How would you classify your latest work, what inspired its inception?
The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball is a book of popular philosophy in the tradition of Robert Pirsig’s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book’s inspiration was the birth of our first child, my daughter Cecilia. Becoming a parent can really focus your thinking. Holding her in my arms, I realized that what I wanted most in the world—maybe more than I ever wanted anything before—was for her to be happy. I needed to know the answer to the age-old question first asked in ancient myth and philosophy: how to live, how best to pursue happiness? I needed to know because I needed to tell her. I surprised myself by finding my answer while taking her to Wrigley Field spring and summer afternoons to see the Cubs. I found that heroic play on the field recalled for me the heroic ethos sung of by Homer in his epics and later explained by Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy.
How long did it take you to complete? .
My daughter is now in her twenties. So it took about twenty years to write. Twenty years was how long Odysseus was away from his home island of Ithaca. He was ten years at Troy at war and then ten more years wandering the sea persecuted by Poseidon.
Who are some of your top 5 authors or writers you look up to & admire?
Well, there is Homer, who remains a model of strong, lucid style and whose powers of metaphorical invention remain amazing, not to mention his storytelling. It’s for good reason that director Christopher Nolan’s next movie will be “The Odyssey.” An author I love who recently died was the Italian mythographer Roberto Calasso. His The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony retells the Greek myths. I gave a hardcover edition to all of the groomsmen in my wedding. I loved all of Patrick O’Brian’s historical novels set in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. His work has been aptly described as Jane Austen goes to sea. There are more than twenty novels in the series. Each is wonderful. Cormac McCarthy was my favorite living writer. Whenever his new novel dropped—which was not often enough—I dropped everything to read it. Now my favorite living writer is probably Haruki Murakami. He’s the literary equivalent of David Lynch. A latter-day surrealist, Murakami creates haunting experiences that open your mind to whole other worlds of weirdness and wonder.
Why do you write?
I write in order to figure out what I think. I’ve got lots of questions, about which I am always staging conversations in my head or telling myself stories. Recording these conversations or putting these stories into words really helps me. As I tell my students, the words you write are the words you speak are the words you think. By writing, you practice and get better at using words. As you tell a child frustrated with the world, use your words! Writing improves your conversation, but more importantly it improves the conversation you constantly have with yourself. Writing is a way of refining the quality of your inner conversation, clarifying your stream of consciousness, polishing the mirror of your mind, or, as the ancient philosophers would say, of cultivating your soul.
What’s the biggest take away you want your readers to come away with after reading your latest work?
In my book, I make the case for baseball as a repository of fundamental ideas that go back to ancient myth, that the classic cardinal virtues of courage, prudence, temperance and justice and a poetic vision of life as beautiful, sublime, comic, tragic, and epic are all waiting to be discovered at the ballgame, along with the inspiring insight that your own life can an odyssey toward happiness.
How is the writing/reading scene in your locale?
The left side of my living room couch is well lit and the cushion comfortably broken in. For me, writing essays and stories is a solitary pursuit. My wife is my first reader and my best critic. But I do find inspiration in other media—in art, film, music, theater, even in the culinary arts, and, of course, in sports. I live in Chicago, a big city rich in cultural resources. I open my door daily onto an overflowing cornucopia of inspiration and provocation. There is the Art Institute of Chicago, where I teach. We go to the opera and the ballet. I attend poetry readings in church basements. I get to see Shakespeare performed regularly. Chicago even has a two-week long international puppet festival! Much of my new book was “researched” and some of it was even written in the stands at Wrigley Field.
What’s the best book you have ever read?
Still the best book I’ve ever read is Moby-Dick. I reread it every few years. My home is decorated with framed illustrations from different editions. I find myself thinking about it all the time. I remember vividly still first reading those final chase scenes. It gave me shivers. Still you can open Melville’s novel at random and you’re likely to have the hat blown off your head!
When did you first realize you wanted to become a writer?
I’ve always loved reading ever since I was a kid. I wrote a book report in second grade for Sister Mary Anne, a sports biography, Fisk of Fenway Park: New England’s Favorite Catcher. I was the back-up catcher for the Oak Square Orioles at the time and Carlton Fisk was my hero. There is a way in which this first “literary effort” many years later grew into The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball.
How have you evolved as a writer over the last year?
I’ve grown to trust myself more. I am not at the Zen master ideal of “first thought, best thought” as poet Alan Ginsberg espoused, but I am getting better at silencing my own “monkey mind” and having confidence that my “first thought is not such a bad thought” and may be good enough to move on to the next thought.
If you could meet, have dinner, have a drink with anyone (writer/non-writer) (dead or alive) who would it be?
Walt Whitman, about whom I wrote my dissertation. We would have hot dogs and cold beers in the bleachers at Wrigley Field on the 4th of July. It would be a double-header, and the Cubs would win both games (against the St. Louis Cardinals).
What’s next for you?
I have two projects I am excited about right now. First, I am finishing a dark historical fantasy novel about chariot-racing in Constantinople. It’s kind of like “Gladiator” meets “The Exorcist.” It’s “based on true events.” And it actually dramatizes some of the same themes as my baseball book, showing how virtue and character are forged through competition and conflict but also through cooperation and camaraderie. Second, I am developing a podcast on Homer’s Odyssey. I want to do an hour dedicated to each chapter of Homer’s epic, interpreting each episode through the frame of the history of its reception from Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno to Goethe’s “Faust” and Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The result will be 24-hours, a day of adventuring with cunning Odysseus through three millennia of Western culture, from the “rosy-fingered dawn” of civilization to tomorrow morning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://www.christiansheppard.com/
BUY THE BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/ANCIENT-WISDOM-BASEBALL-Lessons-ODYSSEY/dp/B0DHHK19S6
End of Interview
