W·P·金索拉

William Patrick Kinsella (May 25, 1935 – September 16, 2016) was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, known for his novel Shoeless Joe (1982), which was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989. His work often concerned baseball, First Nations people, and Canadian culture.

Early life

William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, the son of Irish Canadian parents, Olive Mary (née Elliott/Elliot), a printer, and John Matthew Kinsella, a contractor. He was raised until he was 10 years old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 kilometres (37 mi) west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. "I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write," he says.

When he was ten years old, the family moved to Edmonton. He did not go to school until grade five, attended Parkdale School for junior high, and did not attend university until he was in his mid-30s. Kinsella was barely exposed to literature in school, saying in a 2010 interview, "One Shakespeare play and one J. M. Barrie play was the total literature of my high school years."

Kinsella's literary education in his formative years came from reading and by attending all the plays at high school and any theatrical productions that made it to Edmonton. He also worked in the school library his senior year.

As an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. In 1967, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia, running a pizza restaurant called Caesar's Italian Village and driving a taxi.

Although he had been writing since he was a child (winning a YMCA contest at age 14), he began taking writing courses at the University of Victoria in 1970, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing there in 1974. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. Before becoming a professional author, he was a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Literary life

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, Kinsella's literary output primarily consists of two cycles of work dealing with two fictional universes: those dealing with baseball and those depicting the indigenous people of Canada. His first published book was Dance Me Outside (1977), a collection of 17 short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella's native Alberta.

A later collection of similar stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, earned Kinsella the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Kinsella was criticized for writing from the point of view of Native people, with Ojibwe author Lenore Keeshig-Tobias writing in 1990, "W. P. Kinsella's Hobbema stories may be insulting. But the real problem is that they amount to culture theft, the theft of voice." Kinsella said after a heated public exchange with Rudy Wiebe on the topic, "Fiction writers can write about anything they damn well please," and that he considered the term "cultural appropriation" the nonsense of Eastern Canadian academics. He also considered that much of the humor focused on white bureaucrats on reservations: "The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about."

Kinsella also wrote nearly 40 short stories and three novels about baseball. Shoeless Joe (1982), his first novel, blends fantasy and magic realism to tell the story of a poor Iowa farmer who, yielding to voices in his head, builds a baseball field in his cornfield that attracts the spirits of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), another book blending fantasy and magical realism, recounts an epic baseball game a minor league team played against the 1908 World Champion Chicago Cubs. Box Socials (1991), an evocation of life in rural Alberta during the Great Depression and World War II, has a growing boy as its narrator and recounts a local batting hero's hopes of facing a visiting major league pitcher 60 miles away in Edmonton. The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame awarded him the Jack Graney Award in 2011 for a significant contribution to the game of baseball in Canada.

Shoeless Joe remains Kinsella's most famous work. The book was mildly controversial for using a living person, the reclusive author J. D. Salinger, as a main character. Kinsella, who had never met him, created a wholly imagined character (aside from his reclusiveness) based on The Catcher in the Rye, a book that had great meaning to him as a young man. To get a feel for Salinger, he reread his body of work but created an imaginary version of the author. "I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn't sue me."

In an example of metafiction, he named Shoeless Joe's protagonist Ray Kinsella, a character from Salinger's uncollected story "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All". Salinger also used the surname Kinsella in The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield's friend Richard Kinsella, who also shared a name with Ray Kinsella's twin brother in Shoeless Joe).

Known for his litigiousness, Salinger contacted Kinsella's publisher via his attorneys to express outrage over having been portrayed in Shoeless Joe. Kinsella denied that Salinger, as a writer, had any real influence on his own writing, despite rumors to the contrary (some said that Kinsella had actually met Salinger).

Shoeless Joe won Kinsella the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1982. The book garnered good reviews, sold very well, and was made into a movie, Field of Dreams.

Adaptations

W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe was made into the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner. The movie grossed nearly $65 million in the United States. It helped establish Costner as a star and was later inducted into the National Film Registry.