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 project 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.