Corn Dogs & Capitalism: Inside the World of Dollartorium
In Dollartorium, Ron Pullins builds a strange, funny, and unsettling world where capitalism is reimagined as a university and philosophical inquiry happens behind a fast-food counter. With wit, absurdity, and moral urgency, Pullins explores how monetization shapes our lives, our relationships, and our sense of self.
In this conversation, Pullins reflects on language, revision, villains, silence, Kafka, Beckett, and the long, strange pleasure of writing toward clarity.
What inspired you to start writing?
I have always loved writing and the world it creates, the understanding that comes with putting words down for what I think. Writing stories or longer works is like having a delightful and enriching conversation with someone. Otherwise a rare treat.
Do you have a writing routine or ritual? If so, what is it?
I am fortunate in being able to write as much as I want. Mostly I write during the day. Mornings are best for explorations. Afternoons best for revisions. I sometimes like to write in longhand. It is a completely different, tactile experience.
How do you handle writer’s block?
I rarely have writer’s block. Knock on wood. When I get bored and need to push on, I generally revert to revision. I go back to the beginning of some scene or work where things seem to be written in a mode I like and go forward. Editing and revision revs up my engine. Everythign always needs to be revised. Everythign cn always be better.
Which of your characters do you relate to the most and why?
All my characters are a part of me, so it seems unfair to relate to one and not to others. My characters are never too far outside my own universe. Even my worst characters are possibilities of me. Bad characters are always more interesting. In writing characters for the stage, the playwright needs to realize someone has to play that character in public and find the good in them. I think that is well for fiction writers to remember as well. In the Dollartorium, it is easy to admire Ralph and relate to him, caught between a job and his philosophical musings. But his bossy wife is the one who incites the story and finds a new joy in life. Where would we be without her?
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about yourself through writing?
The profound nature of language and writing. Who knew when I began that scratches on the page could carry so much imagination and create whole universes. Who would have guessed that the “real” world we live in is one we create in the same way we create fiction, and both are experienced much the same way?
If you could have dinner with any three authors, living or dead, who would they be and why?
Reynolds Price, not only because he was a great Southern writer and persevered as he suffered great physical hardship, but because he was supportive of my work. He found me when I was lost (as they say), a young college student trapped in an unsupportive institution and in fact discouraged from writing. Not knowing me at all he encouraged me as a writer, as an explorer of words. He helped me publish my first story and to rise above the indifference of my environment. Without him at that time I would have quit long ago. I would like to thank him for guiding me to an enriched life.
Samuel Beckett. I grew up in a small non-reading town, and went to college to find myself in a flood of realistic narrative (especially as an English major). Standard, basic ruled-defined writing. Rules. Models. In Beckett I discovered a fresh voice, dark and absurd, comic and despairing, to be endured. He was the first among others who helped me experience a vision beyond realistic naturalism.
Franz Kafka. I long to be in his writing group, with Max Brod and the others. I want to sit while he reads his work and laughs at his stories. Imagine he brings in the Penal Colony and smiles at the dark comedy of his liffe. It would be a hoot to have dinner with someone who might at any moment wake up a cockroach.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received about writing?
Write one true sentence. That’s Hemingway. It’s not easy. And,
A book must be an ax for the frozen sea within us. That’s Kafka. And what better ax than the one you create.
Can you describe your writing space?
An iMac. Scrivener. A window to look out of.
What’s your favorite part of the writing process?
Rewriting because it is an attempt to give shape to crude, poorly articulated thoughts yearning to be clarified and experienced. In the Dollartorium for instance, Ralph serves corn dogs and converses with his customers but they talk over each other as if they exist in two different worlds. His customers get their corn dogs and Ralph discusses philosophy. This absurd image started as a rough thought and was revised over numerous versions into this quixotic encounter. Rewriting helped bring out the voice.
How do you develop your characters?
I really feel I listen to them. I am sure that I constrain them because they exist within the parameters of my imagination, but otherwise I let them go. Sometimes when I am stuck on what to do next, I will ask my characters to say something. I ask them what they are doing now.
What’s one book you wish you had written and why?
There are a special few: The Castle (Kafka). Beckett’s novels, especially Malone or Watt. Ecclesiastics. The Castle brings together self inspection in an ominous world/ I have stolen the two clowns set to spy on K. in much of my own work. Beckett’s novels are a progress into language (taken altogether). Ecclesiastics is a book full of wisdom without religion plunked down in the middle of myth.
How do you balance creating a world that feels real while keeping it imaginative?
The “real” world is an imagined world. We are locked into its rules. Fiction breaks those rules or modifies them. Thus, as in Dollartorium, the materialistic/capitalistic system we are drowning in can be imagined as a university. One thing is another. Both are real. In fact in the Dollartorium, the lessons Ralph is given are far more realistic than the world he inhabits. I try to find the real truth in an imaginative setting.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve had to research for a book?
I do little actual “research”. Much of what I do is drawn from personal experiences. The lectures in the Dollartorium are not too different from lectures I had in college. I worked in fast food. I didn’t make corn dogs, but close enough. My ex-wife wanted me to be get rich at the risk of losing my soul. That said I am reading materials from torture victims of the Argentinian coup of the 1970s. It’s weird but also too timely..
Do you prefer writing heroes or villains, and why?
Every hero has a bit of villain in him, and ever villain has the potential to be a hero. In the Dollartorium, the strongest character in the book is the terrible Money Master. And it is Ralph’s wife whose greed causes all this trouble who is the one most redeemed. It’s fun to write characters from both sides. We root for our heroes, but villains are more fun.
What’s the most difficult scene you’ve ever written?
There is a scene in another novella/long story, The Boss is Dead, (self published, now OP) where our protagonist (hero) who hates his boss and wishes he were dead thinks his boss is being fired and he wants to take his place. Thus to qualify for the position he comes to act like his boss and harasses one of his employees in the hopes he will quit. It is an embarrassing and painful scene.
How do you handle criticism and negative reviews?
Not everyone is going to like what I write. If they did, I’d be worried. All writing needs a little controversy. Not everyone will share my taste or vision. I try to please myself first, then those who “get” what I am doing, then convert the savages. That said, a negative review can contain a clue as to a larger audience.
If you could live in any of the worlds you’ve created, which one would it be and why?
In a forthcoming long story/novella, Fracture, (RedSpot Literary Journal, Fall 2025) the protagonist finds his world has shattered in a hundred ways, but he endures to see his fractured world reassembled into something endurable, even pleasant. The Dollartorium, of course, steps outside the monetarized, competitive world, brings back a sense of family and community and the worth of each of us. I could live there most happily.
What’s the most rewarding part of being an author?
With stories, and especially with well-produced plays, it comes in listening to your own vision from others, be it reading, or on stage, or even referred to in conversation. Stage works are particularly good at that. Your universe is on stage. What has lingered so long in your mind is the universe outside it. Before it is “realized,” it is a great pleasure to get lost in what you write.
How do you stay motivated when you don’t feel like writing?
I can read a bit, particularly magazines that are not literature, like Scientific American. Or go to theater. Or talk with my partner. I host a small writing group that meets every Saturday and deadlines help me write. The possibility of reading what I write motivates me. The potential of embarrassment helps me rewrite.
What do you hope readers take away from your books?
Above all else I hope readers undergo an experience through my work. I hope the experience is meaningful enough, actualizable enough that they feel like they have been somewhere interesting and can reference what they have experienced in their daily lives. Through the Dollartorium, I could hope they would see a banana and wonder how it got priced. Or distance themselves from commercials. Or see how monetarization dominates our American lives.
Do you listen to music while you write?
I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work for me. I prefer silence. I do try to escape into the imaginative world myself. I go to bed with audiobooks, but I never get to sleep until the voices in my head overcome the voices streaming from my ipad.
How do you decide on the titles of your books?
Titles are tricky, if essential. I usually find something in the text of the work to inspire the title. My best title ever was The Boss Is Dead, a novella set in a restaurant where the night manager hates the manager, but changes his mind when he senses the opportunity for him to become one, the very object that he hates. Another for a short story derived from a short play of the same name is Baby Dada, a dadaesque story a baby with an Oedipus complex.
What’s a fun fact about you that most of your readers don’t know?
I am deaf in one ear. In difficult to hear situations I have to fill in the blanks I don’t hear correctly, meaning I sometimes “hear” some very odd things. Often enough it is delightfully surreal and far more interesting than what has been actually said
If you could have one superpower to help you with your writing, what would it be?
The ability to flip into a total mind state of the story, so words come easily and full of surprise and I am both the writer and the reader. I wish I could do that on command and keep it up for more than fifteen minutes
What are you working on next?
I am working on a novel on the life and inner life of a survivor of the junta in Argentina in the 1970s, The Loin. It weaves three threads together — an evening barbecue, the events in Argentina during the coup, and the timeless inner struggle of us all. Also.a novella/long story Fracture is being published in a literary journal this fall, and I hope to combine it with another experimental novella, Ice Dancing, and few stories. They are experiments in both language and story structure. I am also revising The Boss is Dead to see if I can reissue it in the future.
Ron Pullins’ work asks us to slow down, question the systems we take for granted, and listen—carefully—to language, power, and desire. Dollartorium is both absurd and deeply human, a philosophical satire that lingers long after the last page.
Read Dollartorium, explore Ron Pullins’ singular voice, and consider what happens when we imagine a world beyond monetization—one conversation at a time.
