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Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson

I keep thinking about Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame baseball player who died at 83 three days ago. He was the first African American to manage a MLB team and the only man to be named MVP in both leagues. I’ll list some of his other achievements below, but first a personal story:

The 1970 Baltimore Orioles (with the two Robinsons, Frank and Brooks) were one of my favorite teams of all time. That October, when they beat Frank’s old team, the Cincinnati Reds, in the World Series in five games, I had just “purchased” a tiny, tiny transistor radio, probably with Bazooka Joe bubblegum wrappers. In those days, Series games were played during the daytime during the week. I took that radio to my grade school and listened to the Series in class, with the left side of my head turned away from the teacher so he couldn’t see the thin line of the wire attached to the earbud in my left ear. I never got caught.

That 1970 Orioles team had seven All-Stars on it, and except for Frank, who was paid $125K, none of them made more than $65K. The Series that year, by the way, featured the first African American ever to umpire a Series: Emmett Ashford.

Okay, here are some more of Frank Robinson’s achievements:

1956 Rookie of the Year
1958 Gold Glove
1961 National League MVP (Cincinnati)
1966 Triple Crown (tops in HRs, RBIs & batting average)
1966 World Series MVP (Baltimore won it that year too)
1966 American League MVP (Baltimore)
12-time All-Star
1975 1st black MLB manager (Cleveland Indians)
1989 American League Manager of the Year (Baltimore)
2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom

Career stats:

1,829 runs
2,943 hits
528 doubles
586 HRs
1,812 RBI
204 stolen bases
.294 batting average

RIP, Mr. Robinson. Thank you for giving so much pleasure and inspiration to a little white boy with a tiny radio.

IN HIS OWN WORDS: A TRIBUTE TO BRIAN DOYLE — 7 p.m., Thursday, March 28, in Portland

I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be part of a reading called IN HIS OWN WORDS: A TRIBUTE TO BRIAN DOYLE at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 28, with these amazing authors:


Robin Cody, David James Duncan, John Freeman, Jordan Imani Keith, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kim Stafford, and Joe Wilkins. Chip Blake, editor of ORION, and Sy Safransky, editor of THE SUN, will speak too.


The event will take place at the McMenamins Mission Theater & Pub (1624 NW Glisan, Portland, OR). It’s FREE but you need tickets, which will be available starting at 4 p.m. (PST) TODAY. (The theater seats about 200 people, but the organizers–ORION and THE SUN–think tickets will be snapped up quickly, so don’t wait!)

To order tickets, go to: https://www.mcmenamins.com/mission-theater. You will go through what looks like buying a ticket, but in the end, there will be no charge, no asking for credit card info, etc.


We’re all going to be reading pieces of Brian’s work. It should be a wonderful evening.

“The Story Catcher” is a Best American Essays 2018 “Notable Essay” Selection

I just learned that my essay on Brian Doyle, “The Story Catcher,” published in the Autumn 2017 issue of Notre Dame Magazine is listed among the “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction 2017” in Best American Essays 2018, edited by Hilton Als.

A piece by Brian called “Everyone Thinks that Awful Comes by Itself, But It Doesn’t,” published in the February 2017 issue of The Sun, was selected too.

It makes me very happy to see Brian honored in this way.

On TV: A Shot of John Belushi and Me in Our Only Movie Together

I went to the Stanford-Oregon game on Saturday night, which was broadcast nationally, and jokingly told a friend to look for me on TV, not knowing a picture of me had already appeared on that morning’s ESPN College GameDay. They showed a short video about “Animal House” that included this still. That’s me (in the center) and my college buddy Brad McCuaig behind John Belushi.

The movie was shot on the University of Oregon campus in the fall of 1977 when I was just beginning my sophomore year there.  All you had to do to be in it was get a haircut, they said, so I lined up with the others and had my head shorn.  Then I worked as an extra for a week, meeting Belushi and the movie’s other future stars and playing fussball with Karen Allen once.  After a week, though, the standing around was too boring and I didn’t want to miss any more classes, so my time as a film actor ended.

No one had any idea, of course–not even the director, John Landis–that the movie would go on to be one of the most iconic comedies of all time.  I remember a quote from Landis saying that the movie might do only modestly well but it would make stars of its young actors.  He was wrong on the first point but prescient on the second.  The young and mostly unknown actors in the movie who went on to big careers included Belushi, Allen, Kevin Bacon, Tom Hulce, and Peter Riegert.  In the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, my Bacon Number is 1.

My TIN HOUSE Essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s THE EVERGLADES is now online

Tin House has selected my essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s classic environmental book, The Everglades: River of Glass, as one of their sample pieces online for the fall 2018 “Poison” issue.  Here’s the link.  Let me know what you think.

Speaking at a Celebration of Robert Lax at Poets House in NYC: 7 p.m., Friday, November 30

If you live in or around New York City, come down to Poets House at 10 River Terrace at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 30, for a Celebration of Robert Lax on his 103rd birthday.  I’ll be sharing stories about Lax and reading some of his poems, along with poet and former Lax literary assistant John Beer and poet Stacey Tran.  Lax’s niece and literary executor, Marcia Kelly, will be in attendance too.  It should be a wonderful evening of great poetry, fellowship and reminiscences.  The cost is: $10, $7 for seniors & students, free for Poets House members.

Note: We were hoping we’d have copies available of New Directions’ reissue of Lax’s classic collection 33 Poems, but publication has been delayed until next February.  We’ll have advance copies for you to look at, though.

More About my Writing Residency in China This Fall

I announced a couple of months ago that I’ve been asked to be a resident writer at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, this fall.

I have a few more details about it:

The residency is sponsored by the English Creative Writing Center at Sun Yat-Sen University, the only program in China focused on creative writing in English.  The programs founder and director is a writer herself, Dai Fan.

The residency begins on October 22 and lasts through Nov. 18.   For the first two weeks, we’ll be in Yangshou in the Guangxi Autonomous Region with no duties other than writing.  (The featured image here, of Yangshou, is from the China and Asia Cultural Travel website.)  Next, we’ll spend a week at Sun Yat-sen’s main campus in Guangzhou, giving talks and readings and meeting with faculty and students.  Then, the last week, we’ll be back to writing, this time in Meizhou in Guangdong Province.

I’ll be there with seven writers from six other countries–for information on them and their work, click on their names below:

Charlson Ong, the Philippines

Elisa Biagini, Italy

James Scudamore, Great Britain

Monica Aasprong, Norway

Sally Ito, Canada

Vladimir Poleganov, Bulgaria

Zdravka Evtimova, Bulgaria

I’ll post some of their work in the days ahead.

I haven’t been blogging on this site lately but I will during my time in China.  For now, if you’re interested in learning more about the program and what I’ll be experiencing, check out this edition of Ninth Letter with links to creative works by participants in the program two years ago.

An Essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s THE EVERGLADES in the September Issue of TIN HOUSE

My first trip to Florida this past March introduced me to all kinds of new things: alligators, islands called keys, spring break on Miami Beach, Cape Canaveral, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the amazing writer and environmentalist whose name is on the Florida school where 17 students and staff were murdered earlier this year.

Although Douglas published the definitive book on the Everglades in 1947–The Everglades: River of Grass–her work is not as appreciated today as it should be.  To do my small part to remedy the oversight, I wrote a piece for Tin House magazine’s Lost & Found section.  You’ll find it in the new September issue, out tomorrow.

Douglas was 108 when she died in 1998, old enough to have cut her advocacy teeth in the struggle for women’s suffrage.  You can get a taste of her remarkable career as a journalist, fiction writer and activist on her Wikipedia page.

Or, for a quick list of 13 things to know about her, try this page.

Another Piece on Brian Doyle: Turning MINK RIVER into a Play

Oregon Arts Watch just published my piece about a Northwest theater director and playwright turning Brian Doyle’s novel Mink River into a play.  You can read it here: http://www.orartswatch.org/brian-doyle-and-the-language-of-the-stage/

Still Crazy (to Write Fiction) After All These Years

Twenty-one years ago, I graduated from Columbia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program with a focus on fiction writing.  My intention was to find a job teaching fiction writing and focus on writing short stories and novels, all of which I did…for a while.

My first teaching job was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I taught three sections of fiction writing each term, with an occasional literature class, while advising the student magazine, Grassroots.  During the three years I spent there, I revised and published four short stories I had written in graduate school, one of which, Fireline, published in StoryQuarterly, went on to win both an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and the Daniel Curley Award for Short Fiction.  I completed the novel that had been my thesis too, and found an agent for it.  So far, everything was going according to plan…

But I couldn’t find a permanent job in Fiction and, since I had a solid journalism background and had published a number of essays and profiles in publications such as Poets & Writers, I started applying for Nonfiction jobs.  I was ultimately hired by Portland State University in 2000 to help found its graduate program in nonfiction writing.  When the agent failed to sell my novel, I started shifting my energies more and more into nonfiction and, although I worked on another novel for a time, I left fiction behind.

Now that I’m retired from teaching, I’m able to go back to my first love.  I’m working on that set-aside novel again and I recently published a short story–my first in 17 years–in Inkwell.  It’s called “O Kairos” and features a Greek couple scratching out a living on a small island.  You can read the beginning of it here.