The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

"[Bill] Meissner has the storyteller's gift," writes Tim O'Brien, "for creating living characters, living speech, living emotions, living drama."

This week, Meissner has a new book coming out - Spirits in the Grass - published by Notre Dame Press. While he's written numerous collections of stories and poetry, this is Meissner's first novel (for which the author is very much deserving of "mad props" and/or hearty kudos).

With aspects drawn from his own experiences living in small towns and playing for town-level baseball clubs, we're introduced to Clearwater, Wisconsin - a place where lawn mowers always start on the first pull, where the clock that adorns City Hall is practically more punctual than the sun. As we learn more and more about Clearwater, though, we see that its history isn't so spotless and linear as its inhabitants may like to believe...

The action centers around Luke Tanner, a thirty-something ballplayer and laborer, trying to make Clearwater's baseball team. He is helping to build the town's new field, and is the first one on site each morning, unrolling fence and laying sod. When he finds a mysterious bone fragment embedded in the soil, it sets off a chain of events that disrupts the tenuous balance between his small town and the near-by Native American reservation - a tension that resonates with Luke's personal life.

The Rake got the chance to sit down with the Meissner - a creative writing instructor at St. Cloud State University - and talk with him a bit about his book.

The Rake: Why do you think the subject of baseball is so ingrained in American literature - aside from being ‘America's Game,' does it have any aspects that make it especially fertile for fiction?

Meissner: Baseball has a great metaphorical quality - it's got those natural elements: a leather glove, a baseball made from horsehide, wooden bats. And so it's organic, in a way. I also like that it's an individual game, where you bat individually or field individually, and yet it's a team sport.

On a personal level, I grew up playing ball in Wisconsin and around Minnesota - wherever I was I'd go someplace and, you know, hit a few - so for me it's something I enjoy doing, and I really like writing about it. You get inspired as you play.

The Rake: And why do you think so many baseball books - Malamud's The Natural, Mark Harris' The Southpaw - are so depressing? You seem to take the same tack, setting up a pristine little town, but then slowly making it...not so pristine.

Meissner: I hope the book's not depressing, because, you know, there are some resolutions. I try to make some scenes uplifting, rather than depressing.

I know what you mean, though. What I do, and I do this in a lot of my writing, is to try and show the underside of everyday life, or let's say small town life, in some ways. You know, people talk about the towns I've lived in as being quite idyllic. But after you've lived there for a while - and this is true anywhere - once you get to know the inner workings of a place, you know there's squabbles, there's tensions, there's envy going on. There's crime going on. Things underneath the surface that you don't see until you've been in a place for quite a while. So I'm just trying to show the true underside of life, I guess. There are resentments, there are conflicts - even as we try to say that everybody gets along, that all cultures get along. But there are definite realities.

I do hope the book becomes upbeat and uplifting toward the end, though. There's a spiritual realization, with Luke's thoughts about life and death, which is, I hope, a significant part of the book. All in all, I think of it as having a positive resolution, though there are some bittersweet moments - which is what I want, rather than the apple-pie-life-is-perfect note. I do like to write with realistic detail whenever I can, and to give a story depth, I like to show the complications of life, not just the surface levels.

The Rake: Is Clearwater real?

Meissner: Clearwater is my fictional place, but it is comprised of some of my favorite details from places I've lived - Cold Spring, St. Cloud. And Clearwater is really a town, too - it's about thirteen miles outside of St. Cloud - and has about five hundred people, I think. The Clearwater Lakers are an actual team, too.

They were building a new baseball field in [the real] Clearwater while I was already writing, so everything sort of fell into place. I'd go over there to hit a couple balls once in a while, with friends or with my son. So I got to talk to the guys who were building it, and I learned how much the sprinklers cost, and how they put it together, and what they did - parts of those details went into my book, for sure.

The Rake: Are the conflicts that take place on the Lakers' team - young guys hot-dogging; racial tensions; teammates getting into fistfights and pitch-offs - usual of real-life town ball dramas?

Meissner: I don't know if it's typical of a small town team, but when I'm writing I want to heighten the drama, so I made it a little more intense. I've never been on a team where anything like that has happened.

Whenever I can, I try to inject some conflict into the book, even if it's sub-conflicts within the major conflict. It's important, and propels my writing, by making it way more readable. No one would read past the first page of a book if everything were on an even keel. If a character needs to find something, or need something, the reader will be more engaged.

The Rake: It seems this is how the Native American culture is manifested in the novel - a culture that's sort of bitterly avoided and ignored, if not explicitly antagonized by the townspeople.

Meissner: The Native American culture definitely gets stepped on by the town fathers. I did want to show that. I did a lot of research about Native American mounds, their burial sites and culture. I had a couple grants to do that, so I went around all the way through Wisconsin and Minnesota, looking at various burial mounds or ancient effigy mounds. So that was really interesting.

One thing that I found was that they [the mounds] are basically over-looked. They'd be on golf courses, and people would just walk on them. You kind of see a cultural indifference, in some ways.

I'm interested in this because my hometown, like Luke's hometown, has a huge set of burial mounds - especially effigy mounds - there were about ninety of them throughout our town. A lot of them were ploughed over by farmers, and some were just built on. There's a street called Mound Street, and it's basically just houses that were put up over the sacred places where Native American people lived and worked and died. It was interesting to see the ninety mounds that have now been depleted to only one that you can actually go to. And the rest are all basically destroyed, or else there are houses right on top of them.

But then what ended up happening was I had all this research, and thought, ‘What am I going to do with all this?' - it wasn't exactly pouring into a novel. But at the same time, I sensed that it was informing my writing.

The Rake: Given how much time you spent on this novel, would you talk a little bit about the process of writing it?

Meissner: It took seven years to write the novel, though what that really means is that I got the idea for it seven years ago. I worked on it intermittently, and actually published two other books during that time period - The Road to Cosmos (a short story collection) and American Compass (a poetry collection). Also, I drafted a different three-hundred-page novel during that time period, but then came back to Spirits. It was the kind of story that kept nudging me, pulling me back, calling at me to finish it. I finally did a complete rewrite of the novel in 2006 and 2007, and that was the manuscript that got accepted for publication.

How it started was, when I'm near a field, I look around for lost baseballs. And one day I thought to myself, what if I found something that wasn't a ball...and from that came the first step. I wrote the idea down in my car, right there next to the field, and what I wrote that day, seven years ago, is very close to the first chapter as is.

I just got my first copy of the book. My wife Chris (my main source to read and critique my writing) and I celebrated by opening the parcel on the Clearwater Lakers' baseball field, then opening a bottle of Cold Duck. I then proceeded to hit some brand new baseballs toward the fence in left.



Meissner is doing a publication reading at The Loft Open Book for Spirits in the Grass on Thurs., Sept. 18 at 7 p.m. Admission is free, and booksigning follows.

A second publication reading will take place at Magers & Quinn on Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m.