My name is Michael McAllister, and this is my blog.

I’ve been yammering on and on here since 2001, which makes me Old School, or at least old. Dogpoet is my rough draft, where I mess around with stories, memories, and characters. Everything’s true, though sometimes I change the names so that people will still talk to me the next day. This is also why my weblog is rather annoyingly all about me; I’m as desperate for love as the next guy, and I like having friends who will take my calls, and family who will give me money.

So why “Dogpoet?”  I just like the word dog paired up with other words; dogstar, dogtown, dogwood, and I used to write a lot of poetry. In the beginning the blog was called “Dogpoet’s Campfire,” and I thought of Dogpoet as this other character, separate from me, but of course that didn’t last long.

I’ve been writing since the fourth grade, when the school newsletter published my first poem, which was full of big words that didn’t make any sense when strung together. I was a skinny kid who read Agatha Christie and preferred Tarzan over Jane. Apparently this ran in my family, as both my parents eventually came out of the closet. We call my straight brother the black sheep of the family.

I grew up in Minneapolis, went to school in Florida, and settled for a bit in San Francisco.

In August of 2004 I moved to New York City for the graduate writing program at Columbia University. I moved back to San Francisco during the summer of 2006 to finish my book, which follows my family in the years after I turned ten years old, and that whole family-wide coming-out thing. You can check out an excerpt in the anthology From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up. The excerpt comes from the beginning of my book, when my family begins to change.

Another excerpt from my book was recently published in The Sienese Shredder, an art and literary magazine from New York City. This excerpt is from the second part of my book, when I arrive at college, seventeen hundred miles away from home, still holding out the hope that I will turn out straight. The next few weeks change all that, as first semesters at college often do.

In June of 2010 I totally didn’t mind reading the following plug from San Francisco Weekly: “We’re currently crushing hard on writer Michael McAllister, whose story is mind-expanding in its barest-bones description: His parents both came out of the closet(s) within months of each other when he was in elementary school. He hoped he would grow up to be straight, but he gayed up in college and stayed that way — only his younger brother is straight, the freak. We loved his contribution to 2006’s “From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up,” so we know what McAllister is capable of.”

I write a lot here about a guy named the Manly Fireplug. I kinda dig him, and as of August, 2011, he’s my husband. In real life his name is Joe, and he owns a barbershop. You could get a haircut there, or you could just stop in and admire his hotness, as I often do.

At his shop I host the Barbershop Reading Series, which puts great authors and musicians together with a lively, eccentric audience for a fun, intimate, dirt cheap night of entertainment. The series is on a sabbatical of sorts as I finish my book, but will return soon.