SASKATOONEXPRESS - September 7-13, 2015 - Page 1
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1702 8th St. & Louise | 3330 8th St. E. | 705 22nd St. W. | 1204 Central Ave. | 802 Circle Dr. E. | 519 Nelson Road. Volume 12, Issue 36, Week of September 7, 2015
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Shoeless Joe author to attend festival
W
ith a passion for the sport, an incredible imagination and a creative writing style, W.P. Kinsella sparked the beginning of what might have been baseball’s most famous double play. Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe, a 300page novel that hit People the book shelves in 1982. It told the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the left fielder and batting hero of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. He was one of eight players banished from baseball for allegedly fixing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In the second half of the double play, Phil Robinson adapted Kinsella’s story and turned it into the 1989 motion picture Field of Dreams, arguably the best-ever baseball movie and positioned at No. 6 among alltime fantasy movies by the American Film Institute. Kinsella, now 80 and virtually retired as a writer, will be featured on Sept. 20 at 1:30 p.m. at Saskatoon’s The Word on the Street festival. Appearing on the Great Expectations stage near City Hall, Kinsella will read from his latest collection — The Essential W.P. Kinsella — and will then be interviewed by Yann Martel, the Saskatoon-based, internationally known author. “When I finished the second section of the novel, I was reading it while on a trip to Black Butte Dam in California. I knew this had the makings of something special,” said Kinsella from his home in Yale, B.C. “My dad played semi-pro baseball on the Prairies and he’d tell me stories. As a boy living west of Edmonton, I grew up listening to the World Series on the radio. My first one was the 1945 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the St. Louis Browns.” Kinsella’s interest in baseball history, and the fact that he attended the University of Iowa, led to his dramatic imprint with the book. From the pages of Shoeless Joe come the words: “Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within baseball, anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say ‘the game is never over until the last man’s out.’ Colours can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.” (Continued on page 4)
NED POWERS
W.P. Kinsella’s novel was adapted into one of the best sports movies of all time (Photo Supplied)