Pam McAllister

If you are looking here, you may already know that I am a WRITER, author of nine books (described below) and poems, stories, essays, and articles or that I am a PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN, piano teacher, church organist, choir director. A grab bag of jobs, to keep the lights on and the rent paid, have added texture and adventure to my life – bus station diner waitress, emergency room nurse’s aide, temp secretary on Wall Street, office manager for several non-profits, live-in babysitter....
 
Mine has been an unconventional, kaleidoscopic life, lived on a shoestring budget. I’ve called Park Slope, Brooklyn home since 1975. Other than going from rural to urban, the two primary paths of my life were forged early.
 
MUSIC:  I grew up in western New York, in a home filled with music. We sang around the piano, in the car, and on camping trips. By age fifteen, I was a paid church organist, following in the footsteps of my maternal grandmother. A lifelong “hymn nerd,” I am a columnist for The Progressive Christian magazine, writing about hymn texts and composers.
 
WRITING: My passion for words, books, poetry, theater, and writing was also established early. Both parents read to my sisters and me at bedtime, children’s classics and poems by Wordsworth, Longfellow and the like. Now, I live in a quiet, book-filled apartment, the city-that-never-sleeps within easy reach for inspiration.
 
Behind both the music and the writing is my identity as a feminist, activist, and pacifist-with-attitude, a woman of faith bent on finding the sacred in the ordinary. I’ve described my best self as a little bit Gandhi (eyes on the prize, feet on the path of justice and peace) and a little bit Ethel Merman (brassy, fleshy, campy, and loud, inclined to belt out “Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses”).
 
SOCIAL JUSTICE BOOKS:
 
In 1982, I edited Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (New Society Publishers). The Village Voice called the anthology “one of the most important books you’ll ever read.”

“I’m interested in anything Pam does ... Her work on women’s lives and nonviolence is direct, true, close to my heart, actually – essential.” ~ Grace Paley

Two books in a series named for my mentor, Barbara Deming, illustrate how women have used creative nonviolent action for a variety of causes – You Can’t Kill the Spirit: Stories of Women and Nonviolent Action (NSP, 1988) and This River of Courage: Generations of Women’s Resistance and Action (NSP, 1991).

“We need this book, especially for the history we learn about women and nonviolence. We need it because the times are so hard and anger is so deep, our sorrow so pervasive, and our patience so thin. What to do? we ask, to make a world worthy of our suffering. You Can’t Kill the Spirit helps us with this question.” ~ Alice Walker

After the publication of my anti-capital punishment book, Death Defying: Dismantling the Execution Machinery in 21st Century U.S.A. (Continuum, 2003), 150 attended the book party, including Judith Malina, whose Living Theater troupe performed “Not in My Name,” a play about ending the cycle of violence and revenge. My book Standing in the Need of Prayer: Devotions for Christians in Prison (Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1992), has been distributed to 50,000 chaplains and inmates across the U.S.
 
BOOKS ABOUT LITERATURE
 
Of my nine published books, the most fun to write was The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Mark Twain (Continuum International, 2008). What a wild mind and stormy soul Twain had.
 
I co-authored several books in Continuum’s Companion series with a writing partner, Dick Riley, on Shakespeare (2001), Sherlock Holmes (1999), and Agatha Christie (1979/​1986). Angela Lansbury attended the book party at NYC’s Mysterious Bookshop for the Christie book.
 
At their 2011 spring concert in NYC, the Melodia Women’s Choir sang “Mornings with You,” a setting of four of my poems by the composer Christina Whitten Thomas.
 
I’ve been a featured speaker at church and secular conferences, lectured at high schools, colleges, and universities, and given readings in bookstores and cafes. In 1992, a Swedish peace institute sponsored my attendance at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. I then toured Germany as a guest of social justice activists.
 
I am a member of the Hymn Society, American Guild of Organists, Poets House, Author’s Guild, Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, Brooklyn Community Storytellers, Animal Rights Advocates of Upstate New York, Brooklyn for Peace, and the War Resisters League.