W. P. Kinsella

William Patrick Kinsella was a Canadian novelist and short story writer whose work often turned toward baseball, First Nations people, and Canadian culture. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 25, 1935, to Irish Canadian parents, he grew up first on a homestead near Darwell, west of the city. His mother home-schooled him and guided his early correspondence courses. Kinsella later said, “I’m one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write.” He died on September 16, 2016.

Kinsella did not enter school until grade five, and he later described a thin formal exposure to literature in high school: “One Shakespeare play and one J. M. Barrie play was the total literature of my high school years.” What he did have was appetite. He read on his own, attended school plays and theatrical productions that came through Edmonton, and worked in the school library during his senior year. Before becoming a professional writer, he worked as a government clerk in Alberta, managed a credit bureau, ran a pizza restaurant in Victoria, and drove a taxi.

Although he had written since childhood and won a YMCA contest at 14, Kinsella came late to university. He began writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, earned a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing in 1974, and completed a Master of Fine Arts in English at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. Before writing full time, he taught English at the University of Calgary. His first published book, Dance Me Outside (1977), was a collection of stories narrated by Silas Ermineskin, a young Cree describing life on a First Nations reserve in Alberta.

Much of Kinsella’s work formed two broad cycles: stories about baseball and stories depicting indigenous people in Canada. His reserve stories brought both awards and criticism. The Fencepost Chronicles won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, but Ojibwe author Lenore Keeshig-Tobias objected to his use of Native points of view, calling it “culture theft, the theft of voice.” Kinsella defended his position bluntly, saying fiction writers could write about anything they pleased, and argued that much of the humor in his stories was aimed at white bureaucrats on reservations.

His best-known book is Shoeless Joe (1982), a first novel that blends fantasy and magic realism in the story of a poor Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field in his cornfield after hearing voices, drawing the spirits of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The book won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, sold well, and was adapted into the 1989 film Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner. The film grossed nearly $65 million in the United States and was later inducted into the National Film Registry.

Kinsella also wrote The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and Box Socials, along with nearly 40 short stories and three novels about baseball. In 2011, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame gave him the Jack Graney Award for a significant contribution to baseball in Canada. Other adaptations followed, including the film Dance Me Outside, the CBC series The Rez, and the Oscar-winning short film Lieberman in Love, made from one of his stories. His writing remains attractive because it joins ordinary places, local speech, sport, memory, and the strange pull of belief in stories that feel both familiar and uncanny.