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Josh Wilker's baseball card bildungsroman
Some books, like Josh Wilker's memoir Cardboard Gods, are good enough to make you wanna get funky with your facial hair (check image at the end). The blog Cardboard Gods launched in 2006 as an homage to and restoration of Wilker’s childhood collection of Topps baseball cards from the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s. The Chicagoan's success as a blogger--getting about 800 page hits per day--and as an award-winning writer (Mosher Prize for Fiction) led to his coming of age memoir about baseball cards and brotherhood, Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told through Baseball Cards.
Clever, witty, self-effacing, fun and poignant, Gods is too good to be classified as mere blog-to-memoir, that genre stamp of the digital age. This is a narrative of two brothers figuring out their place in the world when the only thing that can be relied on to make sense is the facts on the back of a baseball card. Click for a full review.
Wilker took time out to talk about his love of the game, the White Sox shorts, the blog-to-memoir, and the Harold. He'll be reading at Quimby's(1854 W. North Ave) on Thursday, April 29 at 7pm.
EX: You're a Chicagoan now. In the book there seems to be more White Sox than Cubs players cards--almost double. Mere coincidence or is it your partiality to AL teams as a BoSox fan? You got issues with the Cubs? (as a Cub fan, I do)
JW: I guess I’d say I’m positively neutral about both Chicago teams—I’ll go to the games of either team with pleasure and be guaranteed a good time because it won’t pain me in any way if the home team loses, unless it's to the Yankees. As for how the White Sox topped the Cubs in terms of cards featured in the book: The book is in part an ode to the 1970s, and the White Sox seemed to embrace the awkward experimentation of that decade with more abandon than the Cubs, at least as far as I could perceive it through my baseball cards. For starters, the White Sox took the field one game wearing shorts! And they regularly wore old-timey big-lapeled jerseys and had guys named Wilbur and Cy, both elements that seemed to hearken back to an earlier time in a way that echoed the unmoored decade’s own delirious reaching back into the past for some semblance of solid ground. And, of course, they hosted “Disco Demolition Night,” perhaps the single most emblematic event of the late-1970s epoch of sound and fury signifying nothing. I kept coming back to the White Sox as jumping off points to talk about the times and about my own experiences in those times. But the Cubs helped me tell my story, too. The book centers largely on two brothers in Red Sox country, so the “Big League Brothers” card of Paul and Rick Reuschel (because despite looking goofy, like my brother and me, they had achieved my greatest dream—being on the same major league team with my brother) and the Bill Buckner card (for obvious reasons) both helped me define the heartachey heart of my story.
EX: How did this come about--did you think you'd have memoir material and wanted to get an audience or did you want to wave your nerd flag and see who'd follow?
JW: When I started the blog, I honestly just wanted to fool around in a new way with my writing. I didn’t even tell anyone I had started a blog for a while. I’d written about my cards in my notebooks periodically for several years previous to the blog, and I thought it might be interesting to see if I could keep it up on a regular basis and in a somewhat more public way. I thought it might be a way to loosen up every day before I got down to “serious” writing. But the playtime kept seeping into the serious time, and the writing kept stretching out into new territory, so I just kept going with it.
EX: I read in an interview (Baseball America) that Mom, Dad and Tom all loved the book and felt championed by it. Your wit and honesty have ignited many blog comment battles, about yourself or a player's card. How did audience commenting inform your process as a writer of the book, and if at all, of the blog? The blog-to-memoir is a good bet for publishers, I'm curious how it affects the writer...er...comment?
JW: It’s hard to say how the blog affected my writing. Writing had been the primary focus of my life for twenty years before I started blogging, so I had already done quite a lot of work toward trying to develop a voice. But getting some very kind encouragement from readers certainly helped me to keep going. Also, the conversational and more improvisatory nature of blogging likely helped loosen me up as a writer. And I certainly got more rigorous about trying to get the baseball stuff right. (If you get a baseball fact wrong in a blog post, you will hear about it.)
EX: You've had to have exhausted your collection by now, no? What happens next? What else are you working on?
JW:I actually haven’t even come close to writing about all my cards (and I’m not even what you would call a serious collector). I plan to continue writing about my cards as long as I’m on the right side of the grass, and maybe if I live to a ripe old age I’ll get to the end of them, or perhaps get to the last card and make it an ongoing work in progress so that I can die with my boots on, writing about Bob Apodaca or Rudy May.
This isn't exactly on-topic, but the idea of "what's next" got me thinking about the term “blog-to-book,” which troubles me a little because it suggests that an author was just using the blog as a means to an end. (The term may also imply that the book is a haphazard collection of blog posts.) My own blog certainly fed into my book, but I see it as a whole different thing, too, an ongoing conversation that is open for everyone to chime in on. It’s also, for me personally, about as close to religion as I’ll come, in that I “practice” it regularly and use it as a way to ponder the imponderables. Or maybe a better, less pretentious way to say it: it helps keep me out of trouble. As for books, I am currently writing a book about The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, of all things, and after that I’m sure I’ll try to write another book if I don’t get hit by a bus. I’m not sure what it’ll be yet.
EX: That's a key clarification because it is much mroe than a collection of blog posts. It has the narrative and pacing of a novel, which is one of the reasons why it is so enjoyable. Back of the card fun facts say you enjoy visiting the library--do you have a favorite Chicago branch?
JW: The Harold Washington branch is tough to beat. I go there when I’m feeling lousy and walk out feeling enthused about life, a knapsack full of books on my back. In a perverse way, I also enjoyed, or at least was always moved by, my visits to a Chicago Avenue branch that was closest to where I live. It recently closed down, but for a while it inched along, and whenever I went in there time would come to a standstill. Everyone there seemed to be moving in a thick, paralyzing fog. It always took what seemed to be an eternity to get the lend on a couple Harold Washington-branch books renewed. I walked out of there a little dizzy and glad to be free.
Wilker reads from Cardboard Gods at Quimby's(1854 W. North Ave) on Thursday, April 29 at 7pm. FREE, ALL AGES.
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