3 interviews + 4 new essays

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Four essays and three interviews I've completed recently, for those who don't obsessively follow all my tweets

1. For the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about the challenges of offering support to students who have much bigger problems than teachers can actually solve.

2. For Buzzfeed, I wrote about the Philadelphia Eagles taking on Donald Trump, and how they've done a fine job of not playing into his hands by getting into a stupid cable news shouting war. 

3. I contributed to Essay Daily's cool "What Happened on July 21?" project, in which writers try to document their days on 6/21/18. My piece got a little darker than I expected it to.

4. Lyz Lenz interviewed me at The Rumpus about How to Be Safe. We talked about writing from a female POV, Twitter's influence on the novel, and pre-apocalyptic books. 

5. Bradley Babendir interviewed me about How to Be Safe for The Millions. We talked about research, finding a compelling voice, propaganda, lightning, and more. 

6. The blog Advice to Writers asked me a few broader questions about what I'm reading, how I'm writing, and what advice I would give to younger writers. 

7. For The Millions, I wrote a piece called "Who Will Buy Your Book?" which quite a few people seemed to like a lot, and which seemed to really annoy a bunch of others. 

News + more news + how I learned to teach

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A roundup of links and news and so on below:

  1. In the past couple weeks, How to Be Safe has gotten starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and Library Journal. A sample from Booklist: "Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister’s well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller—itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events."
     
  2. In The Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote some of the nicest things anyone has ever written about my work. A sample: "Like nothing else I’ve read, 'How to Be Safe' contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions."
     
  3. If this sounds like the sort of thing you would like to read, you can pre-order the book from pretty much anywhere.
     
  4. How to Be Safe is also on the LibraryReads top 10 list for April. Librarians, as always, are our favorite. 
     
  5. I've been adding a lot of events for HTBS. Right now, they're mostly in the Philly area, but I'm continuing to update that page, so please check back occasionally to see if I'll be in your neighborhood. 
     
  6. The Millions published another short essay of mine, this time about how I learned to become a better creative writing teacher by breaking away from a default syllabus and giving students more freedom. There's also some discussion of the worst day of class I ever endured. 
     
  7. I think that's it.

News from 2014

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This barely qualifies as an update, but in October 2014, I wrote an essay called "Halloween Glossary, D-H" for Waccamaw, and I've always been pretty happy with how it turned out. In my ongoing quest to make this essay an October staple on par with the Great Pumpkin and Bobby "Boris" Pickett's entire oeuvre, I thought I'd share it again today. 

It includes one of my favorite dumb jokes I've ever made, and it starts like this:

 

DEATH
Halloween is a celebration of death, of dead things and things that kill—vampires and werewolves and zombies—but also a time of literal death, first the leaves and the grass and the millions of mosquitoes and the creatures that feed on the mosquitoes, then the end of the hopes one always pins to summer, the plans to get organized, to spend a romantic weekend in Cape Cod, to finally finish that novel manuscript, to get that scuba diving certification, to go on a safari and watch a lioness as she stalks an antelope. Also the time of year when my dog died, when I took two elderly Welsh Corgis to the local groomer in preparation for a pumpkin carving party and then returned from the groomer with two elderly Welsh Corgis, but Otis, the tri-color, the one with the little patches of brown fur like eyebrows, which invited us to attribute all sorts of human characteristics—empathy and understanding and high-level cognitive skills—was quietly suffering from a ruptured spleen. I didn’t know the spleen was ruptured then, and I ignored his abnormal behavior when he wobbled across the room wheezing and flumped in front of me with the force of a sandbag dropped from the ceiling; I patted him on the head and then left to drink beer with my friends in the city. While I was out, my wife returned home from work and called to tell me Otis wasn’t standing and could barely breathe. My wife—a nurse, normally calm and rational and never panicked (see also: PANIC ROOM PROCEDURES)—was sobbing and I knew that the dog was dying, had been dying in front of me, that his flumping was a cry for help, that the other dog was at home watching him die and was incapable of understanding why she would never see Otis again, and so, four beers deep, I drove to meet them at the animal hospital, speeding at ninety, ninety-five, checking my phone at the same time for directions, and knowing I was endangering others’ lives, hoping only to arrive in time to see the dog one last time and to be with my wife who had grown up with this dog and who had made many unbreakable associations between the dog and her own long-deceased mother, and I remember thinking: I hope if I get pulled over, the cop is a dog-lover. I remember thinking: I hope he understands.