The first thing one notices about the body of work produced by Paul Limbert Allman is that the man is versatile. He published a textbook on how to start a career in video and digital video production. He’s also the author of two YA novels; both of which are structured as two separate narratives by the two main characters in each. He also produced a mainstream novel that is densely packed with incident and character and brings to mind the classic tall tales of Americana about figures like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and Johnny Appleseed. His most famous work is a non-fiction essay that provides a fictional (probably) alternative explanation (conspiracy theory) about that infamous incident when Dan Rather was accosted by two men mistaking him for somewhat named Kenneth and desperately needing to know what the frequency was. He went on to adapt a play based on that essay and if you think that many plays have been based on essays, then do the research, man! Plays, short stories, essays, novels for teens and novels for everybody and a freaking career textbook to boot.
This is what writing really is. A lot of people think that writing is the way it is portrayed in movies where some guy works himself half to death writing a single masterpiece that nearly kills him just to finish. If most authors worked that way, there would be a lot less one-book writers in the world because most of them would give up long before they finished. Most writers diversify and most of that diversification is fueled by the universal requirement of a paycheck. What separates the hacks from the artists are those guys who write for a paycheck but still manage to pursue a small set of persistent themes no matter the type of literary creation. How, one might wonder, can an essay, a young adult book about high school lovers, a broad picaresque story that is quite mad, a short story about the historically authentic event of finding a treasure trove of lost silent film footage buried beneath an ice skating rink in an Alaskan town nobody outside that town has ever heard of and a play featuring both Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the same prison courtyard as the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing all possibly pursue a single theme? Well, there is only one way to pull that off. You get a writer like Paul Limbert Allman who is working for a paycheck, yes, but also working from the heart. Or, possibly, the mind. Because the literature of Allman is not to be skimmed over lightly but process and analyzed.
Which is not to suggest that he is a difficult writer. His essays, novels and plays are not particularly abstruse in the use of language nor do they feature a convoluted plot. Even his textbook is engaging and endearing and an easy read. At the same time, however, it is deceptive. It is deceptively complex. Rather than drily conveying necessary information about where the jobs are in video production, how to get the training and how to land the job, Allman writes about his own experiences and people and places and movies which you know. He mixes and mingles the factual stuff you don’t with the storytelling you can easily get and the result is a hybrid. At times you wonder if may he is making up some of the stories in his textbook in order to facilitate the point. And maybe he is, but it doesn’t matter because it works.
In his stories and novels and plays, he begins from a place of reality; things are situated deeply—embedded even—within the context of historical authenticity. Layered over this factual reality is the fiction. Of course, any merely competent writer can do with a work of fiction. What makes Allman truly impressive is that he is able to reverse the process and introduce fiction into essays and textbooks and plays with a strong historical foundation. What is real and what is fiction? This is the question at the heart of much of the writing of Allman. Is he being serious when he suggested highly respected literary novelist Donald Barthelme is the mastermind behind the attack on Dan Rather? Seems like he is…but can you ever be sure? And then you get to a story like “The Frozen Archive” where the reader is thrust immediately into this absolutely bizarre story about long-lost silent movies starring Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd and Douglas Fairbanks being discovered—of all places—beneath an ice skating rink which was originally a swimming pool. It’s crazy and can’t possibly be true. Except, turns out, it is absolutely true.
What is real? What is not real? What should you believe? What should you dismiss as purely the work of imagination? It’s a thrilling ride through the works of Allman because you just never know for sure.
