Allyson McOuat's Essays Conjure Haunts and Ward Them Off in The Call is Coming From Inside the House

Allyson McOuat turned heads back in 2020 when her fabulous essay, The Ghost Was the Least of Our Problems, was published in The New York Times. With a signature mix of intimacy, humour, and haunting images, her writing grabbed readers immediately.

Her debut essay collection The Call is Coming from Inside the House (ECW Press) builds upon the reputation that McOuat established with her breakthrough non-fiction, exploring what it means to be a mother and queer femme woman, and using life experience, urban legends, horror tropes, and other devices to uncover what has made the author who she is. McOuat's deft touch guides the reader through the hilarious and spine-chilling, and dispels the haunt of a heteronormative, nuclear family structure.

Join us today in conjuring up the ghosts and warding them away with these brilliant essays, and check out our fascinating True Story Non-Fiction interview with the author below:

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book and how it came to be. What made you passionate about the subject matter you're exploring?

Allyson McOuat:

The Call is Coming From Inside The House is a series of essays structured around common tropes in horror such as The Babysitter, The Coven, The Harbinger and The Haunted House. Each essay interweaves film analysis with personal stories from my GenX life where I aligned with the trope and perhaps held-up societal constructs that were bad for me as a Queer woman. Where in my life did my own inner misogyny get the better of me? My own desire for a heteronormative life. We are so quick to point fingers and over simplify the villain/victim, but things are complicated. We are sometimes both depending on which way the camera is pointed. 

OB:

Is there a question that is central to your book? And if so, is it the same question you were thinking about when you started writing or did it change during the writing process?

AM:

The Call is Coming From Inside The House is about a lot of things but across almost all I examine how problematic systemic beliefs that I absorbed through societal expectations in my youth led me to perpetuate them or prop them up to the determinant of myself and others. It seemed fitting when so much of the 80’s was puritanical people screaming about how the music, movies and video games of the time were going to be our doom. Ultimately, it was the times that I upheld those puritanical beliefs that pulled me off course to who I was really inside me. 

OB:

What was your research process like for this book?

AM:

Did you encounter anything unexpected while you were researching? Rewatching some of the movies I analyzed in the book was often surprising. It goes without saying that many films from the 80’s and 90’s haven’t aged as well as some of the stars of the same movies have. But in other cases I found I loved them now in a way I couldn’t appreciate then. I viscerally did not like the Blair Witch Project when it came out and for decades after. But I feel differently now after examining it from the perspective of female leadership in action. It was fascinating how boldly feminist it is as a film, I hadn’t really considered that. 

OB:

What do you love about writing nonfiction? What are some of the strengths of the genre, in your opinion?   

AM:

Do you have an opinion on how the word nonfiction is set – i.e. with or without a hyphen? I believe they say the correct way is sans hyphen. But I love hyphens. At the end of the day, I don’t care a whit. Being overly strict around language seems like the lowest bar of gatekeeping to me. Canada is so beautifully multi-lingual and our way of communicating has changed so drastically through generations and with the advent of social media, that strict grammar rules mean less and less. I don’t care how meticulously the message is delivered, only that I receive it. When you make people feel nervous to write because of their punctuation, you silence them. And who is nervous about poor grammar? New Canadians, people with learning disabilities, the neurodiverse and those without education. Marginalized communities. So call it whatever you want. It’s ok with me. 

OB:

What do you need in order to write – in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?

AM:

I don’t like sitting in a desk chair and writing - that’s awful. My legs and my brain fall asleep immediately. I need to curl up on something soft. So ideally, a comfy couch and a laptop. But I’m also a copywriter so I am always writing. I have learned how to write on my phone in the notes app in the Dr’s waiting room or parked waiting for kids to finish school. I can write in a box, with a fox, wearing socks.

OB:

A lot of nonfiction prizes and anthologies have expanded to welcome more personal nonfiction as well as strictly research-based nonfiction. What do you think of this shift within the genre?

AM:

What does the term creative nonfiction mean to you? The creative part of Creative Non Fiction to me is the exciting part. My book opens with a simple story about the night my friend and I got chased by a coyote-wolf. The facts of the story are the facts. We walked my dog to the park. Our legs got tangled up in the leash when my dog lunged at something that turned out to be a coyote wolf stalking us. It followed us out of the park and chased us until we got to the door and then it walked away. It’s decently exciting as is, but I’m obsessed with the ‘how’. How do I tell that story? Where do I start it? Where do I end it? What kind of thematic imagery are we going to use? What can this moment in time tell us about the universal experience? 

OB:

What do you do if you're feeling discouraged during the writing process? Do you have a method of coping with the difficult points in your projects?

AM:

I write all day every day - I’m a copywriter for work and I write digital media content. And I’m a grant writer too. So I know what it means to make sure you get the salient points in and how to make them shine. And that just because you like a turn of phrase doesn’t mean this is the right project to use it for. So if something isn’t working I simply start again. I make a list of the important points that I want to make on the page. And then I build out one sentence, and then another and then I connect them until things start to flow.  

OB:

Do you remember the first moment you began to consider writing this book? Was there an inciting incident that kicked off the process for you? 

AM:

After I was told that I was going to be published in the New York Times in 2020, I was advised to have a plan ready for what I would like to write next. That was easy. I had a computer full of essays all ready to go. What was harder was deciding what message I wanted to give with my writing. Having a voice is not something to take for granted. I wanted to use this opportunity for good. Pia Singhal, my editor, was instrumental in encouraging me to lean into the more academic elements and analysis and it was entirely the missing element. 

OB:

Did you write this book in the order it appears for readers? If not, how did it come together during the writing process?

AM:

The essays are non-chronological so you can pick up The Call, read an essay for 15-min before bed, and pick up another essay next week or next month. My editor Pia Singhal and I had several discussions about this aspect of the book. We bounced around with a more chronological order for a time. You know, I helped three friends pick out wedding gowns and each one of them ended up picking out the first dress they tried on. Similarly, the order of essays found their way back to where we started. Sometimes you have to trust your instincts. 

OB:

What defines a great work of nonfiction, in your opinion? Tell us about one or two books you consider to be truly great books.

AM:

I had the privilege of growing up around a lot of the classics in a big home library including the diaries of Anais Nin. She regularly watered my budding, romantic teenage soul. She said something like “the writer writes the words we are unable to say”. I think that’s what I love about essay writing, memoir, journals and the like - the bravery to write the words we can’t say out loud. That’s why it’s often the medium of choice for marginalized communities. A place for the voices of persons of colour, members of the queer community, feminists, radicals. People who want to be heard but don’t have the platform. It starts with diaries and it becomes something positively punk and transformative to communities when we share our intimate thoughts in this way.   

OB:

What are you working on now?  

AM:

I have a new book of essays in the same vein as The Call, a little more lighthearted, a domestic memoir a la Irma Bombek and Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons that I’m tentatively calling Back Off Get Your Own Sandwich.  It looks at the role of caregivers in film and literature, from Kathy Bates to Kitty Foreman. The book is in 3 sections - Parenting, Caregiving (for Seniors), and a comically small section in the middle about my own self-development. 

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Allyson McOuat (she/her) is a queer writer from Toronto who has been published in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Broadview Magazine, and Plenitude Magazine. McOuat’s Modern Love essay was adapted for television by Modern Love Amsterdam on Amazon Prime. She is a mom of two amazing daughters.