![]() ![]() Pollock titled his first collection of stories Knockemstiff, and except for a piece of one story titled “Honolulu,” the entirety of the book takes place in that Ohio town. ![]() “I was trying to figure out what the fuck you’d do when you write.” Eventually, thanks to a program funded by the local mill, he went to school part-time at Ohio State and went on to get an MFA. ![]() So he sat down in a chair at a typewriter-the secret to writing, he told me in an interview in 2008, is “I mean, you got to stay in the chair”-and typed out stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and Richard Yates, word for word. Pollock knew he wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t know how to be a writer. With a population just under 60,000, Knockemstiff is the kind of town you don’t typically find in contemporary American literary fiction half-rotten by meth, starved for hope, and entirely broke, it’s about as far away from the world presented in Jonathan Franzen’s novels as you can imagine. Pollock was born and raised there, and worked in a nearby paper mill for three decades. You can pinpoint the origins of Donald Ray Pollock’s literary genius directly to a town in Ohio called Knockemstiff. ![]()
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