Donald Pollock: From Knockemstiff to Netflix

But he liked books—enough to earn an English degree part-time at Ohio University Chillicothe while working with his father at the nearby Mead paper mill. When his father retired, it struck Pollock, then 45: “That was going to be me not too long from now, just packing up the toolbox and heading home to sit on the couch. I began wondering if there was something I could do with the rest of my life. I didn’t really know anything but factory work, but I did love reading, and so I decided to try to learn to write.”

In his mid-50s, Pollock published Knockemstiff, a short story collection named for his hometown. The acclaimed debut not only pulls zero punches, but—like one of its characters—also licks the blood off its knuckles.

In September 2020, Netflix released the film adaptation of Pollock’s first novel, The Devil All the Time, a tangled yarn of depraved preachers, corrupt lawmen and serial killers.

“I went into it knowing a book is a book and a movie is a movie,” Pollock, who narrated the film, notes. “I thought they did a great job of staying true.”

A couple years after the release of the 2011 novel, producer Randall Poster secured adaptation rights and tapped director Antonio Campos and his brother, Paulo, to write the script. They planned to film in Knockemstiff’s Ross County, but when weather pushed them south, Pollock narrated remotely.

“Antonio would send lines, and I would record them on my cell phone,” Pollock recalls, admitting feeling detached from our hyper-connected, virtual world. “I’m not a Luddite, but I’m not a fan of technology. I don’t feel about the present as I do the past.”

Compared to the violence of his fiction, Pollock’s own past might seem tame. He spent his childhood reading a pulpy blend of 1950s tabloid scandals, lurid crimes and hard-boiled detectives.

“We didn’t have many books, but we had magazines: crime magazines, True Romance, that sort of thing,” he says.

Pollock still owns the first book he bought, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and remembers high school English teacher Mrs. Green encouraged him to write, to no avail. On quitting school, Pollock’s youth oscillated among books, factory work, drink and drugs.

“I wasn’t quite 33 when I got sober,” he says.

At the time, the paper mill subsidized higher education for workers, so he enrolled at Ohio University, exploring Shakespeare, foreign literature and more at the Chillicothe and Athens campuses.

“[College] showed me there are other options out there. I was confident I could get a degree,” says Pollock—the first in his family to do so. “But I didn’t think I could write.”

Pollock befriended English Professor Emeritus Dr. Ron Salomone and would later return to speak to Salomone’s students at the Chillicothe Campus. Pollock has since read for the 2008 Kennedy Lecture Series and other Chillicothe Campus events.

In 2010, he received the Ohio University Chillicothe Distinguished Alumni Award, and in recent years, University donors have created the Donald R. Pollock II Scholarship that, once it reaches the endowment level, will be available to Chillicothe students studying humanities and the arts. 

“The humanities are having a tough time, and I’d hate to see that slide away,” Pollock says. “Without the arts, things would be pretty shabby.” 

Pollock still lives near campus, rising before dawn at the insistence of his beagle mix, heading to the attic where wife Patsy allows him to smoke cigarettes, and writing. 

His schedule and setting have changed. He wrote The Devil All the Time and his second novel, The Heavenly Table, mostly late at night in his old writing shed. When he began it all at age 45, Pollock sat down to his typewriter after working second shift.

“I told my wife if nothing happens after five years, I can go to the rest home knowing I gave it a shot,” he recalls. “The first two years, everything I wrote was terrible.” 

Pollock started re-typing stories by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor and Denis Johnson. 

“I learned more from that than anything—how Hemingway did dialogue, or how another writer made transitions,” he says. 

After copious rejections, Pollock began publishing his own work. At 50, he enrolled as an MFA student at Ohio State University. 

“I thought, I’ll get this degree, publish a book, then I’ll get a job at a college and have it made,” says Pollock, who changed course after teaching for his graduate stipend. “I found out I hated teaching,” he laughs. 

Admittedly, he sometimes hates writing, too, but he does it anyway. His advice for aspiring writers? “Read and write; that’s about it.” 

Pollock says he’s never met a writer who didn’t love to read, and he otherwise recommends patient persistence. 

“There are times I would rather be doing anything: washing windows, vacuuming.” But even when inspiration fails, he says, “At least you’ve been writing. It’s like playing an instrument; you have to put in the time.”