The Brooklyn Rail

I first met Tom McAllister in 2004, when we were first-year students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At thirty, I felt like an old timer; McAllister seemed by comparison an upstart kid, a guy from Philly who always seemed to be hanging out on the front steps of the Dey House before a fiction workshop, cracking jokes and laughing explosively while wearing an oversized Eagles jacket. My favorite anecdote about the mid-aughts era of Tom Mcallister that I once heard and will never not believe: his mom once FedExed him a cheesesteak. Something else I like remembering: in the lone workshop McAllister and I took together, Charlie D’Ambrosio eviscerated McAllister so thoroughly over his depiction of a pickup basketball game that one of Iowa’s future Hall of Famers left the room in tears. But McAllister? He shook his head and grinned. At least that’s what he does in my memory. Because whenever I imagine the guy in my mind, no matter the challenge, he’s always grinning.

Fast forward twenty years. McAllister teaches at Rutgers-Camden. He’s the author of a memoir—Bury Me in My Jersey—and two novels—The Young Widower’s Handbook and How to Be Safe. For over a decade, he’s co-hosted the podcast Book Fight and served as nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. (Do yourself a favor: like and subscribe to both.)

Now comes It All Felt Impossible (Rose Metal Press, 2025), a memoir constructed under a delightfully irresistible constraint: one essay for every year of his life, each under 1,500 words, with minimal research allowed—a book that would surely also be friends with Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, whose author, Brian Blanchfield, commits to writing only from what he knows, guesses, remembers, or even misremembers. What emerges, in McAllister’s case, is both deeply personal and unexpectedly universal—a chronicle of growing up in working-class Philadelphia, navigating family loss and marriage, and the slow accumulation of wisdom that comes from simply surviving. McAllister writes candidly about everything from childhood panic attacks to learning to ride a bike at forty-one, creating snapshots of American life that feels both achingly specific and broadly familiar.

David Hockney once claimed that if you were asked to draw a tulip with a hundred strokes of a pen or five, you’d be more inventive with the latter. I’ve often imagined the most powerful constraints are beguilingly provocative, like the dancer whose hands and feet are bound yet who mesmerizes an audience more profoundly than one enjoying unrestricted movement ever could. McAllister’s essays, bound by his own self-imposed limitations, achieve a similar magic, transforming everyday moments into mesmerizing performances of memory and meaning: a panic attack in a Pizza Hut bathroom, a dog named Satan, an uncle’s Berlin Wall fragment displayed alongside a signed baseball, and a false memory of falling through a cellar door, which itself feels not unlike the experience of reading these very same essays: each one a sudden plunge into something unexpected, disorienting, and—in the end—vibrantly illuminating.

Matthew Vollmer (Rail): Let’s begin with the obvious question: how did you come up with this idea to write an essay for every year you’ve been alive?

Tom McAllister: In part, the idea came from a moment of desperation. I’d just had two novels out, and had been doing all the related press materials one does for a newly published book, and I felt wrung out. I went a long time without writing anything, almost a year. I hadn’t gone that long without at least writing something since before grad school. So I went into winter break from teaching feeling like I had to give myself some homework in order to produce some words, but also worried that maybe I had used up all the good words I had in my system. It feels very dramatic to describe it this way now, but in 2019, when I started this project, I really felt like I had to prove to myself I could still do it. 

As to why this specific project: I needed a break from fiction, primarily. Even though my first book is a memoir, I had written it without studying memoir or nonfiction at all, and in the intervening years, I’ve read so much more nonfiction, experimental memoirs, and similar projects, and felt like maybe it was time for me to take a more serious crack at nonfiction, to see what kind of writer I am now vs. the guy who was just figuring it out on the fly in his mid-twenties. I didn’t have a central inciting incident, so I was just thinking simply. The year-by-year structure helped me to organize it into a coherent structure.

And, importantly, the reason I started trying experiments like this specifically is because of the work you’ve been doing. Thinking especially of your book Inscriptions for Headstones here. All of which is to say: for you, what is the draw of writing with these kinds of constraints? And when did you start employing more formal restrictions in your writing? I don’t recall this being one of your trademarks when we were in grad school. 

Rail: I think in some ways, form has always appealed to me, even if I didn’t know it. I’ve always liked art that misbehaves and surprises. The spoofs in MAD magazine come to mind. The Far Side. Misusing written forms—like the epitaphs in Inscriptions—are essentially a kind of subversion. It’s transgressive. Obedience to genre creates more of the same. The quote I always trot out, ever since I found it as an epigraph in David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is from Walter Benjamin: “All great works of literature either dissolve their genre or invent one.”

I always got excited when I saw writers doing something with fiction I’d never seen. It could be as simple as using numbers to signal divisions in a short story, something I remember having seen the writer Rebecca Curtis do in one of her stories—reusing that simple device in my own work somehow had an energizing effect. I’d formatted the sections of another of my earliest published stories, “The Gospel of Mark Schneider,” as chapters from scripture—each paragraph began with a giant number and every sentence had a little number next to it—but the Virginia Quarterly Review said it would be too difficult to publish the story in that manner, which I found unfortunate, though I have to think that initially, it had to have made the work stand out in the slush pile. 

Future Missionaries of America, my first collection, featured a story in the form of a message left as a voicemail on the speaker’s ex-wife, and another story that masqueraded as a will and testament. You’re right, though, that I probably didn’t turn any stories in to workshop at Iowa that were all that subversive, aside from the one where the main character ends up having sex with the ghost of his dead wife. 

McAllister: I am rudely intruding right in the middle of your answer here to say I assign “Will and Testament” almost every semester. For some students, it’s revelatory—they had no idea such a story could exist. Others are like, “I don’t know, this is weird.” Which is fine too, I think. Anyway, back to you.

Rail: It wasn’t until I’d finished a novel—one that subsequently never got accepted—and was trying to bear the agony of the submission process by immersing myself in distractions, that I came up with the idea of creating an anthology of so-called “fraudulent artifacts”: that is, stories that appropriated other forms of writing. Epistolary stories, stories unfolding as instructions, stories as contracts, disclaimers, lectures, contributor’s notes. I spent hours in Newman Library at Virginia Tech—back before they condemned all the old copies of literary journals to “remote storage”—poring through old issues of the Paris Review and the New Yorker and other magazines, looking for stories that behaved in this manner, and at some point, I sent feelers out to writers in other MFA programs, to see whether or not they’d be interested in contributing or if such an anthology—were it to exist—seemed like it might be instructive for their students. The aforementioned David Shields—who I’d never heard of, really—was especially excited, and offered to co-edit the manuscript, a draft of which I’d shown him. Thus, Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, & Other Fraudulent Artifacts was born. 

Around this same time, I had designed an exercise for my Advanced Fiction class: write a story as an epitaph. My understanding of teaching any student how to write—and I was still teaching some sections of first-year writing at the time—was founded on the idea (and still is) that the best way to learn how to write is to experiment with as many forms of writing as possible: to understand that forms and genre have rules or conventions that help readers identify and classify them as what they are, but that real joy comes when you’re able to both maintain enough of the conventions to make them recognizable, but to subvert expectations and break some of the rules. What are the conventions of an epitaph? Short, pithy, often general, often in third person: “Beloved father and husband.” What might happen if you subverted those conventions and wrote super specific and really long epitaphs? What if you began one with something like: “Here lies a girl who used to like stealing grapes at Kroger…” and continued for a thousand more words?

Honestly, I felt sheepish about submitting my initial attempts at unpunctuated essays in the form of epitaphs that unfolded in single sentences, but they were incredibly fun to write—it felt like a great unleashing—and I hoped that the rhythmic momentum they generated might be appreciated by someone else. I was floored that DIAGRAM accepted the first two, and so I guess I can blame Ander Monson for emboldening me to continue. 

What about you? What draws you to form-busting work? (Coincidentally, my students in Graduate Fiction Workshop just read your essay “Halloween Glossary, D-H,” from Waccamaw, and really enjoyed it.) And what happened to your writing when you discovered the premise for It All Felt Impossible?

McAllister: In part, the appeal is that it can be a fun game. You’re stuck, have no idea how to get started, but you have time and desire to write something. So giving yourself some boundaries can be pretty freeing—instead of looking at a blank page and thinking, “I have to make a story, any story, happen here,” you can eliminate a few variables by whatever arbitrary constraints you’ve imposed. As in the examples above, you’ve got the variables of genre conventions, and the form makes decisions for you. I think of Brian Oliu’s essay “As is,” which is written in the form of an eBay listing selling one used Brian Oliu. I don’t know if he started with the idea of the eBay listing and then found his way into making it about body image issues, or if it went in the reverse order, but when I show that to students, it’s an eye-opener. You can be silly and you can be weird, but also you have to make lots of hard choices to make the narrative fit the form. 

Rail: Agreed. Also love that essay.

McAllister: In the glossary essay you mentioned (thanks for teaching it!), I stole the idea wholesale from Kevin Wilson, whose story “The Dead Sister Handbook” I often assign. I love the idea of being able to just tell a part of the story and trying to give the reader enough to piece together the rest. As a naturally longwinded writer, that limitation is a way of saving me from my worst impulses. 

On It All Felt Impossible, it was kind of the same thing. I was feeling burned out, didn’t know what to write but wanted to feel productive over winter break. As a former grade-obsessed student, I always respond well to homework, so I gave myself an assignment to just write one essay draft a day, no matter what. But that wasn’t enough; I needed some kind of frame, which is how I eventually worked my way to the rule of writing one essay for each year of my life. And even still, that felt too open-ended. The word count was at first a matter of pure practicality: if I didn’t have a limit, I would never finish anything. In the process of writing, though, I found that the totally arbitrary choice of 1,500 words was enough to force me into all kinds of hard choices about what to cut, how to move through time, and what version of myself I even wanted to present. 

On that note, I’m interested in the way you approach the movement through time in your nonfiction. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, the way my favorite essays seem to be fluid; they don’t just plod along in chronological order telling me everything that happened. They have that Denis Johnson-y thing of subtly sliding between various time periods and asking the reader to keep up. Does that make sense? Is this something you think about consciously, something you work at? Something you don’t care about at all? 

Rail: I often think about this quote from Reality Hunger, taken from Ben Marcus:

If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a methodology, a criterion, a standard, a purpose (is there anything left for fiction to have?), it is time itself. One basic meaning of narrative: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depiction of time. To the writer searching for the obstacle to surpass, time would look plenty worthy a hurdle. If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired at this point (there’s time again, aging what was once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without and, therefore, to grow or change, must. Time must die. 

He’s talking about fiction here, obviously, but the same principles apply to creative nonfiction, I think. My favorite essayistic mode is one that is associative. I like fluidity. Connection. One thing leading to another. I like to read prose that feels like thinking. How do you tell a story that feels like thinking? I’m not sure I have a good explanation. All I know is that, as a human, the longer I live, the more mysterious and incomprehensible my concept of time becomes. The events of my last book took place five years ago—it’s been five years since COVID. That’s almost preposterous to me. I want to say it feels maybe two to three years ago but, having been Earthbound for a half century now, I no longer know what a year “feels” like. And neither do I understand linearity. Time itself—that it can be counted upon, that it is anything but relative, that it is dependable, knowable—seems mythical. 

What I do understand, though, I think, is thought. I understand, at least to an extent, how I think, and what happens when I try to replicate a story is often attempting to replicate any and all thoughts that I have—and when I say, “thought,” I think I mean “perceivable brain-happenings:” daydreams, memories, speculations, curiosities, observations, questions, etc. That said, I do think that it is often essential that readers understand how one event follows another, just as one thought follows another. Those who write should then aspire to making that process seem as right and plausible and compelling on the page as possible. 

I’ve been jealous of the premise of It All Felt Impossible since the first time I heard you talk about it—it’s so simple and obvious (“Do you write nonfiction? Well, then, write an essay for every year of your life.”) but also exciting to imagine the possibilities. The first thing I’d probably try to do is escape whatever year I started in, in part because my experience of any year is also the re-experiencing and re-framing of all the other years that came before. You make a nod to this phenomenon in your very first essay, talking about the writer James Ferry and how his story in Best American Stories in 1982 was the only thing he ever published, and use that as a springboard to talk about your own relationship, years later, with publishing and writing and teaching. It makes me wonder if that was something you thought about as you were writing these essays: obviously, each one is situated in a particular year, and therefore in a particular time, but I’d imagine part of the fun is finding ways to slip in and out of whatever year in which that essay happens to be anchored. Becoming “unmoored,” I think, but at the same time loosely tethered is an experience that I like to try to replicate. 

Some other questions: did you write the essays sequentially? Or did you open forty-two Word documents, title them, and flit back and forth between? And how do you hope readers experience the book, timewise? Did structuring this in a chaotic sequence—or simply backwards—occur to you? 

McAllister: Originally, I had a rule where I had to write them sequentially, but I bailed on that on day one. The problem, as you might guess, is I had no idea what to say about 1982, especially with the no research rule. But I had an idea for 1988, and I decided to just go for it and see what happened from there. At that point, I determined that the sequential rule was not going to materially improve the project, and instead just focused on trying to get them all down. I made a quick list of years and was able to identify some obvious potential starting points for some years (the year I got married, the year we both survived a tornado in Iowa City, etc.). Others were less obvious at the beginning, but that made for a fun challenge. The ones I enjoyed writing most were actually the ones about the less consequential events, the quiet moments. I half-joke with my students that I’ve shifted into a period in my life where my essays are all just about a guy walking his dog in the suburbs, and the challenge is to figure out what to say about that. 

But also, like you said, they all move all over the place in time. I was doing this by accident at first, mimicking writers I love who have the confidence to travel quickly across time periods. But as I got deeper into the project, I realized that those associative moves are what give the book a reason to exist. 

As to how I’d like a reader to experience it, I’d originally thought of it as a linear, traditional collection. But then my agent wasn’t especially interested in selling the book, and I spent two years submitting the essays all over the place, and I grew to love the way it became this fractured memoir, scattered across time and place, the kind of thing that few or no people would ever see in full. I briefly entertained the idea of all of them being out there, and some intrepid McAllister superfan piecing them together into a single manuscript.

Now that it’s a full actual book, I think my editors at Rose Metal Press have helped me to make it a more cohesive whole, and not just forty-two essays next to each other. That said, I think it would be cool for people to just flip around and read a random chapter here or there. In a way, that’s how memory works for all of us, right? One minute you’re in 2006, another you’re in 1999, and then you’re in 2025 again, whether you want to be or not. 

I like your note above about how it’s important for readers to be able to follow how one event follows another, one thought follows another. It seems pretty obvious, but it’s so hard to pull off. Do you have any practices to make that easier? Any common pitfalls you see in student writing? 

Rail: Like literally everything I can think of associated with the practice of writing, it all just comes down to trusting your instincts, thinking hard about what you’re doing, letting go, being yourself, and putting in the work. Every good essay or story should be an immersive experience. I think of that essay “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle, which is a stunningly embroidered meditation on hummingbirds and hearts and whales that takes spectacular leaps and includes zero scenes but feels infinitely larger than its 1,023 words, each of which are nested in the most elegant and perfect-seeming sequence, and I think of “Hawk,” by Joy Williams, a braided narrative that begins with Glenn Gould bathing his hands in wax and eventually dramatizes the moment that the author’s beloved German Shepherd goes bananas and attacks her, and I could give a hundred other examples of essays and stories in which every line feels improvised and perfect and inevitable, and I don’t think there’s any way for me to pinpoint how to do it or how they did it or how to teach students how to do it. All I can really do is show my students texts written by writers who are being unabashedly themselves, telling the stories only they can tell, and encourage them to do the same, while creating a space where honest attempts are always celebrated, along with curiosity and wonder and the bravery to be vulnerable. And then I trust them to do it. And more often than I’d ever imagine, they do.  

McAllister: I was sort of hoping you were going to give me a secret trick that makes it all easier. But I guess I’m willing to accept that answer too. That is a thing we’ve talked about before, this idea of letting go and being yourself. Back in grad school, you gave me such an important workshop letter on a bad story where you did more than just say the story wasn’t working; you pointed me to some other writing I was doing online that sounded like me. Such an important thing, to be given permission to sound like yourself, whoever that is, on the page. There is no way, for example, that I would have had the confidence to write about the relatively mundane details of my life back then—I was so afraid of finding out I wasn’t interesting or smart enough. But with enough practice, you find ways of making the small moments pop, and trusting your instincts.

Let’s start bringing this thing home. Three quick questions for you:

1. What is one thing you wish the grad school version of yourself had understood and/or tried to do with your writing? 
2. One essayist you think is overlooked and/or should get more attention? 
3. 3. If you did your own version of the year-by-year essays, which year would you start with? 

Rail: Man oh man these are great questions, and I want you to answer the first two as well. 

I wish I’d gone to school for Creative Nonfiction. It took me too long to understand the richness and potential of that genre, and how my essential disposition as a writer was probably just as well suited to it if not more so than fiction. 

I sort of wish that I’d never come up with what at the time seemed like the best idea I’d ever had: a novel narrated by a demon who lives at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school because he prefers to possess the bodies of teenage Christians. I spent a hell of a lot of time researching all things Satanic—including the entirety of Marvel’s Son of Satan comic books and the Malleus Maleficarum (i.e., Hammer of Witches, a fifteenth-century treatise on the existence of witches that describes such phenomena as “nests” where hag-stolen penises writhe of their own accord)—and I very meticulously crafted four large chapters but in the end—after about a year—gave up because I couldn’t really figure out the point of view: how in the world do you write a first person narrative who’s inside a demon? I wish I could’ve figured it out. But that’s the nature of writing: failure is baked into the process.     

And as for an essayist/creative nonfiction practitioner who is overlooked? Hm. Me? I don’t know that I really have ever thought about whether writers are overlooked or who should get more attention. I just love sharing writing I admire. So when I think about that, I also think about work I enjoy teaching. I’ve taught Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia a lot. I’ve also taught Brian Blanchfield’s “On Footwashing,” which was part of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, a book whose original constraints are quite compelling. From his website:

In Proxies an original constraint, a “total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources,” engineers Brian Blanchfield’s disarming mode of independent intellection. The “repeatable experiment” to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project’s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, “What do I know?”

McAllister: I actually saw Blanchfield reading from that collection at Temple when I was working on edits on It All Felt Impossible! I didn’t follow his rules, obviously, but I was directly influenced by the method and also the outcome of that approach.

Rail: Others include: Lyn Hejinian, Mary Ruefle, Eliot Weinberger, Margo Jefferson, Joy Williams, and Blake Butler’s Molly, which was the most harrowing book I’ve read in years. When I try to think about what these writers have in common, I think one thing I would say is that they’re doing what I encourage my students to do: perform on the page, unabashedly, a version of themselves.

To answer question three—I’d probably go with 1985. The year I got baptized in a mountain stream on the day I turned eleven. This was probably close to the year that we got our first VCR, the year I watched The NeverEnding Story three times in a weekend. That year, on a trip to a bookstore, I purchased a copy of the 1985 NFL Record & Fact Book with Walter Payton on the cover. The year I met my childhood best friend, John Ringhofer, who had an Intellivision game system and with whom I rode bikes with to a local convenience mart to spend our allowances on G.I. Joe comic books: this was the year that Dr. Mindbender had the cool plan of creating the ultimate Cobra leader by harvesting DNA from history’s greatest minds. Thus, the powerful Serpentor was born: a bio-engineered Frankenstein’s monster of history’s greatest warlords, strutting around in gold snake-themed armor like a rejected idea for a He-Man figure. Yeah, I’d probably end up writing about Serpentor. Was this the year I stepped on a copperhead and lived to hear my dad—who saw me do it—talk about how my guardian angel must have shut its mouth? Maybe. (I can see how this would be a fun assignment.)

Now you: 

1. What is one thing you wish the grad school version of yourself had understood and/or tried to do with your writing? 
2. One essayist you think is overlooked and/or should get more attention? 

McAllister: I love that you basically have an essay finished up there already. Now you just need… forty-ish more. On the grad school thing, it’s funny how siloed the nonfiction program is in Iowa. It’s such a silly division—or it was when we were there—and I remember more than one person on the poetry/fiction side sneering at them for writing “summer camp stories.” I picked up the condescension toward the genre too, and that meant I was doing serious catch-up work years later as I tried to figure out how to make a memoir work. 

Though that’s not actually my answer. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to write stories for other people. I think this is a natural phase in a young writer’s life, but nothing I wrote in grad school was written because I was interested in it. I wrote what I thought a workshop story looked like. I copied the people who seemed to get praise from the instructors. I just wanted someone to tell me I was good at this, but I went about it by writing these dreadful eight thousand word stories that took themselves so seriously, and had these long, boring flashback scenes alternating with scenes where sad people talked around each other and also maybe some food was lovingly described. No more than 10 percent of it made me laugh, or excited me, or made me want to share the work with other people. That’s nobody’s fault but mine, of course. Other people were in the same place and had no problem pursuing their own interests. I was just insecure.

Essayists: Lucas Mann, Sarah Sweeney, Justin St. Germain, David LeGault, Brooke Champagne, Andrea Avery. These are all people we’ve published in Barrelhouse (and they’ve also published a bunch of other stuff) and I wish they all had even larger audiences than they do. One person we haven’t published but who I think is very good: Jamila Osman. 

It was fun having an excuse to catch up with you. I feel like I learn a ton about writing and teaching every time we do something like this. 

Rail: It’s always a joy to talk to you about writing and the various forms it can take and how those forms can surprise us. And to remember where we came from, who we used to be, what we think about what we’re trying to do now, and why it all might (hopefully) matter. But before we go, I want to give you the last word. This book represents such a complete accounting of your life so far—forty-two years, forty-two essays. Now that you’ve done this deep archaeological dig through your own experience, how has it changed how you think about your life, or about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? And what comes next for a writer who’s just finished such an exhaustive self-examination?

McAllister: As for what comes next—I’m back to fiction. It turns out I did not actually use up every good idea I’ve ever had (at least I hope not). I’m working on a novel now that my agent and I hope to submit in the fall. It’s a weird murder mystery with a very unusual narrator, sort of inspired by Oskar in The Tin Drum. It’s either the most fun book I’ve ever written, or the dumbest. 

The other question is bigger, and more complicated, but thankfully I did an event for It All Felt Impossible last night and a really astute audience member gave me the perfect answer. She said that the book struck her as being profound in a specific way, i.e. giving roughly equal weight to every single year, whereas a more conventional memoir would naturally emphasize specific eras and flashpoints in one’s life. Writing this book, though, made me think about, in a very literal way, treating even the smaller moments and less eventful years with the same gravity as the bigger incidents that usually drive memoir. It forced me to be more thoughtful, and more aware, not just in the writing, but as a person. To think, even when nothing’s happening, this is worthy of study and reflection.