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Hashtag #CNF Episode 2—Author/Nonfiction Editor Tom McAllister
219 Plays12 years ago
Well, what didn't we hit on? It was a pop culture kind of podcast. Let's face it, it had to be since author and Barrelhouse nonfiction editor Tom McAllister joined me to talk about "Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine". McAllister is the author of "Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly." He is also a professor of creative writing at Temple University and, most recently, is the editor of "Bring the Noise". As McAllister riffs in his hilarious introduction, BTN is a treatise "on the the stupid things we love". Yes, there's the stupid things we love, but BTN shows how beautiful these stupid things are when in the hands of seventeen artful storytellers whose personal stories elevate popular culture to the adult table. In it you'll find professional wrestling, roller derby, Barry Bonds, stalking Aaron Grenier, and the "never-ending reality of The Hills" and, in true Barrelhouse style, the Patrick Swayze question.
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Transcript
Introduction to CNF and Tom McAllister
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to hashtag CNF, a conversation about reading and writing with authors in the genre of creative nonfiction. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
00:00:31
Speaker
Tom McAllister is the author of Bury Me and My Jersey, a memoir of my father, football, and Philly. He's also the co-host of the wildly entertaining Book Fight podcast and a professor at Temple University.
Exploring 'Bring the Noise' and Pop Culture
00:00:41
Speaker
Most recently, he's the editor of Bring the Noise, a collection of the best pop culture essays from Barrel House magazine. Bring the Noise, to sum up McAllister's hilarious introduction, is a treatise on the stupid things we love. Yes, there's the stupid things we love, but Bring the Noise shows how beautiful these stupid things are
00:00:57
Speaker
one in the hands of 17 artful storytellers, whose personal stories elevate popular culture to the adult table. In it, you'll find professional wrestling, roller derby, berry bonds, and the never-ending reality of the hills, and in true barrel house style, the Patrick Swayze question. It is my great pleasure to welcome Tom McAllister to hashtag CNF. Tom, thanks for coming aboard. Yeah, thanks for having me on, man.
00:01:21
Speaker
So what brought you to want to make your first book through Barrel House a book about your best pop culture essays? I think the main thing is that for a long time I mean kind of our defining characteristic for a lot of people is our pop culture thing and all of our essays and every issue we've ever published is every essay is pop culture related in some way and so we thought if we're launching a book line we should do something very
00:01:51
Speaker
We had a few other kind of book pitches and some other ideas that we thought about starting with, but we thought it would be good to start with something that's very, I guess to sound like a business student, very kind of on brand. And so, plus we just love a lot of those essays. And we were excited to have a chance to bring them back out because some of them like, you know,
00:02:09
Speaker
None of us even has a copy of issue one as far as I know. And so it'd be, it was nice. We all love the essay from that one. That's the Magnum PI one by Steve Kistelens. And so we thought it'd be great to kind of give those things a new life. And as it turns out, it's been a really useful tool for things like AWP. When people ask, you know, what's your aesthetic? What are you into? We can say, well, here it is. Here's our favorite things we've ever published. And so we think it's a good representation of what we've done for the past almost decade.
The Selection Process for 'Bring the Noise' Essays
00:02:40
Speaker
how and why did these essays make the cut first we wanted to pick one from every issue that ended up not quite happening because there was a couple issues where we wanted and it was our fifth issue the dive bar issue we wanted at least two from there because that's we all tend to agree that's our best non-fiction issue so but we wanted we had a vote for the first for the inclusions from the first ten every one of us uh... just nominated to the ones we love
00:03:06
Speaker
For most of them, it was easy. There was a clear cut winner in some of them. Like the Barry Bonds one you mentioned has already been anthologized in the Best American Non-required Reading, and I think somewhere else. And so we knew that was going to be in there. And even though it was kind of a very timely essay when it was published in, I think, 05 or 06, I think a lot of that stuff still resonates. If you just replace Barry Bonds' name with Lance Armstrong or something, a lot of the same stuff that gets discussed is there.
00:03:36
Speaker
then i kind of had free reign for anything that was new we had the other guys have had the opportunity to chime in if they wanted but the way barrel house works out quickly learned is that you send an email out invite people to join in and if they don't you just go ahead and do it you have to catch up later so all the new stuff is picked by me and what i guess what i look forward to better answer your question is uh... and read a lot of essays
00:04:04
Speaker
when i'm reading submissions and a lot of them are technically sound and interesting enough but there's no sense of urgency doesn't feel like there's anything on the line for the writer but it just seems almost like a creative writing exercise that they did really well and when i really liked about the new ones there's uh... leslie jill patterson's one it's about it's kind of a lyric essay that makes mashes up since the essence it messes up that's a whole different thing that that mixes up
00:04:33
Speaker
discussion of real-life domestic abuse issues with the way popular culture represents those things and i thought and also mixes up some clearly personal stuff of her work her time working in a uh... shelter for abuse women or her time living in one and i thought it was really great if it seemed like there was some stuff on the line there for the writer where uh... you know she was pouring something into it beyond just
00:04:57
Speaker
time. There was an emotional kind of appeal to it, which I guess is what I like a lot about it. The wrestling one is in there. I think it has a lot of those same appeals, but also as soon as I took over as non-fiction editor, I made it my mission to find someone to write me a good wrestling essay.
00:05:13
Speaker
I was pushing for a really long time to make issue 12-hour wrestling issue, but nobody that didn't take. It would be great. I met Todd Canico who wrote that essay at AWP, I think, and he was reading poems about dead wrestlers, and I charged him as soon as he finished, and I said, you have to be in the barrel house business. This is too perfect a fit.
Pop Culture's Impact on Identity and Nostalgia
00:05:43
Speaker
and what is it you think about pop culture and what about pop culture that says so much about us i think and i think this is a uh... sentiment shared by all of us and i think part of it is that what part of our brace of pop culture thing is that we are turned off by the portion of literary culture that is too cool for pop culture you know uh... i think are whatever founders dave housing interview recently said something like
00:06:13
Speaker
we wanted to be the people if we were at a party we want to talk to the people who are talking about what was great on tv last night not the people saying we don't own tvs and uh... so there's that it's kind of an acknowledgement of what's going on around us and i think also the truth is that as much as we would love it if we were all shaped by the classics and to an extent we kind of are most of us a lot of our formative experiences are built around
00:06:39
Speaker
these really stupid things uh... you know uh... well i remember i was gonna put this in the little intro and it turned out it's not a true thing until like a month a couple months ago i was under the impression that during the transformers movie the cartoon from the eighties that with orson wells as the narrator i was under the impression that bumblebee this little car had died
00:07:02
Speaker
because my brother told me that uh... and i remember it being inconsolable for for days you know i was and i was crying i was upset that bumblebee's dead uh... as it turns out he didn't die and my brother is just a liar but uh... i uh... you know those sorts of things shouldn't affect us the way they they do it and yet they do and i think they informed the way we treat each other you know i deal with college freshmen in most of the way they
00:07:30
Speaker
interpret the world is based on things that they've learned from movies and music and TV and stuff, so I think it's an honest way of dealing with the world. And I recently read a piece on Grantland.com about Super Mario Brothers. It's the 20th anniversary of that god-awful movie when I was in school. Bob Hoskins.
00:07:54
Speaker
And John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper as Bowser or whatever. But as I was reading the essay, the woman who wrote it, she put in some YouTube about the classic Super Mario Brothers. And just in reading about that, I was seven years old sitting cross-legged in front of my TV.
00:08:17
Speaker
clicking away trying to beat all these eight freaky trippy world and throwing my controller up against the wall and chipping the hard wall. So there's this chipping the drywall. And there's this nostalgic quality that a popular culture thing can bring to the forefront. Maybe you can talk to that as well of how it brings you back to a time and once you get removed from it, you can see it through a completely different lens.
00:08:44
Speaker
yeah i think that's one of the interesting things about a couple of the essays that we have in there that the magnum piai one that we all like you know the steve is reflecting on how he does that used to watch magnum piai he's realizing now forty years later thirty years later whenever he wrote it uh... for whatever he was never did that it meant a whole different thing uh... to him and i think that's it in reading nonfiction that's one of the that most interest me is is this uh...
00:09:13
Speaker
disconnect between the way different people view the same exact things and here's a lot of what i have my students work on is trying to have them
00:09:23
Speaker
exercises or read short pieces where it's, you know, you could have four different people, four people in the same room seeing the same exact thing and interpret very different and have very different interpretations. And, you know, it's the same thing that you just said. Over time, your interpretation changes. You know, the person I was when I was 12 is very different than I am now and I hope that, you know,
00:09:44
Speaker
I think that's a valuable exercise and it also invites the reader to reflect, even if the reader doesn't have some personal memories of Magnum PI, it invites them to reflect on their own kind of pop culture obsession from when they were 10 or the thing they shared with their father or their mother or whoever.
Challenges in Writing Pop Culture and Creative Writing Insights
00:10:03
Speaker
And pop culture writing, I feel, it balances on this thread. It can be great, but it doesn't take much for it to just fall off and devolve. What do you think are the challenges in writing well about pop culture?
00:10:14
Speaker
yeah you're absolutely right and i think you mentioned that grant land or uh... and it's that site is i think a perfect illustration of the dichotomy i cut like i have a hard time with that site because some of the stuff in there is amazing writing and i think they just give these writers free reign to just write as much as they want about this thing they're obsessed with which turns out great and sometimes it's like the most insipid shallow things i don't know even know understand
00:10:40
Speaker
some of the headlines that are like fantasy drafts for people on reality fashion shows i don't think you can know what that means and uh... so i think there's there's always a risk i see this in submissions to people kind of going for the cheap joke
00:10:58
Speaker
Sometimes or not realize never going beyond just pointing out interesting things about the culture You know even some we might sometimes people will send us Things that almost look like they were drawn from a thesis and sometimes probably were drawn from like a doctoral thesis that are really good deconstructions of the matriarchal values and all in the family or something and
00:11:17
Speaker
but they're not interesting to read. And even more than that, I think what they neglect when it comes to creative non-fiction or literary non-fiction or whatever term people use, I think anything that I feel described as literary usually has some human relationships at the heart of it. And so
00:11:40
Speaker
the pop culture is used as a way to talk about something else like uh... in the in the bring the noise uh... one of my favorites it's the first one i ever accepted as the best non-fiction editor uh... was sarah swiney's one about stocking kind of stocking adrian grande before getting famous yet
00:11:58
Speaker
And that's really all about, I mean, there's some stuff about Adrian Grenier in Seventeen magazine and whatever, but it's really all about her dissolving friendship with her best friend who turns out to be kind of a crazy person. And that's the sort of thing I like. I like it as an entry point, but not as kind of the end point. And what is, has been kind of changing gears just a little bit, what is being a teacher of creative writing done to help your approach to the craft of writing?
00:12:23
Speaker
It has made me a lot harsher on my writing because I can see even the best undergrad, even the most dedicated undergrad is going to often write some stuff that is just not interesting. It forces me to think about it. It's very easy.
00:12:43
Speaker
especially if you're an undergrad a lot of them haven't done a ton of writing since the first stories they've written and just excited that kind of intoxicated by the thought of telling stories and even though people don't read books there's this still this cultural capital to being a writer they just tell stories that nobody's ever gonna care about and so then i have to force myself to to read my own writing the same way i think that with that same kind of harsh attached i as if i'm creating it basically
00:13:09
Speaker
The other thing that's made me think about more is different forms. Because the students, often one of the benefits of them being total novices is that they just do wildly bizarre things sometimes that don't work usually. But the bizarre things are totally worthwhile experiments because they're just like, you know, they're just saying like figuring out what this thing is, you know.
00:13:34
Speaker
And so it's allowed me as a writer, the thing every writer says is that you should be willing to write bad work and be ready to fail and stuff, but I have a hard time actually living and practicing that because I stress myself out over this thing and it needs to be perfect and it's actually freed me up a little bit bad to just do some daily writing that is not any good.
00:13:55
Speaker
Uh, with the intent of it eventually being someday good, but to feel more comfortable with failure. Uh, I think seeing the students consistent failure to write publishable work, uh, which is not a criticism of them to see if that consistent failure helps me to accept my own.
Influence of Kurt Vonnegut and Barrel House's Growth
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, and I wanted to touch upon, too, the epigraph to your memoir, the curve-onigate quote. And I'll just read it here. It says, I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone. And I wanted to ask you what the inspiration for that quote was.
00:14:32
Speaker
uh... okay to express his one is i guess this doesn't make me that unique many high school in college each guy's i was obsessed with bernica you know the rest of us five and i feel like it actually changed my brain he had uh... it changed the way i did everything uh... for better and worse
00:14:53
Speaker
so he's always his writing is always been a major influences i thought especially the memoir which a lot a lot of the stuff i talk about is my kind of journey as a writer i thought it would be it would make sense to have can be there but also he medically with that book it's up as you know it's all about uh...
00:15:11
Speaker
my obsession with with the eagles uh... that's for the prisoners that's the uh... nfl seagulls not the band he's uh... it's all about joe walsh he can't uh... it's uh... it's it was all about my session with this football team in the way i kept trying to create new communities for myself i really i didn't realize the later when i was writing it that i'd spent a long time
00:15:34
Speaker
i was able when i was trying to organize the thing to realize that a lot of the chapters broke down into me setting up a community i tried to join any any other failed to join it or or kind of increasing myself and so i realized that a lot of my story was just one of
00:15:51
Speaker
trying to find a place where it felt okay to be interested in the things i was interested in and you know with varying degrees of success and so i thought that was that that that line i think kind of something up really well and i think that's at the heart of a lot of on against writing a lot of stuff is about but i forget which book it is now maybe slapstick where he talks about uh...
00:16:12
Speaker
There's this kind of running gag of people saying they're from the Hoosier State, and they kind of become friends just because they're from Indiana. Yeah, I think that's the one where they want everyone to wear name tags and everything. Yeah, so that constant, that need to reach out and just have someone say, like, you're not crazy to think the things that you think, I think is at the heart of that book. And I think it's a really pretty powerful universal message, actually.
00:16:38
Speaker
You speak of your evolution as a writer and teacher and I can also, as you're looking to evolve Barrel House further going into this more or less book division too, I see the reflection of McSweeney's which has been Dave Eggers' imprint for a while now. Have you drawn any inspiration or I guess just inspiration from what they're doing and how they're approaching book publishing and book design?
00:17:07
Speaker
yeah well god we would love to be successful in the sweeties that's for sure uh... we talked to best and we had uh... we all live in different places that mostly uh... except for mike uh... mike but by co-host you that's right here but uh... we have what we call corporate retreats but once every six months we get together we can solve all our issues and and and trickle up here and uh...
00:17:32
Speaker
one of the things we talked about there was as it turns out we're all talking about that well we nobody makes money selling literary journals we just do it and we make money to support the journal and as it turns out this week actually does make most of the money from the journals
00:17:47
Speaker
surprise actually thought that even that doesn't nobody actually made money off of them here uh... and especially how much money they must spend on the design which is is amazing uh... we've talked a lot about after that we talked a lot about design especially because we were really happy that people did the work in design for us but in the past we've kind of put it on it because none of us has any real sense of how to do good design work and we've had volunteers do it and we've now are fortunately
00:18:13
Speaker
financially stable enough that we've been we paid a designer for the book we want to launch the book to be as good as possible and i'd love to cover that book yeah uh... i agree it's easy to get a great job at a station uh... as they should know where i think it's a mistake but you know uh...
00:18:28
Speaker
And we're paying someone to design the next couple issues of Barrel House too, because we do want to step up the design game. We felt like there was a point in the beginning where we were ahead of the curve on design, and then we kind of plateaued, and everyone passed us. And so we're trying to catch up, because there are so many journals, right?
00:18:49
Speaker
I don't even know what most of them are, and I don't know how to decide what to read. So one area where you can make yourself stand out a little bit is with more inviting design. So we've definitely taken some inspiration from McSweeney's and Tin House and those other types on that level.
Standing Out in Publishing and Personal Favorites
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, it goes to just walking through a bookstore, AWP, seeing all those literary journals, all these authors, and everyone's, as hard as it is to publish books, there's so many books out there, and it's, how do you stand out? And I guess it ultimately boils down to having great content, but even then, you still have to get people to notice that you have good content.
00:19:32
Speaker
yes yeah that's what i just did uh... have interview uh... treehouse magazine interviewed me about some uh... some stuff about the book and and and they ask like
00:19:41
Speaker
basically that question is that there's so many journals why should we redo and i had a really hard time answering that question because i wanted to say well because the ratings really good you know that's not really much of a sales pitch i don't know that i gave a actually adequate answer to them uh... you know essentially what i think one of my things was that we pay writers now so you're supporting writers and us but uh... the uh... it's a hard it's a hard thing to to say because we were really proud of the work but then they
00:20:08
Speaker
if you were to be peace of the tables you know how do you pick one of seven hundred tables to to spend your money out uh... and that's uh... if my experience working the table there is most of the sales you have with people who come in the beginning of the day i don't realize they should budget just blow their money at the first couple tables but i think or people who wait till the last day and run around looking for deals and it is a huge debt space in between where just a bunch of literary zombies wander around
00:20:37
Speaker
and well now i can't let you get out of here i without asking you uh... what your favorite patrick's lazy movie is that's you know i'm kind of a private barrow house guys and then i don't know patrick's we see that they do you know uh... i always default to uh... d houseley i think in a very ironic way just loves patrick's crazy uh... i i i i think i was default to roadhouse primarily because it's such a
00:21:08
Speaker
lunatic premise of this like famous i think chuck closterman has a great essay about it right this this idea this like famous bouncer uh... the whole thing is crazy uh... and very entertaining it although if i had to say one that i can actually really enjoyed growing up it wouldn't be a movie would be the this the famous sweetie farley chip and dale's thing on sunday live provided uh... that would be the one that that that was probably my first non-ghost experience of patrick's crazy
00:21:37
Speaker
While Tom McAllister is the non-fiction editor of Barrel House Magazine and editor of Bring the Noise, the best pop culture essays from Barrel House Magazine, it is published by Barrel House Books. Tom, thank you so much for covering out some time this afternoon. Yeah, thanks for having me, man.