[In the following interview, Kinsella discusses his depictions of Canadian Indians, his use of humor, and the preliminary plans for the film adaptation of Shoeless Joe.]

The writer W. P. Kinsella, who won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship award and other prizes for his novel Shoeless Joe (1982), has written numerous volumes of short stories: Dance Me Outside (1977), Scars (1978), Born Indian (1981), Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (1980), The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories (1983), and The Thrill of the Grass (1984). He is presently working on another book of short stories and a new novel.

Kinsella was born in 1935 in Edmonton, Alberta, and he spent his youth in the country near Lac Ste. Anne, west of Edmonton. After working at various jobs (claims investigator, cab driver, restauranteur), he took a degree in creative writing at the University of Victoria in 1974, and then studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, graduating in 1978. He taught creative writing and freshman English at the University of Calgary for five years, until 1983, when he left that position to devote himself full time to writing.

Kinsella married the writer Ann Knight in Iowa in 1978. The Kinsellas have homes in Iowa City and in White Rock, British Columbia; when they're not at home, they travel the major league baseball circuit in their legendary beat-up Datsun truck. The interview took place in Kinsella's home in White Rock in May of 1985.

[Murray]: A few critics have charged that you rely on stereotypes in your depiction of Canadian Indian life. How did you learn of Indian culture? Where did you learn of their sacred beliefs and how did you discover their humor? When you've written dialogue, have you ever tried to duplicate Indian word usage and speech patterns? Perhaps you have an Indian editor?

[Kinsella]: Well, my first Indian story came about by accident, as all stories do, while I was at the University of Victoria, taking a creative writing class from Leon Rooke. I was trying desperately to think of something that I could write about when I thought of a couple that I knew casually. The young woman was Indian and her husband was white. There must be a story here, I thought, about the clash of the cultures. I raised the question all writers ask themselves, “What if … ?” Should I have this person tell the story? or that? Should I take the story this way or another? Then I thought, what if I put myself in this young man's position? What sort of problems would I face when I brought an Indian girl home to meet my immediate family? My family at that time consisted of a mother and a maiden aunt who lived in retirement in a high rise in Edmonton with a cat and a Bible, and who hadn't seen an Indian in fifty years and didn't plan on seeing one again. And then I thought, well, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has already been written; but what would happen if I reversed the situation? What kind of problems would an Indian girl have if she were to bring a very straight, not very bright white man home to the reserve to meet her family? And that was where “Illianna Comes Home” came from. I probably chose to tell the story from the point of view of the Indian girl's kid brother because of my experience—I drove a cab first in Edmonton and later in Victoria—with young Indian cab passengers, kids who were so funny although they had very little to laugh about. And so that was how Silas Ermineskin was born.

Although I was living in B.C. then, I had been raised in rural Alberta, near Lac Ste. Anne, west of Edmonton. I originally intended to set the story there because I knew the area. But then, I thought, how do you get someone from Calgary to Lac Ste. Anne? You'd have to drive two hundred miles north to Edmonton, west to the Alberta-B.C. border, north to Lac Ste. Anne, and probably west again. I remembered that there is a reserve near Wetaskiwin on Highway 2, so I set the story there. I didn't know at that time that it was called the Ermineskin Reserve; I probably knew the name subliminally, though I'd never been there. Years before I had been an insurance investigator for a retail credit company and had handled the Camrose-Wetaskiwin area, so that's how the story got its setting. You'll notice that in the first collection of stories, Dance Me Outside, Silas says, “We talk in our language,” because I didn't know whether they were Cree or Stoney or Blackfoot or Assiniboine. It wasn't until the third or fourth story, when I stopped and did research on what tribe actually lived there, that they in fact became Cree.

My talent is for putting myself in the position of another person. I think that I could write about any minority if I chose to do so. There is a “minority mentality” in that minority people are always put upon by the majority people, and the minority always fight back by making fun of the majority. So the oppressed make fun of their oppressors. Silas has an eye for the absurd; he sees all the odd things that the white man does in the name of civilization. He either comments on these things or else presents them with a straight face for the reader to realize how absurd they are.

Did you get much information from books or other historical sources?

I read newspapers carefully and always look for items about native people. For a number of years I subscribed to a magazine called The Saskatchewan Indian. I got most of my names from there because they showed pictures of sports teams and events and gave the names of the players. Occasionally, I got the idea for a story from the magazine. Every issue would feature an article on the significance of that month's moon—I have a story called “Goose Moon” that came right from that magazine. My story called “Bones” came from a newspaper picture of a group of Indians who were occupying a government office in Ontario because the government had dug up some bones and then, instead of reburying them, carted them off to the provincial museum. The Indians wanted the bones back.

The story “Doctor Don” came from a newspaper article on an event in the Queen Charlotte Islands. A man pretended to be a doctor on a reserve and, when he was found out, he committed suicide; but the Indians loved him because he had the gift, not the degree, and the gift of confidence wins half the battle in illness, which is largely psychosomatic.

I've just finished a story in which Silas goes to Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories to cover the Pope's visit. Here we find out what really happened and why Fort Simpson was fogged-in. This story, too, had its origin in the news.

To get back to your question: No, I don't have an Indian editor; and, if you look closely at what I do, you'll find that I don't do anything as far as dialect is concerned. I include some misusage of the word “is”—“Frank and I is going somewhere” instead of “are going”—the inconsistencies of using “say” and “says,” the use of “be” for “is”; but the misusages are decreasing. My feeling is that anyone who has written eighty-some stories, as Silas now has, will have improved his language and sentence structure over the years. Remember, too, that Silas is working with a knowledgeable man who reads his work and corrects his grammar occasionally; so with each book Silas becomes a little more literate, improves his grammar, and uses bigger words, though the writing is still recognizable as that of someone with only a grade seven or eight education.

As to subject matter and tone, did your stories become humorous at a certain point in time?

It wasn't until “Illianna Comes Home” (and after I'd reworked that story in a creative writing course) that I became a humorist. I'd always written everything with deadly seriousness. “Illianna Comes Home” was intended to be a bittersweet comment on race relations; it never occurred to me that it was funny. When I took the story to class, the other students laughed and laughed; at first I was a little put out, because I didn't think that I had written a humorous story. I finally got the idea that, if you can't beat them, join them. If people are going to laugh at my work, they might laugh more if I consciously set out to be funny. So from that point on I've considered myself a humorist. Even in the darkest of my Indian stories, there is always a touch of the absurd.

Are humor and absurdity synonymous, do you think?

I classify humor as innocent or absurd or blatant. There's a certain amount of all three types in my stories. There wasn't too much blatant humor in my early work, but the amount increases in my later stories. There is a lot of absurd humor in the Indian stories. There is also a lot of innocent humor in the early stories where Silas doesn't realize that some of the things that he is telling you are funny. I pretty well had to abandon the innocence later on.

I don't read much humor. I no longer read Buchwald and Bombeck because I don't read the daily paper anymore; I can't stand Eric Nicol; and I find Leacock kind of juvenile.

I'd like to hear a bit more about subject matter and setting. You seem to cross the national boundary line so easily that I wonder if you consider yourself as much an American as a Canadian author. I don't believe that one should call you a Canadian regionalist after the publication of Shoeless Joe.

I hope I'm not considered a regional writer. It's purely a matter of intelligence and economics. When you have 20 million people in Canada—reduced to an audience of about 10 million due to the French factor—and over 200 million people in the U.S., why not write for them all? I consider myself a North American writer. I'm in Canada by accident of birth. My father was an American who came to Alberta but never took out Canadian citizenship. I have a little paper from the American consulate which says that I can have an American passport any time I want one. If it weren't for the medical insurance thing, I guess we would live in the U.S.

“Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Regina” just doesn't cut it. Baseball is an American game; consequently, all but one of my baseball stories have been set in the U.S. One story was set in Calgary, but it was about U.S. players in Calgary. My Indians are Canadian, but they are universal characters. I've had people who know every conceivable tribe from Maine to New Mexico say, “Yes, this is the way it is here.” The Moccasin Telegraph is out in the United States and Dance Me Outside will be out this fall. My original inclination—and I would have done it if the publisher had not put a stop to it—was to go quickly through the book before its American publication and set the stories in Montana, making the characters American Indians. My feeling is that the Americans have no particular interest in Canada and that it would cost me some readers to have the characters Canadian. But David R. Godine [Kinsella's U.S. publisher] said, “No, we want them as they are.” I still think it would be fatal if I set the baseball stories in Canada. As I've said, I write for all the English-speaking people of North America.

Have you thought about describing actual American Indian (as distinct from Canadian Indian) life, in addition to writing the baseball fictions?

Well, as I've said, many of my ideas come from newspapers. I recently read an article, taken from U.S.A. Today, which is titled: “Indian Queen Bucks Tradition, Irks Officials.” It's about a young woman from Oklahoma who didn't wear beads and buckskin to a White House ceremony and consequently had her regal title taken away by the White Mountain Apache tribe. The story is right there; it will be called “The Miss Hobbema Contest.”

I'm working on seven stories at the moment. The one to be called “Frank Pierce, Iowa” is a reincarnation of “The Noontime Sky,” a story written when I was eighteen years old. Another story, which is about a baseball player whose wife is still in love with Elvis Presley, is probably based on my personal experience, though I can't be certain. Several years ago someone sent me a news item about a woman who planted her husband's ashes on the fifty-yard line when they were building B.C. Place—I'm now having this happen at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. I'm also working on a story, “The Eddie Scissons Syndrome,” which is based on Shoeless Joe. I've actually turned up all kinds of people who have lied about having major league careers. Some day I hope to do a nonfiction piece on this subject, if someone will pay me enough for it. I'm also writing a story on a baseball mascot that will be called “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated.” The story is about creatures in an alien culture who pick up television from earth and the first thing they see is that there are people just like them, but what they are looking at are the mascots at the baseball games. Everyone in this culture looks like the San Diego Chicken. So they send down this guy who becomes the Seattle Albatross—with disastrous results. About a year ago I did a story for Vancouver Magazine, called “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” which was about what happened to Silas and his friends when they came to Vancouver. They wind up on Wreck Beach and Mad Etta gets mistaken for a beached whale by the Greenpeace people.

One of my readers suggested that I bring more of the Ermineskins to the west coast, so I'm now working on a story in which a planeload of them come to Vancouver to hear one of their young women who's been successful as a country singer. In Vancouver they meet a west coast Indian, named Bobby Billy, who runs a pizzeria. [Kinsella once owned such a business.] I think that Frank Fencepost will take over the restaurant.

Another reader told me of a National Enquirer story about a woman who was stabbed ninety-seven times but survived because she was so fat that the wounds were all superficial. This is admittedly a terrible story, but I'm telling it from the woman's point of view. It will be a sad story, quite different from my Indian and baseball stories.

Do you always build toward a whale of a conclusion?

As far as story-writing is concerned, I consider the ending most important—it's everything. Give me a good climax and I'll build the story that leads up to it. I've often written the ending of the story first (for example, the endings to “Black Wampum” and “Longhouse”). This is the easiest sort of story to write. Sometimes you just get a good opening, as in the case of “Goldie” [“Old cowboys is like old cars, broke down most of the time and a lot of expense to whoever own one.”] The ideas for stories come from everywhere. The idea for “Goldie” came from a Waylon Jennings' song that I once heard on the radio.

When you speak of finding ideas in the local paper, do you mean the White Rock Bugle, or whatever it is?

No. One of the things that I do not do is to ever become involved in the place where I'm living. I try to ignore local politics absolutely and completely. I would just as soon ignore provincial politics also. I have no involvement with White Rock and a minimal one with British Columbia and Vancouver. The test of it is that we can go away to the U.S. for two months and find that there may be one item about Canada in U.S.A. Today and that will be the only thing that has been of the slightest importance. The goings-on in British Columbia are not important to the rest of the rest of the world. Why bother yourself with the totally insignificant? I don't get involved in Iowa either [Kinsella owns a house there]. I don't even listen to local radio stations.

I've heard that there's a definite chance that Shoeless Joe will be made into a film. If so, would you want to take an active part in the creation of that film?

Twentieth Century Fox have verbally committed themselves to option the movie and they're putting up enough money for me to take them seriously. No, I don't want to be involved in the process at all, although I might consider being a consultant. I'm too old to learn another trade. And I'm finished with those characters. Screenwriting is a collaborative process and I'm not a collaborator. I'm sure that I'd be very ugly working in conjunction with other people and, after two or three weeks, I'd probably tell them what to do with their script. So it would be better not to get involved at all,

Then you're not afraid of losing control of your original work if it were transformed into another medium? Or would this simply be in keeping with your view of the artist as a purveyor of entertainment?

Yes, I'm a purveyor of goods. A story or novel is like a quality loaf of bread. If you pay the proper price for that loaf of bread, it doesn't matter to me in the least whether you make dainty little sandwiches out of it or feed it to your hogs. That's the analogy I use. I would be disappointed if they made a dreadful teenage movie out of it—“Shoeless Joe Meets Rocky VI”—but their money entitles them to do whatever they please with the material.

Will your next novel convey the same kind of tenderness and solicitude which, to me at least, pervades Shoeless Joe? Or do you think that you'll return to the fantastical air of your later short stories?

I think that The Iowa Baseball Confederacy [Kinsella's novel-in-progress] is a little bit of each. It is again about a man with an obsession, just as Shoeless Joe, is about Ray's obsession with the Black Sox, with Salinger, and with answering the questions that are posed to him. But Shoeless Joe, is, I feel, a story about the power of love and the power of dreams; it's about the ability to chase a dream and make it come true. Baseball is on the periphery in Shoeless Joe. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy is much the same, but not quite so gentle a novel as Shoeless Joe. It's about a man who wakes up one morning with the complete history of a baseball league in his head. The “Confederacy” operated from 1902 till 1908 in and around Iowa City, Iowa. The trouble is that he can't find anyone else who will acknowledge that the league ever existed; yet he is certain that there are people still living who know of it.

Sounds like a Twilight Zone script!

Yes! In the second half of the novel he ends up going back to 1908 in order to find out what really happened to the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Many strange and wonderful things occur on the way. The Black Angel, who is mentioned peripherally in Shoeless Joe, becomes a character playing the outfield in the Confederacy. We have players struck by lightning, a sixteen-foot Indian, and many other oddities, including a rain which lasts for forty days and forty nights.

That sounds like a really great work of biblical proportions! On another topic, Bill, do you believe that the artist has a social function, perhaps a moral role to play in society?

That's like getting involved in politics. I don't like to see the writer or artist meddling in such areas. I don't want to be a sociologist or a moralist or a navel-gazer. The fiction writer's role in life is simply to entertain. If you can slip in something that's profound or symbolic without taking away from the entertainment value of your story, then that's alright. I don't like to see fiction that is incredibly boring because the writer is worrying about life and death.

Although all of your major publications have come out in the past eight years or so, you have accumulated a substantial critical bibliography. Do you pay much attention to reviewers? To academic critics? Who is your best critic? Ann Knight? Or is it Bill Kinsella, the hawkeyed craftsman who spotted a misquotation in one of my reviews of his work?

I think that I'm probably my own best critic because I'm the one who knows what I started out to write in the first place. I think that all writers experience the business of finishing a story and finding that it is only ten or fifteen percent of what they had in mind when they started. That happens to me all the time. I get this wonderful idea; I write the story; when I finish, I feel that I've done only a fraction of what I intended, though it may still be a good story. My wife is a very good critic. She can pick out things that don't quite fit; she notices when a character doesn't act or speak consistently. She has such a good sense of plot that I read my stories aloud to Ann when I finish them. Otherwise, though, I don't pay much attention to critics or reviews; I certainly wouldn't change anything because someone didn't like it.

I've been fortunate in not having many bad reviews over the years. When a bad one appears, it doesn't bother me because I know that my work is good. Reviewing is a very subjective business and I have no objection to a bad review if the person says, “I read this book and hated it because. …” The only thing that upsets me—and I've only answered one review in my whole career—is when it's obvious that the reviewer hasn't read the book. A national magazine [Maclean's] did a review of Shoeless Joe that was just so ignorant it was incredible. The man wasn't even capable of intelligent plot summary because he had the plot entirely wrong. It's no wonder that he didn't like the book! It infuriates me when a person will write a review for a national magazine and hasn't the integrity to read the book.

I actually enjoy reading good critical work, especially academic criticism. I am often extremely critical of academics because I've played the “lit crit” game and know the rules. I often laugh myself silly over interpretations of my work and wind up saying, “What absolute idiocy!” It's very funny to watch a critic probe for hidden meanings which you had no intention to hide. Maybe it's even more foolish than funny when a critic devises an interpretation based on writers that you've never read or even heard of. But it is a fun game, and I do read most of the reviews that come in.

Thank you for an enlightening morning in White Rock.