If You Write It: The University of Iowa Author Who Inspired the Field of Dreams

ILLUSTRATION: Tavis Coburn W.P. Kinsella

I came to Iowa to study, one of the thousands of faceless students who pass through large universities, but I fell in love with the state. Fell in love with the land, the people, the sky, the cornfields, and Annie. —The character Ray in Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella

In August 1976, a 41-year-old aspiring writer named Bill Kinsella boarded a bus in Langley, British Columbia, and set out for graduate school somewhere in the whispering farm fields of Iowa. A former restaurant owner, insurance worker, and taxi driver, Kinsella was ready for a new chapter after years of unfulfilling work and the end of his second marriage.

It wasn't some mysterious voice that beckoned Kinsella to the University of Iowa. But he was called by a persistent dream: to become a professional writer. The Canadian had gained admission to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he would spend two years honing his voice as a storyteller while clashing with an academic culture that never quite suited him. Kinsella (78MFA) would write the lyrical short story "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" while living in Iowa City and teaching undergrads in the English-Philosophy Building. W.P. Kinsella, as Bill became known to the publishing world, eventually turned that tale about baseball-playing ghosts into his best-selling 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, which was adapted for the big screen in 1989 as Field of Dreams.

Today, almost four years after Kinsella's death, the book and film are revered classics—love letters to Iowa, literature, and baseball. Like Grant Wood's American Gothic or Meredith Willson's The Music Man, Kinsella's fable has become part of Iowa's cultural heritage. The American Film Institute named "If you build it, he will come," as one of its 100 greatest movie quotes. "Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa" remains an unofficial state motto. And to this day, no one with a beating heart can hear Kevin Costner as Ray Kinsella say, "Hey, Dad, want to have a catch?" and not reach for the tissues.

This summer, in testament to the story's lasting hold on our imagination, Major League Baseball is scheduled to host its first-ever game at the Field of Dreams movie site outside of Dyersville, Iowa (barring postponement due to the pandemic). Two of baseball's most tradition-steeped teams, the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees, plan to play in a temporary 8,000-seat ballpark carved out of the cornfields where director Phil Alden Robinson brought W.P. Kinsella's words to life. Like in the film, cars may stream into the farm from all corners of the country and gather under the lights on a summer night.

The real-life story behind the book and film is filled with the same kind of serendipity that was a hallmark of Kinsella's storytelling.

Growing up is a ritual—more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time. But baseball can soothe even those pains, for it is stable and permanent, steady as a grandfather dozing in a wicker chair on a vera ndah. —Ray in Shoeless Joe

As detailed in the recent biography Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella by William Steele, Kinsella didn't play baseball as a kid. But like a glove snatching a whizzing line drive, the game caught his imagination at an early age. Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, the day Babe Ruth hit the final three home runs of his career. An only child who was homeschooled, he had few playmates. He grew up listening to the stories his father told about baseball on the family's remote farmstead in Alberta, Canada. John Kinsella, who had played semi-pro ball while working odd jobs and traveling the U.S., would tell young Bill about the time he saw the infamous Black Sox—the Chicago White Sox team that allegedly threw the 1919 World Series.

Baseball may be a national pastime in the U.S., but the game also has a proud history in Canada. In 1946, when the Kinsellas moved to Edmonton, Bill attended his first semi-pro game and listened to the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series on the radio. Kinsella, who battled various illnesses throughout his childhood, devised an elaborate pen-and-paper baseball game he could play by himself with dice. In eighth grade, he wrote his first piece of fiction, a story about murder at a ballpark called "Diamond Doom."

Kinsella was in his final year of high school when his father was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Bill was not particularly close with his dad, and he and his mother, Olive, rarely spoke of the gravity of John's situation. After months of declining health, John died the week of his son's final exams.

Young adulthood was marked by a series of tedious jobs and romantic entanglements. Kinsella married twice, had two daughters, and eventually opened his own Italian restaurant in Victoria. All the while, Kinsella wrote stories in his free time and dreamed of the day he could become a full-time author. In his mid-30s, Kinsella enrolled at the University of Victoria to study creative writing. There he took classes from author and Iowa Writers' Workshop alumnus W.D. Valgardson (69MFA), who wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation to the UI's renowned MFA program. Meanwhile, Kinsella began imagining the first of what would become dozens of short stories and books featuring indigenous characters set on the fictional Hobbema Reserve.

The move from western Canada to Iowa for graduate school was a fateful one. Kinsella quickly fell in love with the state and its "rolling fields of corn, the dense humidity, the tall bamboo canes thick as hoe handles," as he once said in an essay for Sports Illustrated. "I had never seen the dazzle of fireflies before. I also loved the intimacy of the Iowa River where it snaked, green and lazy, across the University of Iowa campus. ... I loved the town, the Prairie Lights bookstore, the small restaurants and the magnificent old homes, one of which Flannery O'Connor [47MFA] lived in when she was a student at the workshop."

His affection for Iowa City didn't extend to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Ever an iconoclast who became increasingly disdainful of academia—later coming to a head during his miserable tenure as an English professor at the University of Calgary—Kinsella was disappointed by the workshop's lack of deadlines and loose structure at the time. He felt unsatisfied with the lack of substantive feedback he received from his peers and with the quality of work of many of his undergraduate students.

"When he showed up at Iowa, he was in his 40s, and in his mind he'd wasted two decades in jobs he hated," says Steele, Kinsella's biographer, who befriended the author in his final years. "He had very little sympathy for those who didn't want to come in and grind it out and work. So that part was frustrating. But he did fall in love with Iowa. He told me not long before he died that Iowa was one of the most beautiful places he'd ever lived."

Still, Kinsella's time at the workshop was productive. Renting a room in an old house at 619 N. Johnson St., he cranked out one short story after another. In spring 1977, he published his first collection of indigenous stories in Canada titled Dance Me Outside, which was a critical success. Kinsella also joined a group called the Iowa City Reading Series that met at College Green Park, took poetry and journalism classes, and met his third wife, Ann Knight, in a writing course.

During his second year of graduate school, Kinsella began work on a new story inspired by Iowa City, the 1919 Black Sox, and his complicated relationship with his father. It was the story that would change his life—and Iowa—forever.

Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, "If you build it, he will come." —Ray in Shoeless Joe

The idea for Shoeless Joe materialized like a phantom ballplayer from the corn during Kinsella's final semester at Iowa. "I wondered, 'What would happen if Shoeless Joe Jackson came back in this time and place, which was Iowa City in the spring of 1978?'" he once explained its origin. Jackson was the White Sox's star outfielder whose role in the alleged game-fixing of the 1919 World Series has been debated ever since. In Kinsella's 20-page short story, an Iowa farmer hears a voice compelling him to build a baseball field that conjures Shoeless Joe back to the world of the living, allowing him to play the game from which he was unjustly banned.

ILLUSTRATION: Tavis Coburn Shoeless Joe Jackson

Kinsella read the story, titled "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," aloud for the first time at the Iowa City Creative Reading Series a week before leaving Iowa City. He'd accepted a teaching position at the University of Calgary that would begin in the fall. The following year, the piece appeared in an anthology of short stories, and an advanced review in Publisher's Weekly caught the eye of a young editorial assistant named Larry Kessenich at Houghton Mifflin. After reading just a brief synopsis, Kessenich urged Kinsella to turn his short story into a novel.

Under Kessenich's guidance, Kinsella completed the 300-page novel in just nine months. Kinsella began with the working title The Oldest Living Chicago Cub, sparked by a conversation he had with an 87-year-old he'd met on the street in Iowa City who claimed to be just that. With his original short story serving as the opening chapter, Kinsella expanded on the tale of the struggling corn farmer, whom he named Ray Kinsella, and the baseball diamond he builds outside Iowa City. Bill Kinsella later said his protagonist wasn't named after him; instead, he had borrowed the name from a character in an obscure J.D. Salinger story that he'd stumbled across while studying at the UI. Kinsella incorporated both the supposed oldest living Cub, whom he called Eddie Scissons, and Salinger in his story.

In the book, Ray travels from Iowa to New Hampshire to track down Salinger, the famously reclusive author. While writing it, Kinsella and then-wife, Knight, made a trip to the East Coast, where they drove through what they called "Salinger Country" in New Hampshire. Along the way they read aloud from The Catcher in the Rye and stopped at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The couple later traveled to Chisholm, Minnesota, the hometown of a little-known player named Archibald "Moonlight" Graham whom Kinsella had read about in a baseball almanac. Graham had appeared in just one major league game in 1905 and never came to bat. Kinsella and Knight learned how he later became his small town's beloved doctor, and the author immortalized him as a key character in the book. Back in Iowa City, Kinsella talked with a local farm owner about his corn growing methods to ensure his scenes were accurate. "He would always read his work out loud to Ann," Steele says. "He said, 'I know I'm on to something special; this is really good.'"

Kinsella submitted his final manuscript with the title The Kidnapping of J.D. Salinger, and Houghton Mifflin published the book in 1982 with the revised title Shoeless Joe. Readers and critics alike were charmed by Kinsella's use of magical realism to tell a story about baseball and redemption. As a reviewer for Sports Illustrated put it, "Kinsella, the writer, has made up a story that in other hands might degenerate into foolishness, and made it work."

Shoeless Joe was the first of what would be several baseball novels and short stories Kinsella set in Iowa and Iowa City. His baseball writing includes novels The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Thrill of the Grass, Box Socials, and Butterfly Winter, and story collections such as The Dixon Cornbelt League and The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt.