A few weeks ago, a friend jokingly asked if I wanted to come over and have a fish stick. I almost fell on the ground when she asked. A few days earlier, I’d read Don Pollock’s Knockemstiff, a debut collection of stories, and the stories had hit me hard. One of the stories had featured a woman who carried fish sticks is her purse. I looked at the woman who asked me to come over, my eyes huge, and I wanted to whisper, “Wait, was that real?”

The point of the anecdote isn’t that anyone who offers fish sticks is somehow connected to either the town Knockemstiff or the book of the same name, but that when you read Don Pollock’s incredible collection, it’s hard to bear in mind that what you’re reading is fiction. His stories stay with you, make you feel like you’ve actually been though someone’s life. In the same ways that you end up wanting to meet—or, if not want to, than believe it’s possible to—some of your favorite fictional characters, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I met someone who resembled, in all sorts of ways, any of the characters Don Pollock has created.

         The following transpired over close to a week at the end of February. Don’s book comes out in the middle of March from Doubleday. The friend was just asking because she had some leftover fish sticks in her freezer.

 

The big overarching question beneath all of these is about the fact that you’ve actually, you know, lived and done shit instead of just going to college, going to an MFA program, and then writing fiction early. I guess the easiest way to ask this is: has fiction always been something that’s been going on in your head/life/guts? Have you been writing or wanting to write forever, and it’s (the writing) only now getting the attention it deserves?

 

I was always a big reader, and I’ve always thought that being a writer would be a nice way to live in this world, but I never actually tried to write until a few years ago.  When I turned forty-five, I decided that I would try to learn how to write fiction.  I guess I was thinking about mortality; I didn’t want to end up on my deathbed regretting that I hadn’t given it a shot.  I promised myself that I would work at it for five years, and at the end of that time I would give myself permission to quit if nothing was happening.  Fortunately, I was able to publish maybe three or four stories in those first years, and then I ended up in grad school at Ohio State University before the fifth year was out.  And that got me out of the paper mill and changed my life.  I was fifty when that happened. 

 

Along the same lines: how has going to an MFA program shifted things for you? Did you feel like some Other (I mean that in the best possible way) since you had (I presume) a different background from those of the students around you?

 

Well, I didn’t walk around feeling like the Elephant Man, but I guess I didn’t have the usual grad school experience either.  You have to figure, I was as old as some of my fellow students’ fathers.   Plus, I lived over an hour away, and because I was only on campus when I had to be, I suppose I wasn’t hooked into the social network as much as everyone else.  Also, I think I was the only person who had never taken a writing workshop before, and it took a while to catch on.   Too, I wasn’t nearly as sharp as the other students, and I had to struggle to make the grade, so that took up a lot of time.  But still, everyone always made me feel welcome, and OSU has been great to me.  I think if anything, the main difference between some of the other MFA students and myself was that I had already pretty much decided what I was going to write about.  You have to understand that I was fifty and didn’t have a lot of time to be fucking around or exploring options.  My big aim was to finish at least one book while I was there. 

 

What sort of stuff do you read and like? And music? And movies? Anything, really: what’s the stuff that you take in/consume?

 

I try to read a lot of different fiction, though I must admit I get impatient with “experimental” stuff.  Lately, I’ve been rereading William Gay’s work, and Keith Banner’s The Smallest People Alive, which I consider one of the best story collections to come out in a long time.  I’ve also recently read Tom Franklin’s Smonk (a real hoot!), George Singleton’s latest novel, Work Shirts for Mad Men, and Jason Brown’s Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, which is another fantastic story collection.  All of these, along with Ernest Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men, Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Chuck Palahnuik’s new one, Snuff.  A new book I’m looking forward to in the fall is Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory. 

Music:  lately, I’ve been listening to the following a lot: Five Horse Johnson, Monster Magnet, Johnny Dowd, Acid King, R. L. Burnside, Chris Whitley, and some classic country from the Fifties and early Sixties. 

 

 

One of the most amazing parts of Knockemstiff, to me, is how generous you are to the characters—like you’ve got this complete and empathetic understanding of them, and there’s almost no judgement, while in other hands characters like yours might be used as stooges or props. The writing seems, in the best way, wise. Jim Harrison once said in an interview that he was glad he’d written Good Day To Die when he did because he’d written it when he was young and he wasn’t that angry anymore. The opposite almost feels the case here: that Knockemstiff is a book that’s generous, that’s understanding. I don’t even know if there’s a question in all of this, but if you see one, or if you’ve got any thoughts, I’d love to hear.

 

Because I’m fifty-three now, and have not lived an exemplary life by any means, I guess I know from experience that anyone can fuck up and get caught in a situation that is hard to escape from, no matter how much they want to.  It’s real easy to fall into a rut or a life that you never wanted: you get pregnant, you fall into a crappy job that just pays the bills, you get into some legal trouble that follows you around forever, whatever.  I was like that myself for a lot of years, so I don’t have any right to feel superior to anyone else.  I try to always remember what it was like to be in that place and how hard it is to change.  For the longest time, I never thought another life was possible.  

 

It feels like an unfair or stupid question, but what’s the sort of fidelity factor between Knockemstiff the town and Knockemstiff the book?

      

Because the title of the book is my hometown, I figure I’m going to be addressing that question quite a bit.  But, though the geography (meaning that there really was a Dynamite Hole and a Pumpkin Center, etc.) is the same, the situations and the characters are entirely fictional.  The book isn’t based on my life or on any other people who lived there, though I guess little snippets of my past pop up, as far as certain feelings or details.  That’s going to happen in any piece of fiction, I think.  For example, I was a chronic runaway as a kid, but I was just screwed up with hormones and daydreams, that sort of thing.  My old man had a hell of a temper, but he was a good man.  I did a lot of drugs and other stupid stuff, and I wasted a good part of my life.  Knockemstiff was known as a rough place when I was a kid, but there weren’t any child murderers living there. 

 

As a midwesterner (I’m from MN), I always get nervous about books that treat flyover country like some weird expanse where crazy shit that’s inconceivable to the coastal folk happens. Is that something you felt or feel at all? Is that something that’s even part of your thinking about Knockemstiff?

 

No, I have never felt that the area where I live is just “flyover” country.  I’ve lived here all my life, in southern Ohio, and this is home for me.  If I went around thinking of it as “flyover” country, I would probably have moved away by now.  Too, I don’t think there’s any shit happening here that is any stranger or different than the stuff that happens on the east coast or the west coast.  I don’t think things get any weirder in Knockemstiff than they do in NYC or San Francisco.  You just have to take a look at the newspapers to see that people are all pretty much the same wherever you go.  People have more or less the same desires and dreams and troubles no matter where you go.  And, for me, the lives of the people who live in southern Ohio are just as important to write about as the lives of those living in a big city. 

 

Both because you’ve had stuff recently in the NYTimes about politics, and because politics (overt, party-based politics, anyway) is absent from Knockemstiff: Do you feel there’s any sort of responsibility that fiction writers (or any writers, really) have right now, politically? I know this is super vague, but I’d be way more interested in whatever you’ve got to say than whatever I’ve got to ask.

 

The gig with the New York Times was just luck.  It sure as heck wasn’t because I knew anything about politics.  Really, after 2004, I got sick of the whole mess.  And it’s still a mess.  The candidates running now are all duds, though I’m sure they mean well.  But when a good portion of the country thinks that the trials of someone like Britney Spears are more important than all of the really fucked-up stuff that’s going on in the world, well, what can those people possibly know or think about politics?   It’s all about money and spin now, more so than ever.  I could walk down Main Street in Chillicothe, Ohio, this afternoon and probably find someone who would make a better President than any of the people running, but the poor bastard probably only makes thirty grand or so a year, thus he’s the same as ineligible.  I do think that more writers should get involved, but in a different, more serious way.  Maybe write a new Grapes of Wrath.  But please, don’t help another rich person get elected to office.  

 

Do you feel a tug-of-war between a novel and a collection of stories? George Saunders one time in an interview talked about how he felt like…not good enough, maybe, for not having written a novel. He may be the only author I’ve read who has said it that clearly, but do you have any feelings about novels versus short fiction? Did you get into the novel knowing it was a novel? Did you start writing at all hoping you’d sometime soon get to writing a novel?

When I started out, I told my wife I’d be happy if I could just write one decent short story (I’d still be happy if I could do that!).  My aims, you see, maybe weren’t very high.  Heck, I could hardly put a sentence together when I began.  Someone asked me after the book was finished why I didn’t just write a novel, since the stories were sort of linked and all pretty much set in the same place.  Honestly, I hadn’t thought of that while I was writing them.  Too, most of my stuff is pretty tight and short, and writing an entire novel that way just didn’t seem possible in those first years I was trying to learn how to write.  Also, I had always read more short stories than novels, and I think I still enjoy them more.  A novel has to be damn good for me to read past the first fifty pages. Still, I guess nowadays to be considered serious, you have to write the novel, and so that’s what I’m trying to do now.

 

Are there any other questions you want to answer which I should’ve asked but didn’t?

 

What is the book that first made a big impression on you as a reader? That would have to be Earl Thompson’s A Garden of Sand, which I read when I was maybe 15 or 16 years old.  That guy was writing about the kind of people I knew.  I think a cousin of mine bought it at a drugstore in town, a big yellow paperback.

 

What’s the view out your window?

 

If you mean the view from where I work (in the attic, the only place I’m allowed to smoke), I live on a hill and look out over the small city of Chillicothe.  From another window I can see the smokestack of the paper mill where I used to work.