Arm Wrestling Tucson Writer Ted McLoof
A conversation with short story writer and Tucsonan Ted McLoof, whose new book comes out today!
Today’s note is a bit of a departure from official Essay Club business in introducing you to Tucson writer Ted McLoof, whose new book of stories Empty Calories and Male Curiosity comes out from Cosmorama this very day. Buy it here or from your favorite local bookstore (cough cough Antigone).
He also wrote an essay for the Essay Daily Advent Calendar about his abiding love for the television show The O.C., which went up this morning.
To celebrate his book release we thought we’d ask him a few questions on behalf of Tucson Essay Club. Look out for an event in Feb at Espresso Art Cafe in Main Gate Square.
Ander Monson: You note in your bio that while you teach and live in Tucson, you “always will be deeply from New Jersey.” I consider myself deeply from Michigan, myself, though I feel an increasing pull towards our shared weird desert city and honestly not a great deal of desire to live in Michigan at this point in my life. Like I can feel just fine living here and being from there, and keeping the tether in place. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to being from Tucson, and I’m not sure what that would mean. I think after the Giffords shooting I felt more from here than I did before, though, so maybe going through something in a place gets at what it means to feel like you’re from that place? I’m wondering for you what does it mean to be from somewhere but not to live or be there? Is it a kind of overlapping from/am? Are you in both places at once sometimes?
Ted McLoof: Maybe there’s a third preposition, being of that place, that works better. I’ve been in Tucson for 17 years now so I get what you mean and I do feel there are parts of it that feel like home to me. But there’s a sensibility in the Southwest that’s almost antithetical to that of the Northeast that I appreciate but definitely don’t feel, and haven’t adopted. And it’s not like I resist adopting it; the Northeast, the tri-state area, New Jersey, is just in my blood. So maybe that’s the difference–when you’re from a place you don’t ever shake it, and even if you want to, you stop trying after a while because it’s futile.
Not to generalize, but I still to this day want to order food and have the line move fast, I still drive like I’m at war with everyone on the road, I still talk with my hands, I still have zero tolerance for bullshit, I still swear constantly, and I’m still impolite-but-friendly, that very Jersey thing of telling someone to fuck themselves and then buying them a drink.
Ander: Plus these stories draw a lot of power from place. I mean the first story, Forever Town, is set (I think) in a real place (NJ), and really leans into the tensions of being from a place and being trapped in a place and being in a place that’s finally (if annoyingly) getting noticed by the rest of the world. How do you think about place in this story or in your stories writ large? Is a place in a story ever a real place? Is it necessarily some combination of fictional and real? What does place do for a story?
Ted: I don’t know that stories always have to emphasize place; my first book is mostly a Tucson book, but I don’t know that anyone would pick that up quite as much as this one’s association with Jersey. I’ll say that when my stories do emphasize place, they put place in conversation with the characters and the plot. The characters in this book are stuck in teenage years and adolescence, when you’re old enough to see adulthood but can’t yet participate in it, when you’re not a kid anymore but not grown up either. The New Jersey of this book is Midland Park, a poor town in a rich county, and a stone’s throw away from Manhattan, so it’s also neither one thing nor the other, it’s also within view of greener grass but not quite touching it. If that makes sense.
Ander: It does! So this is Tucson Essay Club you’re talking to here, and these aren’t essays but stories, but you do write essays sometimes (one just went up by the time this posts on the Essay Daily Advent Calendar). For you what makes an essay different from a story? Are there ever patches of overlap that you find yourself in?
Ted: I don’t want to act like I know what I’m talking about in nonfictionland, this being Tucson Essay Club, but for me at least an essay starts from a place of theme or thesis, whereas stories are driven by narrative. Of course there are narrative essays and there’s autofiction or whatever, but for me it’s about where that idea starts, not the end product. There’s a story in the book (“Elegy for a Sporting Goods Store”) about an after-school job I once had, and I put off fictionalizing it for years because the ideas I had for it were thematic, essayistic ones: the death of mom and pop stores, the rise of the internet, the unusual Lost Boys quality of all of us who worked there, stuff like that. So the narrator-as-protagonist wasn’t much of a protagonist, he was just telling us a bunch of stuff. It wasn’t until I realized the protagonist was the guy who owned the store, not one of the employees, a guy who actually had an arc and a plight and a superobjective, that I finally got it out.
Ander: Even being not from here, you are and have been for quite a while a big part of Tucson’s literary scene. I’m thinking here of a lot of the community building work you do for UA undergraduates in particular at the moment. What does the Tucson literary scene feel like to you, then or now? Are there any literary spots you value particularly and want to shout out to our readers?
Ted: Thanks for putting it like that: I do think it’s particularly important for undergrads to have a real community because being a writer can so easily make you feel like a lonely weirdo. As you certainly know, there’s a gap between the Then and the Now of Tucson; I truly miss Casa Libre, which was just the perfect little venue for the MFA students’ bimonthly WIP readings, and I’ll forever mourn the loss of Plush, which generously let any and all of us weirdos stage our readings. But we still have great spaces. Casa Video has been really generous with their space, and Antigone is the best place in town to buy books, I think. But biggest shout out has to go to Espresso Art Cafe, who are a block away from campus and have made it their mission to be a home for artists of any stripe—poets, authors, essayists, musicians, whoever—to come share what they’ve created.
Ander: Last question for you: do you want to shout out any Tucson writers that mean or have meant a lot to you, now or in the past, or their work that helped you understand Tucson or what it means to make a life in the desert or in the West?
Ted: The faculty in the CW program over the years. You (Ander) have been an unbelievable support system, and a great model for how to blur the lines between story and essay you were talking about before. Manuel Muñoz was my mentor in grad school and remains so to this day. I still use Buzz Poverman’s craft techniques in my own writing and relay them to my students. Aurelie, of course, a phenomenal Southwest writer and a great friend.
I know that answer doesn’t really address the making-a-life-in-the-desert-or-West thing, but to bring it all full circle, I live in the West but am both from and of the East Coast, and other than my wife, no writer, no matter how powerful, can arm wrestle that out of me.
Ted’s got a whole bunch of upcoming book events to mention, both on the East coast and in Arizona, but the one for locals to look out for is a February 2026 reading at Espresso Art Cafe in Tucson.
12/19 at Bob and Barbara’s in Philadelphia, PA
12/22 at Bourbon and Branch, Philadelphia, PA
12/23 Tattooed Mom, Philadelphia, PA
February ‘26, Espresso Art Cafe, Tucson, AZ
3/5 at Vinyl and Pages, Baltimore, MD
3/6 at Pete’s Pour House, Baltimore, MD
Match ‘26 at Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ
April ‘26 NOAZ Book Festival, Flagstaff, AZ
Catch you all after the holiday! Our next event is Work Talks 1/2/26. More details to come your way in the next week or two on that.
Ander