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Episode 34—Tom McAllister Talks Podcasting, Plowing Through First Drafts, and the Writer's Need for Urgency
132 Plays8 years ago
I say in the intro this is Episode 35. It's 34. With Tom McAllister, author of the memoir "Bury Me in My Jersey" and the novel "The Young Widower's Handbook."
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Transcript
Introduction of Guest and Podcast Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, most days I feel like a complete and utter bozo when I wake up and this morning was no different. Reason being, I realized that when I was recording this episode of hashtag CNF, podcast where I speak with creators of nonfiction, my good mic, this one, wasn't on. So, you know, my microphone usually defaults to being on in my software.
00:00:25
Speaker
but this time only the built-in commuter mic was used so I sound a little bit echoey but I don't think it's distractively so so I probably shouldn't have said anything Tom McAllister at T underscore McAllister on Twitter on the other hand sounds downright regal
00:00:44
Speaker
Tom makes his triumphant return to hashtag CNF for episode number 35. He's a professor at Temple University, the non-fiction editor for Barrel House magazine, the author of Bury Me in My Jersey, a memoir of his father, football, and Philly, and the author of the forthcoming novel, The Young Widower's Handbook.
00:01:06
Speaker
He's also the co-host of the podcast Book Fight, which he and Mike Ingram started in 2012. And that's where this conversation starts, more or less, about podcasting. Lastly,
00:01:18
Speaker
Hashtag CNF can now be found on Google Play Music, as well as iTunes as it has. So be sure to subscribe with whatever mobile device you own. Tweet at me, at Brendan O'Mara, with feedback or questions, and be sure to subscribe to my book recommendations newsletter. That's
Teaching Experience and Challenges
00:01:39
Speaker
about it. Let's get rolling. Tom McAllister is back, baby.
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, man. So how you been? Like I said, we haven't actually spoken in about three years. Yes. I'm all right. I mean, I just got back from teaching a class, which is going fine so far. We're only at the end of week two, so it's still salvageable. But so far, it's been a
00:02:09
Speaker
a rocky start in a couple of the classes as far as people actually doing the reading, showing up, making eye contact, all the basics. Do you
Yearly Reflections and Mental Health Balance
00:02:20
Speaker
find that the first two weeks are hard to get the momentum going in your classes? Yeah, there's so much luck involved, right? That semester I got lucky that I had a couple of really good groups, and so on day one, when I was just doing the syllabus there, we somehow accidentally stumbled into a conversation about stuff.
00:02:39
Speaker
So then we kind of just rolled from there. There was already this immediate chemistry. And I actually have a fiction class, and that's going great. But I have these two freshman comp classes. And right now, today, it was just like I was begging them to do anything. So we'll see. Sometimes they come around, though. Sometimes it's just like they need to learn what I want, and they have to understand my sense of humor and the way that I'm approaching things. I guess to develop a trust, right?
00:03:09
Speaker
First full week, thumbs down.
00:03:14
Speaker
So, yeah, it being the new year and all, still, kind of, I've been asking, you know, our recent guests, like, how they've been processing the past year and then kind of what they plan on doing, you know, writer goal-wise, reading goals and forging a path through the new year. And I wonder for you, like, how have you been processing what happened in the past year? And I like, what are your goals for the upcoming year, especially since you've got the book coming out, the novel?
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah,
Podcasting Journey and Evolution
00:03:44
Speaker
man, I don't know how I'm processing. I'd say I'm processing the past year very badly. It's just like I'm trying every day to find an appropriate balance between reading kind of horrifying news stories and being aware of what's happening and also still being a functional person and not in a state of constant panic. Some days have been better than others on that front.
00:04:13
Speaker
like we're recording this the day after there was a real flurry of activity from from the new president because to real God goals he's a reading goals writing goals I am I'm trying so this is a really vague reading goal but in the past couple months there was a lot of people writing basically sharing lists of books and novels that are written by and about
00:04:39
Speaker
countries under authoritarian rule and things like that, I guess for obvious reasons. So at least for now, that's what I've been trying to read. I just read this book called Nothing is True and Anything is Possible. It's a non-fiction thing by a reality TV producer who worked in Russia about the way that truth is controlled there and created.
00:05:02
Speaker
It's pretty interesting, although, again, I don't know if I can stick to it for that long, because there's going to be days where I feel really shitty. Yeah, it's fine. I'm on the West Coast now, so when I wake up in the morning,
00:05:18
Speaker
And I look at the news, like, the East Coast has already been firing for three or four hours. And I'm just like, oh my god, what the fuck is going on? Yeah, there's not a day to catch your breath yet. It's something. It is overwhelming. Yeah.
00:05:37
Speaker
So yeah, as creators of some sort, we kind of soldier on. It's funny, I was given that you podcast as well and have been doing it since before the big podcast boom with Book Fight. I kind of wanted to talk about that a little bit as well and going back to that and what made you and Mike Ingram want to start it.
00:06:02
Speaker
Um, so we started in, I think our first episode posted April 1st, 2012 for thereabouts. And so, yeah, we're coming up on five years of just about weekly episodes. Uh, and we started really because Mike had started listening to a lot of podcasts. He listened to it, like started with comedy podcasts. Um, and then he started looking for a book podcast and he just couldn't find one that he wanted that he liked. They just, they, um, at least the ones that he was listening to then.
00:06:29
Speaker
he felt were all just kind of like too serious or too dry or you know it was like this American life or something which is its own thing or the New Yorker podcast. And so then he told me he really would love a book podcast that is more that is a little looser that has more of a
00:06:47
Speaker
feeling of kind of camaraderie and friendship and you know, digression and all the kind of the conversations we would have it be having anyway. And so then he kind of just talked me into it. So at that point, I don't think I'd even listened to a podcast. And so he sent me a bunch of homework, you know, he mailed, he emailed me links to like a dozen podcasts that he liked and said, Listen to these and see what you think. And then we just started rolling. I mean, for about the first year, we had to figure a lot of stuff out about the basics of how things work.
00:07:16
Speaker
I feel like we hit sort of a comfort zone after that. So what did that look like when you, what were some of those early hiccups and growing pains that you guys experienced technically and also maybe the, you know, how you decided to format the show? Yeah. So, I mean, first definitely was figuring out how audio works. Uh, Mike does all the editing and so he had, he had to figure, he figured out a lot of stuff about basic editing skills and how to do it a little more quickly.
00:07:45
Speaker
And then we had some issues with audio and we tried to have guests in then we'd upgrade our equipment everything And then there was a lot of yeah figuring out Because Mike and I can talk forever. We've been friends for a long time. We can just go and talk on any topic but we realized a lot of the early episodes were Where they were just sort of hard to follow or we repeated ourselves a ton and we didn't really have any particular goal and so we imposed we ended up imposing and
00:08:10
Speaker
I guess what you what you may call a loose structure on the show where it opens up with like a little greeting. And then if we'll spend the first 25 minutes talking about what everything we read, go to a break and the break is really good for us to regroup and say like, oh, wait, have we messed anything up? And then now we've over the four and a half years, almost five years, we've come up with a variety of kind of little segments that we some that we sometimes sprinkle in like Mike does the somewhat beloved
00:08:39
Speaker
segment called fan fiction corner where whole pull-up I Some very bizarre fan fiction from the internet Some interesting stuff a lot of really bizarre stuff That's probably our most most regular recurring segment anyway the point is we ended up building in little little segments that kind of force us to stay on task so that we now are
00:09:01
Speaker
Now we can pretty comfortably record an hour episode in like an hour and 10 minutes. Whereas before, like record an hour episode, we probably sat here for two and a half hours and then, you know, had to cut a lot of nonsense out. And early on, were you able to adhere to at least a strict publishing schedule? Like you were able to at least have that kind of momentum in place? Yeah, that was one that we agreed that basically had to happen because it was
00:09:28
Speaker
You know, that's some podcasts that we that will the mic had subscribed to that would post irregularly or like once every six weeks or and he would just forget to listen. And so he said, like, whatever we do, we got to be posting once a week. And that's why we ended up doing we can't it would be too much for us between with our actual lives to try to do a book a week. And that's why we started doing short essays and stories.
00:09:55
Speaker
And also for a while we were doing like I guess an advice type thing on a more of a question answering. It wasn't so much advice. But yeah, we I think we we've only missed probably five weeks in those years and three of them were scheduled weeks off where after Christmas we just said we'll take a week off and you know catch our breath.
Writing Influences and Processes
00:10:17
Speaker
And at what point did you guys notice that there was a significant or serious uptick in popularity when you were able to, when things were snowballing and like, okay, that doesn't feel like we're just shouting into the address. Yeah. Cause that's like the first, especially the first 10, I was like, probably a couple of our friends are listening, probably my brother's listening and I don't know who else. And, um,
00:10:44
Speaker
I mean, one of our friends told us that he found the first five episodes unlistenable. And I think it was probably about we started to gradually get a little bit more feedback from people who we had never heard of. So that was nice. Like, okay, at least someone who we hadn't met before is listening. And then I'm trying to think the first kind of big bump we got had to have been
00:11:08
Speaker
So the the biggest bump we ever got was the there was a brief period where the website, the A.V. Club was was covering our podcast weekly and we saw a pretty significant jump in listenership from that. But there must have been a bump right before about six months before that that got us even on their radar. And I'm trying to think of what that would have been.
00:11:28
Speaker
I don't know if it just, and we use, we're both editors at Barrel House magazine, and so we use that to promote a lot. So maybe it was just thanks to the Barrel House Facebook page that we ended up kind of gradually accruing enough people to get some of that momentum. If you're starting the podcast, say today, knowing what you know, what might you do differently? Good question. I think the biggest thing that we would
00:11:56
Speaker
do differently is probably having started with slightly more of a structure. We resisted that idea of structure at first because we said we don't want to be too dry and bland and everything else. But you need some sort of structure because you're inviting strangers to listen to you talk for an hour or more every week. And so they need to have a little bit they can count on. And the other thing
00:12:20
Speaker
And this is a thing that we've gotten a little bit better at. Early on, we were very reluctant to invite guests on because I actually didn't want to bother people. We're basically assigning them homework because we're saying you have to read a book. And we probably would have been a little more aggressive in trying to get some guests on who we otherwise were reluctant to invite.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah, those are some of your better episodes, I think, when you bring in someone else or bring in someone who's also a writer, too. Like, I think he had Justin St. Germain on one time. He wrote Son of a Gun. And so that's kind of neat. It's like this little wild card that kind of just, it's this little aberrant spike in
00:13:03
Speaker
Maybe the complacent ear and it's kind of a it's kind of a good It's like a nice little change of pace, but it's still like for a to sound business school II like on brand Yes. Yeah, that's I mean the best guests we've had have been the ones and it's been we've we've been happy We've been lucky that like for inviting just sometimes complete strangers to my basement. Everyone's worked out pretty well But the best guests we've had have been the people who yeah just like jump right in and are willing to start
00:13:32
Speaker
Arguing with us right away or whatever and I like just from a sort of a auditory perspective I like when we have a female guest on because it breaks up the monotony. It's not three male voices Yeah, it sounds low and people always tell us they can't tell our voices apart anyway And so sometimes adding in another male voice. It sounds sort of similar Isn't ideal
00:13:57
Speaker
Or is it the yeah, it's not what everyone's clamoring for. But yeah, it's been I like that. I mean, the guests are fun. I mean, they break things up. And they also make us read things that we would never otherwise pick sometimes. What kind of what is your like, quote unquote, recording studio look like? I am so we have an IKEA table. It's just like a you know, what would be I guess a small kitchen table would
00:14:25
Speaker
We're down in my basement. I have like a finished basement and we're just kind of off in the corner of it. I think we picked the basement because it's out of the way, but also because it's not too echoey. And we have pretty decent audio equipment now. When we started, we sat on folding chairs and had just a single, like a snowball mic, which is kind of a, basically we got it because it's like a
00:14:51
Speaker
Starter mic because it's not that expensive. So if we decided not to do it anymore, it wouldn't kill us Yeah, that's what I that's what I use right now Just for talking into the Skype recordings of the some of the other blue snowball thing Yeah, that does the trick for you. Like you said, it's pretty cheap Yeah, it's yeah, it's actually pretty good quality that especially for an individual speaking into it It's it's actually really good for just a you know, especially if you're in a quiet room and
00:15:18
Speaker
We had that for a while, then we ended up, we did some fundraising and we ended up getting some pretty good mics. So we have like, uh, we've got three mic stands set up here and, uh, trying to look at the brand of them. Sure. Brand mics. Um, so it's probably about $600 worth of equipment down here now, actually. Um, but that was, yeah. And it's, it, I felt that it really did. Well, it made us look more, uh, more like a,
00:15:47
Speaker
Recording studio we have guests in but it also I think I mean the audio quality I think does come through Yeah, do you put up any like egg carton type stuff on the walls yet or these? Yeah, we've we've talked about it, and then we never follow through I don't know that my wife would love that So yeah Yeah, that is one thing we could do actually to kind of trap the noise a little bit better than we do and
00:16:13
Speaker
And so how important do you think the
Motivations Behind 'Bury Me in My Jersey'
00:16:16
Speaker
podcast itself has helped your writing? I think one thing, I mean, one thing it definitely makes me think about it. Definitely. When you sit down to write, you have this abstract idea of an audience or what is a reader going to think when they read this? And then, you know, every week sitting down to sometimes harshly critique stories or essay or books is a reminder that there is like an actual living audience there that, you know, my book's coming out in a couple of weeks and
00:16:44
Speaker
I don't think I'd have the stomach to listen to another podcast talking about my book the way that we talk about other people's books. And not that we're always destroying other people's books, but we have a pretty idiosyncratic response to certain books or sometimes one of us really hates one or whatever. And it's affected me in this way that there's, because
00:17:10
Speaker
half the books I read in a year now are basically dictated by Mike, because we alternate book picks. It has exposed me to some different types of writing that I would not have otherwise done. There was a point where he was reading a lot of, and basically assigning me, a lot of short, non-fiction books that have lots of little vignettes in them, basically, like DJ Waltie's Holy Land. And I really like the voice of a lot of those. What's the other one?
00:17:40
Speaker
I think this is probably fiction. Renata Adler's speedboat. But there are some others. And that definitely got into my head a little bit. And so the thing I'm working on now actually borrows a lot from those kinds of voices.
00:17:53
Speaker
During our last conversation, we talked a lot about community, and specifically the community that you were looking to find and the subject of Bury Me and My Jersey. And I wonder if you think, do you think the podcast itself has provided you with a lot of that community that you were looking for and then subsequently wrote about in your memoir? Yeah, definitely.
00:18:21
Speaker
I actually wrote a thing not too long ago for the website, The Millions, where I talked a little bit about that, where I was trying to... I emailed a bunch of other podcasters to ask, what do you get out of it? How does this change the way you think about books and stuff? And they all basically said the same thing, which is that they feel like the value of it is not that they're offering some critique of where the thing belongs in the canon, but that they're building
00:18:49
Speaker
a sense of community around the things they're talking about. So listeners are really interested not so much in whether this is a great book, but in whether Tom and Mike, these people who I spend time with every week, what did they think of it? And so now, I mean, it's been really cool that we've got enough listeners where we've got a kind of a cluster of regular listeners who interact with us all the time on Twitter and Facebook and email. And they're people who we never met otherwise, they're just a lot of
00:19:19
Speaker
You know, they're in librarians in the Midwest or they're wherever they are. And but I feel like we there's like a certain intimacy that you develop with with people that you that I didn't really expect.
Success and Community in Writing
00:19:30
Speaker
Actually, I went in, I guess, with no expectations. And it's it's it's pretty cool to have that.
00:19:37
Speaker
building around kind of a stupid thing that Mike and I do. The audio has a certain intimacy about it, especially if you're walking around by yourself with headphones on. You feel really plugged in to a conversation like that. You really feel like you're there.
00:19:57
Speaker
even when you're like, if I'm over here in Oregon, but if you know, I'm listening to a book fight, I feel like I'm kind of in your basement like, you know, just kind of eavesdropping on a cool conversation about stuff I like, you know, reading and writing. And, you know, similarly, when, especially when I was living by myself, I would get home from, you know, work late at night, working at the newspaper and
00:20:19
Speaker
I would put in like old Simpson DVDs and I'd watch these episodes a million times. So I would turn on the commentary and like having the commentary, it like felt like I had, it's kind of sad, but it's, but I felt like I had a little group of buddies there as we were watching this episode of the Simpsons. And it's, I dunno, it's similarly like that, like finding like you're, you found your own tribe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's, yeah, there's a lot of,
00:20:45
Speaker
I think that's the motivation for a lot of people who are listening. I mean, some people are just trying to pass time at work or whatever, but when people find whatever their favorite podcast is, it's not necessarily because, oh, this one episode is some all-time classic of radio, but it's because, oh, I found some people I enjoy spending time with. And that's pretty cool. That's hard to find in a lot of places.
00:21:07
Speaker
And as someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, what side of that writer coin do you most identify with? Oh, that's a good question. So when I finished grad school, I thought of myself exclusively as a fiction writer. As I went to school for fiction, at least in my program, there was this weird schism between fiction and nonfiction where there was a real rivalry and there was very little interaction.
00:21:33
Speaker
Then I ended up writing the memoir. And the first thing I ever published was an essay that ended up as a chapter in that memoir. And then the memoir happened. And then I started teaching nonfiction. And I became a nonfiction editor at Barrel House. And I said, oh, shit, I have to learn how nonfiction works. And so it took me a longer time, I think, to figure out how to write fiction that I was happy with. And I think it's because there's this, I don't know if this is the right word.
00:22:02
Speaker
In non-fiction, at least in non-fiction I really like, there's a certain sort of immediacy where you don't necessarily have to build artifice around conveying a subtle emotion, but you can say, you know, I was angry when I left this place. I guess you can do it in fiction too, but at least my conception of it then was, if I wanted to convey an emotion in fiction, I had to craft this entire three-page scene that conveyed something subtly, whereas in non-fiction I could write two sentences and just hit the reader with it right there. At some point I realized there's
00:22:30
Speaker
That's a false dichotomy and I can do whatever I want. Lately though, I've written a lot more fiction than non-fiction lately, though I don't know that it's a conscious choice to identify as one thing or the other. I've had more fiction ideas, basically. That's what I've been excited to write about lately.
00:22:54
Speaker
Do you wish you identified more one with the other just to make, just so like when you hit, go to the computer or go to the ledger, it's like, well, there's no choice. I'm writing, I'm writing fiction or I'm writing, you know, verifiably true stories. Yeah. Uh, sometimes I wish I was just more decisive in general, cause you know, I'll have, I think most writers have some like an ideas file or something, right? And I'll have like six half formed ideas and I'll be thinking like, all right,
00:23:23
Speaker
Let's pick one and start going with it. And then instead I spend the whole morning just kind of looking at them and then I do nothing. And I go, you know, I walk my dog and I, I give up and, uh, such an easy thing to do. I, I look at my dog. I'm just saying, I give up like, Hey, you know what? A 35 minute walk sounds awful good right now. It's healthier than just sitting down anyway. You know, there's a lot of good reasons to just go for a walk. Um, and so the, um,
00:23:51
Speaker
I mean, in general, that's my more general answer that I just wish I could be more decisive about just like, let's just write the fucking thing and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's my answer. I'll stick to that. I had like a half formed
Advice for Aspiring Writers
00:24:04
Speaker
idea for another one, but it was going to end in the middle of a sentence.
00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah. So as with anybody who's, uh, who's come on the podcast and has written memoir, my, my, often my first question is like, why? Like, so, because it is such a, it can seem very self-indulgent, um, on one hand, but it's, but memoir, when it's done, when it's done really well, can be uplifting and inspiring and oftentimes timeless. And I wonder like, what made you want to write, bury me in my Jersey? Like, what was that impetus?
00:24:36
Speaker
Yes, I have to write this. So I wrote that, so I mean talking about possibly self-indulgent, I wrote that when I started writing when I was 26 or maybe even 25. And so there were definitely people in my life, especially non-writer people who were like, what are you writing a memoir for? What have you done? And where it came from for me was two things which I tried to draw to my students to, which is this
00:25:04
Speaker
Sense of urgency and trying to understand an obsession and so like the book is about my dad dying when I was 20 which I realize Even then was not the worst thing that's ever happened to anyone with a from with their dad But it was a thing that I was still clearly not over And I didn't realize how not over it was until I started writing about it and the obsession part is that was the sports obsession being like a very intense Philadelphia Eagles fan and
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, I wrote very little in the couple years after I finished grad school. And the first thing I wrote that I felt pretty okay about. Well, I had this idea. So David Shields, before he became, you know, this guy who is trying to change how nonfiction works, and before he became that guy, he had a book called Body Politic, and there's some subtitle, and it's a collection of essays about sports. And
00:26:02
Speaker
He wrote these things just about like the intersection of sports and politics and race. And they're mostly pretty interesting. And I started trying to copy him. And so I started trying to write this essay about kind of about like the weird intersection of race and class in the way that we watch football, especially like often young, poor black men being drafted into the league and playing college football and so on. And it was like this very academic essay.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I sent it to a friend to say, what do you think about it? And he said, it's really not very good. But there was one line. That's why I sent it to that friend because I knew he would let me know. There was this one line at the first line. It said something about I haven't been to church since my dad's funeral three years ago. But and he said, that's your essay right about that. And it really opened my eyes. You know, it was like, oh, I didn't realize that was this thing that's kind of sneaking through. And that's
00:27:00
Speaker
I mean, anyone who's written nonfiction, I think has those like an early giraffe's you realize, oh, wait, I thought I was writing an essay about, you know, going to night class night school or something, but I'm actually writing an essay about this other thing, this breakup or whatever the thing is. So what drove it was sort
Writing Readiness and Routine Strategies
00:27:16
Speaker
of just like, maybe desperation, because I was like, oh, this is actually the first thing I'm excited to write about since I don't know when, you know, not the grad school
00:27:26
Speaker
drove it out of me or anything. It's just that I left grad school thinking maybe I'm not supposed to write.
00:27:32
Speaker
What was that period like? Because you went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, it was a very prestigious writing program, and so leaving there with that feeling of almost like, do you even want to write, and leaving there and not writing much, that must have filled you with something that was very demoralizing in a lot of ways. You had spent, what, two years, three years there?
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, so like after two years of that intensive kind of training and then to then not have the energy to want a writer publish What was that like for you? It filled me with a certain level of dread. That's for sure Because it was just like, you know, you're like a lot of writers like my whole life I'm like, okay, I'm gonna be a writer and now I went to this big fancy school now I get to be a writer and then I get to the end of it and I think
00:28:26
Speaker
Oh wait, what if this is not the thing I'm supposed to be doing? And I think that happens to people in all kinds of fields, right? They hit a certain age and they say, wait a second, I've been trying to build toward one particular goal and it might not be the thing I want to do or it might not be the thing I'm good at doing. And I wrote some bad short stories. I had this novel that
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah, I had sort of like turned in as my thesis to graduate. And I kind of tinkered with it. But I mostly went up to my office and said I was going to work and then played video games. And then I felt terrible because I would stay up too late playing video games. I wake up in the morning and think like, Oh, well, that's another day you didn't do anything. And so it was it was it was a huge relief to finally to have a friend whose opinion I respected really say like, Oh, wait, this is good and publishable. And you can make a book out of this. And then when
00:29:19
Speaker
That essay got accepted by Black Warrior Review, which is a journal, probably still the best journal I've been published in. I got paid money for it. I got paid money to write. And so I said, oh, wait a second. Maybe I am a writer, you know. That's very validating. Yeah, I felt a lot less like a fraud, you know, and because you come back and a lot of people in your life, especially people outside the writing world are like waiting now, like, OK, you did your art school thing.
00:29:47
Speaker
what are you working on? And they're either being polite and they wanna know, they wanna say, oh, are you working on a book? And boy, I either lied to them or gave them really vague answers for a long time. Yeah, at some point you've gone through the schooling and then you kinda, at some point you have to decide to turn pro. Yeah. And do you remember what that, was it that moment when this essay was published that you're like, that's your pro moment when you kind of called yourself up and put, and sort of suited up?
00:30:17
Speaker
Yeah, man, that absolute that email. I still have the email I have. I have since emailed Alyssa Nutting, who was the managing editor at Black Warrior at the time, to let her know that I feel like she kind of like that was the lifeline in my I mean, probably in this alternate timeline where they don't accept it. Probably I don't just give up writing forever, maybe, but probably not. And probably I just go into a funk and then maybe a few years later, there's some other sort of breakthrough or at least minor breakthrough where I feel a little bit better.
00:30:47
Speaker
but maybe not, I don't know. And so I've, you know, I've, I've, I'm eternally grateful. Basically a black order of view has my, my undying loyalty, uh, for that's cause they just, um, and it makes me feel good. We, from the barrel house perspective, when we sometimes accept an essay, someone will write and they'll say like, Hey man, I've had a terrible run of rejections for like two years. And this just, this kind of saved me, you know, uh,
00:31:13
Speaker
It actually one made me really sad. There was this poem I was reading for a recent issue and I liked it, but we just couldn't fit it. And I emailed the author to say that basically, I really love the poem. It's just like weird logistical issues make it hard to fit into this issue. And he wrote back and he said, it's been a long time since since I've had anything published, but your email really may have saved me because I was ready to quit on everything.
00:31:40
Speaker
So power of like just a respectful rejection can sometimes put fuel in the tank like that Yeah, because it's so lonely, you know and even and it doesn't go away feeling it just that it changed a different it's a different levels in different directions you feel like that because after I published the first book then I Had a book rejected roundly by many publishing houses and then a few years later I had to find a new agent and then I got rejected by a whole bunch of agents and you keep any like that anxiety doesn't it just comes back in different ways and different forms and
00:32:11
Speaker
So what did being a successful writer look like to you when you were in Iowa, and how has that changed to where you are now? The term that people used to use, at least when I was in Iowa, was a working writer. Someone had told, given this statistic to someone in our class, that something like 10 out of 25 people in your class will become working writers. And what that meant to me, I guess, was
00:32:40
Speaker
someone who makes enough money on their writing not to have to do anything else. I would change that definition now, which I think is probably a naive definition. Probably, we might have one person from our class who was at that level, maybe actually, but that's actually kind of rare. I feel like I'll have some sort of
00:33:01
Speaker
Steady gig whether they're teaching or some form of freelance journalism or something as yeah like you said It's very rare for that for just the the writing work to to support it But yes go on for sure. Yeah, or they have a partner who makes a lot of money. Yeah the Now I guess I define working writer as kind of what I'm doing, you know, like I'm publishing relatively regularly I've got I will have had two books out soon
00:33:31
Speaker
And and I have a regular old job teaching. But like I'm someone who has written things that have been read by people who don't know me, which now seems like it seems like a miracle. Right. And like I did this thing at Virginia Tech. They had the student run literary festival. It's called Glacellalia. And it was great. I mean, they they they invited me to come down along with this poet, S. Whitney Holmes.
00:33:57
Speaker
And it was students would read undergrads and grad students. And then we were kind of the featured people. And they had a hundred and on a Friday night on a college campus, they had 150 people in the room and they paid me money and they paid for my food. And it seemed it
Influences and Future Endeavors
00:34:15
Speaker
really seemed like a miracle that I get that my job was to like just fly to a college and read some stuff to people who really like books. That's awesome. You know, it's like and since then I had a real
00:34:26
Speaker
real moment of clarity while I was in that room and I was like oh my god this is this is very lucky you know it won't stop me from complaining if like you know next week the novel gets a whole bunch of bad reviews and but at least in the in the in the interim I can remind myself that I've had more success already than I realistically expected I think
00:34:51
Speaker
What were some of your, this would apply to your first book, what were some of the low attendance readings you've ever done? My lowest is four people in the back room of a historical society in Saratoga Springs.
00:35:11
Speaker
It was cool. They were totally into it, but they buried us in the back room. I did as much publicity as I could, but they basically didn't do anything and it was tricky. But four people showed and we had a nice little time, but it was kind of
00:35:30
Speaker
It's nice to sometimes give other writers, aspiring or otherwise, some of that sprinkling of that kind of experience will happen to you. Absolutely. So were all four of those people strangers, or were any of them family or friends? They were actually strangers. Oh, that's good. Yeah, because my book was about the Saratoga racetrack in that season. So people in Saratoga just go gaga over the track.
00:36:00
Speaker
It had some reach, so the people who were there were just some older folks who were just genuinely interested. So I was like, all right. I did a little reading and did a mini Q&A, and that was it. Signed some books and got out of there. Yes. Yeah, it's disheartening. You get up there and you think, should we just call this off? Should we tell the two people in the audience, let's just get a coffee or something.
00:36:25
Speaker
I had two. There was one that was in this now closed independent bookstore called Chester County Bookstore. Chester County Books in Philly suburbs and it was a huge store. At one point it was a real institution but you know how it goes. And my wife was there. One of my good friends who's in the book a little bit was there and a former student was there with her mom.
00:36:54
Speaker
And the former student's mom sat in the front row reading a different book while I did my reading. And that was that was discouraging. And then there was another one which was just really bad time. It was I was being I was going to read at the borders in Center City Philly right downtown. So it's a great venue to possibly get people in. But the Philadelphia Flyers, the hockey team were playing in game six of the Stanley Cup that same night.
00:37:22
Speaker
and so and my book was aimed largely at sports fans and so Boy, there was there was there was no reason to even go everybody who would have possibly bought that book was at home there was one person who sat in the audience besides my wife and That person came up afterward to ask if I can help get his book published
00:37:39
Speaker
Ah, nice. Nice. That seems to happen like one out of every two. Someone comes up to you with their book idea. It's kind of hilarious.
00:37:56
Speaker
Earlier in our conversation, you talked a little bit about a sense of urgency, which I really like because when I did the transcription of our first conversation, I pulled out a little passage where you talk about that sense of urgency.
00:38:11
Speaker
when people were submitting essays to Barrel House. And just a couple sentences here. You said, I read a lot of essays when I'm reading submissions, and a lot of them are technically sound and interesting enough, but there's no sense of urgency. It doesn't feel like there's anything on the line for the writer.
00:38:30
Speaker
And I love that because in that there's a lot of that, like you said, urgency, but intention. So in your writing, how do you make sure, how do you sort of calibrate your compass to ensure that there is urgency and that you always have something on the line in a piece of writing? I have to say, I'm relieved that I still agree with the thing that you quoted me saying from who it would have been. Yeah. You're like, no, not anymore.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, there's this assignment that I give to my non-fiction students where I tell them where the first line of this exercise has to be something they're terrified of telling their mother. Fiction too, but non-fiction especially, there's this thing in the essays I really love where I feel like the author is a
00:39:25
Speaker
It has something to lose by having published the thing that they wrote, you know, or there's something at risk or like they might and that's something to lose as unnecessarily like their job, but it could be a relationship or it could be just their own sense of their own, possibly their dignity or their own sense of pride or whatever it is. And so I think the main thing I try to keep in mind if I'm reading
00:39:50
Speaker
something I wrote that I want to feel still feel urgent is like, if I'm in a middle draft, am I bored by it? And if I'm bored by it, what's what's the thing that's missing? Am I holding back? Or do I have is the thing I'm writing is there is the idea just not not good enough, you know? So it's I mean, that sounds like the most subjective sort of arbitrary thing. But so many times in a middle draft, you start reading, you say, oh, this is just really boring. Why would anybody ever read this thing? If I don't,
00:40:20
Speaker
if I'm not invested in some way. How quick are you to discard those things that glaze your eyes when you're in the middle of the writing? Or how much time do you allow it to sit there in the event that maybe it'll come around to be more relevant once you finish up and do a few rewrites? Yeah. First drafts, I plow through without looking back at all, basically.
00:40:46
Speaker
you know, makes a handful of edits if I typos and things like that. But I just I just roll. I try to generate a ton of words. And I know a lot of other some of my friends like Mike, Mike, my co-hosts and book fight. He's he's very deliberate, where he wants to make sure every line is right before he starts moving on. For me, that that sort of paralyzes me when I do it. And so I'm pretty willing to throw a
00:41:11
Speaker
a bunch of stuff out there knowing a lot of it's going to end up going. I'll usually give things a chance through at least the third draft. Sometimes it's around draft four or five where I'm like, I get I keep coming back to a thing and I finally have to say, All right, Tom, you know, this doesn't work. You just have to you have to get rid of it now. But for me, I mean, actually, that's been when I was
00:41:36
Speaker
in grad school and the years after, it was much harder for me to commit to actually deleting things. I was, you know, the whole kill your darlings thing. I was, I agreed with it in principle, but then when it came time to actually ruthlessly edit things I was writing, I was very bad at it.
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah, I almost like to call it just putting your darlings in prison or something. I'll cut off the limb and I'll put it in a scrap file. I'll be like, okay, this is here. This is the DVD extras.
00:42:06
Speaker
And just so it's not completely killed. But invariably, if you've written a 5,000 word thing, if you lop off 2,000 words, it's way cooler. It's streamlined. And it's just like, wow, why did I ever need that? But you did need it, in a sense, but not in the final product to spare the reader. You needed it as a writer at first. But for the reader, you get to that leaner state. And you're like, yeah, this is an athletic piece of writing.
00:42:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was in when I was in grad school. We were in Frank Conroy's class. He used to call that the that those words that the writer needs, but that have to go by the final draft. He used to call that the scaffolding that you put up basically to get the work done. But you have to take it down at the end. And yeah, I totally agree. And having you know, making mistakes or having these ideas, it's you know, sometimes you can compress a scene into one sentence. And it's yet so much better. We were at a
00:43:05
Speaker
Dave Housley and Mike Ingram and I were all representing Barrel House at this event at an MFA program. And someone asked, you know, what's sort of a hard question, but they asked, like, what's the biggest mistake you see people making in submissions? And it's there's lots of answers. But one thing Dave said was, I don't think we've ever taken, accepted a piece and told the author, you have to add something here. We always are telling them to cut if we if we're telling them things for the exact reason you just said.
00:43:33
Speaker
And odds are that writer probably did make what they deem to be significant cuts already. So it's almost like you want to just overcorrect, take a big swipe at it. And like we said, it's invariably better. Yeah, absolutely.
00:43:52
Speaker
So what advice or questions do you hear most from aspiring writers or your students? Who want to be like you who are writing books and essays and living the life of a working writer? So with students, first they ask a lot of questions about logistics, how does publishing work, that kind of stuff. But then probably the most common one is how do you know when something is ready? How do you know when something's ready to go out?
00:44:22
Speaker
And that's such a hard one to answer because, I mean, probably there are some writers who have really good answers. For me, it's such a going by feel and it's only by having written a ton of words in the past 10 years that I know I have a pretty good feel for when I've made something as good as I can make it. But I mean, typically with students, it's that they're just like when I was a student, they're not as willing to go through and do the extra three drafts or whatever it is.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yeah, how do you know when something's ready? That's probably the biggest question. Do you have a good answer for that one?
00:44:54
Speaker
I guess a lot of times, if you're allowed to just work constantly, you'll always find things to change and to just chip away at, chisel, change this, add this. Two weeks after you think you're done, you hear a song that triggers a memory and it's like, oh, that's good to add. So it's almost like it will never be finished. So I feel like it's to the point where I feel like it's super,
00:45:24
Speaker
It was super lean and I just eventually I just have to cut the tie and just like submit it and being in newspapers for a bunch of years and all that and having those kind of deadlines where it didn't have to be
00:45:36
Speaker
It just had to be good enough sometimes. You kind of build that muscle where you have to be fine with shipping no matter what. I would say that, but then when it invariably gets rejected, I'd be like, okay, well, let's work on it a little more and see what might have been the problem and tweak it and send it somewhere else.
00:46:00
Speaker
It is a feel thing. Like you write millions of words and you just kind of get a sense like, yeah, this is about as far as I can take it. Yeah. Nothing that you said about doesn't have necessarily to be great. It just has to be good enough. It's like the idealistic young version of me would have said like, that's bullshit, man. You know, only has to be perfect, but like, it's just not, I mean, it depends what you want, I guess. But if you want to be sending stuff out on a relatively regular basis, you just have to, you have to commit to some things. Yeah.
00:46:27
Speaker
I think if you're submitting books or book proposals or query letters, essays to prestigious literary journals, that better be damn good when you send it out. That's not a time for it to be good enough. That has to be fucking great. As great as you can make it, because it's representing you. You don't want to send off stuff that's completely and entirely shoddy.
00:46:55
Speaker
Yeah, and the numbers game is so stacked against any individual writer on submissions to a literary journal or something like that, or for book submissions that, yeah, you can't afford to stand out in a bad way.
00:47:06
Speaker
Yeah, the subjective nature of things makes it, if you are technically off, just give them one little aberration to say no. You have to be so undeniably good that they can't say no, but there are so many reasons to say no to you over the course of the editorial process, as I'm sure you know as an editor at Barrow House.
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah, there's just these little things like if you can't get that right, this has got to go. I've got a big pile to get through. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when you decide to take on a writing project, whether it be nonfiction or fiction, what has to click into place in your head to put all of your creative energies into it? Yeah, so let's start with fiction.
00:47:54
Speaker
The voice has to be something I'm engaged and excited to write like so this the current book I'm working on Is about the aftermath of a school shooting in this town and it started for a long time I had this idea that I was gonna have like 10 different points of view and I was gonna do all these different characters and I was a slog for me to even try to get into the voices of these people and it just it just wasn't I just what I didn't I wasn't interested and I kept making excuses not to do it and
00:48:21
Speaker
And then finally, one day I started writing this one character, this one voice, and it just like, oh, there it is. You know, I finally I figured out what I wanted to sound like. Same thing with the novel. It's coming out in a couple of weeks. The Young Litterers Handbook, where that one happened faster, where I had this idea of this guy, his wife dies and he takes her ashes with him on a road trip across the country. And I sat down to write the first chapter and like the first couple of sentences came out in this way. You know how like
00:48:49
Speaker
Like a basketball player, if they can't miss a shot, they'll say like the rim looked huge. That's how I felt when I was writing that. I was just like, oh my god, this is the easiest writing I've ever done. And so then I said, I gotta go with this. It gets me excited when the voice is right. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And I guess that's probably true of nonfiction too, although I probably have a pretty similar, I mean, since it's me, I have a pretty similar voice in most of my essays.
00:49:15
Speaker
And there it's sometimes I feel like I need to find some sort of, this is not the way I wanna use, I was gonna say a hook, but then I know they teach this, all my students wanna have a hook, and for them that means like a catchy first sentence. I wanna have some sort of emotional thing that I can hang all this stuff on. That's not just me saying, let me tell you about six things I did in a row when I went to Seattle or whatever.
00:49:38
Speaker
Yeah, and there has to be a kind of an element of fun and play involved, too, when you're writing this kind of stuff. That's what gets me into his own. I have to remind myself, this is kind of fun. You're lucky to get to do this. And I've heard David Foster Wallace say that, too, mainly referring to writing fiction. He's like, it's just good fun in that really soft voice he had. And you can tell a lot of times, especially in his nonfiction when he's having a good time,
00:50:07
Speaker
And his tennis essays, one on Federer and one on another guy was like the number 100 player in the world, which is just brilliant. Oh, the Michael Joyce one. Oh, my god. I've read that like five times. I can't get enough of that essay. That one's just so, so good. But yeah, you can tell he's having fun. And when you're having fun, man, you're just clicking off pages. And the reader is going to have a good time, too. Yeah, absolutely.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, it translates when the author is really enjoying something. The same way it does when a musician is really excited and engaged in what they're doing or a dancer or any other artist. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny to say that a few years ago, this store I was working for, they got us tickets to a show. And this was in SPAC, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. And it was like frickin' Doobie Brothers in Chicago.
00:51:05
Speaker
I had never seen the Doobie Brothers, I'm barely familiar with their music, but they were out there and they were just playing, they were opening for Chicago, and after every song, the lead guitarist and lead singer, I don't even know his name, he just pumped his fist and he was just having the best time of his life. I was just like, oh, that's so cool. If you can bring that to your craft.
00:51:26
Speaker
and just that love and energy behind it. It's like, who isn't going to follow you into your creative fires, if you will? Yeah, and it also helps you to sell work that maybe isn't, if you're not one of the most brilliant writers of your generation, like Wallace, then that energy and urgency is the sort of thing that helps you differentiate you and sell what you're doing, too.
00:51:51
Speaker
Yeah. So when do you do most of your writing? What's like your morning routine when you're clicking off pages? How does that start? The best days, so I'm lucky my teaching schedule is pretty open. So I usually have like two days a week where I'm just at home. I don't have to be on campus at all. And so those are often very busy days for getting stuff done.
00:52:14
Speaker
where in theory the way it works, I'll get up, I'll have some breakfast, then I'll go up, I'll mess around on the internet for a little bit, then I'll go upstairs and I'll work until lunchtime basically. So like a three to four hour kind of thing. Some days I,
00:52:28
Speaker
spend more time on the internet than the actual work part. Is that like a sustained block where you're just generating or is it sometimes you're doing a little, then you step off the treadmill and you get back on the treadmill? If it's like a new project, it's pretty sustained usually. In that time, I could
00:52:52
Speaker
come up, I could do three to 4000 words that I feel okay about knowing they'll have to get edited. And then, you know, it'll vary. Like right now, I'm in the stages with a new thing where I'm doing I'm rereading it a lot. And so like yesterday morning, me and my job was just sitting there reading, reading out loud, actually, and trying to catch a lot of the stuff that that wasn't, that didn't sound right. That's probably the the primary. There's lots of variables. That's the that's the main
00:53:23
Speaker
work thing and on school days when I'm teaching, I'll try to get up around like six and try to get at least an hour of actual work in before I go and I kind of tire my brain out. Were you always creating mainly in the morning, such as your circadian rhythm or to have you experimented throughout the day to try to figure out what works for you?
00:53:45
Speaker
I used to say, I work better at night, but I realized that was an excuse to put the work off. And then, because it's so much, you say, I'll get it done tonight, but then stuff comes up or you get too tired or whatever. So I started doing it in the morning basically to try to subvert my own worst impulses of procrastination and stuff like that. And what is the key for you to sustaining momentum over the long haul of a novel? That's three to 400 pages.
00:54:16
Speaker
I struggle with that sometimes. Often I get about halfway through and I realize I've written myself into a corner or this plot is going nowhere and I don't know how to keep it rolling. Sometimes it's grinding, knowing that if you grind through
00:54:38
Speaker
A chunk of work that you don't feel great about that eventually something's gonna click into place Which is not to say I'm not one of those writers That's like you have to lock yourself in the chair for four hours a day no matter what and stare at the blank screen if nothing happens and But I do feel that for me It's valuable to sometimes force myself to write things that I know are just not gonna be good because I need to It's like it's almost like dislodging the bad ideas for my brain or something, which I know that's not a scientific theory
00:55:06
Speaker
But it's kind of grinding it out for a couple weeks sometimes. Usually, at least so far, I've found a way back in or to rediscover whatever it is that got me excited in the first place.
00:55:18
Speaker
How important are those, maybe afternoon or long walks, how important are those to you to kind of unplug from what you're doing and how do you use those to kind of, I don't know, not put gas in the tank but at least to unplug and get away from it so you can come back fresher?
00:55:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's I mean, a lot of right or a lot of people have talked about that idea, right, that it's like letting your subconscious get to work, you know, coming up with ideas in the shower and those kinds of things. And I do I keep, you know, on my phone, I have a long list of notes and things that I think of in kind of random spots. The phone's a real lifesaver in that front. So I used to have scraps of paper everywhere and I would lose them or I couldn't read them. And yeah, it's very valuable kind of getting away from a thing. Sometimes, you know, when I'm when I'm in one of those periods where I'm grinding,
00:56:09
Speaker
Maybe it's like, well, let's just not look at this thing for a week and then maybe something will click into place. Maybe you'll figure something out or that kind of magic that happens where someone says something that all of a sudden your brain rearranges everything the way it's perceiving the book.
00:56:25
Speaker
And what other hobbies do you employ? Here, I'm using the word unplug again, but from writing or reading or teaching. Just something that's a complete departure from your vocation to just get to feel fresh. I watch a ton of sports. I watch a lot less football now than I used to for a variety of reasons.
00:56:52
Speaker
Among them concerns about kind of like the ethics of supporting an organization that seems bad I'm kind of with I kind of struggle with it, too But I watch a lot of I watch the NBA a lot So that's that's among my hobbies is watching the NBA and having opinions about the NBA then my wife and I basically hang out with my wife going out to dinner or
00:57:18
Speaker
traveling, going to sea, that kind of stuff. That's where a lot of my non-writing, reading-related energies go. Are there any other forms of artistic media that you like to consume that kind of helps with your writing? Yeah, it would be hard to draw a direct line, but I listen to music basically the whole time I'm working. I know some people can't have those competing
00:57:48
Speaker
streams in their head. But for me, it's on all the time. And the wet music I'm listening to varies wildly, you know, whether it's some days it's stuff I'm picking specifically to like, because I because of a specific mood I'm trying to be in. But a lot of times it's just like, whatever's on. And I don't like I said, it's hard to say exactly how that helps. But it's definitely it's part it's part of the whole atmosphere there. And I like watching
00:58:19
Speaker
My wife does not like watching these, so I have to watch them by myself. I like watching very slow, sad movies about sad people. What's the movie with the long title? The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, that one, that's like my quintessential example of, that's the Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, of the sort of movie that I totally understand why some people hate them, but I kind of like to immerse myself
00:58:48
Speaker
you know, for a long period of time in kind of a bleak movie world. Yeah, yeah. What book or books do you revisit the most they reread to kind of remind yourself like, Oh, that that's how it's done. So I'm not I'm not a huge rereader in the way so I know some people have, you know, like they have a book, certain book, they'll take off the shelf once a year and reread it or things like that. I think the thing what helps
00:59:17
Speaker
Probably the answer to this is the things I end up assigning my fiction and nonfiction classes where like when I'm teaching not creative nonfiction will read The Fourth State of Matter by Joanne Beard. And every time I say, holy shit, this is the this is so good. I don't even know how somebody wrote something this good. You know, that's one of those essays where I read it. And I think that there's this whole like three tiers of quality of writing above what I'm doing that's inspirational, a little daunting. Yeah.
00:59:46
Speaker
And it just, it changes the way I think about, and every time I'm excited to go back and read that one. And there's examples like that kind of on, actually that's probably the one out of all the things I assign that every time I read it I think I'm so disappointed when certain students don't like it. Because I want to say like, no, you have to, you're reading one of the best things.
01:00:07
Speaker
So before I let you get out of here, what are you most excited about right now with the release of the Young Whitterers Handbook as you're getting ready to really ramp up publicity for that? What's that experience like and what are you most looking forward to? So it's been a long waiting period since I signed the contract. I think I signed the contract in late 2014.
01:00:32
Speaker
And due to quirks in publishing schedules and things like that, now Gonquin only puts out, I think, 10 novels a year, and so they could only slot me in where they could. I'm really excited. I finally got the actual finished books two days ago. I did an event at this conference where I was signing books. And so it's very exciting to see the actual book exist in the world, and we can finally get on with whatever's going to happen with it.
01:01:02
Speaker
You know, it's just been such a long wait where I've been I think we waited longer for it to come out than it took me for took for me to actually write the book and so I'm just I'm excited to finally be out and do some events where hopefully people show up and Yeah, just like let the thing be in the world finally and and hopefully you let it sink or swim
01:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, what's kind of crazy is that you're going to get people asking you questions about it as if you just finished it like Monday, but you finished it probably, I don't know, 18 months ago or whenever you actually put the final bow on it. I think, of course, they send you revisions, but it's like you're a different person when you finish that book and you almost have to go back in time and remember who you were when you wrote it.
01:01:54
Speaker
It's kind of disorienting, I imagine. But anyway, it's probably going to be good fun in the end. I hope so. We'll see. But yeah, you're right. It's definitely like, oh, let's go back to this time in my life when this was the thing that's preoccupying me every day. But I've put it away.
01:02:11
Speaker
for so long. Yeah, because now you're on to another book. And so it's like, oh yeah, I got to remember who I was and where I was and what inspired me about this book at that time. Right. Yeah. Well, very nice, Tom. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for having me on, man. Yeah, you got it. And we'll be in touch for sure. Great. Best of luck with the book. All right, thanks a lot. Talk to you later. All right, later, Tom.