An Interview with Tom McAllister
Newsletter recipients,
We’re a little behind at Newsletter HQ but we’ll be digging out of it! Today I’m really excited to share this interview with Tom McAllister! Later this week we’ll have a regular newsletter and on Monday I’ll be sharing a conversation I had with Lincoln Michel about his new novel, Metallic Realms.
On top of being a wonderful essayist and novelist, Tom is the nonfiction editor at the great literary magazine Barrelhouse and teaches creative writing at Rutgers. He’s also co-hosts the podcast Book Fight, which is currently releasing its final run of episodes.
It All Felt Impossible can be purchased straight from Rose Metal Press or wherever else you buy books.
This is a Newsletter: For our readers, what is It All Felt Impossible?
Tom McAllister: The book is just a short essay for every year of my life with the specific constraint of being under 1500 words per essay. I gave myself that constraint essentially for practical reasons. If I didn't have a word limit, I would never finish them.
And I really wanted it to be a thing where I was doing a quick blitz through first draft of everything over winter break. So I thought I was going to write one a day. And again, if I was going to write one a day, they had to be short. Ultimately, the constraint ended up giving me helping me make better choices and editing and all that.
But that's the basic gist. Very short memoir. That's what I've been telling my family members who don't care about the rest of that.
TIAN: In the author’s note at the start of the book, you explain that you initially wrote the first 37 and have filled in the remaining ones as the years passed. How did the writing process evolve over that time?
TM: I wrote the first 37 and my agent at the time thought it was not for her. I think we both understood it was a small press book. I submitted a bunch [of essays] to literary journals all over the place, and then I put it away.
I gave up on the idea of it as a book until this Rose Metal Press call came out. Then I wrote 2020 through 2023 all in a batch to get it up to date for that submission.
I did find that my perspective on a lot of things was different, even just a few years later, because my writing career had evolved. Possibly stagnated. I was just thinking differently about who I am and what kind of career that I want to have. “2022” is about turning 40 and feeling a little bit washed up. In hindsight, I realized that was driven by the fact that I’d had a long gap publishing stuff. I it was funny. I did a reading of it and everyone else seemed to think it was very sad.
Once it was all together as a book, the editors at Rose Metal did a really great job of helping me to shape things up so that there were more coherent throughlines. They all still standalone. But they noted stuff about, for example, my brother comes up a bunch, in the initial drafts always in one off sentences. And we tried to pull that thread a little bit more. Same with my mom. They helped me to make it a more cohesive project as a book and not just a bunch of essays next to each other.
TIAN: I was actually wondering about how you approached those throughlines in the book.
TM: There's certain things that I'm going to touch on in almost every essay in some way or another. My dad being dead. Not just my dad, but my wife's parents both being dead. That's kind of a big thing for us. Big thing for us. That's one of our one of our things we share. I knew stuff about my marriage would come up because it's such a central part of my life anyway.
But then there were things that I think you find accidentally. In any good essay project accidental themes start to emerge. Stuff about feeling isolated. A lot of stuff about my dogs, my many dogs over the years. I've been joking with people this is just a book about me taking my dogs for walks. I didn't expect that to come up until I realized how much of that is the primary way that I get out of my house and interact with the world.
And actually, I was talking to a friend who's reading an early copy and she said, I feel like this is a book about writing more than anything else.
And I think that's at least partly true, which was not intentional. But as it turns out, even the first essay, which was not the original plan, ended up being about the idea of what makes a writing career successful. And so that stuff was very clearly on my mind, especially in 2019 when I was trying to recalibrate my own understanding of a writing career.
TIAN: How did you decide what you wanted to lean into?
TM: A thing I think I've learned from teaching is that once you start to see certain preoccupations surfacing, regardless of your plan, that means you have to lean into that and see what you have to say there.
You see that all the time in nonfiction workshops. People are writing about Subject A, but subject B is the thing that they really seem to want to write about. And my whole job as a teacher is to say: just do that. I had to take my own advice.
The “1988” essay is one that feels to me like the model for what I wanted the project to be. The essay starts with me at the zoo with my grandmother the day the monorail fell off the tracks. But then it goes into talking about my mom as a nurse because we see the emergency people working there.
That allows me to talk about my wife, who is also a nurse. It allows me to then talk about being on a monorail 20 or 30 years later on a vacation with my wife. Having these moments of time slippage, basically, was the whole thing I wanted. I stumbled into that kind of movement.
As soon as that happened, I thought, okay, this is something I'm excited to work on. Every writer, I'm sure you have done the same, has some brilliant idea in their Notes app, and then they write 3 sentences and think this is stupid. There's nothing here.
And so figuring out how I could make that transition from 1988 to my mom a few years later was this discovery of how to move through time. That felt really exhilarating as a writer.
TIAN: The way you’re talking about that sort of time movement actually reminds me of an episode of your podcast, Book Fight. Sorry if that’s a horrifying sentence. You and Mike (Ingram) were talking about How We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut with Elisa Gabbert, who is one of my favorite essayists. That book is, basically, increasingly fictionalized portraits of people. You were praising Labatut and Elisa for the way their writing is characterized by sideways movements and logical leaps, basically an intuitive logic that is hard to explain but easy to follow. And to me that was a perfect capsule description of what a good essay does.
And then in your author’s note, you mention The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson and My Documents by Alejandro Zambra as inspirations. Which was interesting to me because, along with the Labatut, it seems like you were drawing a lot on fiction.
TM: First, I agree with your praise for Elisa.
Especially as I started going back revising the essays, and I’ve told her this, I had her in mind as my ideal reader, like this is the person who I want to impress with this. And I was thinking like, I'm stealing some of her moves too. She has that poetic sensibility and makes those on a sentence and paragraph level that don't follow a specific logic, but make perfect sense.
But with the Denis Johnson book, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. There's a story called "Triumph Over the Grave.” I don't reread a ton. I've reread that story a lot. I even assigned it to undergrads once, which was a terrible mistake. It’s 52 pages. I was so excited about it because it just felt revelatory to me. It moves in this almost dreamlike way. It feels meandering and almost like, if you didn’t know better, you would think that Johnson is just spouting off whatever comes off the top of his head. But it’s actually very tightly structured and beautifully rendered. It makes the movements across anecdotes, some of which are very silly, some of which are quite sad. The book came out just after he died and the ending of the story is something like, “who knows, I may even be dead by the time you read this.”
It felt revelatory to me the way that it the way that it moves in this almost dreamlike way. And it feels meandering and almost like, if you didn't know better, you would think that Dennis Johnson is just, like spouting off whatever comes off the top of his head. It was a gut punch.
The Zambra does the same stuff. I read them back-to-back. It really crystallized for me what I want out of the way paragraphs are structure in prose, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. When it’s too linear, where a bunch of stuff that makes sense happens in order, I just tune out after a while.
And that’s not to say my book is all that avant-garde or hard to follow. I don’t think it is. But I wanted it to feel like you’re not on sure footing and you’re not quite sure where it’s going to go next.
TIAN: There are a few times in the book where you are almost arguing with yourself about the expectations and constraints of nonfiction. For example, at the end of “2003” where you end by openly refusing the expected movement of assay. In other places you’re accusing yourself of writing fiction when you’re imagining another person’s psychology. How did you think about those moments?
TM: The ending of 2003 specifically was accidental or intuitive, or whichever word is most flattering to me. That's the Iraq War one, right? [Editor’s note: Yes]. I knew I wanted to come up with a slightly different style on that one, to model the anger of what was for me, and a lot of people of exactly my age, the first moment of a true political awakening and understanding of how fucked everything is. It didn’t make sense to wrap it up neatly.
With fictionalizing another person's thoughts, those also happened accidentally. And just trying to be honest with the reader. I've been thinking a lot over the last few years about how a powerful tool in nonfiction is to give yourself permission to lie on the page. Not to make up facts, but to tell the reader, like, I'm imagining something right now.
I feel like it unlocks a lot of stuff for the writer and it also just does model the way that our brains work. Part of trying to understand the people in our lives, even—especially—people we care about is imagining what are they thinking right now, or we can make some educated guesses. But really it is just making stuff up and hoping that we know this person well enough to know what they might be doing.
TIAN: It seemed related to an another thing I was thinking about throughout the book, which is that you’re often pretty generous to other people and pretty hard on yourself. I took a personal essay class with Jerald Walker and he said, basically, that the only person a memoirist should ever condemn in their writing in themself. How did you think about that? I guess that’s a pretty personal question. Sorry.
TM: No, I think if you put a book like this out there, you have to be prepared for personal questions too. But, I mean, in a lot of ways it just naturally mirrors my thought process. Which is, you know, probably not as healthy as some other ways of thinking about one's life.
I don't want to assume anything about you, but I know, like so many of my friends, so many days, I'll just suddenly flashback to a minor moment where I said something stupid to someone and feel like a sudden sinking despair at what a fool I've been.
So, actually what I have to do sometimes in revision is to tone that down. I realize I'm coming on too strong. Sometimes the reader might not understand that I'm saying something critical of myself while also laughing at it. There's a humor to it, but it can sound really grim.
And I think I actually write about in some of the later essays having a better sense of self and all that. But I think an honest accounting of my life definitely requires that type of self-critique to come through. Cause otherwise I'm lying about how I process my daily actions.
TIAN: I think that comes through and is something I admired a lot about the book, the way you effectively bring the reader into your process of thinking. One thing that enhanced this effect was a tendency to describe how you behaved or something you did and then end the essay before you or somebody else made a judgement about it.
TM: Part of that was the word count. I just had to make some really hard choices to stay under the—admittedly arbirtary—word count limit.
I had some friends who were like, “okay, you got the draft done. Now drop the word count thing. Write whatever you want.” But I feel like that gave it all the action and energy to me.
I got in the rhythm of thinking, like, how long is 1500? What movies do I have to make? What does that structure feel like in my head?
And I also kept thinking: who gets mad about an essay ending slightly early? Versus how often do I get mad about an essay going on two pages too long? I came to really like the idea of “let’s just call it. The party’s over, let’s all go home and move on to the next thing.”
TIAN: I’m interested in your relationship to the rules you set up. In the Author’s Note, you admit to breaking one—that you’d write them all in chronological order—immediately. And on the other hand, you stuck strictly to the 1500 word rule. How did you navigate that? Did the process just reveal which rules mattered and which didn’t?
TM: Yeah. I think the way you said it actually is right on. Once I saw what it looked like in the process of working, it was clear the word count thing worked and made sense for a bunch of reasons, both practical and artistic.
Some of the other ones, like no research, I mostly stuck to. Except for my early years or confirming facts. But the no researcher rule there is partly there as self-preservation because I know if I just start Googling stuff, I'm going to spend 12 hours not writing. Just reading random factoids from 1984 and not doing any work.O
Other ones, write one a day, write them in order, I realized there was no specific gain from those besides just saying you should get some work done. So violating or breaking those rules didn't feel like I'm doing the project.
TIAN: Did you feel any trepidation about sharing the rules?
TM: As someone who struggles with the basic elevator pitch thing, it allows me to really easily explain to people what the book is. So that’s actually been nice.
I actually did a panel at AWP this year with a couple other Rose Metal Press authors who had their own constraint-based work. It’s been really cool to talk with other people as an opening. Here’s some ways of imposing rules on my own work, here’s how I’ve imposed rules on my students’ work. Swapping ideas. I really like it as a conversation opener.
TIAN: I was curious how you thought about including sports in this book. They’re mentioned, obviously, as you just said. But not as much I was maybe expecting.
TM: My first book is so sportsy. There are people who the only thing they know about me is that I'm like the Philly sports guy. Which is not a terrible thing—and it's definitely a true thing—but it also is also definitely way, way less central to my life than it was 15 years ago when I was writing that first book where the Eagles losing a game would wreck me for a week. I would be miserable. I'd be up all night reading and listening to sports radio. Now I just move on. It feels much healthier.
A lot of my personal relationships even family relationships, we'll hang out because we're watching games together. But I didn’t want to have that takeover. I think there's one essay that mentions going to a Phillies game in D.C., but that's just mentioned because it's that's why we were in DC. Definitely a much more conscious choice in that front.
TIAN: This isn’t really about the book, but as I was preparing I was thinking about the Eagles recent Super Bowl victory. Do you feel like, as you’ve chilled out about your teams, does that blunt both ends of the spectrum? Or do you feel like you can access the elation still when the Eagles drop 40 points on the Chiefs?
TM: That was an extraordinary performance. I couldn’t believe it. Halfway through the second quarter I was trying to open the champagne but my superstitious brothers-in-law were saying, like, “no, anything can happen.” And I’m saying, “guys, this is the most over any game has ever been.”
But it wasn’t like [when the Eagles won in] 2017. Silly as it may sound to your non-sports fan readers, that was a thing that felt like it had to happen for my life to feel worthwhile. That game had a crazy magical quality to it, too. This one it was jut like, “oh, this is cool. My favorite team is just better and stronger and faster than the other team” and that’s just fun to watch.
TIAN: I can imagine. [Editor’s Note: Go Bears]. But back to the book. In the 2018 essay, you write a little about losing faith in your fiction And a few years later you describe a ‘failed novel.’ Are you still feeling that way?
TM: I am not still feeling that way. Though I really did at the time, in case any of your readers are wondering if there’s a put on.
It felt like the phase a lot of writes go through, thinking maybe I’ve just run out of words to say. I wrote these novels and that’s the end of that.
The failed novel I mentioned in there…I guess failed is a hard word to use—even though I use it—because I feel pretty good about it. It’s not gonna get published anywhere. But since then, I came up with an idea for a fun book, a novel that is sort of a locked room mystery with some literary stuff happening.
It was the first fiction I was excited to write again. It’s out on submission now. It actually was a finalist for the AWP Prize so that confirmed for me that it’s not delusional garbage.
TIAN: The last time I interviwed you, I asked you which book you’ve lied about having read most often, which is something you ask guests on your podcast. You said Moby-Dick. It’s been seven years. Have you read Moby-Dick?
TM: I still haven't even after all these years of asking everyone that question. And I really do intend to. I took it off the shelf for this summer and then it's just so long and I'm like, “ah geez do I want to do the next month on one book.” It's a stupid way to think about reading but that's what happens every time. This is my solemn vow: this summer I'm gonna read it.
TIAN: Aside from some of the books we’ve already mentioned, what book would you recommend as a double feature with It All Felt Impossible?
TM: Essay After 80 by Donald Hall. There’s very little in common but I started reading it halfway through working on this book. I realized “Oh yeah, this is the stuff that I want.” I’ll also cheat and say My Documents by Alejandro Zambra. I think it’s just such a great book.
TIAN: And what’s the last great book you read?
TM: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. I picked it up randomly at Brickbat Books in Philly. It’s got this high-concept premise, which is a woman is on vacation in the Austrian Alps and one day wakes up and fins that everyone’s missing and there’s an invisible wall dividing her from the rest of the world. It’s got this big premise and then the next 200 or so pages are just about the day-to-day business of staying alive. Long sections of her chopping wood, moving wood, putting wood on the fire, thinking about when she’s gonna get more wood. And then there’s all this existential stuff about essesntially what makes a person alive. I don’t know, man. I was absorbed by it. I was blown away.