The Man from Knockemstiff

The characters in Knockemstiff are nasty and violent
little slaves to ego. They huff Bactine and get into ill-advised fights
and fuck like animals when the mood strikes them. It’s surprising,
then, to meet Donald Ray Pollock in person.

He’s a compact man with an easy smile, and he dots the air with
apostrophes left behind from all his walkin’ and talkin’. Pollock
worked in a paper mill for three decades before going back to school,
and he’s now hard at work on his MFA in creative writing at Ohio State
University.

It’s hard to believe that the town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, really
exists, but it’s even harder to believe that some of these nasty
creatures crawled from Pollock’s head, and that many of the stories are
loosely based on real-life incidents.

Based on the violence in Knockemstiff, have people on this press tour expected
you to be crazy violent?

No. [Pause.] Well, they haven’t told me to my face. You
know, I’m 53 now, I’ve tamed down a lot from my younger years. I’m a
grandfather now. My only bad habits are I still smoke and drink a lot
of coffee, but other than that, I pretty much don’t abuse myself. I
can’t afford to.

You dropped out of high school and worked in a paper mill
for a couple decades. What brought you back to academia and creative
writing?

When I was in my mid-30s I quit drinkin’ and quit druggin’. And I
found after about a year or two that I needed something to do. The
paper mill had a program where they would pay 75 percent of your
tuition if you wanted to go to school part-time, so I started going to
Ohio State University and I ended up with a degree in English. I was 45
when I decided to try and write. When I was 50 I got accepted at the
MFA program at OSU—well, that program, they pay your tuition if
you get accepted, and in return you teach freshman comp or something so
that’s how I’ve been doin’ that.

I detect a strong Harry Crews influence in your stories. Are
you a Crews fan?

I’m a fan of most of his books from the beginning until I guess the
last couple. The Gospel Singer and Car, all that
stuff is great.

A lot of people have compared your book to Winesburg, Ohio because of the Ohio setting and the
multiple stories about one community. Was that an
influence?

I read Winesburg about five or six times over the course of
20 years. I guess it had an influence as far as me figuring out I’d be
better off just setting up the stories in one little place rather than
spreading them out.

How did you start writing fiction?

I was 45 when I started writing, or trying to write. I wasn’t really
writing; I was trying to figure out what the fuck you’d do when you
write. Hemingway was a big influence mainly because when I started I
would take a story I really liked, someone else’s, and at that time I
was using a typewriter and I would type the story out. I’d usually try
and choose a fairly short story. You get so much closer to writing, you
can read the story, but you get so much closer to the writing of it
when you type out someone else’s words. Plus it trains you to be able
to stay in the chair and type, which is the main thing. I mean, you
got to stay in the chair. So it was kinda good training for
that, typing out Hemingway, John Cheever, Richard Yates.

Did you start out immediately writing linked short
stories?

When I started the program at Ohio State, I had written about six of
those stories, maybe seven. The next year and a half, I wrote 10 or 11
more. They came fast in grad school because I was in writing workshops
all the time. Most of them ended up set in Knockemstiff and then when I
was almost done, I tweaked a couple to connect them. Once I finished
the book, somebody said, “Why the hell didn’t you just write a novel?”
Until that person said that to me, it never occurred to me. I was like,
“Man, I fucked up! I should’ve written a novel!”

You are working on a novel about a serial killer that’s also
set in Knockemstiff. How does writing the novel compare?

It’s been a lot harder. I decided I just had to write a draft. I sat
down and in about 35 days I wrote a draft. I wrote four or five hours
every morning and I’d never look back. [Before that] I would start the
first chapter and go back and work on it and it got so every day I
would start the first chapter. After I finally got the draft done, at
least I had something to work with. It was a real piece of slop. It was
270 pages, but it was horrible. But this is where it begins; this is
where it happens. Out of that 100,000 words, there were 6,000 words
that were really any good, and that was basically the main characters
and basic idea. That was six months ago, and I’ve been rewriting ever
since.

You evoke a great sense of place. Even in “Honolulu,” which
is the only story that really leaves Knockemstiff at all, you really
evoke the area. Are you ever going to move out of
Knockemstiff?

I’m not sure yet. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Damn, if I
could finish that novel, I’d be so happy. I imagine I can squeeze
another good book out of the area. I thought maybe after the novel I
would do a collection of stories based on the paper mill.

Has there been any response from friends and family
yet?

The response I’ve been worried about mostly is because I’m
publishing a book called Knockemstiff and I live 13 miles away
from [the real] Knockemstiff. A lot of people have this impression that
I’m writing a memoir-type thing of growing up in Knockemstiff and when
you tell them it’s fiction they still think it’s about Knockemstiff. So
once they read the book, hopefully they’ll discover it’s not a memoir.
I’m not really sure I want my mom and dad to read it. My dad is 78 and
my mom is 76. My parents aren’t big readers; they read the newspaper
and a magazine once in a while. They haven’t expressed a lot of
interest in reading the book. When I quit the paper mill, they asked
me, “If you got a good job, why are you giving it up?” They’re still a
little worried about that, I guess.

Can you see yourself writing about an upper-class
family?

Even now, I’ve been in this MFA program for two years and I’ve
taught freshman comp, and I can’t imagine writing a story about an
English professor. I think probably most of my stuff will be about
blue-collar—I hate to call ’em lower-class people—but
people who are struggling to make a living, mainly because those are
the people I am interested in. I’m not interested in somebody who’s
rich.

Bologna and other luncheon meat figure into all of these
stories, and usually in a really disgusting way. What’s your
relationship with bologna now?

I like bologna. I eat it once a year now, kind of a bologna binge.
My first job in a factory, I worked at a meatpacking plant, so I know
what goes into that stuff. And for a year after I worked there I
couldn’t eat meat at all. I worked there for probably eight months. It
was pretty awful. This was back in ’72. It’s probably more sanitary in
those places now.

pconstant@thestranger.com