“Glad You Enjoyed Your Biscuits:” Clint Peters’ Interview with Poe Ballantine
Visiting writer Poe Ballantine stopped by Denton in early November this year, where he read at the University of North Texas and we rustled up breakfast at the Old West Cafe. I had the Cowboy and a plateful of homemade biscuits and gravy, and Poe had the Train Robber with cheese. While our bloated stomachs squeezed blood back into our brains, I quizzed Ballantine on the finer points of self-expression, parenthood, Amazon one-star reviews, Jack Kerouac, marriage and fame. We talked mostly in context of his new memoir, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. The book is centered around the unsolved murder of math professor Steven Haataja in Chadron, Nebraska where Ballantine lives, and is also, seamlessly, about Ballantine’s bilingual marriage, his autistic son and wondering where the true heart of America is buried. During Love and Terror’s writing, Poe took part in a documentary about the murder case. The film shares the same names as Poe’s memoir, and a link to filmmaker Dave Jannetta’s kick-starter page is listed below. The book itself is ridiculously funny as it is strangely tragic and page-turning. Somehow, Ballantine has made the Nebraskan panhandle feel both terrible and exotic. I should say too that Poe was kind enough to wait on me at the Old West while I finished my biscuits.
Clint Peters Your book condenses some material down from about five years to a space of about a year, and you modified a couple of other things for narrative flow. Why do you think some readers get routinely miffed, underwear bunched in a knot by a writer who shapes material openly? Do they think artists don’t write nonfiction anymore?
Poe BallantineIt often depends on the type of underwear, you know, tight underwear bunches more readily, but there’s definitely confusion between creative nonfiction and journalism, and I don’t think there should be. Journalism reports an event from the field objectively and factually as it happened. Its intent is to inform. Creative nonfiction unzips the skin of journalism and reaches down into the penetralia for emotions, meaning, beauty, ideas, and if you’re lucky, art. When you set my account side by side with the so-called factual account of Steven Haataja, the newspaper articles, police reports, autopsy report, etc. there’s really no comparison between which illuminates the record best, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
To read the entire interview go to The American Literary Review.