March 2018

Q&A with JD Scrimgeour

by William Meiners

JD Scrimgeour is finishing up his 21^st year of teaching at Salem State University. In a town best known as the site for one of America’s oldest of witch hunts, Scrimgeour has adapted a teaching style to better suit his students, published work in three genres (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction), and provided a great deal of reflection on the games he’s played.

One poetic essay, “Living in the Outfield,” earned Scrimgeour the top prize in Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. The essay, he says, poured out of him like a poem where he tried to avoid conventional sentiments. Hence the line in the first paragraph: “There are no fathers and sons in the outfield.” Except for maybe that short time when Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Junior played together in Seattle.

William Meiners: In your award-winning book, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education in and Out of Class, you talk a lot about race, about class, as well as how much you learn from your own students at Salem State. In general, how are students different now from 12 years ago?
JD Scrimgeour: I’m going to qualify this answer by saying that I wouldn’t trust it, since it has so much to do with where I am in my teaching career. Here goes: I continue to admire Salem State students for their pluck and endurance. Salem State students today do more of their homework than they used to; they seem to be more obedient (subservient?) than in years past. They also are ridiculously overworked and generally stressed and depressed.

The obedience might sound like a bad thing, but what a joy it is to have a class discussion when most of the students have done the reading! On the other hand, they also seem more obedient to their true overlords — their bosses at their crappy jobs who won’t give them a night off to see a play or poetry reading on campus.

Students have always worried about getting a job after they graduate from college, but now they are worrying about a job before they start. And, of course, they are working more than ever while trying to cram in as many courses as possible. They are feeling the squeeze that the middle-class is experiencing in the U.S.

I fear for our students, and for higher education. Yet I suspect desperate situations will lead to necessary action. I see sprouts of activism in students today. I find that heartening.

WM: There’s a nod to Langston Hughes with this book, beginning with the title and the essay, “Me and Langston,” which details some of your earliest attempts at poetry as a Columbia University student in the mid-1980s. How has your “relationship” with Hughes changed over the years?
JD: Our first loves often are inexplicable. We like the poets we like irrationally. Hughes’ sense of social justice is mine (though I suspect my blinders are different than his). He knows that there are both cruel systems and cruel people in the world, but, as he says in The Big Sea, “most people are generally good.” I feel that we have no choice but to believe that, too.

Hughes also mocks pretension, and celebrates our small failures, those weaknesses that make us human. He’s got a great little poem in the voice of a guy who plays the numbers (the underground lottery in Harlem). The guy swears that if he ever hits his number he’ll stop playing: “gonna salt every dime away…I ain’t gonna/play back a cent.” But then he adds, “(Of course I might/combinate a little/with my rent.)” I love this poem irrationally. Why? Because it shows us real human behavior without judgment, with warm humor. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t stick to a no-sugar diet.

I never was fond of Hughes’s overtly political or inspirational verse, which tends to get a lot of play, especially these days. Like James Baldwin said, Hughes kept stuff that “more disciplined” writers would have thrown away. Still, when he’s on, like in “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” well, I fall in love all over again.

WM: There’s a rhythm to basketball — from the particular game itself, to a player finding that zone where everything seems to go in the bucket. I know you’ve explored that through some of your poetry. Can talk about how your own basketball game may have influenced your poetry?
JD: I’m not sure it has that much. In the essay, “Announcing My Retirement,” I draw a few connections, but I also suggest there may be more differences than similarities.  Basketball is what I did to avoid writing poetry, to escape words.

WM: Sport Literate published what seems like more of a narrative poem, and you’ve obviously published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. I’m curious about your approaches to each genre. Do you have a favorite? What do you find, if anything, limiting in one of the genres?
JD: I never planned to write in different genres. Very simply, I gravitate toward whatever makes it easy for me to write. There was a time when I was writing dramatic monologues because the voices I inhabited felt fresher and more human than the other poetry I’d been trying to write. And then suddenly they stopped, and, though I wanted to write more of them, I wasn’t able to, so I moved on to something else.

Poems come to me only occasionally, and then I dink around with them for a long time. Curiously, I need a longer stretch of time to write a poem than to write prose. I have to draft an entire poem (or a section of a long poem) in one sitting. I can use a spare 15 minutes to write two paragraphs of a short story or essay, but I can’t just “make progress” on a poem.

I find poetry has the most limitations, as well as the most possibilities. Poetry not only has a limited audience, but often I feel that poetry’s audience goes to the genre for different reasons than I do; they want flashes of scintillating language, density, and complexity. My own preferences and aims in poetry are more like those mentioned by Elizabeth Bishop in one of her letters: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery.

I feel that the essay might be the best form to expand a reader’s aesthetic (and consciousness). There aren’t as many preconceived notions of the form, and so readers don’t have their guard up in the same way as they might with poetry or fiction.

But fiction? Recently fiction has been what has enabled me to write. I’m writing a collection of stories about youth baseball, based on years of coaching my sons in Little League. It has made me realize how much I came to know that environment, and how much I assumed. It’s a way to test out what I thought I knew about that world by pressing the buttons of class, race, and masculinity and seeing “how folks do.”

WM: “Spin Moves” explores your history with pickup basketball. It’s also the last essay in your book. What are the biggest life lessons you take away from the basketball court? I also read the essay on your “retirement.” What do you miss most about playing?
JD: I’ve learned that people care if you’re good, but they usually care more about whether you’re a good teammate, whether you’ll be in the right place or make the right pass or understand what’s needed in a particular situation. I try to be a good teammate.

I’ve never been in therapy. That’s probably because I played basketball. The nonstop pace cleansed my mind. I could focus only on the next moment on the court. I miss that tremendously, as now my head gets cluttered with Trump, and grading, and email. It seems that I can never empty it.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of the basketball memoir Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. He’s also published three collections of poetry, The Last Miles, Territories, and Lifting the Turtle. His essay, “My Outfield,” won Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. He runs the creative writing program at Salem State University. “Today, Late April” is part of a longer piece, “Forest River Park,” which is from of a collection in-progress of stories about baseball, Hit By Pitch. The title story appears in the most recent issue of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

William Meiners is the editor-in-chief at Sport Literate.

Q&A with Rus Bradburd

by Nicholas Reading

Recruiting Shawn Harrington to New Mexico State from Marshall High School in Chicago, Rus Bradburd described him as an “exceedingly smart, unselfish, and fearless” basketball player. Then an assistant coach, Bradburd was known for bringing Chicago players to the southwest. A decade prior, he lured the future NBA great Tim Hardaway to Texas at El Paso.

In 2014, when Harrington was back in Chicago coaching at Marshall, his unselfish fearlessness was on full display, as he covered his daughter’s body to protect her from drive-by bullets in a case of tragic mistaken identity. In saving his daughter’s life, Harrington was left paralyzed.

“Shawn’s shooting was all over the Chicago news. A coaching friend texted me about it within an hour of the incident, so I began tracking it on the internet,” says Bradburd, now a creative writing professor at New Mexico State. “Although I hadn’t seen Shawn in 20 years, I had spoken to him when his mother was killed in 2003, so I still had his phone number. I waited a week to call, but I thumbed through the New Mexico State basketball programs to rattle my memory of his time playing for us at New Mexico State — which is where things got complicated.”

That complication eventually led to the book, All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, which will be released on May 1, 2018.

 Nicholas Reading: Your book invites the reader into the lives of Shawn Harrington and the Chicago West Side community. The value of making folks, who might be otherwise unknown, into very real, very living people, is immeasurable. You write intimately and personally about their experiences. What do you hope this portrait contributes to the national discussion about guns, violence, and the state of our communities?
Rus Bradburd: I only wanted to tell Shawn Harrington’s story, and the story of the Marshall High School community. At the outset I had very strong opinions about guns, cops, education, and the situation on the West Side of Chicago, but whenever I tried to address the bigger issues — or pretend I had answers — the book started to spin out of control. So I kept the story smaller, which of course became tricky as more and more Marshall players got murdered.

NR: It is one thing to sympathize, even empathize, with someone who has experienced hardship. It’s quite another to initiate the task of writing a book and giving someone’s experience a wider audience. How did you arrive at the idea for this project?
RB: Initially I was only advocating for Shawn, writing to friends who were journalists: Hey! Here is an astonishing story of courage. I was going to sleep at night thinking of Shawn’s trouble, waking up and wondering how I might help. And the more he was ignored — and I was ignored — the more determined I was to keep banging on my drum. I have a daughter the same age as Shawn’s younger one, so the act of heroism in saving a girl’s life was profoundly moving.  Finally, Alex Kotlowitz [bestselling author of There Are No Children Here] said to me, “Why don’t you write this yourself?”

NR: What is so striking about sports is that it is often a confluence of social, racial, economic, political concerns. If Shawn’s story and your writing is a lens through which to closely examine our society, what issues does your book bring into focus?
RB: I think people will read the book differently. As they should, I suppose. Basketball, more than any other sport, gives us a window into African American culture. Even in Chicago, though, you can go through your entire life and never really come in contact with what it’s like for millions of Americans on a day-to-day basis. My hope is that in the specifics of Shawn Harrington’s story that there might be a more universal feeling of empathy. Although I only wanted to tell his story, there are issues of health care, race, guns, unions, poverty, education, basketball, and community policing all swimming around in the book.

NR: What do you think are the most damaging or prevalent misconceptions about communities ravaged by gun violence?
RB: I think the Black Lives Matter stance is badly misunderstood at times. Here’s where it became real to me: nothing tears apart a community like an unsolved murder. In Chicago, there are far fewer murder detectives than there was a decade ago. That’s the institutionalized problem: shootings and killings are never brought to justice, and an unsolved murder encourages revenge. The closing of schools ruins neighborhoods, too. Marshall, when Shawn attended, had over 2,000 students. Today it’s below 400. Empty schools aren’t good for the community. Schools should be the center of the community.

NR: How did the team respond after Shawn was shot? What is their response when mounting numbers of teammates and friends are victims of gun violence? What does this response say about them? About their reality?
RB: One of the surprising things about writing the book is learning how everyone has a connection to the violence. This was mirrored for me in the 10 months I lived in Belfast: everyone had been touched by “The Troubles,” and people mostly didn’t want to talk about it. I was surprised that the players and coaches never talked about their own gun violence experiences, but maybe that’s just me: my impulse is to talk about something until I’m blue in the face. That’s something I learned from writing the Nolan Richardson biography, Forty Minutes of Hell: things don’t get better by not talking about them.

NR: The book opens with a quote from Langston Hughes that seems to both lament and hold dear a, “dream that’s almost dead today.” Obviously, an inspiration for the title of the book, but I wonder if you could explain how the poem speaks to you? What is the dream?
RB: To my ear, Langston Hughes has two voices speaking in the poem, and the refrain “America was never America to me” feels reflective of the West Side community of Chicago. I think if Shawn had saved a girl’s life in Iraq while on duty, he’d be on the cover of Time Magazine. Because it happened in Chicago, it’s just another shooting, and, in fact, a “good” story because he lived.  In any other Westernized country, Shawn would have a far better safety net than in America.

NR: Sports are sometimes relegated to mere pastime, entertainment, and maybe exercise. Though, it seems that the role of basketball in the lives of the folks you present is far from just a hobby. In your view, how does the sport, the gym, offer not only a haven from the streets, but mentor-ship, a way of surviving?
RB: Basketball can be a blessing, but only 20 or 25 boys play at every Chicago Public School. And in some ways, for the ballers, the game can be a mirage or a time-killer. For so many, once basketball season is over senior year, there’s the stark reality: Now what?  The game gave them discipline, teamwork, a goal. But what about when the game is over? And I think a more important question might be, “What about the other kids, the 90 percent who do not play?”

NR: What does Harrington say, what does the community say, what do you say about a hope for a solution to gun violence? You have brought to our attention, with intimacy and urgency, the faces and lives of people living in an America that many can’t fathom. You have called Harrington’s situation a “failure of America,” and I think the reader understands why. This question might be an unfair burden, but where do we go from here?
RB: I don’t know. One thing I stress is that there are great people who have dedicated their lives to ending the violence, so I’m modest about offering any solutions as the “new guy” who just arrived. While Shawn has remarkable courage and endurance, and so many of us find that inspiring, I think the big answers are complicated.  Poverty, education, family, community policing, ending the drug wars — they’re all tied in, but again, I only really know Shawn’s story. Yet, there’s the “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” idea that if you know one thing, you know the world. I guess I’m saying that I hope that reading about Shawn’s life might be a start — just as basketball was a window into a part of black culture for me, perhaps his story might a window into the West Side for others.

NR: What does Shawn envision for his family, the future of Marshall? For himself? And is his story unique?
RB: Shawn’s struggles are very much day-to-day. Get out of the house. Get his exercise. Go to therapy. Talk to Marshall kids and ex-players. That’s one of the great tensions in the book: I want him to be Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali, be the spokesman for progressive movements. He wants that stuff, sure, but it’s the daily grind that wears on him, I fear. The scariest part to me is that there are thousands — really, thousands — of young men in Chicago like Shawn who have been physically and emotionally torn apart by guns. There won’t be a book about many of the others, or not an in-depth study. But who will advocate for them?

NR: Writing about your relationship with Shawn you observe, “… our lives were intertwined. His success or failure would contribute to mine.” How has Shawn’s life changed your own?
RB: I believe that Shawn’s suffering and struggle stands for more — that it has enriched my life, as strange as that is to say. He’s both fully heroic and fully human. That’s part of the human psyche, sort of Joseph Campbell 101: The Hero makes things better for everyone else.

NR: Is there an experience or realization that you encountered over the course of writing this book that surprised you?
RB: Let me see if can answer that sideways.  What I miss most about coaching in Division I basketball — where I spent 14 years and made 8 NCAA tournaments — is the total, free health care. No waiting, no charge, no hassles, you get to see the doctor right away.  I’m fairly healthy, although not that young, so I don’t worry so much about health care. But seeing it up close, how you need a full-time advocate to battle the system — well, what kind of country is this?

NR: How does Shawn’s story, the story of gun violence in Chicago, and the story of hope fit into the national discussion on the subject?
RB: Dorothy Gaters, the legendary Marshall girls’ coach, says that Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School are not on the West Side. She’s right: it’s a national problem, and it’s uniquely American. The “line” is always drawn somewhere — I can’t own a bazooka or a tank or an ICMB, right? We just need to move the line. That’s happened so many times in American history, and it’s always a collective consciousness that changes. I hope Shawn’s life can be part of that conversation.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the poetry editor for Sport Literate and teaches a freshman seminar on sports and literature at Butler University.

Rus Bradburd spent 14 seasons as a college basketball coach at UTEP and New Mexico State, then two more in Irish Super League. He is the author of All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed (Chicago Review Press, 2018), an examination of gun violence in Chicago; the novel-in-stories Make It, Take It (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014); the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell (HarperCollins/Amistad Books, 2010); and the memoir Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). He lives in New Mexico and Chicago.