research — Blog — Tom McAllister

It's been a full week of book-related action, including a fun but exhausting trip down to Washington, DC for the AWP conference, where I met a lot of cool, supportive people who were very excited about reading the novel. Full details/links below:

1) Research Notes at Necessary Fiction - In which I discuss my (probably not great) research habits as a writer, and specifically what I had to research to write The Young Widower's Handbook

2) Salon Author Questionnaire - A group Q & A with authors Cara Hoffman, Sara Flannery Murphy, Jason Rekulak and Amanda Eyre Ward. Some fun questions in this one, including, "How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?"

3) Huffington Post interview - Brandi Megan Granett asks a few questions about point-of-view, writing masculinity, and more

4) Radio Times interview - I linked this in my last post, but, I don't know, here it is again. A 50-minute interview about writing, teaching, grief, and a lot more. The very bad picture at the top of this post is of the control room at WHYY.

5) Largehearted Boy playlist - for the great Largehearted Boy site, I compiled a playlist of songs to accompany this book, and talked a bit a bout how music influences my own work.

6) Review at The Big Smoke - A really nice review by Joseph Edwin Haeger. A sample: “What is appealing about The Young Widower’s Handbook isn’t that it’s funny and entertaining, but that it is both of those things while being honest about grief. Even though it’s a sad book (I mean, what do you expect from the title?), it’s a book full of truths that speak to the full human experience, from happiness to sadness and everything in between.”

7) ADDED 2/14: I wrote a piece for the "If My Book" series on Monkeybicycle, in which I compare the novel to a variety of sights and sounds you'd encounter on a road trip.

I have events coming up on 2/15 (3:30 at Temple U's Paley Library, and 7 PM at the Cherry Hill Barnes & Noble) and 2/23 at the Tirefire Reading Series in Philly.