Kinsella his own ‘biggest fan’
Shoeless Joe writer glad to revisit short stories in best-of collection
W.P. Kinsella reading When: Friday at 7 p.m. Where: Audreys Books, 10702 Jasper Ave.
W.P. Kinsella is not one to display signs of writerly angst or self-doubt when it comes to reassessing his body of work.
“I’m always puzzled at writers who go back and say ‘Gee, I want to rewrite that — I don’t like that; I don’t like the way it turned out,’” says Kinsella, in an interview from his home in Yale, B.C. “I’m always my own biggest fan. I enjoy re-reading my work and I laughed and laughed and laughed when I read some of these stories, which is what people are supposed to do when they read them.”
Kinsella will be coming to Edmonton on Friday to read selections of The Essential W.P. Kinsella, a newly released retrospective from San Francisco-based Tachyon Publications that covers stories written as far back as 1978 and as recently as this year.
The 80-year-old writer may not have found reviewing his large collection of short stories particularly arduous, but it’s still a formidable volume of work to streamline into one best-of collection. The oftenblunt author acknowledges the American publisher did a “really wonderful job” in choosing the 31 stories. Not surprisingly, many of them deal with Kinsella’s favourite topic of baseball. That includes Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, a 1979 short story that eventually evolved into Kinsella’s first and most successful novel, 1982’s Shoeless Joe.
The book, which fused baseball lore with magic realism, was later turned into the 1989 film Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner. Baseball became the topic for many of Kinsella’s subsequent novels, right up to his 2011 release Butterfly Winter.
A short essay that ends the collection and covers how his beloved tale was turned into Field of Dreams is titled How it Began: Shoeless Joe, suggesting Kinsella is at peace with the idea he will likely always be remembered for his baseball stories in general and Shoeless Joe in particular.
Born in Edmonton, Kinsella spent his early days being taught by his mother at a rural homestead near Darwell, Alta. Part of his homeschooling was being read to as a child, which Kinsella says likely sparked an early interest in writing. As for baseball, he can certainly get philosophical about the sport and its ability to spark his imagination.
“I suppose it’s the openendedness of the game because I like the magic realism aspect,” he says. “On a true baseball field, the foul lines diverge forever. So there’s no distance that a great hitter couldn’t hit the ball or a great fielder couldn’t run to retrieve it. That makes for myth and it makes for largerthan-life characters.”
On the other hand, he can also sound fairly mercenary about it. “Once you hit on something that people want to read, it’s like a prospector finding a vein of gold,” he says. “You dig the hell out of it until it’s all gone. I wrote another half-dozen baseball novels and I discovered there was a market for baseball short fiction, which nobody was in. I wrote eight or 10 collections of short stories. The same with the native stories. Nobody had ever done something like that.”
Examples of the native or Hobbema Native Reserve stories — comedic tales that take place on the central Alberta reserve (now known as Maskwacis) — are also included in this collection. Other than the baseball tales, the native stories are Kinsella’s most popular and his most controversial. Kinsella remains angrily dismissive of the criticism he received for appropriating the voice of First Nations people, complaints he says usually came from “academic drones” rather than the natives themselves.
It shows that the famously combative author can still be combative. That much is clear when he is asked about his years teaching at the University of Calgary in the late ’70s and early 1980s, where he clashed with administration.
But a softer side emerges when he talks about his wife Barbara, who died in 2012. He said he will likely read from two of the stories in his collection: 1998’s The Lime Tree and 2013’s The Last Surviving Member of the Japanese Victory Society. The latter, while not autobiographical, deals indirectly with grief and the death of his wife and is dedicated to her. The Lime Tree, about two seniors dealing with memories of departed loved ones, has gained resonance for Kinsella in the last few years.
“I was talking (to a journalist) and he was saying ‘Since you have people go back in time, what would you do if you could go back in time?’” Kinsella says. “I said ‘At my age, I would trade whatever time I had left for one more day with my wife, one of the happy days that we shared together.’ I started thinking about that and thought ‘What would happen if I wrote that story?’ Then I was reading through the collection and said ‘Oh, I’ve already written that story.’ That’s The Lime Tree. That’s why I do the two of them as a set.”