In every interview, I like to ask writers, “Is there a question you’d like me to ask?” I’m always surprised by the types of questions they’d want to ask themselves, so I decided to take the idea of the self-interview and give writers some restraints.
One. Use Who/What/When/Where/Why-ish questions.
Two. Have fun.
Our next Debuti-Self Interview features Tyler McAndrew, author of the debut short story collection My Prisoner and Other Stories, which features stories set largely in the Rust Belt of the 1990s and early 2000s. McAndrew lives in the heart of the Rust Belt: Pittsburgh by way of Syracuse. He currently teaches creative writing at both the University of Pittsburgh and a magnet school for the arts in the Pittsburgh Public School District.
WHO belongs in your writerly family tree, or, which other writers do you see yourself fitting into some sort of lineage with?
If I had to make a family tree of my writerly lineage, my teachers would probably my closest ancestors. I did my MFA at the University of Pittsburgh (where I teach now), and William Lychack was the chair of my MFA thesis. His writing and teaching have influenced me maybe more than any other writer. Reading his stuff and being in classes with him really helped me to think differently about what a story could be, and I credit him with helping me tap into the parts of my writer-brain that are a little more in tune with the intangibles: wonder and honesty and whatever it is that’s sacred for you and your characters.
I know that Bill’s own MFA mentor was Charles Baxter, and I feel like Baxter’s teaching has (hopefully) trickled down to me a bit. I’ve never met him, but I can’t help but see Baxter as sort of a spiritual grandfather to my writing. I’ve read his stories and his craft essays again and again and again—there’s so much in my work that’s just me trying to imitate something from Baxter’s stories, or me trying to put into practice something from his essays.
My favorite author is probably Carson McCullers, and I’ve also always thought (slash hoped) that there might be some line traced between my work and hers. I think McCullers and I are drawn to similar characters: misfits and outcasts—often adolescents, and almost always the sort of people who are lonely for some indefinable thing (or, as she once put it, “homesick for places [they] have never known”). Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is a more contemporary author who I feel a similar sort of kinship with; I adore her book Sleepovers. Even though she writes about the rural South and I write about northeast Rustbelt cities, I feel like I recognize so much of myself and my world in her stories. On the family tree, I like to think that maybe my stories are like a younger cousin to hers.
Justin Torres is another who I feel that sort of kinship with. I met him once, briefly, when he was part of the reading series at my MFA. He grew up just outside of Syracuse, where I spent the first 25 years of my life, and as with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, I feel like I recognize so much of myself in his work. When I first read We the Animals, it was, in some ways, like just reading about the world of my childhood.
Speaking of Syracuse: I went to Syracuse University as an undergrad, so there’s also this whole branch of Syracuse writers that I feel like I’m in lineage with. Arthur Flowers and Phil LaMarche were my undergrad fiction teachers—they both have a lot to do with why I began writing in the first place. At the time when I was their student, it felt like there was sort of a boom of recent Syracuse MFA alums who had books coming out and who were giving readings on campus—people like Jeff Parker and Salvadore Plascencia. Being able to see some of those folks from a distance was really important to me when I was first realizing that I was interested in writing fiction. And Syracuse, of course, carries a whole lineage of other big names: George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, etc…
WHAT is one strange or unexpected influence that might not be immediately apparent to your readers?
There’s an old horror movie called House on Haunted Hill from 1959, directed by William Castle and starring Vincent Price. It’s goofy midnight-movie popcorn fare with a familiar set-up: a bunch of strangers are offered $10,000 each to spend the night in a haunted house. In this version (spoiler), it turns out that the haunting is actually an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Vincent Price in order to manipulate his wife and her lover. Come the third act, Price’s wife, who is played by Carol Ohmart, believes she has killed him, but—and here’s the scene I want to talk about—Price has double-crossed her and tricks her into believing that his own deceased skeleton has risen from the dead to torment her. We see the skeleton drift across the basement as Ohmart backs away in horror. Eventually, Price emerges from the shadows, very much alive, and we see that he’s controlling the skeleton by means of a bizarre contraption: a sort of harness affixed with several large fishing reels that are pulling on puppet-wire.
My stories generally tend much more toward literary fiction, but I love horror movies, and I love going to haunted house attractions during the Halloween season. I specifically love watching movies with practical effects and thinking, How did they build that prop / costume / mechanism? Where on the set is the special effects guy who is hiding and squeezing a bladder to make fake blood spray everywhere? Where is that actor tucking their head to make room for the prosthetic tentacles that are wriggling out in its place? At haunted house attractions, I love being up close to these sorts of things, seeing how simple props combined with light and sound and space can create otherworldly experiences. If I could do it all over again, my dream job would be to design special effects. Before the pandemic, a close friend and I actually spent an entire year trying to drum up resources to build our own haunted house attraction, scouting locations and probing every possible avenue we could think of in search of funding.
So, that scene with Vincent Price puppeteering the skeleton—I get excited by that scene because it feels close to a sort of art that I would love to be able to make. But there’s also something interesting about it to me in a dramatic sense. How in the world does a person get driven to this point of feeling like they need to fool their spouse into thinking they’ve seen a walking skeleton? The whole thing is silly and cartoonish, but there’s a sublimity in how that cartoonishness is rendered with such realism—it’s a guy operating a machine! The materiality of it feels so clumsy, so human. And it’s also the movie showing us that a skeleton risen from the grave isn’t nearly as scary or strange as a guy who would go through the insane trouble of making you think that a skeleton has risen from the grave.
All of this stuff—Price’s skeleton-machine, my own interest in haunted attractions and special effects—was the impetus behind the longest story in my book, “The Storyteller,” which is about a divorced father who, in a panicked effort to maintain custody of his children, tries to convince them that their mother’s house is haunted.
WHEN did you first begin working on these stories?
The earliest story in the book—“Hand-Me-Downs,” which is about a teenage girl trying to cope with the abduction of her older sister—was written more than 15 years ago. I began writing seriously in 2008, during my last year of college, when I was 20 or 21 years old, and I wrote “Hand-Me-Downs” only a year or two later, in 2009 or 2010. It was maybe the third or fourth short story that I ever wrote.
Because “Hand-Me-Downs” is so much older than all of the other stories in the collection, it feels very different to me in a lot of ways. I do still love it, though. It has one of my favorite images that I’ve ever written, and one of my favorite endings that I’ve ever written. When I was sending my manuscript out to publishers, I went back and forth on whether or not to include “Hand-Me-Downs,” and I’m ultimately really glad that I did. It just feels so much like a story that I would write: it’s about kids bumping up against the adult world, and about the rippling effects of violence—both things that I write about often. And it takes place in Syracuse. All around, it’s an extremely Tyler McAndrew story.
Most of the other stories in the book were written between 2015 and 2023. But even the more recent ones—the couple that were finished in 2023—had been marinating for years before then. I’m a very slow writer, and I usually have to poke and prod at a story, writing and re-writing the first couple paragraphs for a year or two or three before I’m able to sneak past the gate and see what the rest of it looks like.
WHERE did the idea for your book’s cover come from?
I’m extremely lucky in that my publisher, Mad Creek Books / Ohio State University Press, asked me for input when it came to the cover design. My idea was, essentially, that I wanted the cover to look like this old copy of Lord of the Flies that I had.
Lord of the Flies is sort of an ur-text for me—one of those books whose influence on me is probably pervasive in ways that I’m not even aware of. I love writing about that secret world of childhood, the things kids get up to when they’re left to their own devices, the moments when they bump against the adult world and encounter situations that they can’t understand or deal with on their own. Plus, I just think that cover looks great.
So, I did a reverse image search on Google and found a bunch of art that resembled the painting on that Lord of the Flies cover, and from there, I dug around and looked at work by a bunch of different artists. The painting on my cover is by Madalina Panaghie—she was one of a few different people whose work I sent along when the press asked for my input. The rest of the cover design is by adam bohannon. I couldn’t be happier with how it all looks.
WHY did you choose “My Prisoner” to be the title story for the collection?
Originally, the manuscript was titled after a different story, “The Familiar Dark.” I changed it after I wrote the story “My Prisoner,” which I had tried drafting several times over several years before finally getting a version that worked. In early drafts, the protagonist was an adult; I eventually thought to rewrite it with the protagonist as a child (maybe that Lord of the Flies influence at work), and for whatever reason, that made the entire story shift into focus for me.
As soon as I finished writing “My Prisoner,” I knew that it had to be the new title story. I don’t necessarily want to call it the “best” story in the collection, but when I finished it, it felt like sort of a culmination of everything I had been trying to do in the years since I’d started writing. All of the stuff that I try to teach my students is on display in that story, and just everything about it—the characters, settings, themes, even the narrative structure—feels very representative of my work. Sort of like with “Hand-Me-Downs,” that story just feels, to me, like a Tyler McAndrew story.
When I wrote “My Prisoner,” I also already had one other prison-related story in the manuscript, plus an idea for a third. I realized that those three stories could act as sort of a backbone or a throughline for the collection—they appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the book—so I thought it’d be good to name the collection after one of them, and of those three, “My Prisoner” just felt like the best choice.