Neal Pollack is the author of 11 bestselling books, a Jeopardy! champion, and is widely regarded as “The Greatest Living American Writer.” I chatted with him about this and more.

You’ve said you realized you wanted to be a writer in seventh grade. Tell us how that came about.

We had these weekly vocabulary lists and we had to write a paragraph using them. For some reason, this inspired me, and I started creating these ridiculous serialized sagas that were part Monty Python, part who knows what. There were “words with Latin roots” so I created this soap opera about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra vaguely modeled on a TV miniseries that I was watching. Then I had Caesar transported to World War II era, and then there was something to do with outer space that was vaguely Star Wars-y.

It was nerdy as hell, and didn’t win me any friends, but I had fun with it, and I was good at it and I realized I was never going to do anything else with my life.

You graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and spent much of your career working for newspapers. How has journalism changed in your lifetime and what do you make of the sad decline of print news, mainly newspapers?

When I started in journalism school, we did our assignments on electric typewriters. Just to give you a sense of how long ago that was, Northwestern had its juniors intern at newspapers and magazines all over the country, and there were an infinite number of choices. My friend runs the same program at NU now, and there are very few choices and very few students actually want to work for newspapers.

I think the decline of newspapers has mostly damaged news on the local front. You need beat reporters and columnists to hold local officials and businesses accountable for corruption and the various petty cruelties of municipal power. I’m not as bearish about journalism on a national level. I feel like the national press has become extremely sclerotic and subservient to power in the last 10 years, not to mention excessively partisan.

It’s all moved online, which means that the press now is kind of like the partisan press that existed at the founding of the Republic. There are various filters you need to parse to come to some version of the truth.

But I feel like the media has actually grown up in the last year or so. If you look at the coverage of the L.A. fires, it’s been mostly excellent, a nice mix of investigative reporting and on-the-scene description. The media’s sympathies are in the right place. It is not totally hopeless for journalism.

You grew up in Arizona but got to Texas as fast as you could. Which state has better Mexican food and why? Also, do they even have barbecue in Arizona?

I wouldn’t say I got here as fast as I could. I lived in Chicago for 12 years and also lived in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The food is better in Texas across the board. There are more people, more Mexicans, more variety. And I would not eat barbecue anywhere else in the world other than maybe North Carolina.

And while on food … Jewish brisket or Texas brisket?

The Jewish brisket I grew up eating was flavorless and fatty and mostly steamed. I do like deli corned beef and pastrami. But Texas brisket is far, far superior.

Early on in your fiction career, you began billing yourself as “The Greatest Living American Writer.” Many saw this as a spoof of larger-than-life authors Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer who were, more or less, being characters themselves. How did this come about, what are some of the pitfalls of billing yourself as someone you’re not, and what does your now-adult son, Elijah, think of the character?

I started writing these pieces as a way to make fun of pompous literary journalists, and it just gradually evolved into something larger than life. It had a lot to do with the fact that McSweeneys picked it up in the late ’90s, when it was the absolute hippest thing in the literary world. When it went online, there wasn’t a ton of competition, so The Greatest Living American Writer had a lot of bandwidth.

Unfortunately, at times, the persona took over my actual life, and then there was the fact that a lot of people didn’t believe I actually existed because Dave Eggers, who founded and edited McSweeneys, was such a big presence himself. So people thought that I was a creation of him. At one point, I had a journalist call my mother to confirm that I actually existed.

After a while, I got sick of the persona, people got sick of the persona, and then the press kind of turned on the persona. It was a real mess. But years later, after the hubub died down, I was able to write some satirical pieces in the persona’s voice and it was fine.

Elijah doesn’t care about the persona. I don’t know if he really knows about it. He has his own life.

Look for Part 2 of my chat with Neal Pollack in next week’s paper.

Young is a Fredericksburg resident and avid outdoorsman whose work appears in the paper, Rock & Vine magazine, and other outdoor publications. Contact him at gayne@gaynecyoung. com.