With his late twentieth century fables, unruly hair, and handlebar moustache, W.P. (William Patrick) Kinsella ranks as one of Canada’s more colourful and successful novelists.

The author of some two dozen books, Kinsella is best known as a Canadian who writes with poignancy about America’s national pastime – baseball. The heartening Shoeless Joe (1982) won the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and was turned into the smash 20th Century Fox movie, Field of Dreams (1989), starring Kevin Costner. The movie which received three Academy Award nominations earned Kinsella international fame.

Born on May 24, 1935, Kinsella has also released several amusing books largely based on a fictitious native Canadian reserve in Alberta and, with his ex-wife, Ann Knight, two collections of poetry.

As an only child (who didn’t attend school until the age of 10), Kinsella walked his own field of dreams on his parents’ bush farm outside Edmonton, telling stories to his cats. He worked through a variety of jobs (selling ads for the Yellow Pages, driving taxis, running his own pizzeria) before enrolling, at the age of 35, in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria in 1970.

Kinsella sold his pieces regularly to magazines before, in 1977, publishing his first book of short stories, Dance Me Outside. This tragi-comedic glimpse of life on the reservation has since passed the 50,000 mark in sales while the 1995 Norman Jewison/Bruce McDonald film adaption has become a Canadian cult favourite.
 

1. W.P. (Bill) Kinsella toured both Canada and the United States promoting Shoeless Joe (1982), the immense international bestseller that captivated the hearts of North American baseball aficionados. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star] 2. The dust jacket of Shoeless Joe suggests that this internationally successful publication was about baseball. In actual fact, this winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award (1982) is, more than anything else, about the power of dreams to move people, to make those dreams a reality.[Photo, courtesy Houghton Mifflin Company]

In 1978 Kinsella became an English teacher at the University of Calgary, a position he held for the next five years. However, at the suggestion of a Boston book editor, he reworked the 1980 short story, Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, into a full-length novel. The final product would turn his career around almost overnight.

The lyrical Shoeless Joe, which had won him the 1982 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, also won him the Books in Canada Award for Best First Novel and the Canadian Author Association’s Award for Fiction. Now famous, he was invited by U.S. colleges and universities to give readings at $2000 to $3000 per night. Writing became a full-time occupation. Meanwhile, his fantastic tale about an Iowa farmer who converts his corn fields into a baseball diamond to bring back the late Hall of Famer Shoeless Joe sold more than one half million copies. Today, the actual ballpark as filmed in Field of Dreams attracts more than 100,000 tourists annually to Dyersville, Iowa!

Kinsella has penned several other baseball-related books, including The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Thrill of the Grass, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, and his 1996 entry, If Wishes Were Horses. He combines an expert knowledge of baseball (he is a member of the Society of American Baseball Researchers) with fabulist plots (citing influences like Richard Brautigan and Ray Bradbury). In a style he has termed “magic realism,” his jaded protagonists often must make a fantastic leap of faith, for redemption. “I write love stories that are peripherally about baseball,” he says.

Kinsella’s The Fencepost Chronicles (1986) claimed the Stephen Leacock Medal for Canadian humour; the screen adaptation of his 1987 short story, Lieberman in Love, won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film (director, Christine Lahti; producer, Jana Sue Memel); and he was named the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Author of the Year for 1987. His stories have appeared in several anthologies including Best Canadian Short Stories, Pushcart Prize V, and The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories. He has also been made an Officer of the Order of Canada (1994).

Splitting his time between White Rock, British Columbia, and Palm Springs, California, Kinsella maintains a prolific writing pace with, finished and awaiting release, four more books, two short story collections, and a mystery optioned for film.

Mike Beggs