Interview with Andrew Careaga
Some people remember dates. Others remember songs. Andrew Careaga remembers a company slogan printed on the back of his childhood artwork and a few notes from Carole King’s Tapestry.
After a forty-year career spanning journalism, public relations, marketing, and communications, he’s developed an eye for the absurd and an appreciation for the stories that linger inside memory.
What’s something completely ordinary that you pay an unreasonable amount of attention to?
Our world is awash in logos. I think because of my marketing and brand management background, and the amount of time I spent in my career talking about the importance of branding for an organization, I pay a lot of attention to those things, the bad as well as the good. I try to think about the thought process behind creating these logos or identity marks (sometimes just a company name) and wonder what the logo creators or the company owners, CEOs, etc., were hoping to achieve with a particular logo, a redesign or refresh, etc.
What kind of memory sticks to you? Not necessarily the important ones—the ones your brain refuses to throw away.
I don’t have a great memory, but the memories that stick with me are usually related to music and a time in my life when a particular song or album was in the air. For instance, any time I hear a sling from the Cars’ first album, my mind goes back to a certain party hangout from my junior college days and the good times we had there. Or I can hear a song from Carole King’s “Tapestry”--any track from that album–and my mind goes back to the year one of my sisters and I lived with our dad in Massachusetts, and the girl who always brought that album over to our apartment and played it for us. Over and over.
What’s a belief you held for years before realizing you’d inherited it from somebody else?
This is a tough one. I think I know where most of my beliefs originated, but I may be unaware of some I’ve inherited. But I can think of one example. My grandfather worked on the assembly line of a shoe company for years, and he always had scrap paper from time sheets the company used. I assume these were discards, and my grandfather, being a bit of a hoarder, probably brought them home. Whenever I was around and wanted to draw, he gave me several of these sheets. The back sides were clean; they were for my brilliant grade school works of art. The front sides were time sheet grids, and at the top of the sheets was the phrase, “A job done with pride is a job well done.” I guess I’ve often thought that belief came from my grandfather, but I realized later in life it came from the company by way of my grandfather.
When you’re telling a true story, what are you most tempted to leave out?
Anything that makes me look bad. I always want to be the hero of my stories. Doesn’t everyone?
What subject could somebody bring up at dinner and accidentally lose you to for the next forty-five minutes?
Just forty-five minutes? :) It would be the pop and rock’n’roll music of the mid ‘60s through the early ‘80s, the soundtrack of my life. But after U2’s “Joshua Tree” era I’m less conversant. Don’t ask me anything about the music of the past decade. You’ll lose me in a heartbeat.
Do you trust your memory? What do you do when the version you remember and the version somebody else remembers don’t match?
My memory is faulty, as my wife frequently reminds me. If my version doesn’t match someone else’s, I’ll usually defer to that person. Especially if that person is my wife or one of my older siblings and we are discussing family lore. But if I like my version better, and I think it would make for a good story, I’ll try to incorporate it into some fiction or autofiction.
What’s something you’ve learned from writing nonfiction that you probably wouldn’t have learned just by living through the experience?
Writing nonfiction has taught me to crystallize and organize my thoughts about an experience and to focus on the central point of the account.
What’s a question you keep returning to even though you’re pretty sure there isn’t an answer?
What makes some people more curious and inquisitive than others? And there’s a question behind that question: Where does curiosity come from? If you know the answer, please advise.
What makes you laugh that probably shouldn’t?
Like a lot of writers, my sense of humor skews dark. There’s a saying attributed to various people that resonates with me: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.” That’s an oversimplification, of course. I’ve experienced times of tragedy in my life where I couldn’t see any reason for hope, let alone humor. But understanding and appreciating the absurdity of life helps me cope, I guess. Over a 40-year career that began in small-town newspaper journalism and took me into PR, marketing, branding, and strategic communications (whatever that is; isn’t all communications strategic?)I've witnessed plenty of situations that tickled my funny bone, but I couldn’t laugh out loud at many of them without risking my job or a stern reprimand. Decorum dictated I not laugh at those situations while they were happening. These were everything from lengthy board or committee discussions on strategic planning and attempts to wordsmith a mission statement. You know, the kind of corporate or institutional stuff that made Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” cartoon so popular many years ago. I guess I laugh mostly at the high and mighty ones in life. I don’t like laughing or poking fun at the less fortunate, the so-called little guys and gals. There’s too much mean-spiritedness in our world today. I try not to contribute to it.
What’s currently itching at you?
The unfinished novel, several unfinished short stories in progress, a couple of unfinished essays in progress, and a monkey barrel full of ideas for more writing projects that I want to pursue like the proverbial shiny objects but know I must set aside until I get some of these other projects finished.
Andrew Careaga is a recovering marketing and PR executive who writes from his home in the Missouri Ozarks. His work has appeared or soon will in dozens of literary journals and three anthologies published in 2026: Bad Intentions: Crime Fiction Inspired by Warren Zevon (Literary Garage), DISSOLUTION (La Rotonde Review), and COLOURS (La Rotonde Review). He is allegedly working on a novel. Find him on Twitter/X and Instagram at @andrewcareaga and on Bluesky at @andrewcareaga.bsky.social, or visit his website, andrewcareaga.com.
