Book Received: The Essential W. P. Kinsella

Taxes: done (finally). Current editing deadline project: completed early this week, and ahead of schedule, too.

So that brings me to one of my recently received books: The Essential W. P. Kinsella, from Tachyon Publications. Though when I initially worked on this book, and then wrote a blog post about it back on August 26, 2014, the working title was "The Very Best of W. P. Kinsella."

Whether it be "The Very Best" or "The Essential" -- "to-may-to, to-mah-to" -- it doesn't matter...this is really the one and only book you need to read, especially if you are new to the writing of W. P. Kinsella.

For those completely unfamiliar with the author's work, he wrote the story "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," which is included in the book. The story was expanded into the novel Shoeless Joe, which later begat the 1989 Oscar-nominated movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, and Ray Liotta: If you build it, he will come.

There are quite a few baseball stories included in this collection. But the way in which Kinsella tells such a story, the reader doesn't need an understanding of baseball; the game of baseball merely serves as a metaphor on life -- and what a life it can be: W. P. Kinsella-style, and that "style" typically includes a touch of the supernatural as well. Here's an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly review:

...Other charming baseball fantasies include "The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record," in which a fan agrees to sacrifice himself to bring back the recently dead Yankees star Thurman Munson, and "Searching for January," which concerns an encounter with the deceased Roberto Clemente. Alongside these stories are several more realistic and mostly gentle satires, such as "The Fog," that present the escapades of several indefatigable members of Canada’s First Nations. "The Grecian Urn" concerns a couple who can inhabit the interior worlds of great works of art. "K Mart" is the touching tale of three boys who use baseball to escape from their unhappy lives. Kinsella is a masterly writer of short fiction....each of these works, whether fantastic or realistic, is individually a small marvel of the storyteller's art. ~ Publishers Weekly starred review

In support of the publication of The Essential W. P. Kinsella, the author -- who turns 80 on May 25 -- has been making the rounds of media interviews. In an interview with Richard Warnica of the National Post, Kinsella says of his popular, and oft controversial, First Nations/Hobbema Reserve stories: "They are funny and they are true. They portray the native people in a great light and they show their sense of humour. That is how oppressed people survive." Short story "The Last Surviving Member of the Japanese Victory Society," "a sweet piece about late-life love and loss," was the last story Kinsella read to his wife, Barbara, before she passed away in 2012. "I always read everything aloud [to her]. She is the best editor I ever worked with." The story was published in 2013.

In an interview with Charity Nebbe on Talk of Iowa, for Iowa's Public Radio, Kinsella said of this new collection: "I just want people to enjoy the work. I'd like them to say, 'wow that story really moved me, or that really made me laugh, or it left me with a little tear in my eye.' That's all that I've ever wanted from my writing. I want people to enjoy it."

Two stories, "Do Not Abandon Me" and "Out of the Picture," are original to this collection.

Editing in Process...The Very Best of W. P. Kinsella

Cover art by Thomas Canty

If you read this blog fairly regularly, you'll recall my post earlier in the month when I wrote about purchasing the Xcanex Professional Book and Document Scanner by piQx imaging. In that post I mentioned a huge scanning project I had begun working on at the time, which is why I was in a bit of a kerfuffle over scanners -- and the fact that my go-to scanner for nearly 10 years no longer worked with OmniPage Pro and Windows 7.

That scanning project is short story collection The Very Best of W. P. Kinsella, forthcoming in 2015 from Tachyon Publications.

And the project is indeed huge: approximately 138,000 words of fiction, all of which has to be scanned, then cleaned up and formatted, and finally copy edited.

If you've seen the movie Field of Dreams (1989), starring Kevin Costner, then you've experienced a wee taste of W. P. Kinsella, who wrote the novel Shoeless Joe (1982), upon which the movie is based. And Kinsella's novel is an expansion of his 1979 short story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" -- which is included in this Very Best of collection. In the story, a corn farmer in Iowa hears a voice:

Two years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, as I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa, a voice very clearly said to me, "If you build it, he will come."

The voice was that of a ballpark announcer. As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive. I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors' hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate.

The "he" in "he will come" is Joseph Jefferson Jackson, the "Shoeless Joe Jackson" in the title, one of the greatest baseball outfielders of all time -- who had passed away in 1951, years (and years) before our Iowa corn farmer heard that voice. But if our farmer builds that ballfield, he will come. [Note: Shoeless Joe had been mired in the Black Sox Scandal after the Chicago White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series; Joe and seven other teammates were banned for life from baseball the following year.]

There are a few other baseball stories in this collection, but you don't need to know anything about baseball to enjoy these tales: baseball merely serves as a backdrop to these stories, which are about life and the human condition, often with a bit of the "fantastic" thrown in. My favorite story in the collection is "K Mart" -- but don't let the title fool you: it's the story of lost childhood love, nostalgia, and survival, all amidst the backdrop of a neighborhood dirt-lot baseball game, a game that seemed endless (to the children playing it), but only lasted throughout the summer months.

W. P. Kinsella is also well-known for his "First Nation" stories about the indigenous Cree on the Hobbema Reserve near Edmonton, Canada. These stories reflect the Cree's destitute and disadvantaged culture, yet add an element of humor by exploring the convoluted situations (and shenanigans) they get into trying to survive in a world dominated by white people. But even with the element of humor, there is a sadness to all of these stories. What is especially delightful about these stories is that Kinsella's characters -- Silas (the narrator), Frank Fencepost, Mad Etta, Bedelia Coyote, Sadie One-wound, and Rufus Firstrider, to name just a few -- appear in all the stories. By the time you finish reading this collection, you'll certainly consider them acquaintances, if not friends. In "Beef," Bedelia Coyote determines that a treaty the Cree signed with the Canadian government in the 1800s is still valid, and she files the necessary paperwork so that the reserve receives financial compensation. But Frank Fencepost has a better scheme in mind: he hijacks the paperwork and requests the government honor the compensation put forth in the original treaty: cattle -- figuring he can make more from the cattle than the money the government was offering. The title of the story, "Beef," says it all.