One heck of a midlife crisis

Author Donald Ray Pollock went from one side of the paper mill to the other

PROFILE. When former paper mill worker Donald Ray Pollock went through a midlife crisis, he didn’t buy a Ferrari, have an affair with a younger woman or make the unfortunate decision of getting hair plugs. Instead, he began to write. That decision led to him getting his MFA, then an agent, a book deal and praise from literary luminaries such as Chuck Palahniuk and Katherine Dunn  for his debut collection of short stories called “Knockemstiff” [Doubleday, $22.95].

“I’ve not always been a writer, but I’ve always been a big reader,” Pollock tells us with a slow Southern drawl over the phone from his home in Ohio. “Right around the time I turned 45, I went through a midlife shift. I’d been at the paper mill for 27 years and by that time, I was really not satisfied. I wanted to do something else before I kicked the bucket. I told my wife I was going to try to write and I would give it five years. If it didn’t happen, at least I gave it a shot.”

Influenced by such authors as Flannery O’Conner and John Cheever, Pollock looked to his hometown, Knockemstiff, Ohio, for inspiration. After publishing a few searing short stories about the disenfranchised, damaged characters who struggle to get by in the dismal small town, he earned acceptance into Ohio State’s MFA program. Eventually, his work came together as the  loosely connected stories in “Knockemstiff.”

“It’s more than I ever expected,” a modest Pollock says about his success. “When I told my wife I wanted to write, I told her if I just wrote one good story, I would be satisfied. Then to get it published by a major publisher — that’s been pretty exciting. I’ve known a lot of good books that come out and no one even reviewed them, you know?”

And while he’s currently enjoying the well-deserved critical praise for “Knockemstiff” and working on his next project, a novel (thanks to a Presidential scholarship from Ohio State), we did find out one drawback to his very-well-played midlife crisis. When we asked which paid better — being a published writer or working back at the paper mill, he set us straight. “Are you kidding me?” he laughed. “The paper mill. That was a union job.”