W. P. Kinsella

Personal

Born William Patrick Kinsella, May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; son of John Matthew (a contractor) and Olive (a printer; maiden name, Elliott) Kinsella; married Myrna Salls, 1957 (divorced, 1963); married Mickey Herring, September 10, 1965 (divorced, 1978); married Ann Knight (a writer), December 30, 1978 (divorced); married Barb Turner (an artist); children: (first marriage) Shannon Leah, Erin Irene; (second marriage) Lyndsey Denise (stepdaughter). Education: University of Victoria, B.A., 1974; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1978. Politics: "Rhinoceros Party." Religion: Atheist.

Addresses

Home—9442 Nowell, Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada V2P 4X7.

Career

Government of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, clerk, 1954-56; Retail Credit Co., Edmonton, manager, 1956-61; City of Edmonton, account executive, 1961-67; Caesar's Italian Village (restaurant), Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, owner, 1967-72; student and taxicab driver in Victoria, 1974-76; University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor, 1976-78; University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, assistant professor of English and creative writing, 1978-83; writer, 1983—. Founder of the Calgary Creative Reading Series.

Member

American Amateur Press Association, Society of American Baseball Researchers, American Atheists, Enoch Emery Society.

Awards, Honors

Award from Canadian Fiction, 1976, for story "Illianna Comes Home"; honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, 1980, for "Fiona the First"; Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and School Library Journal's Best Books for Young Adults, both 1982, Books in Canada First Novel Award and Canadian Authors Association prize, both 1983, all for Shoeless Joe; Writers Guild of Alberta O'Hagan novel medal, 1984, for The Moccasin Telegraph; Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature, 1987; Stephen Leacock Award for Humor, 1987, for The Fencepost Chronicles; named Author of the Year by Canadian's Booksellers Association, 1987-88; Vancouver Award for Writing, 1987.

Writings

Dance Me Outside (stories), Oberon Press (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), 1977, published as Dance Me Outside: More Tales from the Ermineskin Reserve, David Godine (Boston, MA), 1986.

Scars: Stories, Oberon Press (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), 1978.

Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (stories), Oberon Press (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), 1980, Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, TX), 1993.

Born Indian, Oberon Press (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), 1981.

Shoeless Joe (novel; based on title story in Shoeless JoeJackson Comes to Iowa), Houghton (Boston, MA), 1982.

The Ballad of the Public Trustee (chapbook), William Hoffer Standard Editions (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1982.

The Moccasin Telegraph (stories), Penguin Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983, published as The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Tales, David Godine (Boston, MA), 1984, published as The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories, Penguin Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

The Thrill of the Grass (chapbook), William Hoffer Standard Editions (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1984.

The Thrill of the Grass (story collection; contains "The Thrill of the Grass"), Penguin Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1984.

The Alligator Report (stories), Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1985.

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (novel), Houghton (Boston, MA), 1986.

Five Stories (chapbook), William Hoffer Standard Editions (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1986.

The Fencepost Chronicles (stories), Collins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1987.

Red Wolf, Red Wolf (stories), Collins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt: BaseballStories by W. P. Kinsella, Collins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1988, reprinted as Go the Distance, Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, TX), 1995.

(With wife, Ann Knight) The Rainbow Warehouse (poetry), Pottersfield Press (East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1989.

Two Spirits Soar: The Art of Allen Sapp (art book), Stoddard (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

The Miss Hobbema Pageant, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

The First and Last Annual Six Towns Area Old Timers'Baseball Game, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1991.

Box Socials (novel), Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 1992.

A Series for the World, Woodford (Emeryville, CA), 1992.

The Dixon Cornbelt League, and Other Baseball Stories, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

Even at This Distance, Pottersfield Press (East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1994.

Brother Frank's Gospel Hour (stories), HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

The Winter Helen Dropped By (novel), HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

If Wishes Were Horses, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1996.

(Editor) Diamonds Forever: Reflections from the Field, the Dugout and the Bleachers (stories), HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

Magic Time, Bantam (Toronto, ON, Canada), 1998, Voyageur (Stillwater, MN), 2001.

The Secret of the Northern Lights, Thistledown (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), 1998.

(Editor and contributor) Baseball Fantastic (stories), Quarry Press (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

Japanese Baseball, and Other Stories, Thistledown (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), 2000.

Contributor to Ergo!: The Bumbershoot Literary Magazine, edited by Judith Roche, Bumbershoot, 1991. Also author of foreword to Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Don Johnson, University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Contributor to numerous anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories: 1977, 1981, 1985, Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1979, Best American Short Stories 1980, More Stories from Western Canada, Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature, Pushcart Prize Anthology 5, The Spirit That Moves Us Reader, Introduction to Fiction, The Temple of Baseball, Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories, The Armchair Book of Baseball, Small Wonders, Illusion Two, West of Fiction, Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Volume II, and Here's the Story.

Adaptations

Shoeless Joe was adapted and produced as the motion picture Field of Dreams, released in 1989 by Universal; Dance Me Outside was produced as a motion picture by Norman Jewison in 1995; Magic Time was optioned for a feature film.

Sidelights

Canadian author W. P. Kinsella has become a household name for baseball fiction. Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and Magic Time, among other novels, mix the supernatural and the mundane in epic baseball encounters, making Kinsella something of a homegrown, North American magical realist. "Build it and they will come" and "field of dreams," phrases from Kinsella's work, have entered the everyday consciousness and language of North Americans. "The infinite possibilities of baseball is Kinsella's trademark metaphor," wrote Maclean's contributor Brian Bethune, and he pursues that metaphor not only in novel-length works, but also in short story collections such as The Thrill of the Grass, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, and The Dixon Cornbelt League.

Kinsella, whose stories and novels have attracted an international readership, also writes from a Native American perspective in short stories that follow the daily escapades of characters living on a Cree Indian reservation, the Hobbema reserve in Alberta. In such fictions, Kinsella presents a regular cast of characters who are "sharp-witted, vulnerably intelligent, and spiritually guided as much by Oprah as by the holistic enlightenment of their own medicine lady," according to Catherine Osborne writing in Quill & Quire. A determined writer who published his first story collection at the age of forty-two, Kinsella has won numerous awards, among them the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary fellowship. He once commented: "I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer's duty is to entertain. If you can then sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better." The author of nearly thirty works of fiction, Kinsella set his pen aside in the late 1990s, virtually worn out after two decades of steady production.

Raised in Isolation

William Patrick Kinsella, born in 1935 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, spent his childhood in relative isolation in northwestern Canada. For the first ten years of his life he was raised in a log cabin. "There aren't too many of us can claim that distinction anymore," Kinsella reflected in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). "Our log cabin was located in an isolated area of central Alberta. Although it was only sixty miles from Edmonton, the capital, it might as well have been six hundred. Our only transportation was horse and buggy in
summer, and horse-drawn sleigh in winter. I was an only child, and the nearest neighbors with children were several miles away."

Since Kinsella found few companions his own age, he spent much of his childhood with adults. "Having no contact with children, I considered myself a small adult," Kinsella admitted. "Consequently, I claim to have been suffering from culture shock ever since." Despite some deprivations, he considers himself fortunate that his upbringing exposed him to literature: "My parents and my aunt Margaret were highly intelligent people, and though none had gone much beyond eighth grade, all three were readers, and all read aloud to me, especially my father. He would read what few novels we possessed, and as I grew, a weekly novel that appeared in the weekend edition of a Toronto newspaper.

Some of the novels I heard read aloud many times over were The Valley of Silent Men by James Oliver Curwood, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, The Desert of Wheat by Zane Grey, and Tarzan's Great Adventure by Edgar Rice Burroughs."

Kinsella claims the combination of reading and loneliness stirred his creativity: "I believe being raised in isolation had a good deal to do with my becoming a writer, for in order to entertain myself . . . I had to create my own entertainment. That meant I created fictional companions. . . . And I created elaborate fantasies involving my stuffed animals. . . . I'm one of these people who woke up at about age five knowing how to read and write, and I did my first fiction writing then, little, one-page, hand-printed stories, some of which my mother still has, with titles like 'The Little Lost Pansy.' Our farmhouse had large beds of those velvety purple-and-yellow flowers outside the kitchen door."

In 1945 Kinsella's family moved to Edmonton so that he could attend school. He had completed the first five years of his education by correspondence, but his mother did not feel qualified to teach him further. Kinsella regrets that his formal schooling did not recognize his budding talent as a writer, and, in fact, seemed to discourage creative ventures altogether. "Creative writing was not encouraged at Eastwood High School, in fact nothing creative was encouraged," he explained. "Our parents and teachers had survived, and been scarred by, the Great Depression; what was pounded into us was, get a job with security, learn a trade, acquire a profession, attend university. My high school counselor, whom I will never forgive, after I had scored ninety-eight
percent on the writing section of an aptitude test, and zero percent on the mechanical section, discouraged me from considering writing as a profession. He suggested instead that I become an accountant or an engineer, and write as a hobby, once I was established professionally."

Though Kinsella concedes that his study habits were not ideal, he managed to retain the information that would be important to his later career: "I graduated with ninety percent in English and fifty-one percent in each of seven other subjects, the nature of which I immediately forgot. I would get up at 4:00 a.m. the morning of an exam and cram enough vital information to pass, then let that information float away as the exam finished, knowing I would never use it again. I have never regretted my approach to learning."

During his school days, Kinsella began to develop an interest in baseball that would later blossom into a lifelong passion. He first heard about the game from his father, Johnny Kinsella, who travelled around the United States as a semi-pro third baseman for several years after World War II. Admitting that he is not athletically inclined, Kinsella recalled his first, comical attempt to play the game: "During my first spring in a regular school . . . during a pickup game at recess, I suddenly had a bat thrust into my hands and was told I was 'up.' I had witnessed enough play to know I was supposed to hit the ball, and I did hit the first pitch somewhere deep into the outfield, but I hadn't witnessed enough of the game to understand that I was supposed to run the bases after I hit the ball. I stood at home plate and watched the proceedings, while my playmates screamed at me, 'Run! Run!' 'To where?' I said, as I was pulled along by the arm toward first base. Unfortunately, by the time I had been dragged to first, the ball had been retrieved and I was out."

After high school Kinsella held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, Alberta, and Victoria, British Columbia. He was a clerk for the Alberta government, a collector for a finance company, an investigator for a credit bureau, a taxicab driver, and the owner and operator of a pizza restaurant. "No matter what I did, I always thought of myself as a writer," he told a contributor for Publishers Weekly. "You're born with a compulsion to write." In 1957 he married Myrna Sails, and they had two daughters, Shannon Leah and Erin Irene. The marriage ended in 1963, and in 1965 he married Mickey Herring and acquired a stepdaughter, Lyndsey Denise. He would eventually marry twice more.

Turns to Writing

Kinsella continued his education in 1970, enrolling in a creative writing course at the University of Victoria. He graduated in 1974 with a degree in creative writing and a major in play writing. One particular instructor, Kinsella said, set him on the road to publishing success: "I had published a number of poems, plus three or four stories in minor, minor markets, but, even though I knew my stories were good, there was something lacking. In the fall of 1974, a writer named W. D. Valgardson came to teach at U-Vic. He was a writer I admired very much, so I enrolled in his Advanced Fiction Workshop, a step that changed my life. I knew my stories were ninety percent publishable, but I couldn't get that last ten percent. Billy Valgardson looked at my work, and he would tear off my first page, then tear off the last page, and scissor off half of the second from last page, and say, 'Look! You warmed up for a page before you started your story, and you wound down for a page and a half after it was over. Don't do that!' I took that advice from Valgardson, and my work suddenly started to catch on. In one week I had five stories accepted by magazines, as many as had been accepted in the previous five years. And I've sold every story I've written since—over two hundred of them."

Though he would eventually find literary success, while studying at the University of Victoria neither Kinsella nor his mentor Valgardson entertained the possibility that Kinsella could ever make a living from storytelling. At Valgardson's suggestion, Kinsella enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop to earn an M.F.A. in creative writing, a degree that would enable him to teach at the university level. "The week before I left for Iowa," Kinsella told CAAS, "I packaged up eighteen of my Indian stories and mailed them to Oberon Press, Billy Valgardson's publisher, a small, quality press, located in Ottawa, Ontario. Earlier, Valgardson had submitted a sampling of my stories to Oberon. Their reaction was, 'These are very good, but so diverse they sound like they've been written by at least three different authors,' which was true, since they saw two Indian stories plus 'Fiona the First,' 'The Grecian Urn,' and 'Waiting for the Call.' Soon after I arrived in Iowa, I received word that my collection of stories had been accepted. Dance Me Outside was due for publication in the spring of 1977."

Dance Me Outside is a collection of short stories about life on a North American reservation narrated by a young, self-conscious Cree Indian. Unlike the many biased books of Indian fiction—guilt-ridden works written by whites, and finger-pointing prose by Indians—Dance Me Outside is a balanced depiction of the North American Indians and reveals a variety of ways in which they are conditioned to resign themselves to victimization. Most critics agreed that the book is an authentic and sensitive handling of the Cree culture. Dance Me Outside's success has been attributed in large measure to Kinsella's handling of Silas Ermineskin, the book's endearing narrator. In the CAAS, Kinsella recalled his search for a successful narrative voice: "I thought of a couple I knew casually; the young woman was Indian and her husband was white. I thought, 'There must be a story there about the clash of the cultures.' My immediate idea was to write from the young man's point of view, theorizing, 'What kind of problems would I have bringing an Indian girl home to meet my immediate family,' which at that time consisted of my mother and aunt, now living in retirement in Edmonton, and not having seen an Indian for many years, and with no plans to meet one. Then I said, 'No, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has already been written; so, what would happen if (a phrase fiction writers bandy about from dawn to dusk) I told the story from the Indian girl's kid brother's point of view? A boy who had been possibly to sixth grade, but wrote by intuition, not in white man's syntax.'"

The result was Silas Ermineskin, who brought Kinsella literary recognition. Kinsella experienced his first sustained success writing about a fictional cast of reservation-dwellers from Silas's point of view, and since then he has published nearly one hundred short stories about the Cree, many of which are collected in Dance Me Outside, Scars, The Fence-post Chronicles, Born Indian, The Moccasin Telegraph, and The Secret of the Northern Lights. Both Canadian and U.S. critics express admiration for Kinsella's accomplishment. Prairie Schooner contributor Frances W. Kaye noted: "W. P. Kinsella is not an Indian, a fact that would not be extraordinary were it not for the stories Kinsella writes about . . . a Cree World. Kinsella's Indians are counterculture figures in the sense that their lives counter the predominant culture of North America, but there is none of the worshipfully inaccurate portrayal of 'the Indian' that has appeared from Fenimore Cooper through Gary Snyder." In Wascana Review, George Woodcock likewise cited Kinsella for an approach that "restores proportion and brings an artistic authenticity to the portrayal of contemporary Indian life which we have encountered rarely in recent years." Anthony Brennan offered a similar assessment in Fiddlehead, writing that Dance Me Outside "is all the more refreshing because it quite consciously eschews ersatz heroics and any kind of nostalgic, mythopoeic reflections on a technicolor golden age."

Career Takes off with Shoeless Joe

In 1980 Kinsella mined his passion for baseball, publishing Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, a collection of short pieces set in Iowa, urban Canada, and San Francisco. The title story also was selected to appear in an anthology titled Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1979. An editor at Houghton Mifflin saw Kinsella's contribution to Aurora and contacted the author about expanding the story into a novel. "It was something that hadn't occurred to me at all," Kinsella recalled to a contributor for Publishers Weekly. "I told [the editor], 'I've never written anything longer than 25 pages, but if you want to work with me, I'll try it.'" Much to Kinsella's surprise, the editor agreed. Kinsella set to work expanding "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," but he decided instead to leave the story intact as the first chapter and build on the plot with a variety of other material. "I enjoyed doing it very much," he said. "They were such wonderful characters I'd created, and I liked being audacious in another way. I put in no sex, no violence, no obscenity, none of that stuff that sells. I wanted to write a book for imaginative readers, an affirmative statement about life."

Shoeless Joe, a novel-length baseball fable set on an Iowa farm, won Kinsella the Houghton Mifflin Literary fellowship in 1982. The story follows a character named Ray Kinsella in his attempts to summon the spirits of the tarnished 1919 Chicago White Sox by building a ballpark in his cornfield. Among the ghostly players lured to Kinsella's perfectly mowed grass is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the White Sox star player who fell in scandal when it was revealed that his team threw the World Series. As the story progresses, the same mysterious loudspeaker voice that suggested construction of the ballpark says, "Ease his pain," and Ray Kinsella sets off to kidnap author J. D. Salinger for a visit to Fenway Park. The novel blends baseball lore with legend and historical figures with fictional characters. "I've mixed in so much, I'm not sure what's real and what's not," Kinsella told a contributor for Publishers Weekly, "but as long as you can convince people you know what you're talking about, it doesn't matter. If you're convincing, they'll believe it."

Kinsella does seem to have convinced most critics with the novel Shoeless Joe. According to Alan Cheuse in the Los Angeles Times, the work "stands as fictional homage to our national pastime, with resonances so American that the book may be grounds for abolishing our northern border." Detroit News writer Ben Brown claimed: "What we have here is a gentle, unselfconscious fantasy balanced perilously in the air above an Iowa cornfield. It's a balancing act sustained by the absolutely fearless, sentimentality-risking honesty of the author. And it doesn't hurt a bit that he's a master of the language. . . . This is an utterly beautiful piece of work." A dissenting opinion is offered by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, who suggested that Shoeless Joe "is a book of quite unbelievable self-indulgence, a rambling exercise the only discernible point of which seems to be to demonstrate, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, what a wonderful fellow is its narrator/author." Conversely, Christian Science Monitor contributor Maggie Lewis praised the work, concluding: "The descriptions of landscape are poetic, and the baseball details will warm fans' hearts and not get in the way of mere fantasy lovers. This book would make great reading on a summer vacation. In fact, this book is a summer vacation." Made into the successful 1989 movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, Kinsella's Shoeless Joe hit a home-run for its author.

Of Baseball and Magic

Kinsella continues his fascination with baseball in his 1986 novel, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Jonathan Webb described the work in Quill & Quire: "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy contains bigger magic, larger and more spectacular effects, than anything attempted in Shoeless Joe. Kinsella is striving for grander meaning: the reconciliation of immovable forces—love and darker emotions—on conflicting courses." Time travel and a ballgame that lasts in excess of 2,600 innings are two of the supernatural events in the story; characters as diverse as Teddy Roosevelt and Leonardo da Vinci make cameo appearances. Chicago Tribune Books contributor Gerald Nemanic wrote: "Freighted with mythical machinery, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy requires the leavening of some sprightly prose. Kinsella is equal to it. His love for baseball is evident in the lyrical descriptions of the game."

In Toronto's Globe and Mail, William French suggested that Kinsella lifts baseball to a higher plane in his novels. The author, French noted, is "attracted as much to the metaphysical aspects as the physical, intrigued by how baseball transcends time and place and runs like a subterranean stream-of-consciousness through the past century or so of American history. . . . His baseball novels are animated by a light-hearted wit and bubbling imagination, a respect for mystery and magic." "To be obsessed with baseball is to be touched by grace in Kinsella's universe," wrote Webb, "and a state of grace gives access to magic." However, Webb felt that in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Kinsella fails to persuade the reader to go along with his magic. French likewise stated: "In the end [of the novel], Kinsella's various themes don't quite connect. But it hardly matters; we're able to admire the audacity of Kinsella's vision and the sheen of his prose without worrying too much about his ultimate meaning." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Roger Kahn called The Iowa Baseball Confederacy "fun and lyric and poignant."

Although baseball surfaces as a theme in Kinsella's 1991 novel, Box Socials, the author revolves his work primarily around the young narrator, Jamie O'Day, and the quirky characters who live in and around 1940s Fark—a small town near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Filled with "crackpots bizarre enough to put [American humorist] Garrison Keillor to shame," ventured Joyce R. Slater in Chicago Tribune Books, Box Socials features such individuals as Little Wasyl Podolanchuk, one of the only Ukrainian dwarfs in the province; teenaged Truckbox Al McClintock, who once batted against Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller; and bachelor Earl J. Rasmussen, who lives in the hills with six hundred sheep and delights in belting out "Casey at the Bat" at whim. Many reviewers noted that Box Socials is essentially a coming-of-age tale about the curious and wideeyed Jamie, who learns about sex by listening in on the women who gab with his mother, and who attends his first box social and bids on poor, down-trodden Bertha Sigurdson's lunch, even though Velvet Bozniak paid him to bid on hers. "The 'little box social' turns out to be a humdinger," Fannie Flagg maintained in the New York Times Book Review. "If you've never been to a box social, go to this one. Along with a lot of laughs, we are given a touching and sensitive portrayal of the love, sometimes happy, sometimes heartbreaking, between young men and young women, and experience the pangs of first love through Jamie's eyes." Other reviewers commended Kinsella's leisurely narrative style. Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times Book Review asserted that Box Socials is "a delightful comic ramble, written in a quirky, digressive style that reads like a cross between [American avant-garde writer] Gertrude Stein and [American cartoonist] Al Capp." And Slater concluded, "If long-winded, seemingly pointless stories make you anxious, Kinsella's not your man. If you're patient enough to stay for the payoff, if you're an admirer of the perfect wry phrase buried in verbiage, he will give you more than your money's worth."

Off and On the Diamond

Kinsella took a break from America's favorite pastime in his 1995 novel, The Winter Helen Dropped By. Set in a small town in Alberta, Canada, Kinsella's four-part novel depicts one year during the Great Depression through the eyes of eleven-year-old Jamie O'Day, the narrator of Box Socials. "Every story is about sex or death, or sometimes both," begins O'Day as he takes readers through a steady succession of marriages, funerals, pregnancies, and the like. In the novel's first section, an Indian woman arrives at the O'Day's farmhouse in the middle of a blizzard. Another section finds a local widow in the midst of wedding preparations while small-town gossip threatens to muffle the celebration. And Jamie views his parents through childish eyes in "Rosemary's Winter," which Paul J. Robichaud praised in his Quill & Quire review as "the strongest section of the novel." Heavy with child, Jamie's mother has to get to town, but the creek has flooded. Her dreamer husband's solution to the dilemma is to construct a sailboat, which in his creative vision he sees as a "wheelless wind-wagon." While noting that Kinsella sometimes affects a too-down-home air, Robichaud added that The Winter Helen Dropped By "affords the reader a glimpse into a world that no longer exists, and provides considerable laughter and feeling while doing so."

Kinsella has also produced short fiction on a variety of themes. The Alligator Report, also published in 1986, contains stories that pay homage to surrealist Richard Brautigan, one of Kinsella's favorite authors. In a Village Voice review, Jodi Daynard claimed: "Kinsella's new stories replace humor with wit, regional dialect with high prose. . . . He uses surrealism most effectively to highlight the delicate balance between solitude and alienation, not to achieve a comic effect. . . . These are images that resonate-not comic ones, alas, but stirring, not woolly-wild, but urban gothic." New York Times Book Review contributor Harry Marten contended that in The Alligator Report Kinsella continues "to define a world in which magic and reality combine to make us laugh and think about the perceptions we take for granted."

Once again Kinsella mixes magic and baseball in his 1993 work, The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories. In this collection of nine stories Kinsella uses mysticism and conflict to explore human nature. Supernatural events permeate many of the stories: "The Baseball Wolf" shows what happens when a shortstop transforms into a wolf in order to revive his fading career; in "The Fadeaway," even death cannot stop pitcher Christy Mathewson from relaying pitching tips to the Cleveland Indians through a dugout phone. Stephen Smith of Quill & Quire noticed the lack of "baseball activity" in The Dixon Cornbelt League and instructed the reader to "choose your own baseball imagery" when judging the stories. The story "Eggs" takes on a more realistic and serious topic. "Eggs" is an account of a pitcher's premature retirement due to the loss of his ability to throw a fastball. The pitcher's aspiration to return to baseball is unsupported by his wife and his unhappiness grows. Publishers Weekly critic Sybil S. Steinberg appreciated Kinsella's stories because they "read like lightning" and present "fascinating scenarios," yet she felt Kinsella does not fully satisfy his readers, does not offer enough substance and depth in the characters and their stories. Drew Limsky agreed in his review of the collection in the Washington Post Book World, contending that "although Kinsella's voice is frequently winning even after he's run out of ideas, some of the entries are so slight they barely qualify as stories; they seem to belong to some lesser genre-tales or anecdotes, perhaps."

In his 1994 book of short stories, Brother Frank's Gospel Hour, Kinsella revisits the inhabitants of Hobbema, Alberta. Two familiar inhabitants include Silas Ermineskin, a Cree writer, and his comical partner Frank Fencepost. The humorous pair return in the short story "Bull," a light-hearted rendering of an artificial insemination case in the Alberta Supreme Court. The other stories in Brother Frank cover a range of topics. "Rain Birds," looks at the results of corporate farming on nature; the reality of child abuse is explored in "Dream Catcher"; a boy ascertains the parallels between the sexes in "Ice Man"; and in "Brother Frank's Gospel Hour" comedy turns a staid gospel show upside down. Criticism of Brother Frank was predominantly positive. Scott Anderson of Quill & Quire credited Kinsella for his "understanding of human foibles" and his revelry in "the inventiveness of the human spirit in adversity."

Benched

By the mid-1990s Kinsella's name had become all but synonymous with baseball stories. His 1996 offering, If Wishes Were Horses, ten years in the works, brings back some of the characters from his earlier baseball fiction, including Ray Kinsella from Shoeless Joe and Gideon Clarke from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Introduced here is a new protagonist, the ex-pro baseball pitcher Joe McCoy, who became a reporter after his so-so career as a pitcher and is now on the lamb from the FBI who want him for kidnapping. But McCoy is convinced that this current life is a fiction; his real life has much better things in store for him. In that alternate reality, he married his high school sweetheart instead of abandoning her, and he also won a World Series ring for his relief work in the 1993 Series. Reviewing the novel in Maclean's, Brian Bethune called If Wishes Were Horses an "absorbing story of long and regret, in which the hero can taste and smell experiences that never happened." However, Chris Nelson, writing in the Calgary Sun, was less impressed with the effort. While noting that "few writers have Kinsella's grasp of language, which often results in books of lyrical beauty and imagination," Nelson went on to lament that the plot of If Wishes Were Horses "is so transparently weak and wobbly that no amount of grace will bring it salvation." Nelson concluded that "everyone's allowed to strike out once in a while."

Kinsella's production began to slow down by the late 1990s, in part the result of a concussion he suffered as a pedestrian struck by a car. His 1998 novel, Magic Time, features a young baseball player in Iowa. Dreaming of life in the big leagues, Mike Houle signs on with a semipro team in the Cornbelt League, located in Grand Mound, Iowa. There Mike works in an insurance office by day and waits for a game in the evenings. But these games seem to always be rescheduled, and the ease and comfort of life in Grand Mound soon begins to seduce him away from his dream of athletic renown. He notices that many of the former players recruited for the team have settled down in Grand Mound, marrying local girls, and soon Mike begins to see that there is another agenda in Grand Mound than baseball. Kinsella at once paints an "idealized portrait of small-town life," as Booklist's Wes Lukowsky noted, and blends it with an edgy supernatural adventure tale, in which players become ensnared in the domestic bliss of Grand Mound. "Is this paradise, or is it an all-too-comfortable prison?" wondered a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. This same contributor went on to note that this "soft lob of a novel doesn't quite fly as high as the author's previous home-run hits, but satisfies with its endearing characters and baseball lore." More critical was the assessment of a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who found the prose "flat and affectless, devoid of texture or sense of place or era, while the interweaving of plot strands is mechanical." Similar complaints were raised by Martin Levin, reviewing the novel in the Globe and Mail. For Levin, "Unless you are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, magic realism tends to work best in the short form," not in novels. However, Roger Burford, writing in Quill & Quire, was more laudatory in his assessment, noting that the reader should "trust Kinsella to pull this kind of thing off." For Burford, "the denouement, if it is no surprise, is certainly quite satisfactory."

Kinsella returns to the short story format with two further volumes, one about his band of Cree characters, The Secret of the Northern Lights, and another about his favorite sport in Japanese Baseball and Other Stories. Reviewing the former title in the Alberta Report, a contributor found that "Kinsella continues to write fun, funny, and interesting stories with endings worthy of O'Henry." For this same reviewer, at fifteen dollars Kinsella's "new book of Hobbema Indian stories is a deal hard to beat" H. K. Kirchhoff, writing in the Globe and Mail, praised The Secret of the Northern Lights, as well as the other short story volumes featuring Silas Ermineskin and friends as "clever, often funny and occasionally moving slices of Indian life, written with deadpan, naive charm." However, Kirchhoff also observed that these tales made him feel "uncomfortable," not because of the manner in which Kinsella "has appropriated the 'native voice,' whatever that is," but because the author "has treated [this native voice] rather shabbily in a self-centered and paternalistic way." Osborne, writing in Quill & Quire, also commented that Kinsella has been "knocked by native critics for his appropriation of voice, but his characters are adept at tripping along in life, and finding each step a telling bit of human and spiritual wisdom." A critic for BC Report, however, had no such reservations, finding that "every new book of Hobbema stories is cause for admiration. This one is no exception, demonstrating yet again that there is no mood which W. P. Kinsella cannot capture, and no aspect of human nature unknown to him."

With his year 2000 collection of stories, Japanese Baseball, Kinsella turns his attention to fields of dreams worldwide, from Japan to Hong King to South America to the United States. The title story features an aging foreign player, Craig Bevans, on Japan's Taiyo Whales team. Umpires take center stage in "The Arbiter," and failed dreams in baseball and love informs "Underestimating Lynn Johannsen," the "three strongest stories in the collection," according to Joanne Peters in Canadian Materials. Peters went on to dub Kinsella a "master," further noting that "you don't have to like baseball to enjoy Japanese Baseball."

If you enjoy the works of W. P. Kinsella

If you enjoy the works of W. P. Kinsella, you may also want to check out the following books:

Bernard Malamud, The Natural, 1952.

Will Weaver, Farm Team, 1995.

Dan Gutman, Honus and Me, 1997.

The author who has been called "a fabulist of great skill" and "a gifted Canadian writer" once commented: "There are no gods, there is no magic; I may be a wizard though, for it takes a wizard to know there are none. My favorite quotation is by Donald Barthelme: 'The aim of literature is to create a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.'" Kinsella gave up the heartbreaking business of writing in the late 1990s. According to Rick Morrissey, writing in the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, Kinsella "stopped writing because it was hard work and he had enough money to get away with it. He travels to play in Scrabble tournaments."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 7, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 27, 1984; Volume 43, 1987.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Popular Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Murray, Don, The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices, York Press, 1987.

PERIODICALS

Alberta Report, June 15, 1998, review of Secret of theNorthern Lights, pp. 39-39.

BC Report, March 23, 1998, Parker Shafer, Jr., "He Said, She Said, He Sued: W. P. Kinsella and Evelyn Lau Give (Literary) Love a Bad Name," pp. 22-26; June 22, 1998, review of Secret of the Northern Lights.

Booklist, November 1, 1994, Barbara Deltz-Siler, review of Shoeless Joe; January 15, 1995, Dennis Dodge, review of The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories, p. 895; March 15, 1995, Ted Hipple, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, p. 1343; May 15, 1995, Wilma Longstreet, review of Box Socials, p. 1664; November 1, 2001, Wes Lukowsky, review of Magic Time, p. 460.

Books in Canada, October, 1981, Kenneth McGoogan, "W. P. Kinsella on the $10,000 Trade That Took Him from the Indians to the Chicago Cubs."

Calgary Sun (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), October 6, 1996, Chris Nelson, review of If Wishes Were Horses.

Canadian Materials, March 30, 2001, Joanne Peters, review of Japanese Baseball and Other Stories.

Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 1982, Maggie Lewis, review of Shoeless Joe.

Edmonton Sun, April 12, 1998, Colin MacLean, "Kinsella's a Field of Smiles."

Explicator, spring, 1995, Clarence Jenkins, "Kinsella's 'Shoeless Joe,'" pp. 179-181.

Fiddlehead, fall, 1977, Anthony Brennan, review of Dance Me Outside; spring, 1981.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON, Canada), April 12, 1986, William French, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy;; March 4, 1998, Chris Dafoe, "Literary Lovers' Quarrel Gets Nasty," p. C1; August 1, 1998, Martin Levin, review of Magic Time and H. J. Kirchhoff, review of The Secret of the Northern Lights.

Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2001, review of MagicTime, p. 1385.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, May 25, 2004, Rick Morrisey, "Kinsella Masterpiece Still Batting 1,000," p. K7377.

Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1982, Alan Cheuse, review of Shoeless Joe.

Los Angeles Times Book Review,July 6, 1986, Roger Kahn, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy; March 29, 1992, Patrick Goldstein, review of Box Socials, p. 6.

Maclean's, May 1, 1989, Brian D. Johnson p. review of Field of Dreams, 66; November 11, 1991, Victor Dwyer, review of Box Socials, p. 90; March 13, 1995, Brian D. Johnson, review of Dance Me Outside, p. 66; December 16, 1996, Brian Bethune, review of If Wishes Were Horses, p. 69; March 16, 1998, "From Love Story to Lawsuit,"p. 12.

National Review, October 24, 1986, Mike Shannon, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, p. 60.

New Republic, May 8, 1989, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Field of Dreams, pp. 26-27.

New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1986, Harry Marten, review of The Alligator Report, p. 15; July 12, 1992, Fannie Flagg, review of Box Socials, p. 33.

People Weekly, April 27, 1992, Tim Whitaker, review of Box Socials, p. 37.

Prairie Schooner, spring, 1979, Frances W. Kaye, review of Dance Me Outside.

Publishers Weekly, April 16, 1982, Robert Dahlin, "Publishers Weekly Interviews: W. P. Kinsella"; October 19, 1990, Penny Kaganoff, review of Red Wolf, Red Wolf, p. 53; March 2, 1992, review of Box Socials, p. 48; September 27, 1993, review of Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, p. 58; December 5, 1994, Sybil S. Steinberg, review of The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories, pp. 65-66; February 13, 1995, Paul Nathan, "Here, There, Everywhere," p. 18; October 29, 2001, review of Magic Time, p. 36.

Quill & Quire, April, 1986, Jonathan Webb, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy; June, 1993, Stephen Smith, review of The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories, p. 27; July, 1994, Scot Anderson, review of Brother Frank's GospelHour, p. 94; September, 1995, Paul J. Robichaud, review of The Winter Helen Dropped By, p. 68; February, 1997, William Humber, review of Diamonds Forever, p. 45; May, 1998, Catherine Osborne, review of Secret of the Northern Lights, p. 28; June, 1998, Roger Burford, review of Magic Time, p. 53.

Saturday Night, September, 1999, Stephen Smith, "A Loss for Words," p. 14.

Studies in Short Fiction, winter, 1995, David Dougherty, review of Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, pp. 106-107.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 30, 1986, Gerald Nemanic, review of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy; May 3, 1992, Joyce R. Slater, review of Box Socials, p. 6.

Village Voice, December 4, 1984; April 1, 1986, Jodi Daynard, review of The Alligator Report.

Wascana Review, fall, 1976, George Woodcock, review of Dance Me Outside.

Washington Post, March 31, 1982, Jonathan Yardley, review of Shoeless Joe.

Washington Post Book World, March 30, 1995, Drew Limsky, review of The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories, p. 4.

ONLINE

Well Known Canadians Homepage,http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~terning/bios/Kinsella.html/ (June 12, 2004).*