Poe Ballantine
Poe Ballantine
Poe Ballantineis a fiction and nonfiction writer known for his novels and especially his essays, many of which appear in The Sun. His second novel, Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, won Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Ballantine’s work often draw comparisons to the life and work of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
together way wells
A bilingual marriage, by the way, is a great way to stay together for longer than you normally would because you can't understand each other very well.
evil literature flow
Amazon is evil, like anything big, but we can't help if it flows the very center of literature.
life risky subjects
Because I've lived a risky and unconventional life, I don't often struggle for subjects to write about.
conversation life
All my life, I never realized you could have a conversation with a ghost.
across
I first came across Chadron, Nebraska, by accident in 1994.
studied
I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect.
compared rejected traveled
I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.
guy himself honest likes putting puzzles wants
I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way.
love plains terror took
'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.
people
Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.
art devil good lying money plenty true
There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.
blowing falling nebraska seen time travels western
Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.
arts featured grain liberal pet sign small store tanning video window yellow
Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'
admire believe decided gone gotten people seemed talk wonderful
One evening, after my wife and son had gone out for a walk, I decided to have a talk with my neighbor, who I believe was murdered. I had gotten to know and admire him by listening to people talk about him. He seemed a wonderful person with much to give.