There is a reason people are paid to write headlines and book titles: when they work they sell. I bring this up because I was sold by just such a device. The book was The Ordinary White Boy by Brock Clarke. I was shopping at a bargain book outlet for some interesting reading material when the title and cover caught my eye. Since I consider my self an "Ordinary White Boy" I was interested to see how the author dealt with the topic. The book proved thouroughly enjoyable. I then realized that the author taught in nearby Cincinnati. Building on my recent success, I decided to attempt an interview. Luckily, Mr. Clarke proved amenable and was gracious enough to answer my questions.

Brock Clarke , a native of upstate New York, received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester. He is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Mississippi Review, American Fiction, The Journal, Brooklyn Review, South Carolina Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Twentieth Century Literature, and Southwestern American Literature. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. His most recent published work is What We Won't Do a collection of short stories. The Q&A was conducted via email and is below. Enjoy.

Questions and Answers:
A coming of age novel set in a claustrophobic small town
isn't exactly literary groundbreaking, what led you to write a book like The Ordinary White Boy?

It isn't groundbreaking? Man, why didn't anyone tell me? Why doesn't anyone ever tell me anything?

Acutally, I did think a good deal about this, about the potentially tired turf I (and Lamar) might be trodding. But in the end this was why I wanted to write this novel: because I thought I had things to say about this man, in this place, at this time that hadn't been said before, at least in the way I had to say them. In other words, the book sets out to confound a lot of what goes on young men in a small, dying town fiction. That's my hope, at least.

The main character Lamar, however, is a unique. How did you go about creating this character? Is he a composite of different people, autobiographical, patterned after one specific person?

In Lee K. Abbott's story "A Creature out of Palestine," his narrator describes himself as a "white boy extraordinaire." I wanted to write about someone who was an ordinary white boy--I wanted to write about this kind of guy because someone who would call himself an ordinary white boy probably isn't as ordinary as he would like to be, and this inner conflict would be productive, novelistically, in that it would cause him and his some interesting pain, it would force him to be self-conscious in a way that might not do him any good, but might do his novel a good bit of good.