Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!
This is Tom McAllister.
A 2006 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Tom McAllister is the co-creator of the popular Book Fight! podcast where writers talk honestly about books, writing, and the literary world. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed novels How to Be Safe—which Ron Charles praised in The Washington Post as “like nothing else I’ve read”—and The Young Widower’s Handbook—which Kirkus called “a quirky, well-told fiction debut”—as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey—which Publishers Weekly declared “a feverish coming-of-age tale of a gridiron groupie known as a Philly fanatic.” McAllister’s latest work is just as surprising, lively, skillful, and human.
Where Tom McAllister Writes
My wife
and I moved to a smaller home in June 2020, a time of great uncertainty for
obvious reasons, and although this was not close to the biggest challenge in my
life, I was forced to replace my desk. My previous desk was a hulking,
utilitarian throwback, the kind of desk my father would have had at the office
jobs he held late in his life, with big bulky file drawers and a flat,
unassuming finish. It weighed, conservatively, 7000 pounds. On moving day, it
took three professionals to maneuver it out of the old house, into the truck
and then into our attached garage, because there was no chance it could fit
into my new office. The new house is smaller because we wanted a smaller house,
wanted to simplify our lives at least a little bit. In the old place, my home
office was a large bedroom, once used by a child who had a wallpaper border
with teddy bear print wrapping around the room (the previous owners had tried
to scrape it off, but gave up on the corners, and in the eight years we lived
there, we never tried to remove it; my guess is it’s still there). In the new
house, a Cape Cod with finished attic, my office is a small, trapezoidal space
carved out into the east-facing side of the house. Perfectly functional, if not
glamorous. The desk couldn’t even fit up the stairs, let alone into the room.
I’d gotten the desk for free, from a
local business called Office Furniture Outlet, when my wife and I appeared on a
short-lived home renovation show called Moving Up. On Moving Up,
you follow a chain of three families: Family A sells to Family B, who sells
to Family C. We were Family C, the young couple just starting out. We agreed to
be on the show because I erroneously thought it would be fun, and because we
would get a number of household items free or at steep discounts: 20 gallons of
paint, two portable air conditioners, a few area rugs, office furniture. I
forget what else. I liked that old desk because it was free, and flat, and it
held my things, but I had no particular attachment to it.
After the move, I decided to splurge
on a mid-century modern desk from a popular retailer. I told myself, “You
deserve this,” whatever that means (if it’s even true). Because of covid, there
was a long delay in my receiving the desk, and in the interim, I placed my
computer on top of a rectangular folding table that rattled every time I
pressed a key. Beneath me, in the garage, was the old desk that I was trying to
sell for cheap on Facebook Marketplace. This new desk looks nicer, I think, and
it is also flat and it holds my things.
My
wife would tell you that it holds too many things, that my propensity for piles
stresses her out, but she tolerates my piles so long as they are mostly
contained within this room. The piles mostly have functions. The two hardcover
books to the right are Asne Seierstad books (both excellent) that serve as an
ideal pedestal for my computer when I am in a Zoom meeting or recording a
podcast. Behind that, I keep the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, the most useful reference book
I’ve ever owned. The pile to the left is a stack of documents, a mixture of
drafts on which I need to make edits and various items that need filing at some
point, though if I’m being honest may never be filed.
In these photos you also see Larry, the lamp, rescued from the trash at my aunt’s house many years ago. It felt criminal to let an artifact like this disappear. Larry, for the record, also weighs about 3000 pounds. The shelf to the left of the desk holds mostly teaching materials, among other doodads and keepsakes and nonsense. The shelf has followed us for all 20 years we’ve lived together, part of a furniture set inherited from my wife’s mother. Behind me, there is another bookshelf, purchased at a consignment store and painted in the back yard, one of many attempts to control the pile situation in my house. I wish the rug were nicer but it’s fine. It’s all fine, it’s all perfectly functional, which, as someone who doesn’t get especially romantic about the creative space, is all I need. I’m not a writer who waits on the muse and waxes poetic about inspiration. I think of myself as workmanlike in my approach to the job, just someone who sits down and types and hopes for the best, and then gets back at it again the next day hoping to make it all a little better. Still, no matter what ends up in the room, or what functions each item performs, I do tell myself periodically: you deserve this. I’m not sure it’s actually true, but you have to say it sometimes. You try to prove you deserve it by the work you do in the space. You earn your small comforts by not wasting them.
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