Writer’s Block: Neal Davis Anderson

All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book, Launch. What can readers expect? 

Neal Davis Anderson: Launch is the story of Theo Strahl, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s heart of the Cold War in an inner ring suburb of St. Louis. He was a bright kid, who skipped grades like a smooth stone over still water but he was a bit out a step with the times. The Cuban Missile Crisis began the night of his 13th birthday. That devastating week changed him, though by then, he was already tuned to apocalypse: he’d come to assume that the warlike grownups on both sides of the Cold War divide would sooner annihilate creation than let the other side have another inch of it, and that the governments had lied and people had no hope of surviving thermonuclear war. By the time of the Cuban Crisis, he already had one eye on the Doomsday Clock.  

Fast forward to 1989. It’s been 20 years since Theo fled St. Louis two weeks before the last exams for his Engineering degree and made his way north to avoid going to Vietnam. He’s settled in Winnipeg. He and Alice have a good marriage, their son, Addy, is growing up well, they have good friends, they’re a part of their community. Through the years, he’s tried to be part of the solution, lived ethically, made a living of sorts from scavenging back lanes, fixed up the things he’s found or repurposed or reimagined them, and not long ago, someone who knows such things called some of the objects he’s made works of art. Which he finds a bit silly, not that he mind people paying real money for things he’d be dreaming up and building anyway.  

Theo’s life is good but on his 40th birthday, an old dread retakes him and before he knows it, a voice is telling him to build a spaceship to escape the dying planet Earth.  

So, Launch is about a guy convinced the world is about to end and agonizing about that. It’s about trauma and collective trauma, the frailty in family bonds, and the possibility of hope in apocalyptic times.  

Oh, also, it’s a comedy. 

ALU: What inspired the ideas for Launch? 

NDA: I really don’t remember.  

Launch started out as a very different novel in the early 1990s, and that manuscript had emerged from a weekly satirical radio play I wrote for the CBC. I picked things up again after grad school and spent a lot of time exploring backstory, and back backstory, exploring minor qualities of obscure characters and rabbit holes as numerous as stars in a clear night sky. By the middle of twenty-teens, the thing was a monster and if it included gems, they were gems packed in bushels of styrofoam packing peanuts. I absolutely refuse to give a word count, but it’s a hilarious number (speaking of stars in the sky) and, as for all the time spent, let’s just say that if I hadn’t been writing, I could have learned a few languages and gotten good at the complicated wood joinery that Japanese masters do and earned a black belt or two. My approach to writing fiction has been wildly, astonishingly inefficient, if eventually satisfying. 

When my mother was in her mid-eighties, she asked whether this novel would be done in her lifetime. It wasn’t a dig—just a reasonable question at that point—but it got my attention. For the next few years, my focus was on sorting and severe pruning. I recognized that I’d been working simultaneously on three very different but related books. I dedicated Launch to my mom. Nikita Khrushchev’s Little Shoes, a coming of age story, is taking shape. 

ALU: What do you hope readers take away from your book? 

NDA: Maybe a thought or two about the Earth’s chances for survival and the viability of hope or magic in this appalling, beautiful world. 

“Apocalypticism” is a belief that the end of the world is just around the next corner and it’s been a preoccupation in some quarters for thousands of years. The end of the world or of human history, bad world events reaching a climax, civilizations collapsing, humankind maybe ceasing to exist, ushering in the age of the cockroaches, or the whole world ending. Images of the end times permeate our thinking, which is maybe why we go for apocalyptic stories and movies. In religious terms, the thought has been that the end of the world will coincide with the arrival or return of a saviour and a fundamental transformation. Maybe the resurrection of the dead. Go online and you’ll find lists of dates predicted for the end of the world, based on whatever scriptural analysis or a leader’s vision. Hundreds of dates have come and gone. There was one in 2021 and the next one seems to be 2026.  

I love the thing about the guy with fierce eyes and wild hair shouting, “The End is Nigh!” and someone asking him, “Okay, but is there still time for hot chocolate?” and the End-is-Nigh guy blinking, saying, “I don’t know. Probably.” 

Just how an apocalypse could roll out hasn’t been all that clear until the twentieth century. Of course, there were ideas before that, like the story of Noah, where an ending came as a flood. Yahweh’d had it up to here with humans so went and drowned every living thing except Noah and his kin and whatever creature pairs they dragged onto their gopherwood ark in time. Then, after 40 days and nights, God painted a rainbow across the sky as His promise that He’d never destroy creation again… by flood. Even as a child, I recognized how super weaselly that covenant was, since the Big Guy retained all options for fire and famine and plague, etc.  

Current scientific consensus seems to be that imminent global or human extinction from natural causes like astroids or supervolcanoes is not very likely. The Big Rip or the Big Crunch are a long way down the line. 

Human caused catastrophe presents more of a concern and this is where the protagonist of Launch is, with his better-than-passing awareness of environmental degradation and the prospects for global thermonuclear war. Which takes us back to the Doomsday Clock, managed by the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world. Until 2007, the Bulletin focussed on the chances of nuclear war but, these days, it considers the climate change, biological threats and disruptive technologies, as well as nuclear risks. 

In January 2025, the Doomsday Clock ticked down to 89 seconds to midnight.  

The Bulletin said that national leaders, especially in the United States and China and Russia, have ignored unmistakable signs of profound danger and, so far, failed to do much of anything to change course.  

Launch is set in 1989 but the questions stand: what really are our chances for survival and what’s your play if you judge the chances to be slim? Maybe you put your hope in a next world, in Heaven, though maybe that’s just kicking the can down the road. Maybe you counter despair with patience and trust, as some great people have when they’ve held that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. In other words, that short and medium term conditions change, cultures swing and technological thinking shifts, idiots gain power and bring their chaos and cruelty, so there are rollbacks as well as gains, but if you tilt your head just so, squint, and wait for the right light, you might just catch the chord’s backside and trust ever after that everything’s going to be all right. 

Launch can’t help but have its doubts about the arc and whether, if history even is toward justice and wisdom, it’s going to bend there in time to make any difference. Launch is set in this world and wrestles with the chances for change—through individual advocacy, policy reform, the force of broad cultural movements, along with some creativity and empathy, a pinch of everyday magic, a dash of kindness.  

ALU: What does a typical writing day look like for you? 

NDA: I’m awake around five am. I make coffee and eat something, then sit down and pick up where I left off. For me it’s a more or less immediate return to a state of hyperfocus. It doesn’t seem to matter where I happen to be in my house (I don’t have a regular work space) or if I’m on the road or whatever. I don’t ease into it but more plunge back into whatever scene or paragraph or rabbit hole I was in the day before, or I’m back to some ruthless pruning. It’s the most intense engagement: it’s invention and discernment and enjoyment. Really, it’s always been like that for me: it’s never mattered that making up a little world is hard and mostly thankless. Back in my twenties, it occurred to me that when the work is going that way, mortality is of no concern; now I understand one name for that state is flow. 

Most days an exhaustion comes over me suddenly after five or six hours and then I absolutely must shift to something hands-on and tangible. I build something out of wood or twist some wire (see the photo) or I run or cook or fix something in this old house of ours. 

ALU: How do you approach developing your characters or world-building? 

NDA: My doctoral dissertation focused exactly on this. I was so fortunate to attend an institute that valued literature, mythology, and religion within the study of clinical psychology. 

In the early 1970s, the English philosopher Colin Radford posed a philosophical riddle, which he thought was insoluble. In order to feel emotion toward someone, it went, one has to believe in the existence of an object of those feelings. Since we know fictional characters don’t exist, our apparent ability to respond emotionally to them is irrational, incoherent, and inconsistent. Some responses to Professor Radford see fictional characters as tools for make-believe that possess no being themselves (de dicto), while others attribute some kind of ontological reality to characters (de re).  

I took a de re position in my thesis and argued (arrogantly, I admit now, in the intellectual kick-boxing style I learned as a Philosophy major) for the centrality of the imaginal within psychology, literature, and life generally. I said that, instead of defining the characters of stories negatively in terms of actual people, it makes more sense to see actual people as fictions. I argued against making a dualism of reality and fiction—of viewing characters in novels, people in dreams or medieval paintings, or images emerging in psychotherapeutic transference as something less real than a coffee table or bottle of olive oil.  

As an historically unfolding species, I said, we have actually begun to shift out of the largely non-participating consciousness we’ve inhabited since the Enlightenment and into a consciousness of imaginal participation with phenomena. In doing that, we acknowledge the perspectival, en-storied nature of our lives, the way actual life rests on a foundation of day-dreaming and imagination. We notice the poverty of subject-object modes of thinking and of atomistic cosmology and, as radical individualism is relativized, we notice that consciousness lives only within intersubjective fields, where actual people and imaginal creatures co-imagine and co-create one another.

As a fiction writer or psychotherapist, it’s important to relinquish certain kinds of control, and to sit patiently as patents or characters come more fully into themselves. Writing becomes less about will or ego or some set of steps than about respect for characters and a kind of patient tending, and it requires an openness to being changed or deepened by the relationship with the character. Of course hardly anyone is dealing with just one character—there’s more likely to be a whole town full—so participating directly and honestly in the imaginal field is complicated, but the point is that characters want their autonomy and don’t want their bodies stretched or contorted to fit some puny author’s plot. They don’t want to be forced to say things they don’t mean any more than I want to be held captive or used in some basement dweller’s deep fake. Characters have their own perspectives and their own being.   

Neal Davis Anderson is an author and clinical psychologist living in Winnipeg. His first novel, Bettina, came out under the name Thomas J. Childs (Signature Editions) and other writing has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Descant, Rampike, and Zymergy and in the anthology 200% Cracked Wheat (Coteau Books). He studied Philosophy and Chemistry at the University of Winnipeg and completed his MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Neal is the past executive editor of Prism International and his feature about the Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic in Border Crossings won a National Magazine Award. His short serial and feature-length drama has been produced by the CBC and he’s written documentary and lifestyle pieces for many CBC programs.