Interview with Bill Meissner - 2022
Interview # 11 (fiction, short stories, sports fiction, literary fiction)
St. Cloud, Minnesota writer and teacher Bill Meissner is the author of eleven books. His newest collection, a book of short stories with a baseball theme, is Light at the Edge of the Field (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). His five collections of poetry include American Compass (U. of Notre Dame Press), Learning to Breathe Underwater and The Sleepwalker’s Son (Ohio U. Press), and Twin Sons of Different Mirrors (Milkweed Editions). His latest book of poetry is The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Bill’s novel, Spirits in the Grass (U. of Notre Dame Press), won the Midwest Book Award. His two books of short stories are Hitting into the Wind (Random House Publishers/SMU Press Paperback/Dzanc Press) and The Road to Cosmos (University of Notre Dame Press).
His most recently released book is Circling Toward Home: Grassroots Baseball Prose, Meditations, and Images (Finishing Line Press, February 2022). His second novel, set during the turbulent years of the late 60s and the Vietnam War is entitled Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire. It will be published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in the fall of 2022.
Bill’s hobbies and interests include travel (especially to tropical locations), rock music, baseball, photography, pulp fiction magazines, and collecting vintage typewriters. He has taught creative writing at St. Cloud State U., and frequently presents workshops at local elementary schools, high schools and colleges as a visiting writer. He lives in St. Cloud with his wife, Christine.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Bill Meissner
When it comes to baseball, the word I think of is romance. The stories in Light at the Edge of the Field all revolve around baseball and grab at that romance unashamedly and passionately. When and where did you learn to love baseball?
Bill Meissner: I learned to love baseball when I was a kid at about age six or seven. I joined a little league team, and my father took me to some local amateur games in Algona, Iowa, where we saw and met some Negro League players. Later, we attended Milwaukee Braves games where stars like Hank Aaron, Eddie Matthews, and Warren Spahn were featured. On the third pitch of the very first game we attended, I got a foul ball hit by Willie Mays. It was an amazing thrill, and that pivotal moment has stayed with me since.
When I was a kid, there was a place across the street from our house that we called "the vacant lot." At the far end of the empty lot was a wood-slat fence bordered by a small, wooded area. The neighbor kids and I always played ball there, using a worn spot in the dirt as a home plate. I once found a Babe Ruth model bat somewhere in the deep grass, and kept it until it was misplaced during one of our family’s several moves.
Some of my fondest memories are playing catch with my dad when I was a kid and later with my own son, the ball arcing back and forth between our hands. It’s a kind of connection between people, a timeless, pendulum-swinging action. During my early high school years, I practiced tirelessly at baseball, sometimes even playing in December in 32 degrees when there was snow on the ground. I had my sights set on making the Major Leagues, but of course that didn't happen.
And yes, I do believe there's a kind of romance in baseball. It's the romance that’s associated with the beginning of the season, when the long, cold winter ends (at least in the upper Midwest), the snow melts in late March, and the first days of spring arrive, along with the promise for the future.
Randal Eldon Greene: In your first story, you give us a girlfriend who is living with her minor league baseball-playing boyfriend, and she wants him to see more than just baseball. At first I thought this was a curious way to start a collection about baseball, but then I realized that these tales are about more than just the old ballgame, and what you're really doing by writing these stories is asking us to look beyond the game while keeping the game at the center of our attention.
Bill Meissner: That's an excellent assessment of some of these stories, Randal. Several stories in this book focus on strong female characters. I hope that the stories only touch on the game of baseball, but that they resonate further than that, to situations in life that parallel or echo the game. Baseball is, after all, a pastime, a sport, and a form of entertainment, and life goes on both before it and after it.
I think of these stories as having a baseball center, and like a baseball with hundreds of feet of string and yarn around its central core, they spiral outward from there. In fact, some stories, like "The Keys" have very few baseball references. That story is a character study of a person struggling with his past, his identity, and his future. The same goes for "A Day in the Life of a Groundskeeper." Its main character portrays a person who completes a task to the best of his ability, and it also touches on the theme of perseverance in the face of adversity. Dusty Sikarsky, in "In the Middle of a Steal," is a former Major League star who must deal with his post-baseball life as a used car salesperson. Bud Walden, in "Swimming the Quarry," grapples with the untimely death of his wife while still trying to retain a positive attitude about his coaching job for the local youth baseball team.
Randal Eldon Greene: "In the Middle of a Steal" was one of my favorite stories (perhaps I'm just a sucker for puns, which this story employs quite effectively). Like all the pieces in Light at the Edge of the Field, there's a positivity imbued in it that just makes me want to peruse it twice in a row. But I think what I love particularly about this story is the character of Dusty Sikarsky. Dusty holds a sales job that is the complete opposite of what he wanted out of life when he still dreamed of bigger things. And that is, for me, totally relatable.
Bill Meissner: I'm glad you liked this one, Randal. Dusty Sikarsky is one of my favorite characters from the book, too. Sometimes being a writer is both strange and exciting. You invent a character, give him or her a physical appearance, an age, an occupation, and certain ways of speaking. Then you develop a story around them. Eventually, if you go deep enough into the character, you almost start to think of them as a real person. You know what the character would do or say or think in certain situations or conflicts. Dusty is like that for me. I wrote another story about him a few years ago in my collection Hitting into the Wind, and in both stories, he works through his conflicts by being true to himself and going back to his roots. It seems to me that a lot of our lives involve compromise—our dreams versus the realities of our lives. And if we can't quite achieve everything we dream, then we have to learn to embrace our realities.
Randal Eldon Greene: There's a tension in some of these stories between the dreams of baseball players and their life outside of the game. What makes this particular tension such a volatile plot point?
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