'WHY I WRITE' by Donald Ray Pollock

‘I found myself, at the age of forty-five, feeling trapped and dissatisfied with a factory job that I’d held for twenty-seven years (I ended up staying thirty-two years). Don’t get me wrong, it was a good job, but I wanted to do something else with the rest of my life.

‘Since I didn’t really know how to do anything except factory work, and maybe because I loved to read, I decided to try to learn how to write, figuring that at least it wouldn’t cost anything other than time and a few reams of paper and a typewriter. Also, being a person who feels somewhat-to-very uncomfortable around groups of people and most “social” situations, writing appealed to me because of its solitary nature.

‘I would like to add that I was extremely naïve when I started. I thought that writing must be fairly easy and that you made a lot of money. Fortunately, by the time those two illusions were smashed, I’d already started to love sitting at the keyboard staring at the wall for hours at a time.’

Donald Ray Pollock is the author of Knockemstiff. A graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State University, he was the winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Award in 2009. He was recently awarded a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. His work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Berkeley Fiction Review, PEN/America, Washington Square Review, and Epoch. Visit his website here.

* More about 'Why I Write'.

'GOOD FOR NOTHING ELSE'?

Of all the questions regularly put to authors by journalists and readers, it seems to me that the most important one is why they bother in the first place.

A number of years ago the French newspaper Libération published a special supplement in which they asked some of the great writers of the day to express themselves on the subject 'Pourquoi ecrivez-vous?' I remember Samuel Beckett's contribution was by far the most concise, reading in its entirety: 'Bon qu'a ca.', which could be translated as 'Good for nothing else.'

I thought it might be enlightening to ask some of the Roving Editor’s favourite writers to address this question under the heading ‘Why I Write’, after George Orwell’s famous essay on the subject, published in 1946. Orwell’s is an honest, revealing attempt at an answer, but ultimately he admits: ‘All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’

In dusting off this question and putting it in front of a new set of writers I am not expecting responses as terse or as self-deprecating as those of Orwell and Beckett. However I’d be surprised not to detect some echoes at least of how they felt. So, in what I hope will be the first in occasional series on the blog, I am delighted that Donald Ray Pollock has agreed to tell us ‘Why I Write’. Watch this space.

DISCOVERING TEA OBREHT

The announcement of the New Yorker's '20 under 40' list of fiction writers worth watching has prompted a huge spike in traffic to the Roving Editor. Virtually all of the visitors are searching for one name: Téa Obreht, whose first published work was praised here almost a year ago. I'm delighted for Téa, whose debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, is due in March 2011.

In addition to the original post, I recommend you sample Téa's story 'The Laugh' and this interview, both published in the Atlantic magazine's 2009 fiction issue.

Congratulations also to three other writers on the New Yorker's list whose work has been featured in the Roving Editor: Wells Tower, Joshua Ferris and Yiyun Li.

ASK FOR SAM LIPSYTE

It was Donald Ray Pollock who first drew my attention to Sam Lipsyte's work in a Q&A he did for the Roving Editor back in 2008. Don praised Lipsyte's 'great and quirky' collection Venus Drive. I sought out his work online and discovered the stories 'Cremains' and 'Flashback, or Why Nobody Won the Fight Between Our Fathers in Walt Wilmer's Toolshed'. Their pitch-black humour and terse, self-incriminating narrative voices reminded me strongly of early Beckett fictions (in particular First Love and Other Novellas) mixed with the earthiness of Bukowski.

Lipsyte has produced three novels since Venus Drive. His latest, The Ask, will appear in the UK next month, thanks to independent publisher Old Street. (Full disclosure: I occasionally do some work for Old Street in my capacity as a freelance editor.) The Observer has already flagged up what amounts to a major coup for a small UK publisher, given the widespread critical acclaim The Ask has enjoyed in the States, not to mention its respectable showing on the New York Times bestseller list.

On the evidence of what I have read so far, The Ask is that rarest of literary beasts, a comic novel that manages to be both funny and profound. Its beleaguered protagonist Milo Burke has echoes of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, while the world of work is depicted with the same merciless eye for detail that made Then We Came to the End so bracing and true. Milo is a fund-raiser for a university in New York he knows is second-rate, but for which he is obliged to make 'the ask', a role that puts him in touch with a wealthy former college friend who has questionable motives for making 'the give'. I'm hoping the working out of the plot is as satisfying as this premise -- and the promise of the opening chapters -- suggests.

If further persuasion is needed, take this endorsement of The Ask from another fine writer who has been featured on these pages, Wells Tower: 'One of the most hilarious and perfectly executed books that I've read in recent years.'

LITERARY ADAPTATIONS IN THE WORKS

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger, is one of a number of upcoming literary adaptations from British filmmakers. A long list of projects recently awarded funding was released by the UK Film Council this week.

Adiga, whose work has been featured on the Roving Editor, will see The White Tiger brought to the screen by fellow novelist Hanif Kureishi. Kureishi recently commented, not entirely seriously, one suspects: 'I needed the money for my children – to ensure that they have a better life. The lives of my children are much more insecure compared to mine. I need to make films like Slumdog Millionaire.’ Elsewhere he said 'The White Tiger is a rags-to-riches murder story. It is Aravind's extraordinary characters that make this one stand out above all others.'

Among other forthcoming attractions. . .

• Conor McPherson is adapting Taichi Yamada's novel Strangers, with James Marsh(Man on Wire) set to direct. (There has already been a Japanese-language version.)
• Lynne Ramsay, who was unfortunately bumped from the adaptation of The Lovely Bones in favour of Peter Jackson, will write and direct We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Schriver. John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton will take leading roles.
• Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, (Slumdog Millionaire, The Full Monty), is adapting The Raw Shark Texts from the novel by Steven Hall, and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, from the novel by Paul Torday. Beaufoy recently told the Daily Telegraph: 'I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.'
• Sadie Jones is writing the screenplay for her debut novel The Outcast for John Madden(Shakespeare in Love) to direct.
• And finally, yet another debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is currently being adapted; this one by the venerable Christopher Hampton (Atonement, Dangerous Liaisons).

PETINA GAPPAH ON THE AGE OF INDEPENDENCE

In what has been an exceptional year for the short story, the announcement of Petina Gappah as winner of the Guardian first book award is further cause for rejoicing. Her debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, is published by Faber.

You can read a brand new story called 'Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close' here. This is a quietly powerful piece about a child coming of age as Rhodesia transforms itself into Zimbabwe.

In her blog, the author describes the background to the story as 'the time that I find most interesting to write about, the move from settler rule to majority rule and the early days of independence. I am interested in exploring how independence materially changed lives, especially for the blacks who made it to the suburbs and whose children found themselves in the alien territory of formerly whites-only schools.'

Not only that: she also includes the video for the hit 80s record (by David Scobie, 'one of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's early rock stars') her parents dance to at the end of the story. It takes you right back. . .

WILD ROVING

Despite appearances to the contrary, the Roving Editor has not been on an extended summer break. There may have been no blogging of late (apart from via Twitter) but there's been plenty of browsing -- all the fine publications that usually yield the exciting new work featured here have been regularly frequented.

The trouble is, nothing has really grabbed me in the same way that Eleanor Catton and Patricia Engel did earlier this year, or Donald Ray Pollock and Wells Tower did in 2008. Admittedly, it's asking a lot to hold out for talent of that calibre, but that's why I write the blog -- and also why I don't write it that often. It may be that I've been looking in the wrong places; if so, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

In the meantime, to prove I've been a-roving, here are some pointers to work I've enjoyed in the last while but which hasn't quite fit the criterion of being by an emerging writer; while a couple of the names were new to me, all of the writers are established authors to some extent. . .

The excellent Fifty-Two Stories site will run until the end of the year, and I would recommend recent contributions by Lydia Peelle ('Phantom Pain') and the celebrated Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany ('The Kitchen Boy'). I came upon the distinctive voice of Glen Pourciau in the Paris Review last year; 'Nightblooming' by Kenneth Calhoun is one of the most entertaining pieces I've read in 2009. Finally, Five Dials is the most attractively presented online litmag out there; its latest issue has a Paris theme, and features fiction by Steve Tolz.

Do watch this space, and do get in touch if you've got any hot tips to share.