Samuel Tinianow lives in Columbus, Ohio where he collects unemployment benefits and contemplates the long-term feasibility of capitalism. Occasionally, during his intermittent episodes of sleep-talking, he demands to receive The Blue Chocolate Chip Cookie, which he will then exchange for ownership of the Hudson River basin.

SM: What made you decide to become a writer?

S.T.: I guess I could say it's in my blood, that it's compulsive and I was born into it, and so on--which is true, to a degree, but I think in my case it's less nature and more nurture. As narratology teaches us, communication is based on convention. When I was a kid I rarely interacted with other people in any significant way (still true). As such, most of the "communication" I engaged in was text--in books, in magazines, on video game screens, and eventually online. Writing is just me communicating based on the conventions I'm most familiar with.

SM: What/who is your biggest influence outside the literary world?

S.T.: Much of the way I think was defined by a semester I spent in Europe while I was in college. I took that opportunity to push myself up to my furthest bounds of mental isolation and physical discomfort, traveling to places where I was numbed by cold and unable to communicate with anyone around me. Being in that sort of vacuum helps you distinguish your own thoughts and desires with a degree of clarity you just can't buy.

SM: If an illness or disorder were named after for you, what would it be called? What are its symptoms?

S.T.: Uncanny Resemblance Syndrome: an inexplicable pattern of a very large number of people thinking you're someone they know (or, occasionally, one of their offspring) until they've been talking to you for five minutes. May lead to irrational belief that you are a cylon (Cf. Battlestar Galactica).

SM: What story or novel do you wish you'd written? Why?

S.T.: The Divine Comedy, so I could make it not suck.

SM: If a person dropped an eight-pound bowling ball off a boat over the Mariana Trench (approximately 6.8 miles deep), how long would it take for the bowling ball to hit the ocean floor?

S.T.: I'm not 100% sure of the material composition of a bowling ball, but I'm fairly sure it would be crushed into powder by the pressure and consumed by plankton before it could get that far. Moving up the food chain, the plankton will then be consumed by a school of fish, which will then be consumed by a sperm whale. The sperm whale will eventually die and the parts of its carcass which are not eaten will, still containing the undigestable bits of bowling ball, sink to the bottom of the ocean. So, judging from the life expectancy of the sperm whale, the bowling ball will reach the ocean floor in approximately 80 years.

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To read Samuel Tinianow's story, "Uncle Rick", click here.

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