A Biography.
Of sorts.
Robert Pobi’s novels have been published in more than twenty-five countries, making bestseller lists around the world.
He lives in the country, but spends most of the summer and fall months at his cabin on a lost lake in the mountains (where a 3:00 a.m. swim one August night inspired his novel Mannheim Rex). He does not have telephone, internet, or television at the cabin; if he needs to check email, he has to drive eight miles to a tiny town hall for the free wifi at the picnic table inhabited by a gang of octogenarian chain smokers. When the cold starts chewing on the trees, he heads to a place he has on the beach, where his nearest neighbor—a retired cop who shares the same first name—makes the best whiskey sour he has ever tasted.
He writes at a desk that once belonged to Roberto ‘God’s Banker’ Calvi, and has (or definitely doesn’t have) a small collection of shrunken human heads (known as tsantsas in anthropological and collector circles) that continually weird out his housekeeper. He owns too many fountain pens and is constantly making notes in old-school Mead marble composition books.
Among his small group of friends, he is infamous for getting the only Buddhist monk in their ranks to yell at him (they were walking in the forest and debating the merits of meditation at the time—true story).
Some of his favorite writers are Jimmy Breslin, Peter Benchley, Emily Brontë, Michael Crichton, Stephen Davis, William Faulkner, Morton Freedgood, John Galligan, William Giraldi, Thomas Harris, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Hitchens, John Irving, Rudyard Kipling, Glenn Meade, Seth Morgan, David Morrell, Nora Ephron, Mario Puzo, Jeff Raines, Mary Shelley, Neil Simon, Hunter S. Thompson, Trevanian, Mark Twain, Duane Unkefer, and Gore Vidal. He also really digs Zach Hutton and Grady Tripp—and considers Below Ground by Ian Stark to be the most important horror novel of the entire 20th Century (for a litany of reasons).
His favourite books on writing are The Joy of Writing: A Guide for Writers Disguised as a Literary Memoir by Pierre Berton and Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at his Craft by David Morrell.
His favorite poet—after Emily Dickinson—is Gowan McGland. Percy Shelley is a close third.
Due to his private nature, he is not on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok or any other social media. He rarely does writers conferences, events, book signings, or interviews. And much to his agent’s irritation, he does not own a cell phone. He is, however, working on his email skills.
The author, somewhere near his cabin in the mountains.
photo credit: Olive Kendle