In My Prisoner and Other Stories, Tyler McAndrew explores America’s broke and broken

Anyone looking for the “real America” is more likely to find it in scrubby backyards, litter-strewn parks, and inner-city blocks than Times Square or the National Mall. It’s a world of short sentences and tall tales, conspiracy theories, triple-dog-dares, and letters from jail; a world of train whistles and bungled crimes and latchkey kids and unavoidable neighbors — in short, a world familiar to many Pittsburghers.

Tyler McAndrew explores these facets of working-class life in his new collection, My Prisoner and Other Stories. The entries in My Prisoner — slated for release on Thu., Sept. 4 through Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press — range from shorter tableaux to longer explorations, each presenting a vision of everyday life, alternately healing or fracturing. Many of them take place in and around fictionalized versions of the Steel City or against similar Rust Belt backdrops.

McAndrew completed an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh, where he now teaches as well as at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12. “Pittsburgh kind of quickly became one of my cornerstones in terms of settings in my writing just because I was such a young writer when I moved here,” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I latch on to specific little locations in Pittsburgh that I like to write about.”

McAndrew’s own life is, for the moment, more concerned with the day-to-day: as a new father and educator gearing up for another academic year, sleep has been harder to come by. “My brain is scrambled,” he says with a chuckle. But McAndrew says the collection is firmly rooted in his own childhood in Syracuse, N.Y., and the unconstrained world of childhood at the end of the millennium.

“I’ve always been drawn to this world of childhood, when you have those unsupervised hours after school or during summer vacation,” McAndrew says. “I spent so much time as a kid just kind of on my own, unsupervised, wandering around in the woods.”

That side of Millennial childhood is front and center in “The Cursed Treasure of the McDaniels Kids,” which sees two bored siblings add intrigue to a local man’s metal-detector walks, and “Shit Plate,” which follows a poor kid’s quest to buy a gold necklace by eating “the grossest stuff from our school lunches.” Both stories are full of shadows, with their narrators catching glimpses into much darker corners of the world through the characters they follow. This perspective recurs in several stories.

“It comes from those early experiences of recognizing … ‘Oh, man, this kid’s life is a lot different from mine,’” McAndrew says of “Shit Plate.” More broadly, McAndrew says many of the stories are about “watching somebody else’s misfortune and not really knowing what to do about it.” He says the current political moment has helped him “distill” that feeling in My Prisoner’s stories, all of which previously appeared in literary journals and zines.

“I started sending it out in maybe 2019, 2020,” McAndrew says. “In some ways, I’ve been working on it since 2008.”

For all its heavy themes and title, My Prisoner is surprisingly full of humor and delightful details. McAndrew mentions the Harmony Korine film Gummo as an early influence on his aesthetic, though some stories feel more like William Gay’s Southern Gothic salvos (“How I Came to See the World”) or even Roald Dahl’s horror shorts (“The Storyteller”). Befitting the title, capture and escape play a prominent role in the collection. He says the title story emerged tangentially from a roommate’s daily run on the North Shore “Jail Trail.”

The big picture is one of people scrambling through a half-assembled world and finding pleasure where they can, even if that’s in the company of a burglar or a skunk. In My Prisoner’s world of fragile trust, these unconventional relationships give McAndrew’s characters something real to hold onto.

“A lot of the other art that I make tends to be very loud and aggressive,” he says. McAndrew also plays in a band, has compiled a chapbook of erasure poems, and is working on a long-form horror comic. “With short stories, I feel like that’s a place where I can be a little bit more quiet, a little bit more honest, a little bit more tender.”

McAndrew will appear at several live events for My Prisoner, including a reading on Thu., Sept. 11, with fellow Pitt writer William Lychack at White Whale Books, and, later in the year, a reading in Cleveland, Ohio, with Pittsburgh-based author Patrick McGinty.

He tells CP he’s taken a brief break from story writing to work on other projects. Beyond that, his main focus? “Having a newborn baby.”

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2025.