“Mickey Hess’s self-published creative nonfiction masterpiece, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory, was recently reprinted by provocative indie press Garrett County in November 2008, and to my mind, it is the funniest, most honest depiction of the struggle almost all college graduates face when trying to decide what the hell they’re going to do with the rest of their lives. Hess, during the time the memoir is set, is a young adjunct professor teaching at four different colleges throughout Kentucky and Indiana, working without a contract or health insurance, who takes weird job after weird job to supplement his income: ice cream man, character at a haunted house, ball-pit monitor at a children’s arcade, incompetent house sitter. The question the book keeps asking is, “Can you pay the rent while still maintaining some sense of dignity?”
—Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps (Norton, 2009)
Photo credit: Flint Chaney