Q&A with JD Scrimgeour
by William Meiners
JD Scrimgeour is finishing up his 21st 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.