#51: "Confounding and Transformative Works" by Tom McAllister, author of IT ALL FELT IMPOSSIBLE

Tom McAllister, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, David Lynch, Stevie Wonder, Terrance Malick, Sandra Cisneros, Anthony Bourdain.

Hello friends! As promised, I’ve got something different for you today: a guest craft essay by Tom McAllister, friend, Barrelhouse editor, co-host of the podcast Book Fight!, and author most recently of It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, out today from Rose Metal Press.

Here’s the jacket copy for his newest book:

In this meditative and lyrical collection, Tom McAllister challenges himself to write a short essay for every year he’s been alive. With each piece strictly limited to a maximum of 1,500 words, these 42 essays move fluidly through time, taking poetic leaps and ending up in places the reader does not expect. Funny, insightful, and open-hearted, It All Felt Impossible aims to tell the story of McAllister’s life through brief glimpses, anecdotes, and fragments that radiate outward and grapple with his place in the culture at large. In the span of these essays, McAllister witnesses a monorail crash at a zoo, survives a tornado, plays youth sports for tyrannical coaches, grieves for dead parents, learns how to ride a bike as an adult, works long shifts making cheesesteaks, and more. Each annual offering is a search for meaning and connection, chronicled by an engaging and honest voice. A testament to the power of creative constraints and finding innovative ways to tell one’s story, It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays is a compelling document of an idiosyncratic human existence that volleys so skillfully between the mundane and the profound that readers will find themselves marveling at these essays long after they have read them.

I love the concept of this book and am eagerly awaiting my own copy in the mail. I hope you enjoy Tom’s essay below, and please consider purchasing a copy of his new book or requesting it from your local library. Maybe many of us will end up reading it together!

Happy pub day, Tom! Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

Confounding and Transformative Works: Learning how to Defend and Define Your Taste

Though I feel I am a good teacher, I’ve never considered myself especially innovative. I’ve been teaching at the college level for nearly 20 years—for a while, it was mostly freshman composition with a little bit of creative writing mixed in, and now it’s the opposite—and although I’ve received strong student evaluations and even a handful of teaching awards, I’ve always felt like I’m at a natural talent deficit.

I have long envied those instructors (like the proprietor of this very newsletter) who share their bounty of creative in-class writing prompts, while I struggle to cobble together a functional class plan. When peers post pictures on social media of complex diagrams on their whiteboard, I wonder why I never have anything useful to write on the board (I use the board exactly one time every semester in a fiction workshop, and it is to draw a very simple diagram, which I have stolen wholesale from one of my MFA professors, illustrating the passage of time in a 1^st person retrospective narration, ). Their craft talks and elaborate slideshows and energetic group activities—I don’t know how they invent these things. Whatever success I’ve had in the classroom is the result of grinding, of deep investment in my students’ work and well-being. I borrow liberally from friends and colleagues, but most of the time, I plow straight ahead and hope that my effort can overcome my other limitations. I sweat a lot when I’m teaching; I think that’s important information here.

Which is why I am so proud of one particular exercise I always give to my MFA students. I don’t think I’ve fully invented this assignment, and I don’t want to pretend it’s the most innovative approach you’ve ever seen, but a) when I started assigning it, none of my peers were doing anything similar, and b) it is the best new thing I’ve tried in a classroom in many years. In short: the student runs a 25-30 minute presentation/guided discussion focused on a work of art they find either confounding or transformative (or both). I first tried the presentations with great trepidation—we can all envision numerous ways a 30-minute presentation could go off the rails—but the results have been so extraordinary that it has become central to my pedagogy.

My theory is that one of the primary goals of an MFA program is not just to write some good stories, but to develop a strong sense of aesthetic preferences and to be able to meaningfully articulate your tastes. Knowing what you like, and why you like it, is a major step toward producing your best work. Conventional workshop discussions are one means of honing this skill, but the presentation centers aesthetics in a meaningful way. By giving the students control of the room for a long chunk of time, I’m telling them that the things they care about matter, and they are right to take them seriously. Part of taking them seriously is identifying what it is about the artwork that has so captured their attention, and then (importantly) trying to connect this response to their writing pursuits.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of taking a workshop with an instructor who insists on The One True Way for stories to be knows how badly it can stunt the work. Before I can give any meaningful feedback on their writing, I need to know what they’re trying to do, and why. Ceding the floor to students for such a long time means of getting to know their perceptions and their history. It informs all of my ensuing work with them. Now, no matter what they submit for workshop, I at least have a sense of what their ideal artistic achievements are, and I can more effectively guide them in revision.

The assignment defines a transformative work like this:

Some specific piece of art (or a collection of related works, or other cultural artifact) that at some point changed the way you think about what art can do, that rewired your brain in some particular irreversible way, and that, at the end of the day, is the thing you always compare yourself to. Fill in the blank on this sentence: ‘If I could one day make something like ________________, then I will die happy.’

And a confounding work like this:

Some story, or book, or film, or entertainer, or cultural artifact that you want to like, or know many other people like, or otherwise understand to be a well-respected piece, but that you just don’t get. This could be something that’s over your head, or it could be something you understand on a literal level, but don’t see what it is that has people excited about this thing. The point is not about trashing someone else’s tastes; it’s about trying to pinpoint why your taste diverges from the (real or imagined) consensus.

Once the student chooses their topic, they are free to present in any way that makes sense to them. Some create PowerPoints and bring in visual aids, while others stay in their seats and speak extemporaneously while referring to a short list of handwritten notes. Some show video clips or play audio. Some assign in-class writing prompts and others include interactive elements throughout. Some save the Q & A for the end. Some dress in (relevant) costume. One (so far) has included a brief dance interlude.

Only a handful of students over the years have chosen the Confounding option, for reasons that seem pretty obvious: it’s more fun to talk about something you love. You’re not going to offend anyone in the room by criticizing a book or musician they enjoy. Those who have taken on the challenge have been just as successful and compelling as those who presented on transformative works. One of my favorites was a student who grappled at length with their inability to connect with the works of David Lynch despite otherwise exactly fitting the profile of a Lynch fan.

You may be wondering why I would open this assignment up to more than just books and authors. Aren’t I just exacerbating a growing problem of aspiring writers not reading enough? My view is that the works that transform do not necessarily have to be a part of the genre we’re studying. That moment of transformation, when you glimpse something new about how art can function, may happen while listening to a Stevie Wonder song or watching a Terrence Malick film. As long as the presentation does find its way back to writing and literature, I don’t care what journey we take to get there. I love to hear students talk about how they want to replicate the feeling they got from an especially striking music video in their writing. I want to know what they value, and why. The rest we can figure out later. Though I should add: about half the presentations are about books and authors anyway.

The MFA environment is often an overwhelming space: everyone is constantly name-dropping books, movies, musicians, and when they’re not name-dropping, they are scribbling these names in notebooks in hopes of one day checking some of them out, if only so they don’t feel left out. When I was a grad student, I felt that every single other person in the room had read every book, seen every movie, gone to every concert, and I was an uncultured fool. Later, I realized how many of them were faking it, or at least embellishing how worldly they were. I did have a massive reading deficit, but I’d also internalized the idea that to be a “serious writer” I had to develop an entirely different set of interests and cultural habits. If my students leave the room feeling this way, I will have failed them. I want them to think about how they can use the tools they already have to make their writing even better.

One memorable presentation began with a few clips from The Twilight Zone, which led into a narrative about the presenter being told her whole life that her writing was “too weird” and “not serious enough.” She was so discouraged by this feedback that she gave up writing in high school. The lesson she’d learned was that the stories she loved to write were intrinsically wrong and bad. One evening she sat down to watch The Twilight Zone with her father—he was a big fan but she’d never bothered to watch because it was in black and white—and felt an immediate sense of relief. “I learned that it’s okay to tell weird stories,” she said. A simple, but powerful message: this work of art gives you permission to write the way you want. She went on to discuss at length the ways she had evolved as a writer since that time, trying to learn to embrace her strengths and seek out more writers like her.

That idea of permission comes up more than any other during the presentations. It is one of the most important experiences a young artist can have, encountering some artwork that tells you not only is it okay to want to write the way you do, but there’s a whole world of like-minded artists waiting for you to discover them. Eventually, you learn to trust your own taste. It makes you a better writer, knowing that what you’re working on is valid. I never get tired of hearing people share their version of this story; the details vary wildly, but the core message remains the same.

There was the working-class guy who’d dropped out of community college and never seriously pursued writing until encountering Anthony Bourdain’s TV show and then his book, both of which convinced him to embrace a particular kind of plainspoken and funny memoir about working class New Jersey kids. The Mexican-American student who learned from Sandra Cisneros that you can write fun and compelling stories about Mexican-American people. The Black woman from Oklahoma who discovered the hip-hop collective Odd Future when she was in a predominantly white high school and was introduced to an entirely new (to her) way of being a weird, nerdy, unconventional Black artist. The student who told us about her history of competitive tap dancing, which led to a video of Savion Glover, which led to a (brief) tap dance performance in the room, which led to a fascinating dissection of the way her writing attempts to match the rhythms and moods of the dance she loves. The transgender student who talked about grotesque depictions of the body in William Burroughs’ Junky and used Burroughs’ work as a lens for discussing their own complicated relationship with their body and ways of writing about uncooperative and unruly bodies. (And, at the risk of pandering to the audience here, I feel I must add: I once had a student who presented on Refuse to Be Done, and talked at great length about how it had completely changed her understanding of novel planning and revision).

When I encounter former students, I often remember them first by the topic of their presentation. Some presenters are far more self-conscious than when they share their fiction with the workshop, because now they’re sharing a piece of themselves. I would have been intensely anxious myself had I been given this assignment. I would not have had the courage to present on a confounding work, though had I been forced into it, I probably would have talked about Catch-22, a book that has been recommended to me dozens of times and that seemed like it was written exactly for the kind of young, jaded, sarcastic male reader I was, but which I have never managed to read beyond page 10. If I presented on a transformative work, I probably would have focused on Slaughterhouse Five, the very first book that blew my mind wide open and showed me how much a writer is allowed to do. Actually, I probably would have lied, knowing this is the kind of thing that would make some of my classmates roll their eyes—of course this young guy loves the most stereotypical of all young dude books. This is where the instructor has to play an important role, establishing an ego-free atmosphere (as much as is possible and within their control), so that nobody is performing for the others or feeling judged because their tastes aren’t sophisticated enough.

Even the sheepish presenters come into their own over the course of a half hour. It is exhilarating to watch them start sometimes in a very unexpected place (I’m thinking here of a student who opened a presentation on magical realism and Guillermo del Toro with a video of her father, a barber, cutting someone’s hair and telling a story about a guy from his old neighborhood) and manage to bring it in for a landing. They never quite go where I expect them to, and that’s a beautiful thing.

I’ll note briefly that I have tried a version of this assignment with undergraduates a few times, and each time I have found I need to keep simplifying it and building in more guardrails. At least with the undergraduate groups I’ve known, there just aren’t enough people in the room ready to discuss their artistic ambitions in this way, though I will keep trying to push them closer to this stage if I can.

Here is why I feel most proud of this assignment: every time I share it with someone, they immediately begin thinking of what they would focus on. My guess is many readers of this piece have been doing the same. Think of how exciting it would be to share your breakthrough moment with a room full of smart, interested artists. To be told that what you’re working on matters. To be understood, just a little bit.

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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

His website can be found at www.mattbell.com.