The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Paul Michael Anderson

 

I have decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Paul Michael Anderson/ Paul is the author of the collections Bones Are Made To Be Broken and Everything Will Be All Right In the End: Apocalypse Songs, as well as the novellas Standalone and the upcoming The Only Way Out Is Through.

 

What do you do when you’re not writing?

The big obvious answers is that I'm a parent and teacher, but I don't think that's what's intended here.  I read a lot, obviously, and I'm a huge music fan, so going to concerts or fucking around on my guitar (currently trying to figure out how to play Modest Mouse's "Little Motel" in a way that doesn't sound dopey) take up a chunk of my time.  I like to walk in the woods, sometimes with our mutts and sometimes alone (I have no patience for hiking, but long walks are just the speed for this born-and-raised city kid). 

 

What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as a writer?

First time I was able to pay for the entirety of Christmas, or use the sale of a short story to pay utilities.  It sounds boring, I guess, but there's something about the fact that whatever talent I possess allowed me to take care of the basic functions of life in latter-day capitalism.  Sure, my day job handles all of that, but to have my writing manage to pull off that trick?  That's just fucking cool. 

How do you celebrate when you finish writing a new book?

Depends.  When I finished a novella recently, I took our dogs on an hour's long walk.  Sometimes I order food from local Thai or Indian places (we rarely go out to eat).  Pretty minimal stuff.  Here's the thing—I tend to downplay my writing.  Not the work or the effort or the successes, but to see them as just...part of the basic package.  I'm a writer.  It's something I'm programmed to do.  I stopped seeing it as a hobby and, instead, saw it as my job around the time we had our daughter—about twelve years ago.  When I changed my mindset, I had much more success, but it also led me to take a more working-man approach to the whole thing.  I don't tend to do anything special after the end of a semester of my classes, so the idea of doing something really out there when I finish a long piece of writing doesn't come naturally to me.  

What is your favorite way to waste time?

Reorganizing my collections—books, music, movies, the few comics I have from my childhood collection.  I'm hopelessly anal-retentive about the order of things, so if I'm directionless during the day at all, I reorganize something. 

I know I'm sounding less and less cool the longer this interview goes on. 

What is your favorite book from childhood?

The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub.  I'd grown up around genre films and what-have-you, but that book was the first time I felt like any of it was mine.  More, because King & Straub had a very approachable style, it was the first time, also, that I felt like I could do this, too.  I'd always liked writing, but that was typically couched in childishly sophomoric comic scripts about monster-superheroes.  The Talisman showed me I could create worlds. 

What genres won’t you read?

Being an English teacher who tries to keep up with the reading tastes of my students (who always stay the same age), there's little I won't read.   Given the books I carry and how I am, it tends to unnerve my students when I proffer opinions on, say, Sarah Dessen (she's good!).  Sports novels tend to be a harder pull for me, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.  I tend to just read everything. 

 

What’s on your literary bucket list?

I've already hit a few of them.  Jack Ketchum, the author of novels like Red and The Girl Next Door, praised my first collection of stories back in 2016, and, man, I was on Cloud 9 for the next two weeks because of that.  In shorter works, I want to see my stories in venues like Fantasy & Science Fiction and Nightmare magazines. 

 

What songs would be on the soundtrack of your life?

How much time do you have for this question?  Pick a moment in my life, and I can find a song that will take me back to that time, regardless of how inconsequential.  In any event, if we're sticking to big moments of my life, here's five songs, without context:

 

"I-95" by Fountains of Wayne

"Invented" by Jimmy Eat World

"First Day of My Life," by Bright Eyes

"Antonia" by Motion City Soundtrack

"The Future Freaks Me Out" by Motion City Soundtrack

 BONUS: "Walls (Circus)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

 

What scares you the most?

I've written a lot about the horrors of parenting—the pits and cliffs that exist because of this little thing you've brought into the world.  Nothing scares me more than something happening to my kid. 

That, and heights. 

 

Are you a book hoarder or a book unhauler?

Unhauler.  I grew up moving a lot, so I'm used to being extremely compact.  I hold onto the books only if I know I'm going to re-read them (and if I don't reread them within a certain set of years, I donate those, too).  Everything else, regardless of how much I enjoyed it, gets donated or given away.  I just don't want that much clutter in my life.  My TBR pile is never more than twelve or so books deep because otherwise it sets my nerves on edge. 

 

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Charlie Brooks, a newly-minted State Trooper, hoped to begin a new life in the still-wild edges of northern Virginia at the dawn of America's Interstate Age.  President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System is supposed to reshape not just the American landscape, but also its way of life, but there are shadows and people that resist this change, and Charlie finds himself in the middle of the conflict.  Hunted and haunted by the secrets his colleagues, the citizens he was sworn to protect and serve, and even the land itself have held onto for centuries, Charlie has only one chance for survival, and it means revisiting the very trauma that sent him to this corner of Virginia in the first place.

 

"Originally published in an anthology as I Can Give You Life, this revised road-tripping cosmic horror novella appears under the preferred title of The Only Way Out Is Through as a standalone book for the first time.