When Tyler McAndrew entered his undergraduate studies, he declared an English major without much thought. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he knew he liked reading good books. Stephen King and Roald Dahl captured his attention in his youth before AP English classes in high school introduced him to classics he came to love, the likes of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his senior year in college, he took two creative writing workshop classes, in which he wrote a Godzilla-inspired post-apolocalypse story and learned he wanted to take writing seriously.
Around then, he received some advice from his professor, the accomplished writer Arthur Flowers, that he heeded for years.
“I went to his office hours one day. I had a little bit of the fear of the future in me, because I was a senior, and I was about to graduate. I had spent the last three and a half years in college being like, ‘I like reading books,’” McAndrew said to me in a goobery affect. “Not really having any idea what I wanted to do afterwards. So I went to his office hours, and I was like, ‘man, I really like writing, and this is what I really want to do. And I don’t know how to make that work. Tell me what to do.’ And he told me, ‘if you’re taking this seriously, what you need to do is write for three hours every single day, but give yourself the weekends, because you’re going to take them anyway.’”
Since finishing undergrad in the late 2000s, McAndrew has completed a creative writing MFA, developed a teaching career and racked up various fiction publications, about a dozen of which forming his recent literary fiction collection My Prisoner and Other Stories.
Originally from Syracuse, McAndrew obtained an MFA in Fiction from the University of Pittsburgh, where he now teaches fiction as an adjunct professor. He also teaches fiction at CAPA 6-12, an arts school in the Pittsburgh Public Schools District. His fiction, in addition to nonfiction and poetry, has been published in The Baffler, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, EPOCH, Hobart and more. (He has also written horror comic books drawn by his friend Nate McDonough, a prolific self-published cartoonist who recently moved out of Pittsburgh.)
When I met with McAndrew mid-September outside Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning, he had on the same black Reebok Penguins cap he wore the day before at his book’s launch event at White Whale Bookstore. A thin man with a wide smile and a gentle way of talking, McAndrew sat crosslegged and chewed on my questions and conversation pieces for about an hour.
My Prisoner and Other Stories, published by the Mad Creek Books imprint of The Ohio State University Press in September, contains thirteen stories as short as a few pages and as long as about 20. The stories, which sometimes take place in Syracuse or Pittsburgh while sometimes taking place in the nondescript 90s and 2000s rust belt. The thematic aims of the stories defy simplistic explanation, but loneliness and desperation in failures to help others seems like a safe way to explain the throughlines.
The title story follows a young boy who imagines elaborate backstories for a prisoner he waves hello to through a window visible on his regular walks through the woods. Another, “Shit Plate,” features a boy who befriends but never truly connects with a troubled classmate who earns cash through eating disgusting concoctions of disparate school cafeteria food. The lead of “How I Came to See the World” helps a fellow halfway house resident with a damaged nose in his quest to keep a pet skunk. For the most part, the protagonists of My Prisoner and Other Stories suffer only to the extent that they feel suffering from not being able to assuage the suffering of others.
“You hear, or at least I heard when I was in my MFA and in creative writing workshops throughout my education, I feel like people are always talking about how your narrator or main character needs to be involved in the action, don’t have them just be this silent observer because otherwise there’s nothing at stake for them,” McAndrew said. He stuck with this thought until I interjected to affirm his point by saying there’s drama to be explored in being that observer, and he agreed. “In my stories, I think a lot of the drama often occurs from being that observer and not being able to effect any change for the situation you’re seeing.”
McAndrew has become so fascinated by this concept that he wrote an essay about it, “Notes on the Peripheral Narrator,” for Fiction Writers Review. In the essay, McAndrew raises various works, most prominently The Great Gatsby, as examples of peripheral narrators, or “Weird Harolds,” a term McAndrew learned through a complicated game of telephone from writer to writer. He also recounts a story of himself and his wife at a bar, being told an impassioned story of high school football by a bartender with an embarrassing level of pride and obsession, to explain his own fascination with being an observer of a person who exists more in the midst of drama.
“Maybe I just like being told a story, no matter how mundane,” McAndrew wrote in the essay. “I like observing the strange behavior of other humans, and I like to feel that little tug of something – that shifting of feathers in my heart – when I notice a drama unfolding, even if it’s not whatever drama the stranger thinks they’re telling me about.”
Beyond, and in part in conjunction with, his interest in peripheral narrators, the stories’ complex, in-a-sense-unsatisfying endings emerge perhaps as the most striking and compelling aspect of the collection. By the end of most of the stories, the characters don’t appear to have grown or overcome adversity, and the conflicts seem unresolved. In its own way, this satisfies the aim and resonance of the stories. They’re about the discomforting fact of helplessness at the face of personal collisions with the result of societal problems far beyond the purview of the narrators. Still, though, the stories also center the beauty in the moments characters at least develop a more intimate connection to people they may otherwise not understand.
“I think I’m always looking for the ending that to me feels most complex,” McAndrew said. “And by that, I mean the ending that’s not hitting just one emotional note… I don’t like endings that just feel happy or just feel sad.”
At the start of the launch event, McAndrew’s longtime mentor and friend, William Lychack, who spoke in conversation with McAndrew for the audience, described the book as “a long time coming.” At the start of their discussion, Lychack wanted to know about the process of putting the collection together and how he chose which stories to include.
“I made a really complicated spreadsheet,” McAndrew told the crowd, who laughed. “I made many really complicated spreadsheets.”
These spreadsheets included columns covering various point-of-view styles, lengths, tones, subject matter and more to ensure that the collection had range. One story in particular, “You Have to Talk to Mary Anne,” sticks out as different from the rest and comes with the only dedication, “For Bill Lychack.” The story, written in second-person, about an odd, charming woman who gets into infectiously friendly conversations with passersby, emerges by a country mile as the most uplifting, good-natured and happy of the collection’s stories. The story came out of an early note from Lychack, who years ago chaired McAndrew’s thesis board in grad school.
“I went to an office and had a meeting, and Bill was like, ‘these are all good, fine stories, but what you’re really missing is some happy stories.’ What I had given him was just this miserable pile of violent, depressing, evil stuff,” McAndrew said to the crowd. Lychack quipped that “they weren’t that bad” before McAndrew continued. “I honestly spent the rest of my grad school experience trying to write happy stories to round out my thesis. It’s really hard, because how do you make happiness dramatically interesting?”
Lychack has seen McAndrew’s work in many interactions over the years and feels he has turned his writing into something special with My Prisoner and Other Stories, Lychack said to me in a phone call.
“It just became a winnowing down of material that just distilled it down to its essence,” Lychack said. “It’s a short book and a powerful book, and I think, even when I was reading aloud, it really did feel like I was reading poems… It becomes more and more Tyler McAndrew than anything else, and that’s what I always hoped for him. It just was a great thing to have him trust that, trust himself and trust the material and sit his butt in the chair and do the work.”
In grad school and beyond, McAndrew often turned to Lychack for support and guidance.
“I sent him my manuscript for the book shortly before it got picked up for publication, because it had been five years of me sending it out. It had been a finalist in 15 different contests or something, and I was starting to feel like I was bashing my head against the wall,” McAndrew said. “So I asked him to read it, which felt like a big ask, it’s hard to ask someone to read 200 pages or whatever. But he’s been really good for me, just as the guy who, when I’m going through those dark nights of the soul, I can be like, ‘Bill, help me out, tell me this isn’t awful.’”
McAndrew teaches now, to both teenage kids and college adults. At Pitt, he adjuncts creative writing and fiction for undergraduates. And a few years ago, he started teaching fiction to high school students at CAPA. After his students, swapped out every quarter of the school year, have their morning classes, they spend three hours in a fiction workshop with him.
“It’s a really great program,” McAndrew said. “I wish I had been in a school like that when I was that age, because I probably would have liked school a lot more.”
In a workshop from his grad school days, McAndrew said Lychack once decided to bring his own work into the workshop. In the years following, that remained a rare treat, until recently. While struggling with his most recent short story, Lychack decided to turn the tables and send his work to McAndrew for his thoughts.
“It’s something I’ve learned from my mentors,” Lychack said. “It’s nice to feel involved in their creative life as well. So if I keep that separate from my teaching life and my other, then I think I’m doing them a disservice.”
McAndrew’s dedication to writing may well be a way to repay the literary debt he accrued in his early years searching aimlessly for what he wanted to do. Now, other young people with their lives ahead of them will get access to his attention on their work. Not a braggadocious person, McAndrew nonetheless touts the fact that he’s gotten to where he is today from writing every day. He’s taken a break from writing in recent months, in small part because he managed to get the first book load off his shoulders but largely because he and his wife welcomed their first child into the world. Though he has taken some time off some of his teaching obligations to be with his baby, he’s still working with Pitt students and will continue the rest of his teaching and writing work in the future.
“My son is actually taking his class,” Lychack said, “and he’s told the class he’s worked every day on writing for the past ten years, and that’s what it takes.”
