The seventh annual Nightsun Writer's Conference will feature non-fiction writer Tim Wendel as one of four workshop teachers. Wendel has received numerous awards including the Professional Achievement Award in 2004 and an Award for Teaching Excellence from Johns Hopkins University in 2009, where he currently is a writer in residence. He has published over nine books, the most recent of which is Summer of '68: The Season When Baseball, and America, Changed Forever (2013). Wendel was the co-founder, editor, and writer for USA Today Baseball Weekly.


1. As a professor of both fiction and nonfiction, which do you feel more comfortable teaching? Which is more rewarding from a professor’s point of view?

Tim Wendel: The best qualities of fiction and narrative nonfiction are often very similar. The emphasis is on character, a story that moves ahead, a setting that creates an emotion, etc. When you consider such elements, Michael Lewis or Susan Orlean on the nonfiction side can captivate us as much as Anthony Doerr or Tana French in fiction. How we develop these basic components of story is often the key.


2. As a sports writer, you’ve written books on hockey and basketball, but most of your books are about baseball. What is it you find so interesting about America’s sport? Do you find there is more to write about or that you just have more to say about baseball?

Tim Wendel: On the page, baseball often breaks down to one force versus another. This can be the pitcher versus the batter, the fielder trying to catch the ball, the athlete facing some hardship. That can work so well on the page and it’s easier to draw out than the swirl that other sports can become. For example, when the football team scores a touchdown, a whole lot of people are involved. The linemen pulled, the quarterback handed off the ball and then the running back ran like the wind. Sometimes that can difficult to portray on the page. 
Also, I like the history that often is the backdrop in baseball. The other day I was a guest on a national radio show and the beginning was about the first week or so of the season. By the time we were finished, the conversation had included race, salary inequality, and even Cuba. That’s fun.


3. Who is your favorite baseball player? Why?

Tim Wendel: Kirby Puckett, Cal Ripken, and Ken Griffey Junior come to mind. But when I started to cover baseball, back when I was a young beat reporter, one of the teams I covered was the Oakland Athletics. Dennis Eckersley was their closer and he was always in the clubhouse to answer questions, even on the rare occasions when he lost. One night he failed to close out the game and started talking about how that outing had been a disaster, “a real bridge job.” We had no idea what he was talking about until he told us that he felt so bad that he could jump off the Bay Bridge on the way home. We told him it was OK. Really, it was. In fact, several of us offered to drive him home. That’s how good a quote he was.


4. Do you notice any differences between the way current America idolizes professional athletes and the way you may have idolized athletes when you were a young person first experiencing fandom? 
 
Tim Wendel: When I was growing up, athletes were often members of our communities. They had to be. They weren’t making such big money back then. So perhaps they took a job in the off-season. Most of them still lived among us. Now they reside at the end of some gated cul-de-sac. The irony is that we can view as many highlights as we’d like about our favorite player, thanks to YouTube and Facebook. But outside of the ballpark or the arena, we won’t see them in person, as part of everyday life.


5. When did you realize you wanted to become a sports writer?

Tim Wendel: When I realized that I couldn’t hit a curveball. That’s why, in part, my first novel is titled Castro’s Curveball. But really, in my late teens, I decided I wanted to be a writer who wrote about a lot of things. In fact, one of my first jobs out of college was as a rock-and-roll critic in Buffalo, New York. I enjoy being around charismatic people and I’ve done that in sports, music, and politics. It’s like that famous line in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Where he talks about “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time …” I read that novel decades ago, and I’ve been lucky to chase after the mad ones and write about them ever since.




Michael Schussler