Ok maybe I’m wasting my first question on something silly, but I am wondering what is your fascination with the name Paul? Your first book was titled Pauls, and featured characters named Paul, and in Play, our protagonist is a woman named Paulina but who very emphatically wants to be called Paul. Is there something to this?

So the Pauls thing has a bit of a funny origin. When I’d first be writing stories, I’d often default to names of people I grew up with but no longer had in my life as names that felt “real” to me, especially when depicting the types of small towns where I grew up. I started to realize I had a lot of Pauls in various stories. Most people would lean away from this, but instead I leaned into it and decided to lump them into a collection together. Some of the Pauls were very much the same characters, just perhaps in different roles in the story. Others were unique and adding another dimension to the collection. As a millennial Jessica, I always had a few other Jessicas around me, and it always made me wonder, “WTF is the point of a name anyway.” The arbitrary nature of language came early! So it’s also playing with that.

The Paul (“Paulina”) in Play is the same Paulina who is in three of the Pauls stories. Originally when I was working on the collection, Paul hinted about a past but wouldn’t talk about it directly. Her communication style was a bit sideways and not straightforward, but she had a rawness and vulnerability that I was drawn to. I am a very straightforward communicator, so I wanted to get to the core of her hints about her past. What would happen to a character like this if her journey was about healing, about pursuit of a type of openness that didn’t come naturally to her? The novel started at the same time as Pauls, I think mostly as character work or the potential to be another story, but the scope was too big and so started to be a novel.

In terms of Paul wanting to be called Paul, she talks a bit about it directly in one of the stories in Pauls. She prefers her nickname, but her lover calls her Paulina and she thinks its due to them having different views of gender—he often rants about androgenous names. Paul doesn’t really see herself belonging to a specific gender or really understand gender, although she still uses she/her pronouns. This carries over in her identity in the novel as well: Paul sees the people who understand her as people who know and use her true name. When that lover realizes the importance of the name, their relationship has changed and deepened. I have a similar relationship to my name and prefer to be called “Jess.”

You published two other books before Play—both were short story collections. Can you tell me a bit about the process of writing your first novel? For instance, was it hard to land on an idea for a book that you’d have to commit to for a long period of time? And was the process of plot and story arc development different with this more expansive story with subplots, etc.?

Play took me about 10 years to write, partially because of things going on in my life (I had a terrible accident and also had a child in the middle of it), but also because I was still so green as a novel writer. I didn’t know anything about novel structure and always was a bit more experimental with what I wanted my novel to contain. At one point, I was planning to have a series of monologues from the different characters. At another, there was a true crime story with a different set of characters that helped contribute to the final moments of the novel.

Really belonging to a community of artistic peers helped me a great deal. My best friend, Sofia Mostaghimi, helped me plot out the arc on Bristol board, applying what she was learning in a script writing class. Catriona Wright read two drafts and provided wonderful notes. My partner, Craig Calhoun, worked as my constant sounding board, proofreader, and support. I worked with Meg Storey as a developmental editor and then Linda Pruessan as my wonderful fiction editor. Everyone who touched the book transformed it and turned it into this book that I could be proud of.

I think about my short story collections as projects as well and they also tend to have a structure to them, but it’s definitely easier writing novels now that I have one under my belt. I am doubtful I will ever write a novel with such a complicated structure again, as I think that’s why it took me so long.

In your acknowledgements, you write a bit about Cognitive Processing therapy (CPT), a trauma-informed version of CBT, which you say unlocked something for your novel and for your own treatment. Can you write a bit about this? Did you have the idea that therapy would be a part of your novel before you discovered CPT? What did it unlock in the novel and how?

So, therapy was a part of the novel originally, but with the therapist that Paul has in 2016, who isn’t all that helpful—partly due to her own emotional limitations, partly due to being the only type of therapist Paul can afford, and partly due to Paul not being ready to be honest about what actually fuels her conflict with others and general feelings of terror and distress.

I had a lot of issues with the structure of the novel. Meg Storey, who provided me with developmental edits, asked me, “Why is Paul telling the story at this time?” She noticed there was this feeling of distance and reflection in the 2016 sections and wondered where she was writing from. I knew it was Paul in her mid 30s, with a bit of growth and wisdom behind her, but still a lot of life in front of her, if she chose to continue to live it. But I wasn’t thinking of 35-year-old Paul as a character or real presence in the novel.

When I was doing a work project on CPT, I felt like every part of my life was so engulfed in trauma. My novel that was giving me trouble was all about trauma. My work project was on PTSD treatment. And meanwhile, I was experiencing PTSD myself. I’d had an accident in February 2018, and while my body had healed, my mind had not. I had managed to have a positive attitude while in the hospital with a shattered pelvis, but now that I was better, confined to the house during the pandemic, I felt like it was day 1 of the experience all over again, but this time I was fully experiencing the horror of what happened.

My surgeon spotted it at a check up and asked if I felt like I had PTSD. He recommended me to the clinic at Sunnybrook and they began to give me a brief course of CPT. I used some of the exercises to address other trauma in my life as well, and suddenly everything clicked. All this was happening at the same time because it belonged together. The CPT process—which gets patients to recount their trauma in present tense, record it, and listen to it as a means of re-processing and integrating the experiences—provided that missing piece Meg Storey had identified and allowed me to get to know Paul in her thirties, someone, who like me, was desperate to heal.

I always want to ask writers about their “writing life” and how they manage to keep going. Can you tell me a bit about how you balance whatever you do as your “day job”—whatever pays the rent and feeds you.

For a long time, I did contract teaching, freelance editing and tutoring, and writing. I found the amount of work to scrounge together all the pieces was really challenging, along with wrapping my head around the periods of intense work or not enough work. In 2019, I got a 9-5 editing job, and it’s worked well for me. Sometimes I write or read on my lunch breaks. I use a good chunk of my vacation time for writing.

All of this became more complicated once I had my daughter… being a parent is something that engulfs your psyche, so even carving out the mental space can be difficult at times. I try to look for pockets of time that I have (some days I have more times in the morning because I’m not doing drop-offs, lunch breaks, etc.). But really, when I need to, I try to scrape together the time to work. I have a very supportive partner who also makes my writing a priority, so that helps as well.

I find writing is the one thing I can never give up on. I don’t even know what I think half the time until I get it down on paper. Writing’s so essential to my mental health and who I am as a person that I will never stop.

With your writing, and then also maybe you, personally, how to you define “success” as a writer or even a book’s success? I know this is different for all of us, and I’m always curious to know what others think.

I think when I was younger, I thought success would come with achievement and reaching goals … The big goal was just putting out a book, becoming legitimate as a writer. When I reached that goal, I experienced a lot of difficulty with my mental health, as I didn’t know what else life would have to offer me. I learned a lot from reevaluating what I wanted from my life at that moment and from reinterpreting my relationship with writing. For me, the sign of success with writing is to keep going and putting out books. Writing is a long game, and it’s important to keep being true to yourself and putting out work you think needs to exist.

Finally, I’m really interested to know what you’re working on now and also do you feel you always need to have a writing project (or maybe more) on the go or are you OK with taking some non-writing down time after a book is published?

I’m usually working on a couple projects at a go to help my brain stay interested. Right now I have three projects that I’m more actively working on: a memoir about breaking my pelvis, a new short story collection of weirder stories, and my second novel Experiencer. They are all in various stages… For the collection, I have a good group of stories, but they may still change shape a bit. The concept of the collection is still evolving and changing within me, and I need to do some reading about craft before I totally understand the structure I want to go for. I also am writing a few new stories for that.

The second novel is in draft form, but I still need to do a pretty heavy revision. I completed the draft last February and haven’t touched it since, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot and making notes towards a revision strategy.

For the memoir, I am also still in the thinking and dreaming phases. I have a fair amount written, but once again, I need to land on the right form to see the project through. As you can probably tell, I’m in a bit of a thinking/dreaming/drafting phase with my work. I am trying to be more okay with periods of non-writing time… I am one of those people who is constantly creating, but I’m beginning to learn how essential periods of rest are for creativity and see rest as part of the process.

Jess Taylor is a writer and poet who works on the traditional lands of the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat peoples and the Missaussagas of the Credit, in the city currently called Toronto. Her second collection, Just Pervs, was released by Book*hug in Canada in September 2019. Recently, Just Pervs was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction. A short story from that collection, "Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love", was long-listed for The Journey Prize. The title story from her first collection, Pauls (Book*hug Press, 2015), "Paul," received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Play is her first novel.