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Episode 212: Kevin Guilfoile on Uncovering the Chaos and 'A Drive into the Gap'
125 Plays4 years ago
Kevin Guilfoile is the author of the memoir A Drive into the Gap. It is published by Field Notes.
This podcast is sponsored by my writing coaching services as well as Casualty of Words, a writing podcast for people in a hurry.
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Coaching
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and efforts creative nonfiction podcast is brought to you by Me what that's right. You've heard me say that if you want to get in better shape you hire a personal trainer Yeah, she knows the basics can watch that deadlift form But she's mainly there to tell you where to put the tired and and to hold you accountable in your journey That's where I come in
00:00:25
Speaker
to objectively read your work, find ways to make it stronger, and coach you along. Personalized. Every writer is different. There's no cookie cutter approach. Sessions include a personalized questionnaire, several reads with detailed notes, and an in-depth critique, as well as Skype calls with me. So if you're ready to level up, I'd be honored to serve you and your work. You don't
00:00:55
Speaker
become a writer and then write a novel. You become a writer by writing.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Overview
00:01:06
Speaker
Well alright, seeing efforts, you know what this is. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, welcome. I'll come right out and say it. I think I have forgotten, I must have forgotten, to link up my microphone to Zencaster, which is what I've been using up late to record the conversations.
00:01:33
Speaker
So my audio was supposed to be so clean and crisp is actually pretty echoey because my voice wasn't getting picked up in my good mic. It was getting picked up in the built-in laptop microphone, which was, you know, a foot or two away from me instead of this beautiful thing I speak into now. So that happened. So I really apologize for that. I hope it doesn't distract you too much.
00:02:05
Speaker
You'd think after 212 of these, I'd have safeguards in place.
Introduction to Kevin Guilfoile and Memoir Discussion
00:02:11
Speaker
Nope, still a moron. My guest is Kevin Guilfoyle, and he's the author of the memoir, A Drive Into The Gap.
00:02:19
Speaker
It is published by field notes, which is super cool. It's a story about stories, fathers and sons, and a mystery to find out the true identity of Roberto Clementi's bat that registered his 3000th and final career hit. Kevin has also written novels and a movie. So he plays in different sand boccas, uh, the boccas, sand bocca, Jesus.
00:02:47
Speaker
I don't know guys. This could be it. This could be the end.
00:02:53
Speaker
Plays in different sandboxes, you dig? Good Lord. Keep the conversation going on social media at CNF Pod wherever you hang out. I've been deleting all my tweets on my Brendan O'Mara Twitter feed because it's my great goal to vanish and disappear and live a life like Ferdinand the Bull. Then my friend Ruby McConnell of episode 202 fame said I should make an essay out of the deleted tweets. I deleted some doozies, but there's many more.
00:03:23
Speaker
And it'll make for a good essay to write to avoid doing the things I should be doing, of course. The Great Lesson.
00:03:33
Speaker
I'm not funny and I'm not clever and all these tweets are just some pathetic, sad grab for attention. Truly, truly pathetic.
Engagement and Subscription Encouragement
00:03:43
Speaker
Lastly, if you head over to brendanamara.com, hey, you'll find show notes to this episode and others and can subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I give out reading recs.
00:03:53
Speaker
podcast news, writing tips, and I raffle off books. That's right. If you're on the email list and you don't unsubscribe, which I take super personally, you're entered in raffles to win books.
00:04:07
Speaker
And if you're feeling kind, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, screenshot that, send it to me, and I'll grant an hour of coaching. So think about 1,000, 1,500 words-ish, and just try to honor that. Once I see that screenshot, I'll reach back out and we'll get started. Not too shabby, right?
00:04:28
Speaker
I'm keeping this relatively short today because, well, just because. Once again, I'm apologizing for the audio. My end. Kevin sounds great. It's embarrassing. And I'll go into a shame spiral and won't pull the nose up until I'm definitely close to the Earth.
00:04:48
Speaker
Today's
Writing Discipline and Early Experiences
00:04:49
Speaker
show is also sponsored by Casualty of Words, my writing podcast for people in a hurry. It's a daily show that is often under two minutes long. So go on, become another Casualty of Words. All right, let's do this. Let's do this thing. Let's welcome Kevin Guilfoyle. Whoo! In the practice of writing, it's
00:05:17
Speaker
You know, for those of us who are really in the thick of it, we know it's not as romantic as Instagram might make it out to be. So, you know, so how do you how have you cultivated a practice and a discipline in your writing, whether it's the novels you write or something that you really something that's more personal and close to the heart as a drive into the gap is.
00:05:36
Speaker
You know, every project I've undertaken, I've had to sort of learn how to do it over again, just because I'm in a, you know, a different stage of my life. You know, I wrote my first novel before I had kids. I had actually written a novel, you know, just Nights and Weekends. I was working at an ad agency. Actually, the ad agency Kudol Partners that eventually became Field Notes.
00:06:02
Speaker
But I was working at an ad agency and working on the novel, you know, Nights and Weekends. And it took me two years. And when I finished, I realized it was terrible. So I literally threw it in a drawer, started a new one the next day. Took me another two years. And I finished that novel just before my first son was born. And sold it.
00:06:29
Speaker
rather quickly. And so I was, and this was at a time when the ad agency was sort of transitioning out of advertising and into the retail company that would become Field Notes. And so they didn't really need a copywriter anymore. And so I sold my first novel just as my son was, first son was being born. So I just quit to be home with him and write full time.
00:06:58
Speaker
But then but now that that would became a whole new routine because now I've got I'm I I don't have a another job, but I have this baby I'm taking care of And so that was you know you I thought this is gonna be this is gonna be a snap I'm gonna knock this novel out in like six months or whatever now it took me another two years because I I was busier than ever, you know raising this child and so
00:07:26
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Then that novel came out in, I guess that was 2010. And then I started a number of other projects kind of in succession and
Publishing Challenges and Writing Process Insights
00:07:45
Speaker
Driving to the Gap was one of them. But again, every single project had its own,
00:07:50
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Challenges in my end and just because my life was in a different place completely different routines
00:07:57
Speaker
Right. And I love in an interview I read that you did early 2000s, I think you said, you know, before I sat down and wrote that novel, and that might even been your first published novel, not the one you threw in the drawer. You said, I always thought that novelists were other people. I didn't know what it was they had, but I figured it was something I didn't have. So how did you get over that and build the muscle of creativity and the muscle of writing to overcome that mindset?
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's just, you know, I guess I always thought there was some that the novel is just something I didn't know how to do, you know, and, but I didn't realize that everybody teaches themselves how to do it like that right there is no
00:08:41
Speaker
There is no secret, there is no, and everybody does it a different way and everybody is self-taught, right? I mean, you can go and take creative writing classes and you go to workshops and you can learn.
00:08:58
Speaker
tricks of craft and good practices and those kinds of things. But everybody's got to figure out their own way through it. It's such a massive personal undertaking. There's really no way anybody can help you with it. It's the loneliest kind of project that you can undertake and you just need to
00:09:21
Speaker
muscle through it and figure out your own way and so I guess what I meant when I said that was that that was the big revelation I had when I was writing it you don't
00:09:32
Speaker
become a writer and then write a novel. You become a writer by writing. And it sounds obvious when you say that, but it's really not obvious when you're trying to undertake a task like that, like writing a novel for the first time. You're always going to, when you start, feel like, I don't have any idea how to do this.
00:09:53
Speaker
Right. And in the people that we see in lights and even not in lights, just the fact that they have, you know, something between two hard covers or paperback it in some ways, you know, especially as you're just getting started, it might feel that they have been anointed somehow and it just appeared on the shelves and it just appeared fully formed out of their out of their heads because.
00:10:14
Speaker
all that work and the grinding and the dozens of drafts that go into it and the repetition, it's not immediately apparent as, you know, why would it be? But it does just feel like it comes out fully formed. And then when you sit down in your chair and you realize how hard it is to put something coherent together, it can be really dispiriting.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. It is constant, almost constant despair with little moments of revelation and ecstasy, you know, like sort of sprinkled in. But, you know, it's the the joys of it are kind of like gambling. It's just complete intermittent gratification, you know, with with long stretches of failure in between.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, and ultimately the house wins somehow and it bludgens you. That's exactly right. Yeah, I also like how you said that, and you're alluding to it throughout this early part here, that there's nothing magical about it. It's just a matter of sitting with it, doing the hard work. And of course, as I heard you say one time, there's some luck involved. But the harder you work, sometimes the more luck comes your way, right?
00:11:32
Speaker
Oh, for sure. The luck part of it
00:11:40
Speaker
Is more is a lot of that is is really what I was talking about the publishing end of it where a lot of things have to align For your book to get published right you have to find an agent who Yeah, I mean the rules have changed a little bit now because there's a lot of people I'm not talking about people who you know, there's self publishing and vanity publishing and those kinds of things but if you're talking about the traditional publishing route
00:12:07
Speaker
you need to find an agent who really understands you and is as passionate about your book as you are. And then he's got to find an editor who is as passionate about your book as you are. That editor has to convince
00:12:23
Speaker
You know a board of a committee of people who are going to release the money publisher to Purchase to buy your book that they should be as passionate about This novel as you are and all of those things are outside your control, right? So You know you hear so often about you know Books that are now considered Masterpieces that were
00:12:49
Speaker
uh you know rejected uh you know let's say confederacy of dunce as an example just rejected time and time and time again before they finally you know uh found the the right person who was able to give it to the right person who was able to give it to the right person and you know that happens a thousand times uh or that the rejection end of that happens a thousand times a day to writers all over the world right and uh the the
00:13:18
Speaker
I was very, very lucky that I was able to have all those stars aligned with my first book. I'm very proud of the novels I've written. I'm very proud of my first novel, but there are a lot of excellent novels that didn't get the breaks that mine did, and I understand that,
Influences on Writing Style
00:13:40
Speaker
and I am grateful for it.
00:13:43
Speaker
I wonder if maybe you can talk about how important reading the correspondence between Shelby Foote and Percy were to your sort of development as a writer. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I was a big Walker Percy fan. I guess I started reading in college and then many years after. And I found that book
00:14:10
Speaker
at Faulkner House in New Orleans, a great bookstore in New Orleans, and read it on a vacation I was taking down there. And I was just enthralled by it.
00:14:23
Speaker
There, just the, as I, you know, I hadn't published a novel yet. I was, you know, I'd done some, I'm trying to remember exactly when this would have been, but I'd done some, a little bit of freelancing at this point, but I was mostly in advertising, you know, as a creative director at an ad agency who one day wanted to write a novel. And to see these, to read these guys,
00:14:46
Speaker
talk about writing as a passion, but also as a vocation at the same time. These two guys who had been friends their whole lives was just really, really inspiring me and really opened up. And it also revealed them as sort of ordinary people in a way like we were saying before that
00:15:08
Speaker
you know, they understood that writing is just hard work, right? And all of that was kind of a revelation to me reading that novel. And it's also full of like, I had never really thought about writing as a philosophy or philosophies of writing. And they had two very kind of different approaches to what they were doing. And it was, and that,
00:15:36
Speaker
That enabled me to start thinking about writing in a completely different way. So it was inspiring that way too. What I especially like about everything you're saying with respect to that is that what underscores this is doing or finding books as mentors and almost going through your own
00:16:00
Speaker
MFA program, if you will, like you just find books that you admire and you try to imitate them as best you can. And through the repetition of it, your own voice will come out. And that's the way you do this. I think there's an agency there where you can just say, I'm going to, these are the writers I admire and I'm going to try and do my best to try to throw my hat into that ring and not, you're not think that, okay, if I get this next degree, then I'm a writer. It's just like, no, it's like read these things.
00:16:30
Speaker
that I enjoy, you know, fill up on that and then just try to do it yourself. And then through that messy repetition, eventually you get better.
Enhancing Fiction with Nonfiction Techniques
00:16:40
Speaker
Yes, yes, absolutely. And I also think that for me anyway, as a person who primarily has published fiction, the, I,
00:16:56
Speaker
You know, when I was in college, I mostly studied, I was basically a journalism major. And so I mostly studied nonfiction writing in college. I took from that more of the idea of, as I was talking about sort of writing as a vocation, that the discipline of nonfiction writing, where your goals are to be clear,
00:17:23
Speaker
Goals are to really think about the reader.
00:17:27
Speaker
And your goal is to get a paycheck too, right? And, you know, I think, I think I really, whenever I am talking to other fiction writers, I'm writing workshops or I'm running workshops with even fiction workshops. I lean on nonfiction source, like On Writing Well is I think the greatest book about written about writing.
00:17:53
Speaker
by William Zinser. I think it's the greatest book written about writing that there ever was. And I think even though it's all about nonfiction writing, every fiction author should read that book. Because it will just clarify, you know, the fiction canvas is so large that I think that when you start to employ
00:18:19
Speaker
non-fiction techniques to fiction, you are able to focus what you're doing so much better. And so that was kind of an early revelation for me too, you know, like the sexy thing to study is narrative non-fiction, right? But I think that it works both ways. Like there's non-fiction that's been informed by
00:18:48
Speaker
creative writing. I think that creative writing should be informed by nonfiction writing too. I think that you end up with fiction that is just clearer, more concise, and that thinks about the reader in a way that a lot of fiction that I read, I think, doesn't but should.
00:19:15
Speaker
What do you think it was about nonfiction, a skill set that lent itself to a greater sense of focus and clarity? Was there something in particular that you could point to that really sort of unlocked something for you? Wow. Sorry, let me think about that a minute. Yeah, sure. I think
00:19:43
Speaker
Well, I mean, clearly that like, you know, just reading as I didn't conjure, I read a ton of sort of the great 20th century writers of nonfiction, you know, like Hersey and Agee, you know, those guys were all telling stories that you could compare to the greatest novels ever written, right?
00:20:13
Speaker
But they had this huge restraint on it, which that it had to be true. And I think that for me, putting limits
00:20:29
Speaker
putting those kind of restraints on it just philosophically just focuses you in a way that focuses your creative writing in a way that just makes it clearer and you know it's it's what's the there's an old Elmore Leonard line where he says he when he
00:20:54
Speaker
Oh, gosh, I'm going to blow it. I can't remember exactly what he said. Something like writing for him is just taking out all the stuff he doesn't need or something like that, you know? And I think I know he said it much better than that. But, you know, I think too much fiction has a lot of stuff in it you don't need. And nonfiction almost never good. Great nonfiction almost never does. That's when I read a novel that is
00:21:22
Speaker
as streamlined as like a John Hershey essay. That is when I'm like, oh, that is my favorite kind of fiction, the stuff that just has stripped away all the extraneous things. And it's just, you know, takes you on a bullet train from the beginning to end. Those are the novels and the stories that I love to read.
00:21:49
Speaker
So where and when are you getting the writing bug as you were coming up as a young person working for the Houston Astros and maybe even somewhat following in the footsteps of your father?
Early Storytelling Influences
00:22:04
Speaker
When do you get this bug for story and a bug for writing? In my family, my dad was a really good storyteller.
00:22:15
Speaker
I think when I was real little, telling stories was just the way in my house that you got attention, right? Because my dad loved stories. And if you could come up with a good story to tell him, you could have everybody in the house would shut up and listen to you. And I think that initially was probably when I was drawn to it. And then eventually, obviously, when I was very young, I was a big reader, and I just loved getting lost in a big book.
00:22:45
Speaker
uh you know at some point I knew like oh I want to do for somebody else what you know Tolkien did for me you know I used I remember I you know my when my dad worked for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 70s and we would go to I don't know 50 or 60 games a year
00:23:01
Speaker
And we would then we would wait for him after the game. It would be like you have to work for like two hours after the game. I was like in third or fourth grade. And so we just sit in his office while he was running all over the stadium, you know, setting up interviews with reporters and stuff and players.
00:23:17
Speaker
And yeah, typewriter there. And so I would just put a piece of paper in typewriter and I would just write stories. Well, it was a way for me to pass the time, waiting for my dad to get off work at midnight or whenever it was.
00:23:33
Speaker
And that's really when I started writing. I never finished them, because I would stop writing when he was ready to go. Whenever I was writing, I would throw away. And then the next time I would start, I wrote 100 beginnings of first couple pages of stories sitting in his office. But that was really where I really just started to love the idea of writing.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it's great. Was there, was there a moment as you, as you got older and then you, you figured that you might have to, you know, quote unquote, like get a real job that pays real money and stuff. And you look back and be like, you know, all along, it was that thing I was doing at my dad's typewriter in the office. Like was there that moment of revelation where it's like, yeah, why can't I do this right now? Wow. I mean, I never,
00:24:27
Speaker
I still was always skeptical that I'd be able to write full time for a living until literally till I got the call that my novel had sold. You know what I mean? I always thought it was going to be a hobby. And that was just a life changing phone call.
00:24:51
Speaker
So no, that revelation didn't happen until after it had already happened. For me, it was never a thing like, oh, I'm going to write this novel and somebody's going to pay me for it. I mean, obviously, in the back of my mind, that's what you hoped to be published. But when I was writing it, I never felt, oh my gosh,
00:25:21
Speaker
If I could get a publisher for this novel, I'm going to be crushed. It was a thing I did because I enjoyed doing it and it was fulfilling. I had a story that really felt like I had to push it out of me.
00:25:40
Speaker
No, I would never say that being a professional, a full-time professional writer was a dream, but it was never like a great ambition. I just didn't, I realized that the chances of it happening were slim. And if it didn't happen, I had a job at, you know, working at that ad agency, I had a job that I loved and I would have been perfectly happy to continue doing that and writing as a hobby. I would have had a very happy life that way, I think.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess that's the, maybe even like before that you knew that it was something you could do as a living writing novels. It was like, you know, sometimes there's some sort of a moment where you realize that there's this thing that you just desperately need or want to do. And sometimes people just get bogged down by work, by life, by extenuating circumstances. And then they just fail to prioritize
00:26:40
Speaker
whether it's painting or writing songs or in your case novels, that at some point you just realize like, oh, when I was a kid, there was that thing I would just love to do for the sake of doing it. And it seems like at some point or another, you did pick up, maybe you just continually wrote, but it just feels like it was something that you found and you were going to do no matter what. And it just so happens you were able to parlay it into something more permanent and sustaining it, so to speak.
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's true. And even like the last 10 years or so, you know, I've sort of gone from, I've been working on a couple of novels in the background, but I've gone from sort of project to project. I wrote for a TV show for a while. I wrote A Drive into the Gap. I wrote a movie that came out last year. And, you know, and eventually
00:27:38
Speaker
The movie is called Chasing the Blues. It's an indie film. Came out. I guess it was I guess it's your before last is when it was actually released now, but it has John Lovett's Grant Rosenmeyer, who was he was Ari Tenenbaum in the Royal Tenenbaum show. One of the kids in the track suits. Oh, nice. He's obviously not favorite movies. Oh, yeah. He's a great actor, too. He's great in this movie. He's he's not a kid anymore, obviously. But it's a it's a movie about it's based on an old short story of mine.
00:28:08
Speaker
And it's about a pair of rival record collectors in the 80s. Right at the time when CDs are coming out and LPs are kind of fading. And they basically simultaneously discover a mythically rare blues record from the 30s in this old woman's apartment on the south side of Chicago.
00:28:35
Speaker
And they both sort of end up in this apartment. Neither one of them will leave because they know that the other one will take it. And the woman is, she's a little...
00:28:49
Speaker
She's got a little bit of dimension. So she just sort of she's happy to have the company so she she keeps feeding them And letting them stay in her apartment And the record is also alleged to be cursed. It's supposed supposedly allegedly nobody's ever heard it but allegedly has the screens of a woman being murdered on it and so anyway, they so half the movie is this
00:29:15
Speaker
the two of them in this apartment trying to take this record from each other. And the other half takes place in the present when they get out of prison for what happened in that apartment eventually. And I was really pleased with it. It came out great. It was a Chicago director. It was his first feature film. And I was really, really pleased with the way it came out. You can find it on demand and Amazon, I think, and places like that.
00:29:45
Speaker
So with respect to a drive into the gap, how long was this story sort of percolating in your head as you were sort of conceiving of the story and taking on this project?
Origin of 'A Drive Into The Gap'
00:30:05
Speaker
Well, as I said before, I used to work for the company that became Field Notes. And I'm still great friends with everybody there. Jim Kudall, who is the president of that company, is one of my best friends. And I would continue to occasionally do work for them. If they had a little project or something needed to be written, Jim would call me up and I would help them out with little things here and there.
00:30:33
Speaker
And so one day he called me and he said, we are going to do a baseball edition of Field Notes. And he said, you know, when you were here in the office, you used to tell all these baseball stories all the time, you know, stories from my dad had been a baseball executive for 35 years with the Yankees and the Pirates in the baseball Hall of Fame. I worked for the Pirates and the Houston Astros over the course of three seasons.
00:31:03
Speaker
And I just had a lot of baseball stories that I was always sort of, you know, throwing around in the office. And his idea was to just have a little, an additional field notes, memo book sized book that just had a bunch of these stories in it. And I said, yeah, sure, I can do that. And then he said, but you have to tell the story about Roberto Clemente's bat.
00:31:33
Speaker
And so this, this was a story that that didn't have an ending. You know, it was a story about a bat that a baseball bat that had been Roberto Clemente's that hung in my childhood bedroom.
00:31:49
Speaker
for the entire time I was growing up. And then sometime in the 90s, a gentleman named Tony Bartaro, who had been trainer for the Pirates, stopped by. It was a good friend of my dad's. My dad was, Tony was retired. My dad was now in Cooperstown at the baseball Hall of Fame.
00:32:13
Speaker
And he came to visit my parents in Cooperstown. And on the way to the bathroom, he saw this bat. And he came back, carried it back into the living room when he showed to my father. He said, Bill, where did you get this bat? And my father went through the story of how he got it. And Tony said, this is the bat Roberto Clementi used to get his 3000th and final hit.
00:32:36
Speaker
And this was a huge shock to my father because he had been the public relations director of the Pirates when Clemente got the hit. He was the one who got the bat from Clemente, a Louisville slugger, that he sent to the Hall of Fame, the bat that's in the Hall of Fame as we speak. And to now be told that there's another bat that he owns,
00:33:05
Speaker
that might be the actual bat that Clemente used to get his 3000th hit. This would be like a major memorabilia scandal in baseball. So I knew that and all I knew was that my father said he looked into it and he didn't think it was true. And honestly, I didn't even question very much about it. I just figured somehow they had gotten a photograph or so they figured it out and it wasn't true.
00:33:36
Speaker
So, but I told that story in the office and Jim was, Jim said, all right, you just, with all these other stories you're gonna tell, you gotta tell that story. But then I was like, well, I don't know, it doesn't feel like it really has an ending. Cause I don't know how my dad figured that out. And I don't, and he at this point had Alzheimer's related dementia and I couldn't follow up with him and figure it out. So I said, I guess I've got to now try to recreate what he did.
00:34:06
Speaker
and find out if this story can be true. That became the entire book, was this journey of me trying to figure out, is it possible that this bat that was in my bedroom as a child was actually the bat Roberto Clementa used for his 3000 pet?
00:34:24
Speaker
And I suspect that kind of the narrative thrust of it is like trying to solve the mystery or this unsolvable mystery of the bat. But of course, there's the thread that goes through it about, you know, you and your father and, you know, and the the caulk of Alzheimer's that you talked about sort of filling itself in, in the in the synapses, which I thought was just like a beautiful way of
00:34:49
Speaker
in an evocative way of putting that. Well, thank you. And I mean, you know, and the crazy thing about what happened was that when I started looking into it, I started to think it. Oh, my gosh, it might be true. You know, when I talked, I found I tracked down Tony Bartirome and I and he told me why this story about why he believed that was the bat. And it was entirely convincing. It was a completely. And then I talked when I talked to other people who were in the dugout.
00:35:18
Speaker
who believed the same thing. I wasn't sure what to think anymore. And so that really drove the investigation even further because I just taken my father's word for it that they had already solved this mystery. And when I started pulling at the thread,
00:35:39
Speaker
I wasn't sure they had at all. You say that you know you had a life in proximity to baseball and I and so much of this you know it's it's great how you you know spackle in all these different kind of stories but we're all going in so essentially one direction um you know what did being in the proximity to baseball mean to you and even playing a lot of your uh you know pony league and probably in in your games on double day field in that beautiful field in Cooperstown.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was, you know, at the time, of course. Yeah. I mean, at the time when I was a kid, I just didn't know any different, right? Like, you know, we would, you know, my entire family and I was like an elementary school, our entire family would move to Florida for two months and I would go to school down there.
00:36:26
Speaker
We would just back up at the end of February and moved to Bradenton. We let that run a house on Annamarie Island. For two months, I lived in Florida. I had a different set of friends down there. I went to school with them, hung out at spring training.
00:36:47
Speaker
every weekend. I would go to 50, probably 50 or 60 Pirates games every summer. Looking back, it was an incredible childhood. It was just absolutely idyllic.
00:37:03
Speaker
you know, way to live. And then we moved to Cooperstown, which is at one time when I was working in, I think for either the Pirates of the Astros, I was in a press box and somebody introduced me to a reporter. This guy's a baseball writer. And so he said, Kevin grew up in Cooperstown. And this reporter looked at me and he said, my God, he said, until this moment, it never even occurred to me that people lived there.
00:37:29
Speaker
Right? Like, like, like, like a Disney world or something. Like, it was just a theme. Like, it was a myth. It was just a mythical place. Right? Where, you know, baseball was allegedly invented. But in a lot of ways, it was. It's the strangest
00:37:48
Speaker
most wonderful town, like it's just like people there are nuts. And, you know, baseball is this, it's just sort of a company town for baseball, you know, but it's also got this rich literary history, you know, it's where James Finn or Cooper lived, that the town was actually named after his father. It's just, it's a really super weird place, like out of a movie or something. And, you know, we lived there. I grew up there as a kid.
00:38:17
Speaker
And at the time you're just like, oh, I can't wait to get out of this place. Like every other kid who just wants to grow up and be an adult and be out on his own. But I look back on him and I was like, that was the greatest childhood I could have, I couldn't have fashioned. I could have made up a better childhood for myself. It was the best. It was the best.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, I love the the point like you're of course on teams that weren't very good, but a lot of teams bust in to play a double day field and you wrote in the piece that you know winning stopped being the point for us. It was about playing, playing as much as you could every day that you could.
00:38:55
Speaker
And I love that sentiment. I think that just that applies to so much. I comply to writing. There are certain things that are out of your control. But as long as you enjoy the playing or the writing, then and you can do it again and again, like that's really its own victory. Yeah, absolutely. You know, now Cooperstown has what's called the dreams park. It's a place where little league teams from all over the country every summer come and they play these tournaments every week. Thousands and thousands and thousands of kids do it every year. When I was growing up,
00:39:25
Speaker
team wanted to come to Cooperstown, they would just book a... Say they want to go play a game on Double Day Field and if there's nobody else for them to play, they would just play us. We'd just get nine kids together and run out there and play them. Pony League and American Legion and high school and those games
00:39:46
Speaker
You know, I don't know. I can't even tell you how many games I played on double-day field for. Hundreds? Two hundred? I don't even know. I mean, it was we played almost every day in the summer. And it's it's this it's gorgeous, you know, fields like manicured like a professional baseball diamond. It's ten thousand seats. And, you know, just to be able to as a kid to play in a park like that every single day is is a dream. It's an absolute dream.
00:40:16
Speaker
What position did you play? I played second base. Nice. Yeah, I didn't have the arm to make the throw from the other side of the diamond. But I knocked the ball down OK. Really?
00:40:31
Speaker
So as a, primarily as a novelist, what was the challenge for you, if any, of writing something that, you know, was, of course, rooted in, you know, in something true, a true story, a verifiably true story? Like, what was that challenge for you, you know, pivoting genre, so to speak?
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I didn't think that much about it. In terms of how different it was, the journalism aspect of it was obviously different. Like, you know, the interviews and, you know, suddenly there's a lot of people involved besides me. And also, you know, the story had to be what the story was, not what I wanted it to be, which, you know, is just the temptation you have as
00:41:21
Speaker
as a novelist, I think, is to sort of, when you start, you know, kind of outline where you're going. And, you know, maybe you don't end up exactly there, but, you know, you always have a destination that you think you're writing toward, or at least I do. And this was very different. You know, I would find out a new piece of information would take you to a completely different direction.
00:41:46
Speaker
So writing something that I had absolutely no idea how it was gonna end, I guess that was the big difference. But the writing part of it, like I said, I've been influenced by a lot of nonfiction writers. My formal education as a writer was all in nonfiction. So that part I felt came really naturally. It was the becoming a journalist thing that was really new.
00:42:14
Speaker
Yeah, I love how you were able to create tension in this piece as well. While you're on the hunt for the identity of this bat is that the slug or the Adirondack or whatever it is, you're able to track down footage from this rogue photographer who goes in with his two kids and actually
00:42:38
Speaker
calling says you spoke to your dad and he's in the dugout taking, you know, shooting shooting footage of this. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Crazy story like I like better and wilder than I could have made up is the discovery of right this 40 year old
00:42:56
Speaker
eight millimeter, super eight film that nobody had watched. And it was just been sitting in this guy's closet since 1973, or 1972. Insane, absolutely insane.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I love to the most novelist right fiction to create order out of chaos. And then you go on to say the nonfiction writer often does the opposite. He starts with the assumption that the true story he wants to tell conforms to a logical narrative and steady discovers that there are always motivations that are incomprehensible, that people act irrationally, that memories are imperfect. The nonfiction writer uncovers the chaos hidden beneath the orderly surface. I was like, I love that. That was such a great passage.
00:43:38
Speaker
Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's that I guess that's the answer your question earlier. That is the frustration of the novelist writing nonfiction is that you can't tie up every loose end. And there are a lot of things that are just unknowable. That's that that is the biggest frustration is all of these unknowable things that you know, you, you want to resolve, but you just can't.
00:44:04
Speaker
And the best part is the following sentence after that is, I decided to write another novel. Yeah, that's true. After that, that's right.
00:44:15
Speaker
And yeah, so at what point do you know that when you're writing this thing that it's not just this mystery of the bat, but that you are also going to tie in your relationship to your father and then his slow sort of succumbing to Alzheimer's throughout this whole story as well? Right. Well, that was the thing that was going on when I was writing it that was sort of preoccupying
00:44:42
Speaker
my thoughts and my emotions. And it just seemed natural that it didn't make any sense to ignore that. That was sort of the primary thing I was feeling at the time that I was writing. And since my dad was a part of the story, it kind of made sense to pour all that
00:45:07
Speaker
stuff into it as well. There are all the things that I, this story could be over really quickly if I could just ask him. And he's alive and he's there and I can sit in the room with him and he can't answer, you can't ask him the question. And so that was the sort of sense of frustration that I think just sort of permeates the mystery in the search throughout the book.
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, and you write so poignantly about the unrelenting present, as you put it, to your father at the time, you were a 40-year-old father and also at age, you're at Notre Dame and so forth. It was like you were everything at once, whereas your mother, of course, could sequentially put you in the right order. So it was like, that must have been just incredibly hard to witness.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's I mean, you know anybody who's been through that with a relative, you know,
00:46:13
Speaker
It's just the hardest thing to see someone because they're there and you can even see some of their personality. It's not like they're completely gone, but they just can't make sense of anything. And so they just live in this sort of, you know, my dad just lived in this constant state of frustration and bewilderment. And he, you know, especially, you know, around that time when I was writing this book, he knew
00:46:43
Speaker
He knew that something, he knew, it wasn't like he was sort of blissfully ignorant. He knew that this wasn't right. But he didn't know what it was, you know? And he just constantly, constantly anxious and frustrated. And it's just really hard to watch somebody you love go through that. It's just really painful.
00:47:13
Speaker
Right, right. Do you see yourself writing more, you know, baseball stories and nonfiction of this nature or is that something you feel like you still have the itch to do?
Curiosity-Driven Writing Interests
00:47:29
Speaker
I don't know. I might on some level, especially, you know, something
00:47:35
Speaker
short. I tend the big projects, if I'm going to undertake a project that is going to take a substantial amount of time, I prefer to write. People say that there's an old adage about writing what you know, but I much prefer to write about things I'm curious about and by definition don't know all that much about it. My preference is to write about something I'm learning about. So
00:48:05
Speaker
I love baseball. I don't have a burning desire to write a lot about it. This story was a little bit different because it was really a story about, it wasn't just a story about baseball. It was a story about my dad. I think at some point in there I say it's a story about stories. It's a story about memory. And those things were really captivating to me. But as much as I love baseball and I miss baseball, I don't feel a huge urge to write about baseball just for the sake of it.
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah, and maybe you can tell a little story about having to court Barry Bonds to sign material. Oh gosh, so I was an intern with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1989, and Barry Bonds was on that team. He was a much different player than I think most people remember. I can't remember how many years he'd been in the league,
00:49:03
Speaker
he was still like a promising future star. And I think the year I was there, I think he hit about 240 something and he had, he stole a bunch of bases and he hit a bunch of, quite a few runs, but he wasn't like a big, an all-star yet, but he was, everybody had their eye on him. They knew he was gonna be a great player. And so my job, because I was like literally the lowest employee in the entire building,
00:49:34
Speaker
And so I got all the jobs nobody else wanted to do. And one of them was the community services department would put together a list of requests, most of them from kids who were in the hospital, like, you know, terminally ill children. And then mixed in there would be like, you know, the, the owner of the team, you know, had wanted to give an autograph to somebody, friend of his. So, you know, there was, it was that sort of mix of things, but there usually weren't that many. It was like,
00:50:02
Speaker
I never brought more than three or four for any one player on any given day, because they've got other things to do. Most of the time, the players would see me come to the clubhouse with the stack of 8x10 glossy photos and a Sharpie, and they would roll their eyes. But most people had a good
00:50:27
Speaker
Everybody else in that clubhouse really treated me well and were really nice about it. They understood it was part of their job, but Barry just never, he just didn't, absolutely didn't want to do it. And I think I was even saying in the book, I began to understand at some point, I think what
00:50:46
Speaker
I think he thought in the back of his mind that whatever he gave you, like if I asked him to sign three pictures today and he did it, I would come back with 20 tomorrow. So I think that was his attitude was just like, I'm just gonna not do it. Even though not doing it was a huge pain, like because I would just sit there and stare at him in the car and he would get mad.
00:51:12
Speaker
But I have a job to do. They're going to just send me back down here if I don't get this autograph. And I'm going to get yelled at if I can't make you do this. And so he would just make up stories about, he'd accuse me of taking these pictures and selling his autograph and stuff, which is insane because they all say like too Jimmy on them.
00:51:37
Speaker
Like, you know, there's no, there's no never deal you market for personalized, you know, photos or anything. And so it would be on a home game, I would, you know, it'd be a huge chunk of my day, a couple of hours, just stalking him in the clubhouse every day. And eventually I did figure out that the only way I could get him to do it is that the only person who was his opinion mattered to him was the manager, Jim Leland. And he also knew that Leland wouldn't
00:52:06
Speaker
If Leland saw him giving me a hard time, he wouldn't put up with it. And so I would just, my job was just basically to wait until Leland walked through the room and then I would run up to Barry and I'd say really loud, Barry, I need you to sign these photos. And he, as soon as he saw Leland, he would just, he really couldn't say no.
00:52:25
Speaker
But yeah, that was my, I spent, my whole summer was like 40% of that job was trying to get Barry Bonds to sign three pictures for sick kids. Like it was the worst, it was the worst. And then having him berate me and accuse me of all kinds of things in between. Yeah, oh my God. So just a couple of things, Kevin.
00:52:53
Speaker
You know, be mindful of your time, of course. You know, when you when you're writing novels or even thinking about or when you were writing Drive Into the Gap or something or or anything for that matter. You know, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in the process of of of creating something?
00:53:13
Speaker
There are just times, it's not always like this, you know, writing is, you know, 95% of it is a grind, right? It's just, you know, it's just hard work like anything else. But there are times when you have a scene and a story and a character in you that you, and you know the only way to make it real is to get those words out on the page.
00:53:38
Speaker
And there's just, there are times when you feel that urge to take this part of your imagination and make it real. That is thrilling. Really, really thrilling. And I think every writer writes because they put up with everything else just to experience those moments. And they don't even last long. You know, it's not even like a full day of writing.
00:54:07
Speaker
You know, it might be like an hour where you just can't get the words out of you fast enough and there's a great satisfaction in making this platonic thing in your head become an actual thing on the page. That for me is the whole ballgame. That's when it gets good.
00:54:32
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Kevin, where can people find you online and get a little more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it?
Where to Find Kevin's Work
00:54:42
Speaker
You know what? Currently, I would say the best place to go, just go to the search up field notes and a drive into the gap and look up that page. You'll get a good sense of that book. I actually just think this is
00:55:02
Speaker
publishing weeds, but I actually just clawed back the rights to my first two novels. So they are, yeah, it's great, but currently they might be, as we're having this conversation, they might be hard to find.
00:55:18
Speaker
I'm sure you can find them used someplace. Those books are Cast of Shadows and The Thousand are my two novels. Chasing the Blues on demand somewhere on your television set. I think it's on Prime somewhere. But yeah, if you're curious at all, I would go search out of Driving the Gap.
00:55:46
Speaker
quote Mel Allen, how about that? That was fun. Thanks to Kevin for the time and for my kick-ass editing and coaching service for sponsoring the show along with Casualty of Words, the writing podcast for people in a hurry.
00:56:02
Speaker
go subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and if you dig the show, either one, this one, especially, and casualty of words, consider sharing it and I'll give digital fist bumps. Consider leaving your views. Those all help if you want, if not, whatever.
00:56:21
Speaker
Follow the show, keep the conversation going at cnfpod. Sign up for the newsletter, BrendanOmero.com. I think that's about it. I know, it's just, it's amazing. I'm sorry about the audio there. And you think, cause I'm, cause, cause really, all I do is interview.
00:56:39
Speaker
And I couldn't get my own damn audio right. So I can't even- I almost feel like I can't even say my catchphrase here. Cause I truly messed up. But in any case, if you can't do... Interview... See ya!
00:57:26
Speaker
you