An Uncontrolled Interview with Allison Mulder

Allison Mulder physically resides in the Midwest writing fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Figuratively, she exists somewhere in the Venn diagram of silly, scary, and sappy. She also has a frankly untenable number of hobbies. Her stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Escape Pod, Cast of Wonders, and more. You can find them all squirreled away at allisonmulder.wordpress.com, though Allison herself is more easily found on Bluesky as @amulderwrites.bsky.social.

Allison is the author of “Uncontrolled Emotion” from Issue 12, a story about Dermot, a “safety censor” who spends his days surveilling recorded conversations for subversive subtext and brewing dissent.

 

Q: Parallel to Dermot’s dire job in your story, what is your own relationship to work in the real world?

Is it that obvious that I’ve spent a lot of time in office jobs? I actually enjoy the balance of repetitive, established procedures and the problem-solving necessary when those procedures break down. 

Routine can be reassuring…sometimes to the point of complacency. But in every corporate job I’ve held, I wind up trying to make the process as painless as possible, imagining the person on the other side of the paperwork. Remembering when I’ve been that person, filling out a form—major aspects of life dependent on a signature, a paper trail, a processor and the regulations they’re held to.

Q: Do you feel you’re adept at handling emotion in your day-to-day, or wrestle with it consistently?

Well, I’ve got anxiety and a couple other neurodivergencies going on, so… I think I handle emotion reasonably well, considering.

I grew up pretty high-masking, and I’m the friend my group chat goes to when they need some message translated into corporate-speak. I’m often at my best with a routine to relax into, and a steady day job with clear expectations and regular pay all helps tremendously with that.

But when huge, external events coincide with my nine-to-five, it can lead to a very particular sort of horror. At this point, I’ve ridden out the start of a global pandemic, January 6, layoffs, friend breakups, family moving far away—all of it playing out while I plug away at a cubicle. I have visceral sense-memories of doomscrolling myself into a panic attack on my lunch break, then riding out another four hours of work with chatty coworkers who clearly get their news from different sources.

Familiarity and stability can be a huge comfort. It can also be surreal as hell when everything outside the office is spinning into chaos.

Q: Why have you taken to describing yourself as a Venn diagram of silly/scary/sappy?

When asked to pick between two extremes, I’m the kind of person who often answers, “Yes, good, both, all.” Grimdark and cozy. Happy endings and heart-wrenching. Quirky, nonstop action and slow-burn slice of life. Which I’m sure is just great for my personal brand and what expectations a reader might bring to a new Allison Mulder story.

Reading or writing, I get equally excited for a joke, a jump scare, or a knife through the heart. All three are frequently used in my toolkit, and they tend to run together for me. People mention the humor in my horror, my funnier stories often have some strain of deep sadness at the core…and really, I’m always a sucker for a sad sap doing their best, no matter what other genre or tone I’m working in.

My aim is always to make a reader feel something. Which particular thing (or mix of things) just depends on the story at hand—and it may not always be the one you expect.

Q: What are your thoughts on the demise of Tumblr in the late 2010s?

I did my time on Tumblr (enough for at least one friend in real life to comment, “You seem like you were on Tumblr…”)  though I don’t think I was ever as active or adept at it as some. As far as the general shrinking and enshittification and censorship of the internet today, I mourn every time a good thing goes awry.

I grew up in a lot of small, rural towns. For all that the internet can be a hellscape, “online” was where I first found people who cared about other people. Where I figured out who I wanted to be in the world. I hate the idea of those avenues being cut off, of kids today existing in a similarly sheltered place, with no idea how much wider the world is. Or of kids (and adults!) who’ve found a window out, now trying to weigh: Is this the thing that will get my account canceled? My links to friends cut off? My coping mechanisms and communities of support, stripped away from me forever?

My values and priorities may not be the ones that adults in my life would have selected for me, if they’d had their pick.

That does not mean they were the wrong ones to build.

Q: What real-world trend or fear was the impetus for “Uncontrolled Emotion”?

This story actually began through a writing prompt on a forum. Something like, “What are you afraid to know?”

Dermot doesn’t know if he really chose this. He doesn’t know if he’s truly connected to the people on the other end of the call. What’s worse? Knowingly agreeing to be complicit in something awful, or getting manipulated into it so thoroughly, you can’t even remember when it happened? And if both possibilities horrify you, then why are you still there?

With censorship in particular, there are also countless lines you don’t know you’ve crossed until repercussions land on your head. You develop a constant little voice:

“Is it safe to say this?”

“Will this get me on a list somewhere?”

“Is this the action that will come back to bite me?”

“Will this endanger someone I care about?”

You do half the work yourself, complying in advance. Never toeing the line, too afraid to even find it.

And then the last element of this story: Uncontrolled Emotion.

A certain subset of people equate “getting upset” with being wrong. If you care too much about a topic—if you raise your voice, or burst into tears, or get perceived as a bleeding heart—clearly your opinion is biased and fallible and not worth listening to. Especially in the workplace, public areas, the holiday dinner table, the wake of a tragedy (when the tragedies are never-ending)—it is never polite to express big ideas you care deeply about. There is constant pressure to blunt those ideas, make them palatable, make sure you don’t create any discomfort for someone who might disagree with you (even when the point of contention is, say, someone’s right to even exist).

It’s something I’m still working at. The terror of expressing real opinions, and defending them.

It feels harder than ever, in the world today.

But it also feels more necessary than ever.

Q: What is the hardest technical problem specific to short fiction for you?

Brevity. If I were a stronger comedian, I’d end this answer there.

But no—I always write long. I started writing flash fiction as a challenge to myself, and I’ve grown to love the form. Getting across so much story in so few words…

But I’m definitely a rambler, an ambler at heart. My dearest friend and best beta reader is always clearing her throat. “Is this important to the story?”

To which I earnestly reply, “Yes! To me, it is!”

The right place to start, the right place to stop, and which darlings to slash in between are always the hardest bits for me. Especially the right place to stop. I can just go on, and on, and —

Q: Do you think dystopian fiction is genuinely cautionary, or does it risk making the unacceptable feel inevitable and easier to accept?

This question fascinates me. The more I think about it, the more I think dystopia comes from a slightly different place for me.

I know for many people, reading and writing dystopia at this current moment hits too close to home. We’ve blown past so many cautionary tales. Unacceptable things are here, and have been here. How can you prevent a dystopia you’re already in?

But I grew up in a very small, very White, very evangelical Christian area. Pastor’s kid. Homeschooled for a good chunk of my childhood. I might have turned out a very different person, had Child Me not started reading, started writing, started looking online to meet other writers. Had I not chased writing into communities of people very different from myself, and started listening to them.

I’ve spent so much time holding my upbringing to the light, testing it against what the world really looks like. What does it mean to care for other people? What history was I missing back in Sunday School, or elementary school, or right now? And every place I’ve lived, I’ve met good people doing that work, trying to answer that question for themselves: how to remake yourself and your community, once you realize you’ve been part of the problem?

So, when I think about dystopian fiction, what pulls me in is that moment of realization between prevention and acceptance. That first moment you realize the world is not what you thought. “We are the baddies.” Your favorite uncle owes his retirement fund to thirty years of loyal work at the Torment Nexus. And you still have to go to work tomorrow with no power to personally change any of it.

It’s the first opportunity to consciously turn yourself around.

It’s a theme I don’t think I’ll ever get away from (As proven by two more of my most recently published stories: “Who Could Feel Haunted With Luck in Their Pocket?” in Trollbreath Magazine, and “Rewilding the Many Tethered Winds” in Kaleidotrope).

Writing or reading, fiction or nonfiction, I always wind up giving my whole heart to characters who recognize their complicity and take the first step on the lifelong journey to undo that—whether that’s burning it all down, or simply sitting with their own discomfort long enough to admit, “No. This isn’t right.” “The world is not what I thought it was, now what am I going to do about it?”

Characters trying. Maybe poorly, maybe not enough. Tripping, stumbling, squabbling, but with every fumbling bone in their body, desperate to claw goodness out of the storybooks, and back into the world.

It’s hard. And no one’s perfect. And none of us have the control to fix it all ourselves. But I think that if you find yourself on the inside of a vast and terrible machine, you have a moral obligation to start loosening screws, whatever that means for you.

We may never know which ones hold the whole mess together, until it someday finally falls apart.

Q: Was there any music (1-3 songs) that you think would make a good mini-setlist for your story? Either ones that may have been on your mind, or ones that give readers a good idea of the themes?

If I wrote this story to a particular song, I don’t recall which it was, but odds were very good it was one of the following:

“Soon This Space Will Be Too Small” by Lhasa De Sala, which I first heard in the movie The Decline (2020), and was delighted to find once again while watching Ravenous (2017). It’s a beautiful song that’s always a little bit on my mind, but I think it fits here, if not totally what the artist intended. To me, it feels calm, and steady, and a little sad, but building to a bigger change—even if it’s not in the cards just yet.

Honestly more likely with the corporate horror vibes, though? “The Fine Print” by The Stupendium, written about The Outer Worlds (a game I love) but which I first heard on a random Murderbot playlist made by Spotify user Caoimhe, long before the show or anything came out. It’s a very good Murderbotplaylist, and the song’s focus on following orders given by the company you signed yourself away to… Yeah. “Perhaps you have simply forgot what you signed.”

Finally, I’m gonna toss in some Hadestown, simply because I love Hadestownand think everyone should listen to it. “If It’s True,” “Flowers,”—you know what? Just start at the beginning and let the whole thing play on a loop.