Today we’d like to introduce you to Frank Allison
Frank, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I got started in writing early through the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Downtown Cincinnati, and found my start in motorsports much later in life. I was made aware of Formula 1 racing via a dear friend (Riley Girmann) who already worked in motorsports as a graphic designer, and made the choice to throw myself in fully as a fan and see where it took me. About a year in, a friend jokingly told me I should write poetry about F1 because I was so in love with it, and I decided to run with the idea again and see where it took me. Within two years, I had a published book within a very small niche of the motorsports world, with a press that truly believed in my vision (Game Over Books.)
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Overall, the journey has been fairly smooth, if only due to the brute force with which I entered the field. I was very lucky to have already had an understanding of how to get published due to previous writing experience. I also knew within a field as saturated as motorsports media, I would need to start with the physical product as proof of my capability before I could develop any sort of respect for what I was doing. If you tell someone you write motorsports poetry AND you’re newer to motorsports as a field in general, you need to have something good to back it up with, and thankfully I did the order of operations correctly.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a motorsports writer first and foremost, and I specialize in motorsports poetry. My first book is called Don’t Thank God, Thank The Crash Test Dummies That Came Before You, and it is a book about the mythos surrounding Formula 1 racing. There are very few people publicly operating within a more creative capacity in motorsports writing, often you find most writers cater to a more documentarian style (if not directly biographical) and I am proud to be able to do that right out of the gate. I want to flip motorsports writing on it’s head, and challenge the bounds for what has been traditionally considered “serious” sports writing.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
Cincinnati is a city so integral to my personality and my being, I don’t think any of what I do could be possible without it. The core of Don’t Thank God relies on the idea that the grit and the blood and the history of reality is inextricable from any and all forms of growth. As the city itself is pulled between what we love that Is and a gentrified idealization of a city, I think about the history I spent my young years learning, and about my neighbors who lived here long before it became a destination location. What is real and what is will always hold my love and receive my defense.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gameoverbooks.com/store/p/dont-thank-god-thank-the-crash-test-dummies-that-came-before-you
- Instagram: @frankwithanknife
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/18hYCiREZy/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Twitter: @frankwithaknife
