IT ALL FELT IMPOSSIBLE: Charles Rammelkamp follows Tom McAllister’s life story as summarized in a sequence of 42 essays
It All Felt Impossible
Tom McAllister
Rose Metal Press, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941628-35-5
$16.95, 184 pages
Subtitled 42 Years in 42 Essays, novelist Tom McAllister’s collection of short essays (McAllister restricted himself to no more than 1,500 words an essay, preferably around 1,000), one for each year of his life so far. He extrapolates from the different incidents and highlights of his growing up in order to reach for more universal truths and commentary. Thus he recounts getting a haircut at the age of eleven, to be like the cool kids – a “mushroom”, they called it in 1993 Philadelphia – and it turns into a meditation on racism. (Racism, white privilege, is a recurring concern throughout, as in the 2014 essay that alludes to the police brutality in Ferguson,MO, that eventuated in the Black Lives Matter movement.)
The forty-two essays start in 1982, the year of the Commodore 64, the year of the Falklands Islands War. (A joke from that time: Why did Argentina invade the Falklands? To impress Jodie Foster, a reference to Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley.) In some ways McCallister’s birth year essay is reminiscent of the start of David Copperfield, which begins, ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…these pages must show.’ Significantly, the essay ends: ‘There’s one more fact here that I have to mention. 1982 is the year LauraBeth, my wife, was born.’ For in many ways this series of essays is about the passage of time, and growing older with, the author’s loved ones.
The book’s title comes from his 2006 essay about a tornado that struck Iowa City, where McCallister was a graduate student for two years at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. It’s in response to the tornado, during which he sheltered in his basement along with four other people in the apartment house. Afterward, they surveyed the devastation and had an impromptu picnic with others. ‘We swelled with the urgency of people living their last night on Earth.’
McCallister expresses the same sense of wonder and gratitude elsewhere, as in the 2000 essay that covers his final year of high school, in which he again rails against the cruel racism that consumes so much of the country, though mostly he expresses his embarrassment and remorse over some of his behavior at that age, which occurred ‘seven months from meeting the woman I would eventually marry.’ Now together nearly a quarter of a century, back then this ‘would have seemed impossible to me.’
Similarly, he concludes his meditation on 2012, whose occasion is his thirtieth birthday and whose theme is death (‘for the first time in my life my mortality felt real’), on the day his niece is born. He is watching LauraBeth participate in a boat race with her co-workers on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The essay ends: ‘I applauded, and I thought: Isn’t it nice to be alive? None of it had ever felt possible, and yet here we are.’
Again, in the 2016 essay which takes place in Acadia National Park, on Cadillac Mountain, the first place in America where you can see the sun rise, where Tom and LauraBeth have come for their wedding anniversary, he again expresses his sense of awe. ‘None of it should be possible. But man, the colors. You’re going to have to take my word for it.’
In this same essay, McCallister expresses his dismay and disgust for the racism and misogyny of his fellow countrymen. He’s encountered some bigots at the B&B where he and LauraBeth are staying, people who believe the various nutty QAnon conspiracies, such as Pizzagate. He is dismayed by these people for whom travel has not made a dent in their attitudes. ‘A lot of people are assholes before they leave town and they’re assholes when they get back. I don’t know what category I fall into, but I swear I’m trying my best.’
Indeed, remorse over past behavior is a recurring theme in It All Felt Impossible, his failures in the face of family and friends. He recounts getting drunk at his brother-in-law’s wedding in 2010 on Sanibel Island, vomiting and disgracing himself, mortifying his wife. His Catholic school education is another source of embarrassing memories. In large part, his misbehavior was youthful rebellion. He writes is his 1996 essay, covering his eighth grade year, ‘At Catholic school, my job was to show up and shut up and fill in the blanks. The whole point is to be mediocre enough not to draw attention to yourself.’
Education is something McCallister is passionate about. His day job for at least the past fifteen years has been teaching writing in college. Currently on the faculty in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden, he thinks about teaching quite a bit. Both the 2007 and 2009 essays consider aspects of pedagogy. While he was a graduate student part of the role was teaching and he observes: ‘In 2007, I would never have believed myself saying this, but I genuinely like these students, with their messiness and their drama and their irresponsibility.’ Much of his description of his own undergraduate days at LaSalle University is of messy drunkenness.
While he laments in his 2009 essay that teaching ‘is a long string of failures interrupted by occasional bursts of blinding clarity’ he also notes that it’s ‘hard to quantify the impact I make by teaching writing.’ But he sums up, ‘I feel guilty about having a job I actually enjoy, one that pays well and offers a sense of fulfillment.’
Throughout the collection, Donald Trump comes in for some withering assessments for his ignorance and his racism. ‘He’s always the college freshman who hasn’t done the homework but thinks he deserves an A just for showing up,’ he writes in the 2011 essay. In the 2017 essay, whose occasion is his and LauraBeth’s tenth wedding anniversary trip to Paris, he expresses his disgust over Trump catering to white supremacists at Charlottesville and his Muslim travel ban. Even as far back as his 1989 essay, about his seventh year of life, largely devoted to childhood games and pastimes, Robocop among them, McCallister notes the outrage of Trump pardoning a Navy SEAL accused of murdering Iraqi teens, making a “hero” out of such a sociopath.
McCallister has a gift of comic description, as when in the 2004 essay he writes, ‘I could tell by his relief pitcher goatee and the Ray-Bans tucked into his shirt pocket’ the man sitting next to him on an airplane was a conservative type who wouldn’t share his values. Or his 2011 description of ‘a handsome young guy with the look of a mid-market meteorologist.’
So what exactly is “It” that feels so impossible? Being alive is the short, comprehensive answer. As he concludes his final essay, 2024: ‘When I say alive, what I mean is I can sense and see my own body, can understand my thoughts, can understand myself as significant to other people who are also alive, like me, and trying to make it all work.’’ In short, It All Felt Impossible is an eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on being alive.
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May 19 2025
It All Felt Impossible
IT ALL FELT IMPOSSIBLE: Charles Rammelkamp follows Tom McAllister’s life story as summarized in a sequence of 42 essays
Subtitled 42 Years in 42 Essays, novelist Tom McAllister’s collection of short essays (McAllister restricted himself to no more than 1,500 words an essay, preferably around 1,000), one for each year of his life so far. He extrapolates from the different incidents and highlights of his growing up in order to reach for more universal truths and commentary. Thus he recounts getting a haircut at the age of eleven, to be like the cool kids – a “mushroom”, they called it in 1993 Philadelphia – and it turns into a meditation on racism. (Racism, white privilege, is a recurring concern throughout, as in the 2014 essay that alludes to the police brutality in Ferguson,MO, that eventuated in the Black Lives Matter movement.)
The forty-two essays start in 1982, the year of the Commodore 64, the year of the Falklands Islands War. (A joke from that time: Why did Argentina invade the Falklands? To impress Jodie Foster, a reference to Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley.) In some ways McCallister’s birth year essay is reminiscent of the start of David Copperfield, which begins, ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…these pages must show.’ Significantly, the essay ends: ‘There’s one more fact here that I have to mention. 1982 is the year LauraBeth, my wife, was born.’ For in many ways this series of essays is about the passage of time, and growing older with, the author’s loved ones.
The book’s title comes from his 2006 essay about a tornado that struck Iowa City, where McCallister was a graduate student for two years at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. It’s in response to the tornado, during which he sheltered in his basement along with four other people in the apartment house. Afterward, they surveyed the devastation and had an impromptu picnic with others. ‘We swelled with the urgency of people living their last night on Earth.’
McCallister expresses the same sense of wonder and gratitude elsewhere, as in the 2000 essay that covers his final year of high school, in which he again rails against the cruel racism that consumes so much of the country, though mostly he expresses his embarrassment and remorse over some of his behavior at that age, which occurred ‘seven months from meeting the woman I would eventually marry.’ Now together nearly a quarter of a century, back then this ‘would have seemed impossible to me.’
Similarly, he concludes his meditation on 2012, whose occasion is his thirtieth birthday and whose theme is death (‘for the first time in my life my mortality felt real’), on the day his niece is born. He is watching LauraBeth participate in a boat race with her co-workers on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The essay ends: ‘I applauded, and I thought: Isn’t it nice to be alive? None of it had ever felt possible, and yet here we are.’
Again, in the 2016 essay which takes place in Acadia National Park, on Cadillac Mountain, the first place in America where you can see the sun rise, where Tom and LauraBeth have come for their wedding anniversary, he again expresses his sense of awe. ‘None of it should be possible. But man, the colors. You’re going to have to take my word for it.’
In this same essay, McCallister expresses his dismay and disgust for the racism and misogyny of his fellow countrymen. He’s encountered some bigots at the B&B where he and LauraBeth are staying, people who believe the various nutty QAnon conspiracies, such as Pizzagate. He is dismayed by these people for whom travel has not made a dent in their attitudes. ‘A lot of people are assholes before they leave town and they’re assholes when they get back. I don’t know what category I fall into, but I swear I’m trying my best.’
Indeed, remorse over past behavior is a recurring theme in It All Felt Impossible, his failures in the face of family and friends. He recounts getting drunk at his brother-in-law’s wedding in 2010 on Sanibel Island, vomiting and disgracing himself, mortifying his wife. His Catholic school education is another source of embarrassing memories. In large part, his misbehavior was youthful rebellion. He writes is his 1996 essay, covering his eighth grade year, ‘At Catholic school, my job was to show up and shut up and fill in the blanks. The whole point is to be mediocre enough not to draw attention to yourself.’
Education is something McCallister is passionate about. His day job for at least the past fifteen years has been teaching writing in college. Currently on the faculty in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden, he thinks about teaching quite a bit. Both the 2007 and 2009 essays consider aspects of pedagogy. While he was a graduate student part of the role was teaching and he observes: ‘In 2007, I would never have believed myself saying this, but I genuinely like these students, with their messiness and their drama and their irresponsibility.’ Much of his description of his own undergraduate days at LaSalle University is of messy drunkenness.
While he laments in his 2009 essay that teaching ‘is a long string of failures interrupted by occasional bursts of blinding clarity’ he also notes that it’s ‘hard to quantify the impact I make by teaching writing.’ But he sums up, ‘I feel guilty about having a job I actually enjoy, one that pays well and offers a sense of fulfillment.’
Throughout the collection, Donald Trump comes in for some withering assessments for his ignorance and his racism. ‘He’s always the college freshman who hasn’t done the homework but thinks he deserves an A just for showing up,’ he writes in the 2011 essay. In the 2017 essay, whose occasion is his and LauraBeth’s tenth wedding anniversary trip to Paris, he expresses his disgust over Trump catering to white supremacists at Charlottesville and his Muslim travel ban. Even as far back as his 1989 essay, about his seventh year of life, largely devoted to childhood games and pastimes, Robocop among them, McCallister notes the outrage of Trump pardoning a Navy SEAL accused of murdering Iraqi teens, making a “hero” out of such a sociopath.
McCallister has a gift of comic description, as when in the 2004 essay he writes, ‘I could tell by his relief pitcher goatee and the Ray-Bans tucked into his shirt pocket’ the man sitting next to him on an airplane was a conservative type who wouldn’t share his values. Or his 2011 description of ‘a handsome young guy with the look of a mid-market meteorologist.’
So what exactly is “It” that feels so impossible? Being alive is the short, comprehensive answer. As he concludes his final essay, 2024: ‘When I say alive, what I mean is I can sense and see my own body, can understand my thoughts, can understand myself as significant to other people who are also alive, like me, and trying to make it all work.’’ In short, It All Felt Impossible is an eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on being alive.
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