Demian Naón interviews writer Donald Ray Pollock
What was your childhood like in relation to writing?
Of course, as most people know by now, I grew up in a very small community in southern Ohio called Knockemstiff. Most of the people who lived there were poor, and my family was related to many of them. However, my father, who had only an eighth grade education, was lucky enough to have a union job in a paper mill in nearby Chillicothe, and I suppose we were what would now be called lower middle-class. There were no books in our house, but there were magazines, trashy stuff mostly dealing with crime and romance, and so that’s what I started out reading. Many of the characters in my work feel stuck in the place they were born in, and want to escape to somewhere else, which was also one of my dominant desires when I was a kid. But like them, I never did.
Were there traces of the writer you would become?
Nothing really, except for a love of reading. I hated school, and dropped out when I was seventeen and started working factory jobs. I spent the next fifteen years punching a clock, drinking, and getting high. I wouldn’t recommend it! I did read some during those years, but I have to admit I don’t remember much of it.
Do you have any anecdotes that synthesize your connection to writing at that early age? Could you tell us about that?
I have memories of sitting in my great grandfather’s house when I was young and listening to him tell ghost stories, lurid stuff with decapitated men walking around in the swamps nearby, murdered women traveling the roads at night in carriages, and so on. He was a good storyteller. My father was too, though his stories were always personal recollections about growing up, etc. I’ve always thought that maybe that’s where I got my later desire to write stories.
Could you tell us, which characters, ideas or paragraphs surprised you in the act of writing?
I’m not sure I can speak on that, but I will say that there are times when I’m working that I lose myself in it. An example would be starting to write in the morning, and at some point, looking out the window beside my desk and realizing that’s it’s been snowing for the past four or five hours, and I had no idea. Also, when I begin, I might have an idea of the “plot” and one or two characters, and that’s all. So it’s just bare bones starting out. But as I work, stuff happens, sometimes quickly, oftentimes slowly. More characters show up, and the story begins to expand. It’s a mystery to me as to how that happens, but it does if you keep working at it.
Was there a moment when things clicked into place? Was there a point when you decided to take risks with your ideas? Did your writing, themes and types of character change over time?
When I decided to try to learn how to write, I was forty-five years old. I didn’t know any writers, but I had read a lot by that point. I struggled for a couple of years trying to emulate certain short story writers that I admired, people like Richard Yates, Andre Dubus, and John Cheever, and so I was trying to set stories on the East Coast among suburbanites and Roman Catholics and nurses and lawyers, and I didn’t know anything about those sorts of people. Consequently, everything I wrote was terrible. Then one evening I was messing around and began writing a story about two losers sitting in a donut shop in my hometown, and by the time I finished it maybe a week later, I knew that something had happened. “Bactine” wasn’t a great story by any means, but it was better than anything else I’d written, and I realized that I needed to start writing about the people and the place that I knew something about.
What are the characteristics that come closest to the real life of Donald Ray Pollock?
And, after the impact that Knockemstiff had, without forgetting the arduous process of writing and editing, surely there was a shift in the real life of Donald Ray Pollock Could you tell us how Knockemstiff altered your way of being in the world or your approach to writing?
That’s a tough one. I have a hard time honestly “seeing” myself. I live a very boring life in comparison to my characters. I did, however, as I mentioned earlier, drink and drug a lot in my youth. And I also grew up around a lot of poor people, some of them very religious, some of them very violent. But all of that happened before I began trying to write. Nowadays, I try to live a quiet life on a “schedule” of sorts, because I’ve found it’s the only way I can get any work done. This means getting up at 6 am (I would probably sleep later, but my dog demands that we get up at the crack of dawn) and writing somewhere between four and six hours (I work in a room that has no phone or internet, and it’s the only room in the house that I’m allowed to smoke in). I then do some work in the yard or around the house and take a nap. In the evenings, I read and sometimes watch TV, and that’s about it. As I said, very boring, but then that’s one of the biggest challenges to being a writer—you have to be okay with sitting in a room by yourself for extended periods of time.
The biggest shift in my life since Knockemstiff came out is that I don’t work in a factory any longer. I left the paper mill in 2005 at age fifty, and that seems like a lifetime ago. I live in the same town, but in a bigger house, and I pretty much have the same friends I’ve always had. I have gotten to travel quite a bit in the U.S. and Europe because of the books, and have met a lot of very smart people, and those were things I wouldn’t have experienced without the writing. I’ve been extremely lucky!
We know that societies are undergoing dramatic change, especially in the ways of communicating, working and enjoying leisure. Do you think this will change the topics you usually pursue in your writing? Do you feel that your characters will incorporate something they didn’t have before? What exactly?
I doubt it. I’m now sixty-five, and am close to finishing another novel. I’ve already got an idea for the next one, and I’ll probably be sixty-eight before it’s finished, maybe even older. That is, if the virus doesn’t get me. I’m not a fan of the technological times we’re living in, and so I doubt if I ever set any of my stories past the year 1990 or so, before cell phones and the internet.
What were the differences in the process of thinking and writing a collection of short stories like Knockemstiff and The heavenly table a novel?
I tend to approach each chapter of a novel sort of like a short story, each one sort of a separate “entity.”Granted, they’re not the same, but that approach helps me psychologically, helps to get past thinking that writing something as big as a novel is going to be too overwhelming in comparison to writing a twelve-page story. Too, with a novel, you have to be a little more focused on “plot,” at least in that it has to be more developed and maybe more intricate than one in a short story. But I have found that I enjoy writing novels more than short stories, and a lot of that has to do with figuring out how to make all the “connections” between the characters and the storyline.
We have already heard about the rawness of the stories in Knockemstiff. No one has a good time. Neither men nor women nor young people seem to have any hope.
It’s a very particular universe. What was it like to experience writing such a book?
I can’t really answer that very well. I wrote those when I was first learning how to write, and the only thing I can recall is that it was HARD! Of course, it doesn’t really ever get any easier, but at least now I know that’s just part of the process.
Were you aware of how disturbing the stories could be?
And broadening the question, we read in an interview that you didn’t think that the stories were going to be published and that while you were writing you didn’t take into account the reader or the potential audience. Do you think that was a wise move or a mistake? specifically in relation to the impact that Knockemstiff had afterwards.
Yes, I figured many people would think they were written by a nutcase, but I didn’t care. You should never think much about the reader until you’ve finished the work. If you try to guess what they want, you’ll be tying yourself down. Maybe look it over once it’s done, and see if there is anything you’d rather not let out into the public.
Regarding the role of women in the stories in Knockemstiff . If you had to describe the woman of today living in that town in Ohio, what differences would you find?
You’re asking the wrong person. I’ve been married three times, and I still don’t know anything about women.
In Argentina we have a long tradition of writing workshops. Many budding writers take classes with established writers. What would you say to those students who sometimes rush to get published, being that you graduated in creative writing aged 55 and only then started to publish work?
I like the old advice that learning how to write is like learning how to play a musical instrument, So figure you’re an apprentice for somewhere between four and eight years at least. And that’s if you work at it every day. Patience is imperative. And the thing that beats the majority of most aspiring writers is the inability to sit in the chair when nothing’s happening, when you’d rather be doing anything else—cleaning the toilet, washing windows, anything–than stay in that chair.
Could you tell us about what you are working on now?
As I mentioned, I’m working on another novel, set between the years 1959 and 1981. It takes place entirely in Meade, Ohio. The film version of The Devil All the Time begins streaming on Netflix on September 16th, and I hope to have the novel finished by then. Fingers crossed!
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