, as a short story collection, is the closest thing to an album I’ll ever create, then I want to make sure there’s a really particular presentation—so I was really careful with the order. If I read this collection—and I haven’t actually read it cover to cover since it was published—I’d imagine it would be like re-visiting a place you haven’t seen in a long time, like driving down a road and saying, “Hey, I’ve been here before,” and realizing it’s a nostalgic place you always dreamt of seeing again, but you had forgotten where it was.
Regan: It’s really good, Paul.
Paul: It’s four years of work. I’m really pleased with it. I did the cover art, too.
Regan: Good job! And what a great title! It’s not the name of any of the stories in the collection, it's the name of the collection itself.
Paul: It’s an album title.
- - -
Paul Anderson earned his MFA in Fiction from University of Arkansas-Monticello. His work has appeared in such publications as Cardinal Sins, Absent Willow Review, Thunder Sandwich, Temenos, Gravel, and Readers Digest. Model Citizens is his first book.
Paul: I did order these in my own way. I feel like “I Must be God” packs a punch—it's a shocking story. I wanted that as the beginning, because I think the hook isn't always just the first line, it's the first few pages. I really wanted to end with “Advent” because I like to pack a punch at the beginning and then leave you with a kind of catharsis at the end.
Regan: That's exactly the progression that I noticed. And I recognized “I Must be God,” and thought, whoa: to open with this intense story…and then as I kept reading, “The Name,” that story is great, hilarious, postmodern. It's also really thought-provoking, but it's a little lighter… so, this goes to another question: all these characters in these stories are kind of operating in this limbo, a balance that’s either emotional or behavioral. The reader can watch them as they’re thinking and interacting with people, you can watch them, but you don't exactly know where they're going to go. This must be an idea that you think about, so tell me more about that sense of conflict your characters have.
Paul: I love character driven stories. Good plots matter too, but I think character, more than anything, builds the plot. So I have this fascination with characters who are stuck with a binary decision: I either have to do the right thing, or I'm going to end up doing the wrong thing. Part of the picture I try to paint is that, while they're so worried about what's the wrong thing and what's the right thing to do, and they may be falling into either direction, they’re actually caught up in this gray space in between. And they don't realize that they’re there. The order of the stories mirrors that, in a way.
I have this fascination with the way that people think and the way that we get stuck. This came from a struggle that I had in the past. I used to keep a MySpace blog. I was actually featured on MySpace’s Top Bloggers. I used to write a lot of “there’s hope for you, no matter what dark path you’re on, there’s still hope,” because that's what I was going through at the time. I needed to remind myself. I happen to write this one… and I don't really remember what I wrote in it, but I remember my mom commented on it. I was probably in my mid-20s. She was really the first one who kind of opened my eyes to this idea that we really do think in this absolute kind of way. She wrote, “stop worrying about doing the “right” thing. If you make a bad decision, that doesn't mean you’re a bad person, or that you've made the wrong choice in life.” So, I like to write about the dark stuff, because it's fun to see where my mind goes and it’s fun to see these characters as they come to life, to see where they go and the decisions they make. But more than that, I’m trying to reflect the idea that these characters are having some sort of small epiphany, not necessarily the epiphany, if that makes sense?
Regan: It does. And not everybody can do what you’ve done, which is to show the reader this internal action. Your characters say and do things and respond to other people, and we, as the readers, watch them and think: oh, no, but the character doesn’t realize what he’s doing—that he’s on some kind of pathway. Sometimes, he’s not paying attention, or, some of these characters are really emotionally isolated.
Paul: And he always reasons with himself, too, because, deep down, he's feeling a certain sort of guilt for what kind of life he’s choosing…
Regan: First of all, I want to compliment you on doing that so well, and also observe that it’s clear to the reader that most of these guys are good guys; almost all of them have the potential to be good guys.
There’s a spiritual component to what your characters are grappling with, whether they recognize that, or not. And it’s not necessarily what's the right thing, or what’s the wrong thing, or what God wants me to do, or what my mother wants me to do. But even if the characters don't realize it, the reader realizes that these people are shaping their lives with their decisions. In “As For Me,” Geoff spends a lot of time thinking about how he really does have his life together. There are some wonderful moments in that story. At one point, he says, (and this is hilarious) "this is the defining moment of my life” and then, there are, like, four more defining moments after that!
Paul: I think that everybody in their own way, in their psychology, is spiritual, in some way, and each one of these characters represents a different part of my psychology and a different way that I reason with my own spirituality. I think it’s interesting that you bring up spirituality, because it doesn't come through as straightforwardly as I was hoping.
Regan: I was interested in this inner growth when I asked my first question about the order of stories in the book. It's interesting to me that the characters in the first story are so far outside of any ability to bring themselves back into any sense of wholeness, while the character in the final story—it’s deliberate that there is a church involved. (P: very much so), although it's not an overtly religious story.
Paul: That's as straightforward as I can be with that.
Regan: But there is a sense that this character is going to be able to find some kind of balance, to do what he wants to do. I loved the moments in “As For Me” which illustrate what we’ve been talking about, that as a reader, you don't really know what decision is going to get made. It's almost funny, because: ahhhhh, stop stop stop!
Paul: I'm glad you picked up on the dark humor.
R: I definitely did. As the characters swing back and forth, the reader really has to swing with them.
Paul: That's interesting, thank you. Because, that whole story is about Geoff going back and forth: I'm going to do it, I'm not going to do it, I'm gonna do it and feel really bad about it…
Regan: I'm going to stop him, I'm not going to stop him, and, oh shit, I wasn't able to stop him…
Paul: And he reasons with himself that, I'm doing everything I can…that's the struggle of the character of Geoff. It's a roller coaster, that story.
Regan: Yeah, I agree, but in a really entertaining way… It’s not overtly funny, but it is. You can just imagine the young Bill Paxton playing one of these roles…
Paul: I can see that, yes, definitely
Regan: It's not that it’s slapstick, but it's that these guys don't know what they're doing.
Paul: Well, it's like, everybody does this, hopefully not to this extreme, but you get into these awkward situations that you might and up reflecting back on and laughing, but in the moment it's, what am I gonna do? This is terrible! I hate this, I have to get away right now, this has to end. An outsider would watch and chuckle at us. So, when I read that story, that's kind of the reaction I have. I was fascinated by the way that Boyd came to life. He was just going to be the burnout friend, then as I was writing the story he does that one unexpected thing and I thought, there, I have my story. That's how that story was born: a free-write about a guy who has his life together, and his burned-out friend lives with him. Where do we go from there? I mean, it's the same kind of story we see all the time.
Regan: I wouldn't want to have to pick a favorite of these stories, but I think that “Spiral” is quite a ride. If I were to characterize the psychic movement your characters have been going through, I would describe it as balancing on a tippy plate, but I think a spiral is a perfect description of this particular piece. It really does have some centrifugal force. There’s a sense of a spiral going down the drain, but there's also things that happen in this story that push this character away from the center. This is maybe the saddest piece in the collection.
Paul: As a reader, I think “Spiral” is my favorite.
Regan: I think it probably is mine, too. As happens in life, most of your characters are presented with a cascading series of decisions they have to make. Each decision forces the next decision. But the character in “Spiral” is so reactionary. It's not like you think, oh this is a bad guy. It's not that you want this guy to spiral down the drain—you can see by the intensity of his emotional reactions to things that with each revolution he's flinging himself further, unable to get back to some kind of center.
Paul: The narrator in “Spiral,” in a lot of ways, is like Geoff in “As For Me.” He's a different kind of projection of the same idea, mostly, in that, he has this really comfortable life that he doesn't want to give up: I have this stability in my life, this is how I want things to be, and here are all these things in my way.
Regan: And it's not that it's funny, (P: it is!), but it is! It's funny because all of this awful stuff is going on with other people, and he's just half listening, talking to them on the telephone (P: Oh, the conversation with Pike, I was laughing the whole time I wrote it!) These characters are blind to any other point of view. It just doesn't exist for them. And the character in “Spiral” is one of the best examples of that. He has such a strong worldview and he twists everyone else's behavior to fit his own world.
Paul: Yeah, for him, it's all about me. He's the center of the universe, and the whole story is about people breaking off of his universe. It's interesting to me when I write that kind of thing, to see what he ends up doing in the end, that he makes the most predictable choice at the end. And the challenge, for me, was to frame that in an unpredictable way.
Regan: I'll give you another specific complement: I did not see that coming, that ending. I'm a good reader, but I was so caught up in this guy's head…
Paul: I'm glad that I was sneaky.
Regan: I hadn't been anticipating anything, but then, of course! Of course.
Paul: That's a big reason why “Spiral” is my favorite. I don't know if it's my favorite because of the experience of writing it, or as a reader. One thing I like to do in fiction is to have an object that appears early in the story and then reappears later playing a really vital role. This first occurred to me in sixth grade. Early on in this little sixth-grade story I wrote, a girl had bobby pins in her hair, and then later on, those bobby pins ended up playing a huge role. Like, somebody picked a lock with a bobby pin, or something… and that was my first experience with playing around with an object in a story. So maybe it's because I've been practicing utilizing objects that I was able to pull a fast one on you, and hopefully, other readers too.
Regan: Okay, here's a writer-to-writer question: a lot of times, when I think of an action that involves an object, I'll go back and think of how to insert that object. Do you do the opposite?
Paul: Yeah.
Regan: So, you start out with the object?
Paul: I start out with the object. Seriously, this is how I write. I think of a character and write a character description—not too extensive. And then I think about what situation can I put this character in, because I like to see what happens, I like to see what people do when they're stressed. So that's part of what's going on in this collection. And a lot of times, when I make that character description, there's an object that's associated with that person. So I have to make a writer's choice: is this object going to be integral to the story? Or is it just a secondary object?
Regan: Somebody's got a lighter that they flick.
Paul: Yep, “21 Seconds.”
Regan: Oh, and it is really important.
Paul: Yeah, that's the object that…yeah, another spoiler…
Regan: We didn't even talk about that story. That's an intense one…
Paul: That one has gotten the best reception. I've heard that from the publisher, as well as anyone that's mentioned the book to me. That might mean that Burnham is the easiest character to read. And maybe the easiest one to empathize with.
Regan: I'm not surprised by that, and honestly the power of that story, for me, is the way you write the end—you really push that into another dimension, on purpose. It's very poetic, and deep, and shocking, and sort of, not predictable. You can feel the build-up to that moment. So for me, the reader, that's the power. Also, it's an accessible story. This story has more straightforward, dramatic, emotional stuff.
Paul, you have such beautiful language in these stories. There are so many great lines, like, “My nerves rang in my ears like sleigh bells, and I wondered, ridiculously, if it was really the sound of my mom earning her wings.” (both laugh). It's tactile, it's sensory, you hear it, you feel it, and it's an idea. And it's all in one sentence.
Is there anything else that you want to be sure that we explore?
Paul: I like to think that the way this collection progresses mirrors my own progression—the layers and layers of healing, the difficult decisions we all have to make in life: about love and friendships and occupational stuff. Of course I haven’t dealt with murder or a lot of the really dark stuff that pops up here and there in this collection, but a lot of the emotions and the dramatic impact is there—I felt that. I think of it almost like an album, if that makes sense. If you have a particular album you love, you don’t just love it because of the individual songs on there. You love it because of the order of the songs. Your listening experience wouldn’t be the same if the songs were ordered differently. I’m thinking of a few albums that played a role in healing after loss, or were kind of friends during dark times: Days of the New’s “Green” album; Metallica’s Load; Counting Crows’s August and Everything After; Cold’s Thirteen Ways to Bleed On Stage. There are more, but the thing about these albums is that they’re so different—different genres of music, which represent different ways of mirroring where my heart might’ve been at that time. Sure, there are individual songs I like more than others, but for me, the real experience is the album as a whole. If Model Citizens, as a short story collection, is the closest thing to an album I’ll ever create, then I want to make sure there’s a really particular presentation—so I was really careful with the order. If I read this collection—and I haven’t actually read it cover to cover since it was published—I’d imagine it would be like re-visiting a place you haven’t seen in a long time, like driving down a road and saying, “Hey, I’ve been here before,” and realizing it’s a nostalgic place you always dreamt of seeing again, but you had forgotten where it was.
Regan: It’s really good, Paul.
Paul: It’s four years of work. I’m really pleased with it. I did the cover art, too.
Regan: Good job! And what a great title! It’s not the name of any of the stories in the collection, it's the name of the collection itself.
Paul: It’s an album title.
- - -
Paul Anderson earned his MFA in Fiction from University of Arkansas-Monticello. His work has appeared in such publications as Cardinal Sins, Absent Willow Review, Thunder Sandwich, Temenos, Gravel, and Readers Digest. Model Citizens is his first book.