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WORK TITLE: Minor Outsider
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://www.tedmcdermott.com/
CITY: Butte
STATE: MT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb2017010581
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3613.C386944
Personal name heading:
McDermott, Ted, 1982-
Associated country:
United States
Located: Montana South Carolina
Birth date: 1982
Field of activity: Suspense fiction Romance fiction Baking
Found in: The minor outsider, 2016: t.p. (Ted McDermott) back cover
(born 1982; grew up in South Carolina and lives in
Montana; he has worked as a cook, baker and college
teacher; writer of suspense/romance fiction)
Associated language:
eng
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1982; married; wife’s name Shawn; children: Mae.
EDUCATION:Graduated from the University of Michigan, 2004; University of Montana-Missoula, M.F.A., 2009.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has worked as been a college instructor, an encyclopedist, a reporter, a baker, a mover, and a cook.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and Websites, including VICE, the Believer, Portland Review, and the Minus Times.
SIDELIGHTS
After earning his master’s degree in creative writing, Tom McDermott started working as a baker. He was writing in his off hours and working to get an already-completed manuscript published. Then he crushed his hand at work, which led to several surgeries and an existential crisis. McDermott’s first manuscript wasn’t accepted anywhere, and he had to start back at square one. He took a job as a reporter and then started what would become his debut novel, The Minor Outsider. As McDermott noted in a Montana Standard Online interview with Susan Dunlap, “it was the first thing ever that I wrote purely out of personal motivation . . . I was trying to be a writer and that wasn’t working. Feeling desperate after I crushed my hand, I thought about what should I write and then why should I write.” In a second interview, this time with Montana Public Radio Website correspondent Sarah Aronson, McDermott commented: “I wrote the book kind of gradually as a series of short stories., it took me probably three years to write it. I didn’t know I was writing it for most of that. I just started writing short stories that were semi-autobiographical and they started to kind of come together in a strange way. So then I put them together.”
The Minor Outsider follows Ed, a Chicago-based editor who quits his job to get his master’s degree in creative writing. Ed heads to the University of Montana, Missoula. Ed’s brain tumor may have prompted his impulsive and sudden career change, but Ed refuses to acknowledge the time-bomb quietly ticking away inside his head. Ed approaches his life with a deadpan detachment, but then he meets Taylor and falls madly in love. Taylor, is also in the creative writing program at Missoula, and the couple moves in together quickly. Complications immediately ensue, and the couple decides to make a last-ditch effort to salvage their relationship with stunning results.
Reviews of The Minor Outsider were largely positive, and a Publishers Weekly critic praised “McDermott’s droll observations and unique prose.” The critic then went on to advise: “This is a surprising, smart, and memorable novel.” John Sunyer, writing in the Financial Times Online, was also positive, and he found that “McDermott is sharp on the indulgences of the creative set and, above all, portraying the life of many young men—drifting, hard to reach, doomed to try to make sense of a world that resists all explanation and interpretation.” On the other hand, a Nudge Website contributor stated: “I felt the ending was disappointing. The author leaves things very open to the imagination, hinting of what may happen rather than actually going ahead with it.” Guardian Online columnist James Smart offered both pros and cons, and he remarked that “the self-absorbed and evasive Ed isn’t the most sympathetic of narrators, but he anchors a hip, touching and thoroughly readable story.” A far more laudatory assessment was proffered by Mara Panich-Crouch in the Missoulian Online, and she declared that, “with The Minor Outsider, McDermott has written a novel that is raw, yet refined. The characters are full of contradictions, absurdities, cynicism and affection. While flawed, the characters are relatable and engaging. Their stories and experiences drive the plot with a simple ease.” According to Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times Online, “McDermott’s novel is . . . impressive, focusing on life’s contradictions and absurdities, with its title a nod to Camus’s absurdist masterpiece.” Gilmartin then added that “Ed’s ability to pinpoint his own plight and that of those around him makes the novel sing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of The Minor Outsider.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (May 27, 2016), John Sunyer, review of The Minor Outsider.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 22, 2016), James Smart, review of The Minor Outsider.
Irish Times Online https://www.irishtimes.com/ (January 30, 2018), Sarah Gilmartin, review of The Minor Outsider.
Missoulian Online, http://missoulian.com/ (June 24, 2017), Mara Panich-Crouch, review of The Minor Outsider
Montana Public Radio Website, http://mtpr.org/ (January 30, 2018), Sarah Aronson, author interview.
Montana Standard Online, http://mtstandard.com/ (January 30, 2018), Susan Dunlap, author interview.
Nudge, https://nudge-book.com/ (October 30, 2016), review of The Minor Outsider.
Ted McDermott Website, http://www.tedmcdermott.com (January 30, 2018).
Ted McDermott's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in VICE, The Believer, The Portland Review, The Minus Times, and elsewhere. In 2009, he was nominated for the Essay Prize. He has been a baker, a mover, a cook, a college instructor, an encyclopedist, and a reporter. He lives in Butte, Montana. The Minor Outsider is his first novel.
A crushed hand, existential crisis lead novelist Ted McDermott to writing debut novel
Susan Dunlap susan.dunlap@mtstandard.com Jun 21, 2017 0
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“Existential crisis” is a phrase novelist Ted McDermott understands the meaning of all too well.
It began when he got his hand crushed in a mixer at a bakery — at a job he took after graduate school to pay the bills. He broke 12 bones and had to have three surgeries.
That put an end to his work in a bread store.
“I was in a weird place,” McDermott said over coffee at his home on Mercury Street in Butte earlier this week.
“Dozens of rejections” from prospective publishers plus feeling that his personal life had stalled after graduating from the University of Montana-Missoula’s Master of Fine Arts’ fiction-writing program in 2009 led McDermott to rethink his life after the accident with the mixer.
Disheartened, McDermott felt like giving up on writing fiction.
He started working as a full-time reporter for The Missoula Independent thinking it was time to pursue journalism and let go of the dream he’d had since high school of writing a novel. But in his despair, he began to write in his spare time about the mundane things going on in his life.
Something began to click.
“It was the first thing ever that I wrote purely out of personal motivation,” McDermott said. “I was trying to be a writer and that wasn’t working. Feeling desperate after I crushed my hand, I thought about what should I write and then why should I write.”
Questioning the foundation of what he wanted to do and why, he began to find his literary voice. McDermott decided that he would write only for himself. Doing so, he reasoned, would make him a better observer of his own life.
The result is his novel, “The Minor Outsider,” set to make its literary debut in the U.S. next Tuesday. Published in the U.K. last year by a U.K. publisher, Pushkin Press, the book has already received positive reviews.
The London-based newspaper, The Guardian, called the novel, “ … a hip, touching and thoroughly readable story that presents young adulthood as a frustrating, alien place.”
The novel tells the story of a young man who lands at the University of Montana-Missoula’s MFA fiction-writing program. The protagonist, Ed, falls in love with a fellow fiction writer, named Taylor. She becomes pregnant as he learns he has a terrifying brain tumor. “The Minor Outsider” is darkly comic. With Missoula’s mountains for a backdrop, the reader watches Ed make several unwise choices as he navigates his terror of the fatal illness and his love for his growing family.
Even as McDermott enjoys his newfound success from his home in Butte, he can laugh over how he got to this point. A misunderstanding caught the attention of an editor at Pushkin Press. McDermott thought she had looked at his Linked-In account, an online employment-oriented social networking service. She hadn’t, but it launched an online discussion between the two —and of his work.
And then, even as getting his novel published last year in the U.K. was the fulfillment of a life-long dream, McDermott was still in a “weird place.” He had a published novel, but it couldn’t be found in U.S. bookstores.
That's changed, too.
Now 34, the novelist is a family man with something concrete — a novel that will be in U.S. bookstores starting next week. He also has a full-time job, working remotely as an editor for a Missoula-based academic publisher.
Though McDermott is new to Butte — he and his wife Shawn arrived earlier this year — he has tapped into deep southwest Montana roots. Shawn’s family, the Haggertys, homesteaded at Birch Creek near Dillon in the 1800s before moving to Butte. Shawn’s grandfather, Mike Haggerty, worked briefly in the underground mines before becoming co-owner of a painting business. Shawn and Ted’s 1-year-old daughter, Mae, will grow up as a sixth-generation Butte resident.
The McDermotts moved here to be closer to Shawn’s family, and because, he said, he prefers Butte.
Already the South Carolina native has begun to put down literary roots — in his spare time, he is busy writing his second novel, which is set in the Mining City.
McDermott says he mostly feels grateful that things have worked out as they have for him.
“I only got published by a real stroke of luck. I’m very lucky.”
Ted McDermott was born in 1982 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2004 and received his MFA from the University of Montana in 2011. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in VICE, The Believer, The Portland Review, The Minus Times, and elsewhere. In 2009, he was nominated for the Essay Prize. He has been a baker, a mover, an encyclopedist, and a reporter. After six years in Missoula, Montana, McDermott recently moved to Philadelphia with his wife. The Minor Outsider is his first novel.
Fiction And Autobiography Collide In 'The Minor Outsider'
By Sarah Aronson • Oct 11, 2017
The Write Question
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Fiction And Autobiography Collide In 'The Minor Outsider'
"There is a Russian-roulette effect to the storytelling that will keep readers turning the page ... impressive, focusing on life's contradictions and absurdities." -- Irish Times
The Minor Outsider
Credit One/ Pushkin
The following are highlights from the conversation with Ted McDermott. For the full conversation, click the audio link above or subscribe to our podcast.
Sarah Aronson: Do you think there’s a way writers mask their authenticity with their words?
Ted McDermott: Well, I think that there’s a lot of fiction out there that is just not autobiographical in any way, and I think that’s great, but for me, I’m more interested in writing that is fiction and that connects to reality in ways that are both direct and really fraught and messy. I just am kind of drawn to that. So I guess I would say that writers don’t really hide behind their words so much as that they use language to turn life into something that is manipulable and examinable and something that they can hold in their hands ...
How long did it take for you to write the book?
I wrote the book kind of gradually as a series of short stories. I wrote it because I had recently finished this writing program at the University of Montana and I had another book that I had written that I tried to get published and had kind of a bad experience with that, anyway, it took me probably three years to write it. I didn’t know I was writing it for most of that. I just started writing short stories that were semi-autobiographical and they started to kind of come together in a strange way. So then I put them together.
What was it like to find a publisher?
It was a very strange and coincidental experience. The book was excerpted in Vice magazine, which came about somewhat strangely too. But then I thought that would help me find somebody to publish the book and I sent it around to a bunch of agents and did all that stuff and nobody wanted it. Nobody was interested in it. Then about a year later—I have, like everyone, a LinkedIn profile that I don’t use, but that just exists in the internet and one day I got a notification from them that said this editor in England looked at your LinkedIn profile. I was just desperate enough to write to that editor a funny and self-deprecating email that said “I’m sure I seem desperate because I probably am, but I hope that maybe you saw this excerpt in Vice magazine and you’re interested and that’s why you looked at my profile.” And she wrote back and said, “I have no idea who you are, I don’t remember even clicking on your profile, but I just read your excerpt and it’s great, so send me the rest of your book.” And then they decided to buy it and publish it. Then it came out in England, which was weird.
Right! That’s what I want to know. What’s it like to have the book come out in the United Kingdom and not America first?
Well, yeah, I’ve never even set foot in the United Kingdom so it’s kind of like it came out on the moon. It didn’t feel real in a lot of ways. It was great and I feel extremely fortunate that this book got published at all, and it got some nice reviews and things like that, but I never had that experience of walking in a bookstore and seeing it. A lot of my friends were not able to buy it. Now that it’s coming out in the US . . . really the best part is just that people I know or like or have been friends with can read it and talk to me about it.
About the Book:
Ed and Taylor, both aspiring young writers, fall in love during a summer of aimless drinking and partying in their university town of Missoula, Montana. Lonely and looking for love, they connect despite their profound differences: Ed is brooding, ambitious and self-destructive, living in denial of a mysterious tumour spreading from his limbs to his brain. Beautiful Taylor is positive, full of hope and emotional generosity, but like everyone, she has her limits. Their difficult relationship is intense, exciting yet doomed from the start, complicated further when Taylor falls pregnant. As Ed resists the harmony she brings to his life, Taylor's need to protect herself and their child also grows, until a dramatic finale.
Ted McDermott's stark book speaks truthfully and with a touch of dark humor for and to today's generation of young people trying to find hope in what feels to many like an existential void. The Minor Outsider will be read as the young literary voice of our dark times.
Ted McDermott
Credit Michelle Gustafson
About the Author:
Ted McDermott was born in Delaware in 1982, grew up in South Carolina. He has worked as a cook, a mover, a baker, a college instructor, an encyclopedist and a reporter for an alternative weekly. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in VICE, Believer, Portland Review, Minus Times and elsewhere. In 2009, he was nominated for The Essay Prize. The Minor Outsider is his first novel.
The Minor Outsider
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Minor Outsider
Ted McDermott. One, $16 (224p) ISBN 978-0-9929182-7-9
Twenty-eight-year-old Ed has left his job as an editor in Chicago to pursue a master's degree in creative writing in picturesque Missoula, at the University of Montana. Also, Ed has a brain tumor, which he alternately obsesses over and ignores: "The tumor was like the millions of children starving in Africa: too alarming to think about." The connection between the tumor and the career decision seems clear but is not explicitly stated, which is part of the deadpan appeal of McDermott's darkly funny novel. McDermott's seemingly disaffected prose is not just a comic technique; it shrewdly reflects Ed's mental state, his coping mechanisms. "It was February and weirdly warm and it rained and he walked across the rectangle of pavement labeled Physicians Parking Lot." Ed falls hard for Taylor, a beautiful young classmate, and it's a particularly dysfunctional relationship. The couple drifts into cohabitation, with predictably awkward results. Might a change of scene brighten their relationship? One can plausibly see Ed's malaise as emblematic of the current age, or just relish McDermott's droll observations and unique prose. This is a surprising, smart, and memorable novel. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Minor Outsider." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff525535. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250779
Review: 'The Minor Outsider' accurately captures college-age malaise in Missoula
MARA PANICH-CROUCH for the Missoulian Jun 24, 2017
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They say a writer is supposed to write what they know. Ted McDermott certainly knows what it is like to be a creative writing graduate student in Missoula. His debut novel, “The Minor Outsider,” explores the broad questions of young adulthood. It is a novel that slowly draws in the reader. McDermott looks at questions of youth, love and mortality in a particularly nuanced manner.
The novel is set in Missoula and place is surprisingly well described. Missoula is familiar. As it reads, people who know the town will recognize places without too much consideration. But, unlike experiences with other novels written in places that are known to the reader, McDermott presents Missoula well and honestly, without the feeling of trying too hard to make it a “Missoula novel.” Missoula, as represented in “The Minor Outsider,” is distinctly itself, while it also could be any other small college town in the West. Bars and mountains, bakeries and college apartments will be as familiar to someone who doesn’t know Missoula. Missoulians simply will be able to imagine the exact location McDermott is describing.
The story centers around Ed, the narrator, and his group of cohorts in the creative writing graduate program at the University of Montana. They are typical young adult creative types. We rarely experience them doing actual writing. This is a story more about young adulthood as a tender, yet frustrating experience, rather than a story about writing and writers themselves.
Ed is fatalistic and self-absorbed, in a way that is common amongst his set. He judges his cohorts, his friends, but recognizes that they are also judging him back. Somehow, through his many faults and negative personality traits, we are sympathetic to him. This sympathy is encouraged as the reader finds that Ed has a possibly cancerous lump on his arm, something he is unsuccessfully attempting to ignore but is sure will be the death of him.
Ed falls quickly in amour with a first-year student, Taylor. She is another complex character who, on the outside, looks like the girl next door. We soon discover that she has a much more complex history, including a childhood in a failed commune and slightly outlandish stories about her life that makes the reader question her reliability as a witness. When Taylor becomes pregnant and Ed acquiesces to go to the doctor about the lump in his arm, the story shifts from the seemingly trivial drama of young adults to much more concrete life problems. This juxtaposition is what makes this novel more than another fatalistic anecdote about hip young adults.
With “The Minor Outsider,” McDermott has written a novel that is raw, yet refined. The characters are full of contradictions, absurdities, cynicism and affection. While flawed, the characters are relatable and engaging. Their stories and experiences drive the plot with a simple ease. He has written a story that many readers will know, or at the very least, be familiar with. Essentially, McDermott has successfully captured a glimpse of what it is like to be a young, privileged, creative type in small-town America.
The Minor Outsider by Ted McDermott review – love and mortality
A hip, touching and thoroughly readable novel about a group of creative writing students in small-town America
James Smart
Fri 22 Apr 2016 11.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 05.45 EST
A cafe bar in Missoula, Montana
McDermott’s dark debut is set among a group of creative writing students in Montana, Missoula. Not that they seem to do much actual writing – protagonist Ed, who is working on a novel about homelessness narrated by an imprisoned paedophile, gets no further than tweaking his “false and tame” draft.
Ed’s boozy and listless life is given a structure of sorts when he falls in love with a small and hearteningly genuine young woman called Taylor. She persuades him to get a long-neglected lump on his arm checked out, and Ed is soon facing big questions about love and mortality that he seems utterly unable to answer.
McDermott writes about academia and small-town America with an enjoyable mix of cynicism and affection, while his account of Ed’s tumour – which is subjected to a battery of baffling tests and several not particularly helpful diagnoses – is both grim and comic. The self-absorbed and evasive Ed isn’t the most sympathetic of narrators, but he anchors a hip, touching and thoroughly readable story that presents young adulthood as a frustrating, alien place.
The Minor Outsider’, by Ted McDermott
Anxious millennials face up to adulthood in this debut novel
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Review by John Sunyer
May 27, 2016
No one’s life can be perfect,” a character thinks more than once in The Minor Outsider, Ted McDermott’s debut novel, which started out as a short story published online. For this group of creative writing students in Missoula, Montana, life seems more of an anecdote — one that’s sometimes funny and sometimes prompts faint stirrings of self-knowledge, but is always coloured by bafflement and regret.
The set-up is simple. Ed, 29, is trying to write a novel but gets no further than tweaking his “false and tame” draft. Instead he spends most of his time ingesting large quantities of booze and marijuana, getting “not too high. Just high enough to make everything a little less like it was.”
Adulthood is a strange, wearisome place. But Ed’s life is given some structure when he falls for Taylor, who is beautiful, smart and also an aspiring writer in her twenties. She persuades him to get a long-ignored lump on his arm checked out, and Ed is soon facing big questions about love and mortality. (Of course, it turns out that he is completely incompetent to answer them.)
McDermott’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in all sorts of hipster publications, so maybe it isn’t surprising that The Minor Outsider has been dubbed “a love story for the Vice generation”. And like many thirtysomething contemporary novelists, McDermott portrays his protagonist as a particular type of young man: one who is well-educated and with all the advantages in life, but who prolongs his youth from his teens into his twenties, evading conventional professional responsibilities and delaying personal ones.
Nothing much happens but the novel hurtles along, with Ed’s infidelity bringing further chaos to his situation. McDermott writes about the academic world and small-town America with an enjoyable mix of suspicion and fondness. His clean, unshowy sentences move easily between the diction of casual speech and a more distanced tone, and hold the reader’s attention even when there isn’t much going on, relying on assured storytelling rather than busy plotting.
All this means that the book goes down smoothly enough. While the novel has love at its heart, it is not only a love story. McDermott is sharp on the indulgences of the creative set and, above all, portraying the life of many young men — drifting, hard to reach, doomed to try to make sense of a world that resists all explanation and interpretation.
The Minor Outsider, by Ted McDermott, One, RRP£9.99, 224 pages
The Minor Outsider by Ted McDermott
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Review published on October 30, 2016.
The premise of The Minor Outsider sounded like an interesting one, it being a story about two writers who meet and fall in love against a Montana backdrop. However, for me, it failed to live up to the hype.
The story is told from the perspective of Ed and we follow his experiences of meeting Taylor and how their relationship unfolds. There is the added complication of Ed’s tumour, which is spreading throughout his body. For me, Ed wasn’t a particularly likeable character. He seemed quite negative and very selfish. There was something very immature about him. I understand he may have had trouble dealing with the notion of his mortality, but I felt that he was simply in denial and it was frustrating to read about it.
There were a number of sex scenes and much like the moments they were describing, they were awkward and not very satisfying.
I did enjoy the descriptions of the Montana scenery and I wish there had been more of that throughout.
I felt the ending was disappointing. The author leaves things very open to the imagination, hinting of what may happen rather than actually going ahead with it. I felt it would have been more powerful to commit to it fully and write about it, however sad that may be.
This is the debut novel by this author and while I would not totally rule out reading another of his works, I’m not desperate to read more.
Tracy M 2/2
The Minor Outsider by Ted McDermott
One 9780992918279 pbk Apr 2016