[Dispatch No. 002]
Q&A with Ted McLoof
Meet Ted McLoof, the author behind our newest release, Empty Calories and Male Curiosity: Stories.
Meet Ted McLoof, the author behind our newest release, Empty Calories and Male Curiosity: Stories.
His fiction has appeared in Los Angeles Review, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Minnesota Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus.
He’s been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and his first story collection, Anhedonia, was published in 2022 by Finishing Line Press. Empty Calories and Male Curiosity: Stories is his second collection—a finalist for the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize and a semifinalist for the Wolfson Prose competition before finding its home here at Cosmorama.
We asked him some questions.
Q. What’s the first image or sound that comes to mind when you think about the New Jersey of this book?
A: The opening notes to “Thunder Road.” Springsteen and New Jersey is a cliché, but I can’t help it. Nick Hornby describes those opening notes as mournful but not devoid of all hope, sort of opening with its own closing credits, and that feels like Jersey to me.
Q. Were the characters who arrived on the page totally differently than you expected?
A: More or less. Some of them ended up playing a bigger role than I initially envisioned, but I spend a lot of time thinking of characters before I start writing them, so they guided me more than me guiding them.
Q. Is there a line or moment in the collection you’re secretly proud of, even if no one mentions it?
A: Hopefully people will end up mentioning it, but the entirety of “Elegy for a Sporting Goods Store” I’m proud of if only because it took me forever to write. I started trying to tell a version of that story twenty five years ago, when I worked at the store, and have been trying ever since. It’s the longest I’ve ever taken to write anything so I hope it pays off.
Q. If this book had a soundtrack, what three songs would absolutely be on it?
A: Oh, any three songs from Weezer’s blue album. It’s perfect.
Q. What’s the earliest scene you remember writing for this collection?
A: The first story I wrote was “Cicadas,” because a friend of mine and I challenged each other to write a single-scene story set at a pool. Once the image of a giant empty pool came to me, the story kind of wrote itself.
Q. What’s one extremely 2000s thing you miss?
A : DVDs! Director’s commentaries, deleted scenes, making-of docs; for like a small blip in time, mass audiences became cinephiles and it was so cool. Streaming killed that.
Q. What’s one extremely 2000s thing you definitely don’t miss?
A: Bucket hats. I don’t even get the pleasure of not missing them, though, because they’re back in a big way.
Q. What TV show or movie most captures the vibe of your own teen years?
A: Boyhood is so close to home that I’m wary of even recommending it, because I can’t tell whether it’s universally great or I just relate to it so much. And Freaks and Geeks, which I have zero qualms about recommending.
Q. Do you think the kids in this book are trying to outrun the future, the past, or adulthood itself?
A: Jesus, what a great question. I hope there’s something universal in the way they kind of want all of it and none of it, if you get me. When you’re that age, you’re old enough to know something stinks about adult life but too young to participate or do anything about it.
Q. Is there an image from your own teenage years that sneaks into your writing again and again?
A: I mean, anyone who reads the book will probably notice the ubiquity of cigarettes. My students now are pretty shocked when I tell them our high school had a smoking section for the students. Things changed a lot since the turn of the century.
Q. Where do you actually write? Couch, desk, bar, car, other?
A: Shout out to Espresso Art Café in Tucson, AZ, where I write everything and basically live during the summer.
Q. What’s your go-to writing snack? Drink?
A: Tried to drink, like drink drink, exactly once while writing because I wanted to be Raymond Carver. I found out I cannot. But I reward myself with an Irish coffee after a successful session.
Q. Are you a morning writer or a night writer?
A: I can only write in the summer because of the demands of teaching, so when that time comes, I’ll write any hour of the day I can get my hands on.
Q. Do you listen to music while you write, or do you need total silence?
A: Absolutely music! I don’t know how people write in silence.
Q. What’s something your students would be shocked to learn about you?
A: God, I hope they don’t read this, but they would be shocked at how seldom I follow the rules and guidelines I myself impress upon them. Sorry guys!
Q. What Jersey stereotype are you willing to defend forever?
A: How we drive. My wife, who’s not from Jersey, was once horrified by it but now I think she kind of gets into the road rage when we visit home.
Q. If you could have a drink with any fictional character, who would it be?
Grady Tripp from Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys seems like he’d be a fun time, though he’s not much of a drinker.
Q. What’s the best compliment someone could give you about your writing?
A: I don’t know if this is a compliment per se, but I wrote a story about a kid who gets made fun of for not getting the movie references his friends were making, and an ex-girlfriend said, “Only in your stories is the kid who doesn’t quote movies all the time the nerd.”
Q. What’s a word you overuse in first drafts?
A: Fuck.
Q. What’s something you learned about yourself while writing this collection?
I’m borderline problematically in touch with who I was at sixteen.
Q. How do you hope readers see themselves in these Jersey kids, even if they grew up somewhere else entirely?
Dazed and Confused does this well—it’s set in a specific time and place (Texas in 1976) but it’s also timeless. I hope it doesn’t matter if you grew up in a different time or place, and that as long as you survived the hell that is high school you’ll nod along.
Q. What’s next? What are you writing or avoiding writing right now?
I’ve got half a novel in the works, and a memoir I know I’ll be writing once the summer comes again. Hoping Cosmorama will give them a good home!