Tom McAllister is the non-fiction editor at Barrelhouse and the co-host of the weekly Book Fight! podcast. His memoir Bury Me in My Jersey was published by Villard in 2010, and his first novel, The Young Widower's Handbook is forthcoming from Algonquin in February 2017. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Temple University in Philly. You can follow him on Twitter @t_mcallister.
His essay, "Acknowledgments," appeared in Issue Seventy-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Tom McAllister talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about privilege, momentum through language, and sports mascots.
What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Acknowledgements”? What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?
The essay, like a lot of things I write, started as sort of a joke. I wrote the first few lines while I was on a flight home from one of those all-expenses resorts where you pay a bunch of money to get drunk near a pool all day. I think we’d had a delay or some other flight-related inconvenience, and while I was complaining about minor inconveniences, I tried to remind myself that it’s a luxury to even be able to have an annoying flight home from your tropical vacation. And I just started jotting some ideas down. Over the next week, I wrote seven or eight short Acknowledgments pieces, and I briefly considered the possibility of writing a short book in this form. I had read Matthew Vollmer’s “Inscriptions for Headstones” while I was on that trip, and was still very much under the influence of that book, so I was also just copying what he was doing. Anyway, I spent a couple weeks on it, then drifted away, and didn’t revisit those ideas until about two years later when I was digging through old notes and found them, and remembered how much fun I’d had writing them.
Most stories and essays are built on conflict. Your essay, however, reflects on many forces that have made your life not only possible but comfortable. Did you have any trepidation about writing an essay wherein all’s well for you? What did you attempt to do in order to ensure that your audience would keep reading despite the lack of conflict?
This aspect is definitely influenced by Vollmer’s book too. One thing he does in Inscriptions is he frames each chapter as a single sprawling, digressive sentence, so the language itself propels the reader forward. I didn’t want to completely rip him off, but I liked that idea, that the language, if it’s strong enough—vivid and funny and particular—can keep an essay moving, even if the “plot” of the essay is pretty thin. So I tried out lots of long sentences and hoped the relative quiet of the content was counterbalanced by the propulsive energy of the language.
I had some trepidation, in that lately I’ve been feeling like I have a pretty okay life—in that it’s better than I’d realized or ever expected—and I stupidly worry that this means I can no longer write essays, because you’re supposed to be emerging from some dark shit, or working through terrible things in your essays. But I’ve been trying to figure out how to write from that perspective, to explore relative contentment and comfort in a way that doesn’t seem boring, braggy, or hollow.
The third paragraph describes the level of privilege that comes with certain circumstances of your birth, which some would consider a sensitive subject. Were you especially careful when writing about this topic with both tact and honesty? What is the importance of writing candidly about the privileges that you enjoy?
It seemed essential to the whole project. I don’t intend for the essay to be a big political statement, but if I’m an author acknowledging the forces that helped me to create something, then it just seems dishonest to overlook the many ways in which I’ve benefitted from my race, class, sexuality, etc. It was the natural next step in the essay, from somewhat jokey fears of things over which I have no control (planes crashing, animals attacking) to a much larger sense of the things over which I had no control: where I was born, what I look like, the way I was raised, and all that. I do sometimes think there’s an element of humility lacking in the way authors discuss their success, especially when they just don’t acknowledge the ways they’ve benefitted from being upper-middle class white people who’ve spent their whole lives in private schools, but the truth is, I didn’t have that in mind when I was drafting the essay. I just was churning through the things that scare me, and one thing that’s pretty frightening is the thought that any of my successes are just an accident of genetics and good timing, rather than skill or hard work or any of that bootstraps stuff.
You’ve published a memoir, and you have a novel forthcoming. What lessons have you learned from writing nonfiction that you have applied to your fiction, or vice versa?
When I wrote the memoir, I didn’t really know anything about nonfiction. I’d gotten an MFA in fiction and stumbled into writing a couple essays that people seemed to like. So when I wrote that book, I probably wrote it the way one would write a novel, because I didn’t know any better. In the seven years since I wrote that book, I’ve learned so much more about the genre from working as the NF editor at Barrelhouse, teaching more NF courses, and just reading a ton of great essays.
Anyway, I think the biggest thing I’ve been pulling from nonfiction into my fiction is a willingness to employ a more forceful narrative voice, one that is open to digressions, but also willing to explain things. In essays, you’re basically expected to explain some stuff, but in fiction, we’re all taught “show, don’t tell” from day one of our first creative writing course, but sometimes I like telling. Sometimes I think it’s the best thing a story can do.
What writing projects are you working on now?
Right now, I’m alternating between two projects. One is a novel that takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting. My story “On the Way to the Killing Spree The Shooter Stops for Pizza,” which ran in Sundog Lit, is currently the prologue of that manuscript.
The other thing I’m working on is a littler weirder, but I have so much fun with it. I’ve been writing short stories about sports mascots, in which the conceit is that the mascots are actual animals, rather than guys in suits. Hobart has published two of them. One is about a pig who doesn’t want to sell hot dogs, and the other is about a gorilla sad his best friend was traded. Right now I’m working on one about a raven who gets caught in a torrential downpour during a football game. I could talk about mascots for a long time.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
The two most recent books I’ve really enjoyed have been Sarah Shotland’s novel Junkette, about a young woman in New Orleans trying to quit heroin, and Joseph Mitchell’s nonfiction book Joe Gould’s Secret, about an eccentric (and probably mentally ill) bohemian guy claiming to have written the longest book in the history of the world.
We discussed Junkette at length in a recent episode of Book Fight, and it’s really good, and you should go read it.