Rural isolation helped 'Shoeless Joe' author build field of dreams

W.P. Kinsella says his attraction to baseball is the "open-endedness" of the game and has written about the subject for more than 20 years

In this story: Famed attributed to 'Shoeless Joe' Isolation inspired imagination RELATED STORIES, SITES

TORONTO, Ontario (Reuters) -- Twenty years after he wrote about an Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him to plough over his cornfield and build a baseball diamond, W.P. Kinsella seems to never have tired of writing about baseball.

The original short story that took him from an unknown Canadian writer into the chronicler of the quintessential American baseball story was called "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa." It was made into a novel, "Shoeless Joe," and eventually into the popular film "Field of Dreams" starring Kevin Costner.

Kinsella said his and other writers' attraction to baseball, which he calls the "chess of sports," stems from the nature of the game.

"Writers are attracted to the open-endedness of the game. Other sports are twice enclosed, by time limits and rigid playing boundaries. On a true baseball field the foul lines diverge forever, eventually taking in a good part of the universe," Kinsella said while in Toronto during the International Festival of Authors.

"Theoretically, there is no distance that a great hitter couldn't hit the ball or a great fielder couldn't run to retrieve it, and that makes the myth and the larger-than-life characters -- what writers are always looking for. That is why there is a great deal of literature on baseball and virtually nothing about hockey, basketball or football," Kinsella added.

Although he has written more than 30 books, Kinsella freely acknowledges that his fame can still be attributed to "Shoeless Joe."

W.P. Kinsella's most famous work is "Shoeless Joe," which was made into the movie "Field of Dreams" starring Kevin Costner

"That's my best known book. It's the springboard on which everything else was launched," he said. "I've written a novel that was very successful and I have been able to ride on its coattails for 20 years."

But he finds the story is misrepresented by being called a baseball story.

Shoeless Joe "is not a sports story. It is a love story that is peripherally about baseball," he said. "There is also this father-son business, which, from the mail I get, interests a lot of people."

Kinsella still gets fan mail from sons who say they have not spoken to their father for years, but after reading his book they drive miles to take their father to a baseball game.

Although he continued to write about the quintessential American pastime, many readers may not realize he is Canadian.

Kinsella grew up in a log cabin in the Canadian wilderness, 60 miles (96.5 km) west of Edmonton, in north-central Alberta, where he said his family lived like "eighteenth-century Russian peasants."

"We had no electricity, no running water, nothing mechanical," Kinsella said proudly. "We travelled by horse and buggy in the summertime and horse and sleight in the winter and just plain horse in the springtime when everything flooded."

Kinsella, 65, who looks very much like a cowboy, seems to relish the hardships he and his family once endured.

"In the wintertime, the snow would drift under the kitchen door across the floor. Life was lived within 12 feet (3.6 m) of the kitchen stove; that was the center of the universe because it kept you from dying," he said, recalling how he would take warm stones from the oven into bed with him at night. "It's hard to believe it was only 60 years ago."

The isolation helped mould Kinsella into a writer. "I had to create all of my own entertainment," he explained. "My parents were busy trying to eke out a living on a farm, so I had to create exotic stories about my pet cats and my stuffed toys. I had no idea what the world was like because there were no children near us."

Until he was 10, Kinsella took all his schooling by correspondence. But then the family moved to Edmonton, the provincial capital, and according to Kinsella he has been suffering from culture shock ever since.

Kinsella lives a semi-retired life in Chilliwack, British Columbia, east of Vancouver. Involved in a car accident three years ago, when someone backed out of their driveway, an incident that effectively ended his fiction-writing career.

"I don't know what it did to me but I have no desire to write," he said.

Kinsella also lost his sense of taste and smell and suffers from lateral-movement vertigo. "I went from being a really hyper type-A (personality) to a type B. I wasn't writing and I didn't care."

Kinsella's writing habits were formerly very regimented. He would write 900 words a day and had no plans to stop. "I had more ideas in my head than I could have written in three lifetimes," he said.

He now spends his hours playing Scrabble on the Internet. Luckily, he was several books ahead of his publisher before the accident. His latest collection of short stories is called "Japanese Baseball."

He also recently published an anthology of his and other writers' stories that touch on baseball themes called "Baseball Fantastic."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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