W. P. Kinsella

William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, the son of Irish Canadian parents, Olive Mary (née Elliott/Elliot), a printer, and John Matthew Kinsella, a contractor.[1] He was raised until he was 10 years old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says.[2]

When he was ten years old, the family moved to Edmonton. He did not go to school until grade five, attended Parkdale School for junior high, and did not attend university until he was in his mid-30s.[3] Kinsella was barely exposed to literature in school, saying in a 2010 interview, "One Shakespeare play and one J. M. Barrie play was the total literature of my high school years."

Kinsella's literary education in his formative years came from reading and by attending all the plays at high school and any theatrical productions that made it to Edmonton. He also worked in the school library his senior year.[4]

As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.

Although he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing there in 1974. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, Kinsella's literary output primarily consists of two cycles of work dealing with two fictional universes: those dealing with baseball and those depicting the indigenous people of Canada. His first published book was Dance Me Outside (1977), a collection of 17 short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella's native Alberta.[5]

A later collection of similar stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, earned Kinsella the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Kinsella was criticized for writing from the point of view of Native people, appropriating their voices. He rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything he chooses and called the term "cultural appropriation" the nonsense of Eastern Canadian academics.[6]

These stories use the ineptness of the white bureaucrats on reservations as background, and Kinsella defended the stories, saying, "It's the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about."[5]

Kinsella also wrote nearly 40 short stories and three novels about baseball. Shoeless Joe (1982), his first novel, blends fantasy and magic realism to tell the story of a poor Iowa farmer who, yielding to voices in his head, builds a baseball field in his cornfield that attracts the spirits of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), another book blending fantasy and magical realism, recounts an epic baseball game a minor league team played against the 1908 World Champion Chicago Cubs. Box Socials (1991), an evocation of life in rural Alberta during the Great Depression and World War II, has a growing boy as its narrator and recounts a local batting hero's hopes of facing a visiting major league pitcher 60 miles away in Edmonton.

Shoeless Joe remains Kinsella's most famous work. The book was mildly controversial for using a living person, the reclusive author J.D. Salinger, as a main character. Kinsella, who had never met him, created a wholly imagined character (aside from his reclusiveness) based on The Catcher in the Rye, a book that had great meaning to him as a young man. To get a feel for Salinger, he reread his body of work but created an imaginary version of the author. "I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn't sue me."[7]

In an example of metafiction, he named Shoeless Joe's protagonist Ray Kinsella, a character from Salinger's uncollected story "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All". Salinger also used the surname Kinsella in The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield's friend Richard Kinsella, who also shared a name with Ray Kinsella's twin brother in Shoeless Joe).[7]

Known for his litigiousness, Salinger contacted Kinsella's publisher via his attorneys to express outrage over having been portrayed in Shoeless Joe. Kinsella denied that Salinger, as a writer, had any real influence on his own writing, despite rumors to the contrary (some said that Kinsella had actually met Salinger).[4]

Shoeless Joe won Kinsella the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1982. The book garnered good reviews, sold very well, and was made into a popular movie.

W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe was made into the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner. The movie grossed nearly $65 million in the United States. It helped establish Costner as a star and was later inducted into the National Film Registry.[8]

Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on reserves were the basis for the 1994 movie Dance Me Outside and CBC television series The Rez, both of which Kinsella considered to be of very poor quality.[9] Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987. The short story The Last Pennant Before Armageddon was adapted for the stage by the Live Bait Theater in Chicago in 1990.

Kinsella's short story "Lieberman in Love" was the basis for a short film that won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1996. The Oscar came as a surprise to Kinsella, who, watching the award telecast from home, had no idea the film had been made and released. He was not listed in the film's credits or acknowledged by director Christine Lahti in her acceptance speech. A full-page advertisement ran in Variety apologizing to Kinsella for the error.[9]

In 1997 Kinsella was involved in a car accident that almost ended his writing career. He was struck by a car while walking and suffered a head injury when he hit the ground. He did not publish another novel for 14 years.

In a 1999 interview with the University of Regina's student newspaper, Kinsella explained that he could no longer write as he had lost his ability to concentrate. The injury also robbed him of his senses of taste and smell. Kinsella said he went from being a Type A personality to Type B. After the accident, he didn't feel like doing the things he had done in his former routine and didn't care. He did write book reviews to keep his name before the public.[10]

Kinsella's 14-year-long hiatus from fiction may also have had economic roots. He was cited as an archetypical victim of changes in the publishing industry during the late 1980s, which accelerated during the 1990s, that made it more difficult for well-regarded "mid-list" writers such as Kinsella to remain in print. Changes to the U.S. tax code effected by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 discouraged publishers from maintaining inventories of titles in their backlists, as they were taxed on warehoused books.

This led to the thinning out of backlists and the more rapid remaindering of books. The publishing industry underwent a wave of consolidation in the 1990s, as publishers were acquired by big communications companies seeking marketing synergy. The new publishing houses poured more capital into higher-paid, best-selling writers and celebrities who could guarantee "hit" books as well as media tie-in novels. Mid-list writers with first-rate reputations but mid-range, non-spectacular sales suffered accordingly as they were ignored by the new conglomerates.

Of the state of the book industry in a 2010 interview with Maclean's Magazine, Kinsella said, "The publishing industry today is just—I couldn't break into the market today if I was just starting out. The publishing industry is down to a few dozen mainly adventure and romance writers. There's still some academic fiction out there, but it has an incredibly small audience. Nobody really cares about it."[4]

On September 1, 2011, Winnipeg, Manitoba's Enfield and Wizenty, a small press specializing in limited-edition hardcover books, released Kinsella's first published work in 13 years, Butterfly Winter. The unpublished manuscript had won the publisher's Colophon Prize the preceding March. The release was backed up by a "modest" book tour, according to the publisher.[11]

The story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins whose divine destiny for baseball begins with games of catch in the womb, marks a return to form, combining Kinsella's long-held passions of baseball and magical realism.[12] The University of Toronto Press released a trade hardcover edition on October 1. A short story of Kinsella's by the same title was included in his 1988 collection Red Wolf, Red Wolf, published by Totem Press (Collins Publishers).

A noted tournament Scrabble player, Kinsella became more involved with the game after being disillusioned by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike. He spent his final years in Yale, British Columbia, with his fourth wife, Barbara, occasionally writing articles for various newspapers.

Kinsella suffered from diabetes for decades and chose to die with a physician's assistance on September 16, 2016.[13]

• In 1991, Kinsella received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria.
• In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
• In 2005, he was named to the Order of British Columbia.
• In 2009, he was presented the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Vancouver Public Library and Pacific Book World News Society jointly sponsor and present the annual prize to a British Columbia author for an enduring contribution to the literary arts. "I think a lifetime achievement award sounds pretty final, but I'm always happy to see my work recognized," Kinsella said.

• W. P. Kinsella at IMDb
• Bill Kinsella Scrabble tournament results at cross-tables.com