My Son Thinks He's French Patrick Wensink
			House of Words Scott Tomford
			Slaves Bonnie ZoBell
			The Old In and Out Odyssey Frayn Masters
			Donald Ray Pollock Elizabeth Ellen
			Elizabeth Ellen is deputy editor of Hobart. Though, to be honest, she isn't really sure what this means. No one at Hobart does. They only know such a thing exists because they read it in an author's bio in Esquire. Donald Pollock is the author of Knockemstiff and and has a pretty great author website here.

It takes a lot to get me to read an entire book. I buy, borrow and steal books by the hundreds, but the actual number I read from beginning to end are very few. In the last seven years, I've probably read ten: [this is where I listed the actual ten, but the Hobart editor wisely deleted them saying, "Who really gives a shit what ten books you've read?"]. Most of the time I'd rather read a book I already know and love than take a chance on a new one. I'm the same way with movies. And music. And alcoholic beverages. But I digress.

There are eighteen stories in all, which may seem like a lot. But somewhere around the eighth or ninth I started slowing down my reading, taking my time with the stories, stopping to stare out the window with a particular image in my mind. I was already dreading the inevitable. And since this is (believe it or not) Pollock's first collection and only book to date, it wasn't like I could run out and find ten more of his books to fill the void. Though he's currently working on a novel that sounds pretty rad. Let's hope he finishes it soon. Until then I'll just be reading Knockemstiff for the fourth or fifth or sixteenth time. You think I'm kidding. Did I mention "Rainy Sunday" yet? It starts like this, "It was one o'clock in the morning on a rainy Sunday, and Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table debating whether or not to stuff another slice of American cheese into her mouth when Aunt Joan called, begging her niece to ride into town." Yeah.

You started writing short stories seven or eight years ago, while still working at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. I'm curious what prompted you to start writing at that time and why you chose short stories, as opposed to a novel or memoir.

When I turned forty-five, I started thinking about mortality, and dwelling on all my regrets about all the things I'd never done with my life. At that point, I'd been at the Mead Paper Mill for something like twenty-seven years. I guess it was a mid-life crisis sort of thing (I heard someone call it a mid-life shift, which sounds more accurate in my opinion!). Anyway, I'd always thought that I'd like to be a writer, at least when I was younger. So I told my wife I was going to try to learn how to write, that I was going to really work at it for five years and see what happened. I figured that I could then go to my deathbed or the nursing home satisfied that I'd at least given it a shot. At the end of that five years, I'd published maybe four or five stories and been accepted into the MFA program at Ohio State. I'd also written enough to know I wanted to keep doing it. So then I quit my paper mill job in 2005.

I began writing short stories, I guess, because I had very low expectations, and also because I love short stories, much more than novels. A novel has to be damn good to keep me reading more than fifty pages. Also, a novel seemed way beyond my skills at the time. So I told myself that if I could just write one decent short story, well, I'd be more than happy. As for a memoir, the only sort of honest memoir I could write at this point would probably hurt some people who are still alive, and I don't care to get into that kind of mess.



The assumption being, fiction never hurt anyone? (I ask only as I don't seem to be able to get away with this argument myself... No matter what you call it – fiction, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, memoir – people make assumptions, particularly where the word "I" is involved in a story/novel.)

No, not necessarily that. I'm sure there's been a lot of fiction that's hurt people. I mean I think fiction writers all take from those around them. What is it Faulkner said? Hamlet is worth any number of old grannies – well, something like that, anyway. But Knockemstiff is fiction, even if, for example, I did once know a guy who drove a yellow Super Bee, or another who lived in an apartment below a pair of nympho nurses. But that's where the reality ends and the fiction begins.



So you've written "one decent short story." Many more than one, actually. Are you happy?

I guess I'm as happy as I've ever been in my life, which says a lot. I guess, though, if I had to put a label on how I feel right now, it would be "grateful." Not that many people my age get the chance to start over again.



Growing up in a small town, what were your hobbies/interests? Was reading one of them? Or did that come later? Did you excel in English in school? Were your parents readers?

Well, as for hobbies, I always loved to read. My parents, however, were not big readers. We mostly had stuff like National Enquirer and romance magazines and junk like that in the house. So I'd pick up a book here and there and probably read everything in the Huntington High School library by the time I was fourteen or so. My heroes were writers like Faulkner and Hemingway. Too, I was always fascinated by old horror films like I Walked With A Zombie and The Mummy's Ghost (I watched Chiller Theater coming out of Columbus, Ohio, on Channel 10 every Friday night during the Sixties), along with noir crime films from the Forties and Fifties. As for sports, or whatever, I played, but I was never good enough or serious enough to, say, join the school teams. I mostly hung out with what most people thought of as the losers.



How do you think your parents and friends perceived your reading habits? Was it something you kept mostly to yourself?

I didn't go around bragging about it, I'll tell you that. It was, at least in my mind, a sign of weakness, and Jesus, I already wore glasses, and so kept it mostly to myself. I think my old man considered it that way, too, that you were a sissy if you had your nose stuck in a book all the time. This sounds fucking bad, I know, but it was a pretty common notion at the time. You didn't need brains back then to get a decent job.



I'm interested in the time period between when you were writing stories and working in the paper mill and when you actually entered Ohio State's Creative Writing Program. Talk about that progression. I think I read you'd dropped out of high school. Obviously, you must have gotten your G.E.D. and gone back to school for a bachelor's degree at some point. Did you attend a community college while working at the mill?

I quit high school as soon as I finished the 11th grade. I didn't like living at home and a foreman at a meatpacking plant told me he could get me a job. So I promised my dad that I'd get my diploma if he let me quit. I enrolled in a program that I think was called American Schools, where I basically bought the textbooks from them and some outlines and took the final exams at my old high school. I actually had my diploma before my class graduated. Later, when I was in my mid-thirties, I quit drinking and doing dope. The paper mill had a program set up where they would pay 75% of your tuition if you wanted to go to college part-time, so I started going to a branch campus of Ohio University. I started really just to have something to do with all my spare time since I wasn't using anymore. I managed to get a BA in English when I was forty, but I didn't do anything with it. I didn't take any writing workshops or anything, just lit classes.



You said in your interview with Chuck Palahniuk on Amazon that at one point when you started writing, you typed out other people's stories... I've always wanted to do this but somehow never got around to it. It seems like it could be very helpful exercise, similar to reading a particular story over and over again, which I certainly have done. What stories did you type?

I did this because I had no idea about how to write a story, and I grew frustrated after a while. To make myself think I was actually doing something, I began typing out stories by Hemingway, Denis Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, Sam Lipsyte, John Cheever, and others (I probably typed fifty out that first year). I discovered that this got me closer to those stories, helped me to finally see how they were put together.



Do you remember the first story you typed? Is there a particular story you found to be the most helpful, that you typed more than the others?

I think the first story I typed out was Hemingway's "Indian Camp." I typed out several Hemingway stories in a row, and maybe because they were the first ones, I think they were the most helpful to me in trying to see how a story was put together. But still, I think they all helped in one way or another.



Name some of the places you first started sending your fiction and talk about the rate of rejection vs. acceptance over the years... I'm not sure I should mention this, but Aaron [Burch, Hobart editor] and I were horrified to discover recently that we'd rejected the opening story in Knockemstiff – "Real Life" – over two years ago. Did you find much immediate success in publishing or did the acceptances mostly come later, after you'd entered Ohio State? Are the stories you'd written prior to attending OSU mostly unchanged?

Ha! You dogs! No, really, I read slush for The Journal my first year or so at OSU, and I got a much better understanding of the whole submission/rejection process. Heck, I realize now that I'm lucky any of my stories got published. There are just so many writers submitting and so little space open for stories. I've probably gotten around 200 rejections so far, and I'm sure there will be plenty more, but I was one of those people who believed (and still do) in the shotgun effect: just send out ten copies of the story and hope one of them gets a little bit of attention. I realize that editors probably hate that, but I didn't have that much time to waste (I was pushing fifty!). I actually published a couple of stories early in my writing career, and then went maybe two years before I had anything else accepted. As for the stories I wrote prior to joining OSU, I changed the endings of a couple of them for the book, tweaked the sentences a little.



How valuable do you think going to OSU has been, both in terms of improving your writing as well as forming connections in the literary community? Do you think you'd be where you are now if you hadn't entered an MFA program?

Well, first, the MFA program at Ohio State was fantastic for me, both in terms of being able to workshop the stories for the book and in terms of just being around people who loved writing, which, of course, I'd never had before. The workshops probably saved me at least a year's worth of work, maybe more. Still, with that said, I don't believe people need to join a MFA program to succeed at writing. I used to think that because it seemed like all the new authors had been through a graduate writing program of some kind. It's a great place to "hide out" for a couple of years while you're working on your craft, but don't pay for it. In other words, only go to a school that will fund you if at all possible, unless you opt for a low-residency program that allows you to keep your day job.



What writers/books do/did you admire, both prior to and since going to OSU? Have they changed much?

I've read pretty extensively, I guess, but mostly fiction. It's a mixed bag, I guess, as far as favorites go: Hemingway, Jim Thompson, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, William Gay, David Goodis, Earl Thompson, Denis Johnson, George Saunders and Dawn Powell. Others include Tom Franklin, Sam Lipsyte, George Singleton, Tobias Woolf, Chuck Palahnuik and Breece Pancake. Madame Bovary is one of my favorite novels.

Really, my tastes haven't changed much since going to OSU. I read more novels now, but that's mostly because I'm trying to write one. Some of my peers are really into "experimental" stuff, but I get very impatient with it. I mean, I can see the value of it to an extent, but, well, for one thing, I'm not that "witty." You have to be smart to write that stuff.



Had you always planned for these stories to be linked? Or did that decision come later? Which stories did you write first?

The first pieces I wrote that actually seemed to be stories were "Bactine," "Hair's Fate," Fish Sticks," and "Discipline." If you're very familiar with those, then you can see that I didn't start out with a plan to write a linked collection. That came later, maybe around the time I'd written nine or ten of the stories, after I got to grad school. I heard people talking about all these linked collections that were coming out, some of them even being referred to as "novels," which really didn't make any sense except as a selling point. But I then realized that I could link the stories by geography and maybe "theme" if nothing else.