Twenty
Questions I’m Often Asked –
With
Answers (click on question to view
answer!)
1. Do you
have a family?
2. What are
your most favorite and least favorite chores?
3. I want
to write and publish books someday. How can I get started?
4. When
you’re not writing, what do you like to do for fun?
5. How old
were you when you started writing?
6. Where
did you grow up and go to school?
7. Are you
rich?
8. What’s
the hardest thing about being a writer?
9. What’s
the best thing about being a writer?
10. Do you
have another job, or is writing the only work you do?
11. How
long does a poem have to be?
12. Do
you have any brothers or sisters?
13. Sometimes I get frustrated because I don’t understand a poem. It
makes me not want to read poetry. What should I do?
14. Do you
draw the illustrations for any of your books?
15. Which
to you like writing best, rhymed or unrhymed poetry?
16. What
do you like writing best, poems or stories?
17. Why do
you write about baseball so much?
18. What’s
your favorite baseball team?
19. Where
do you live?
20. What
do you look like?
1. Q: Do you
have a family?
A: I have a super
family.
A
terrific wife, Polly, who has put up with me during forty years
of marriage. Wow! That’s a long time! She’s a nurse. Her speciality is neo-natal intensive care. She loves working with babies. She also loves teaching others how to become a good nurses. She’s in her sixteenth year of teaching at Tri-County
Technical College in Pendleton, South Carolina.
Two
wonderful and talented sons.
Tim
is a history professor at Furman University in Greenville, South
Carolina and loves to play softball. He and his wife Jacquelyn have two daughters, Mireille and her younger sister Gabrielle. Don’t get me started talking about my granddaughters or I
won’t ever get to the next nineteen questions.
Andy
is a realtor who lives on Lake Travis in Austin, Texas, with
his dog Arlo, and he loves all kinds of water activities. He also
loves Austin, which is bad for Polly and me. If he didn’t love it
so much we might be able to convince Arlo and him to move
closer to us so we could see him more often.
Luckily for them, both Tim and Andy can do many things they
didn’t learn how to do from their dad, like use computers and
build things and fix things.
Two
incredibly cute tiny dogs. Angel, a white toy poodle and her brother: Hunter, a black toy poodle.
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2. Q: What are
your most favorite and least favorite chores?
A: Most
favorite – mowing the lawn.
Least
favorite – everything else.
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3. Q: I want
to write and publish books someday. How can I get
started?
A:
First of all, read a lot. All the good writers I know are
also
people who love to read. Secondly, write a lot. To
be a
good musician or athlete, one must practice a lot.
The
same holds for writing: the more often you write,
the
better you will be.
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4. Q: When
you’re not writing, what do you like to do for fun?
A: I
love to play tennis and golf and softball. I play on a
softball team of “seniors” (that’s a nice way of saying
“old
men”) that plays fifty to sixty games a summer.
We
play from March to October. If I were writing a
scouting report about myself, it might say: he hits for
a high
average, runs well and is a good fielder, but he
can’t
hit for power. A park two miles from where I live
has
just built a nice disc golf course, so I’m planning to
try my
hand at that. I also love to read and collect three
kinds
of books: poetry books, young adult and children’s
novels, and sports books, mainly sports fiction. I have more
than
6,000 books in my personal library, so I don’t even
have
to leave my house when I feel like reading a good book.
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5. Q: How old
were you when you started writing?
A: I don’t
recall ever writing a poem or short story until
I got
to college. I didn’t start writing poetry (other
than
just a handful) until I was 33 years old. My
first
story and poem weren’t published until I was 35.
The
problem is, I never had any teacher in elementary
or
high school show me how much fun writing a story
or
poem can be. Those of you who have teachers that
encourage you to write poems and stories and show you
how to
get started are lucky.
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6. Q: Where
did you grow up and go to school?
A: I
grew up in Thomson, Illinois, a little town in the northwest
part
of Illinois right on the Mississippi River. We had 500
people
in town and eleven in my high school graduating class.
I’ve
written a lot of poems about growing up in Thomson.
I went
to college at Northern Illinois University and earned
my
Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees there.
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7. Q: Are you
rich?
A: I
certainly am. But not in money. In satisfaction – the
satisfaction of having great friends and a great family,
and
the satisfaction of waking up every day and looking
forward to the fun things I can do and the new things
I’ll
have a chance to write.
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8. Q: What’s
the hardest thing about being a writer?
A: For me,
the hardest thing has nothing to do with
the
actual writing – it’s trying to keep from
getting too frustrated when a publisher doesn’t
want
to publish something that I think deserves
to be
published.
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9. Q: What’s
the best thing about being a writer?
A:
Seeing a completed copy of a poem or story or book
and
thinking, “Boy, that turned out pretty good!” (Getting
it
published is a great feeling, of course, but that comes
later,
and that’s just a bonus. There is great satisfaction
in
writing something, even if it never gets published.)
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10. Q: Do you
have another job, or is writing the only work you do?
A: I
taught school (English and creative writing) for twenty-eight
years
(one year of eighth grade – the rest in high school
and
college. Now I go around to schools and teach some
creative writing classes or talk to students about writing
and
read poems. That’s not work, though. That’s fun.
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11. Q: How
long does a poem have to be?
A: As
long as you need it to be. The longest poem I’ve written
is
almost five hundred lines long. My shortest poem is one
line
long. Its title is longer than the poem itself. Here it is:
THE
DAY I DREW A GIRL AS MY OPPONENT IN MY
FIRST AND ONLY SCHOOL WRESTLING MATCH
She
threw me flat against the mat. And that was that.
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12. Q: Do
you have any brothers or sisters?
A: No
brothers, three sisters. Janice was one year older
than
me. She died in December, 2004. Rita is 10 years
younger than me and lives in Havana, Illinois. Rhonda, 12
years younger, lives in St. Charles, Missouri.
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13.
Q: Sometimes I get frustrated because I don’t understand a poem.
It
makes me not want to read poetry. What should I do?
A: Don’t
turn a poem into a puzzle that has only one solution
or
one answer. Different readers will see something
different in the same poem depending on their own
experiences in life and their own experience reading poetry.
All
you should do is try to enjoy something in the poem –
the
sounds or the story or the picture it paints. The
meaning of a poem isn’t as important as what it makes
you
think or how it makes you feel. You can enjoy it
without “understanding” it.
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14. Q: Do you
draw the illustrations for any of your books?
A: Never.
I’d love to be able to draw, but I’m as bad an
artist
as I am singer.
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15. Q: Which
to you like writing best, rhymed or unrhymed poetry?
A: I
love writing both. I think that anyone who wants to write
poetry should try writing both kinds. Some poems will
work better if they rhyme, some if they don’t. It’s important
to
give yourself the chance to choose. You can only do that
if
you practice writing in both rhyme and free verse.
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16. Q: What
do you like writing best, poems or stories?
A: I
like writing both stories and poems, but one reason
I
write so many more poems is because it doesn’t take me
nearly
as long to write my first draft. Most writing, of course,
needs
to be rewritten and revised many times.
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17. Q: Why do
you write about baseball so much?
A:
I’ve always loved baseball, ever since I was seven or eight
years old and played by myself, throwing a ball against
a
wire fence in my back yard and tossing a ball in the air
and
then bunting it down a narrow sidewalk, trying to bunt
it
straight so it would roll a long way before going off into
the
grass. I’ve played on teams almost my whole life.
One of my favorite writing projects was that of interviewing
former major league baseball players for my books TALES
FROM
BASEBALL’S GOLDEN AGE and MORE TALES
FROM
BASEBALL’S GOLDEN AGE. These were players who
were
my idols when I was a kid. I never thought I’d actually
have
a chance to talk to them someday and listen to all their
stories about when they were playing ball.
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18. Q: What’s
your favorite baseball team?
A: In
the American League, the New York Yankees.
In
the National League, the Chicago Cubs.
It
balances out because the Yankees almost always win
their division and the Cubs almost always lose theirs.
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19. Q: Where
do you live?
A: I
live in Seneca, South Carolina. My wife and I have lived
here
since 1991. We love living in South Carolina where
it’s
warm much of the year.
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20. Q: What
do you look like?
A:
Some people think I’m a cross between Robert Redford and
Tom
Cruise. I’m old, like Redford, and I’m short, like
Cruise.
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