Never Blame the Umpire (12 page)

I have a super family.

A terrific wife, Polly, who has put up with me during forty-five years of marriage. Wow! That’s a long time! She’s a nurse. When she worked in the hospital, her specialty was neo-natal intensive care. She loves working with babies. She also loves teaching others how to become good nurses. She just retired in 2009 after twenty years of teaching nursing at Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton, South Carolina.

Two wonderful and talented sons.

Tim is a history professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and loves to play softball and baseball. He and his wife Jacquelyn have two daughters, Mireille and her younger sister Gabrielle. Don’t get me started talking about my three wonderful granddaughters or I won’t ever get to the next nineteen questions.

Andy is a realtor who lives near Lake Travis in Austin, Texas, with Kellie and their daughter Kaya and their two good-sized dogs, Arlo and Daphne. Andy loves all kinds of water activities. He also loves Austin, which is bad for Polly and me. If his family didn’t love Austin so much we might be able to convince them to move closer to us so we could see them more often.

Luckily, both Tim and Andy can do many things they didn’t learn how to do from their dad, like use computers and build things and fix things.

Two incredibly cute tiny dogs. Angel, a white toy poodle, and her brother Hunter, a black toy poodle.

Most favorite—mowing the lawn.

Least favorite—everything else.

First of all, read a lot. All the good writers I know are also people who love to read. Secondly, write a lot. To be a good musician or athlete, one must practice and practice some more. The same holds for writing: the more often you write, the better your writing will become.

I love to play tennis and golf and softball and baseball. I play mostly outfield and shortstop on a softball team of “seniors” (that’s a nice way of saying “old men”). We play more than seventy games a summer from March to October. If I were writing a scouting report about myself, it might say: “He hits for a high average, runs fast and is a good fielder, but he doesn’t hit for power.” I also play on an adult baseball team (for players 28 years old and older) with my son Tim. We play about twenty games a year. I pitch and play the outfield and first base. I love baseball. Can you tell?

I also love to collect and read three kinds of books: poetry books, young adult and children’s novels, and sports books, mainly sports fiction. I have more than 7,000 books in my personal library, so I don’t even have to leave my house when I feel like reading a good book, which I feel like doing every day.

I don’t recall ever writing a poem or short story until I got to college. I didn’t start writing poetry (other than just a handful) until I was 33 years old. My first story and poems weren’t published until I was 35. The problem is, even though I really liked my high school English teacher, neither he nor any of my other teachers in elementary or high school ever showed me how much fun writing a story or poem can be. Those of you who have teachers who encourage you to write poems and stories and show you how to get started are lucky.

I grew up in Thomson, Illinois, a little town in the northwest part of Illinois, right on the Mississippi River. We had 500 people in town and eleven in my high school graduating class. I’ve written a lot of poems about growing up in Thomson. I went to college at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees there.

I certainly am. But not in money. In satisfaction—the satisfaction of having great friends and a great family, and the satisfaction of waking up every day and looking forward to the fun things I can do and the new things I’ll have a chance to write.

For me, the hardest thing has nothing to do with the actual writing—it’s trying to keep from getting too frustrated when a publisher doesn’t want to publish something I think deserves to be published.

For some people, the hardest thing is coming up with
an idea and getting those first words on the page. That’s not really a problem for me because I’ve discovered a lot of ways to help myself come up with ideas. I usually have more ideas than I have time to write them. But as a writer, I know how important it is to make time to write.

Hearing someone who’s read something I’ve written say, “Hey, I like it! It’s not bad!” Getting published is a great feeling, of course, but that comes later, and that’s just a bonus. There’s great satisfaction in writing something, and great pride in knowing you’ve made it as good as you think you possibly can, even if it never gets published.

I taught school (English and creative writing) for twenty-eight years (one year of eighth grade—the rest in high school and college). Now I go around to schools and conduct some one-week poetry-writing residencies and do poetry writings and talk to students about writing and publishing. That’s not work, though. That’s fun.

As long as you need it to be. Some say “As long as you want it to be,” but I’ve found out that you might want a poem to be a certain length, but when you start to write it you find that it needs to be longer or shorter. My longest poem is 510 lines long. My shortest one is one line long. Its title is longer than the poem itself. Here it is:

The day I drew a girl as my opponent in my first and only school wrestling match

She pinned me flat against the mat. And that was that.

I won’t print my longest poem here. You’ll need to find it someplace else.

Three sisters. No brothers. Janice was one year older than me. Because she was a year ahead of me in school, I always counted on her to “show me the ropes” and make things easier for me, and she always did. She died in December, 2004. Rita is 10 years younger than me and lives in Havana, Illinois. Rhonda, 12 years younger, lives in St. Charles, Missouri.

Try not to think of a poem as a puzzle that has only one solution or one answer. Different readers will see something different in the same poem depending on their own experiences in life and their own experience reading poetry. Rather than ask, “What does the poem mean?” I think a much better question is, “What does this poem mean to you?” Or even, “What do you like most about the poem?” All you really need to do is try to enjoy something in the poem—the sounds or the story or the picture it paints or a surprising idea or surprising use of language. The meaning of a poem isn’t as important as what it makes you think or how it makes you feel. You can enjoy it without “understanding” it in exactly the same way someone else might.

Never. I’d love to be able to draw, but I’m as bad an artist as I am a singer. Luckily, when my books or poems
require illustrations, the publisher finds someone else to illustrate them.

I love writing both. I think that anyone who wants to write poetry should practice writing both kinds. Some poems will work better if they rhyme, some if they don’t. It often depends on the subject and the mood you want to create. It’s important to give yourself the freedom to choose which approach works better. You can only do that if you practice writing in both rhyme and free verse.

I like writing both stories and poems. One reason I started writing a lot more poetry when I was in my 30s and 40s was because I was busy preparing classes and grading papers as a teacher, and it didn’t take me nearly as much time to write a poem’s first draft as it did a story’s. Most writing, of course, must be rewritten and revised many times. The best writers are those who discover that rewriting can be a fun experience and not something to be dreaded.

In recent years I’ve turned my attention more and more to the writing of full-length books.

I’ve always loved baseball, ever since I was seven or eight years old and played by myself, throwing a ball against a wire fence in my back yard or tossing a ball in the air and then bunting it down a narrow sidewalk, trying to bunt it straight so it would roll a long way before going off into the grass. After playing on my first baseball team
when I was thirteen, I’ve played on teams most of my life.

I’ve always been a big fan. When I was in school, I read all I could about the big leaguers and memorized all their batting averages. One of my favorite writing projects was to interview more than a hundred former major league baseball players for my books
Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age
and
More Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age.
These were players who were my idols when I was a kid. I never thought I’d actually have a chance to talk to them someday and listen to all their stories about their years in the big leagues.

In the American League, the New York Yankees.

In the National League, the Chicago Cubs.

It balances out because during much of my lifetime the Yankees almost always seemed to win their division and the Cubs almost always lost theirs.

My wife and I both grew up in Illinois, but we’ve lived in Seneca, South Carolina, since 1991. We love living where it’s warm most of the year.

Some people think I’m a cross between Robert Redford and Tom Cruise. (Okay, so maybe I don’t exactly LOOK like them.) But I’m old, like Redford, and I’m short, like Cruise.

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