Confessions of a Literary Lion

Lion. Photo by Kevin Pluck, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I never aspired to be Longfellow. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Or Marilynne Robinson. 

I just wanted to write something.

And to have it read by somebody.

Who would be moved by it.

To achieve these aims, I found it necessary to become a Literary Lion first.

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After years of storm and struggle, I retired in 2009 and found the perfect part-time job to entertain me in retirement. 

I was the husband of a good and loving wife, the father of an outstanding daughter, and the grandfather of two sparkling cherubim.

Our house was paid for and had a large backyard with plenty of shade in which one could lollygag to one’s heart’s content.

And my heart, Dear Reader, was content. 

At age 70, I was a success. 

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Only: I had not yet written the Great American Novel. 

Back in 1953, I wrote a story—a private-eye saga on two sheets of lined paper in my Big Chief pencil tablet. 

I wrote it at my third-grade desk, when I was supposed to be doing something else. But I had already finished doing that other thing, whatever it was, and some of my classmates were still toiling away. 

In those days, most teachers did not go out of their way to encourage creativity. But dear old Mrs. Winders, as she walked the aisle looking over her pupils’ shoulders, chose to look elsewhere as she walked by me. So I finished my detective story. 

Robert Frost, ca. 1910. Public Domain.

It had a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as Aristotle recommends. There may even have been a reversal of fortune or two. It was pretty good but, alas, has been lost to posterity.

I always meant to follow it up with more stories—and books, lots of books. But stray fortunes led me down a different path. You know how it is. (If you don’t, check with Robert Frost.) 

So here I was, at threescore and ten, not yet the author of a major work of fiction. 

You know how, when you get an itch, you need to scratch it?

At the end of 2015 I retired from my retirement job with a respectable church magazine to become a full-time fabulist. Editing The Congregationalist was the best job I ever had. I enjoyed it well and could have kept doing it for a long time. But sometimes you have to choose one thing or another. 

Satchel Paige advised, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” I reckon he was right. Look what happened to Lot’s wife.

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I wanted to write fiction. I did not know what fiction to write, but I figured it would come to me. 

And so it did.

I wrote a few stories about a 1950s boy named Izzy Mahler. I submitted them to the Saturday Evening Post and they published two of them on their website. They honorably mentioned another in their Great American Fiction Contest and published it in the 2018 contest anthology.

Chalk it up to beginner’s luck.

As I groped for a topic or theme for a novel, my wife brought forth genealogy on Anders Gunstensen, my great-great-grandfather, who emigrated from Norway in 1853. Based on her research about Anders and his wife, Johanne-Marie Elizabeth Nybro, a fictitious story flashed into my mind—one that could be wedged into the wide spaces between the few known facts.

So in 2017 I started to write a historical novel in which the main characters, Anders and Maria, move from Norway to America and become involved in a black slave’s escape from slavery.

I had attended the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s 2016 “Write By the Lake” conference. There, the great Laurie Scheer had led me to believe that I could actually write such a book and that somebody might read that book. 

So on I wrote. 

Meanwhile, I joined a local writers’ group, Tuesdays With Story, a twice-monthly gathering for mutual critique, moderated by the great Jerry Peterson. I submitted raw chapters of my novel for comments by fellow writers. My mind stubbornly resisted many well-meant suggestions from these colleagues. Eventually—when my original approach left me stuck with nowhere to go—I came to understand what my Tuesday night friends were telling me about narrative structure. Aided by these generous critics, I trudged up the Fiction Writers’ Learning Curve, which turns out to be a lot steeper once you are climbing it than it looked from the bottom.

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I attended the 2018 UW-Extension Writers’ Institute and suddenly realized the writers gathered there had become my tribe. Though they wrote different kinds of stories and took much different approaches, they shared my affliction. Many of them were presenting more advanced symptoms. 

I was the new kid on the block, yet welcomed freely into their midst. 

They warned me it is hard to get a book published and hard to sell copies of it once published. You need a “platform.” Now, if you happen to write nonfiction and are already a known expert in your field—perhaps you make lots of speeches and presentations around the country—then you already have a platform.

If you’re a mere fabulist—a writer of fiction—then you need to build a platform from scratch. It takes connections, relationships, and social media. Don’t wait till your book is published to get started.

One of the best things to pre-sell my writing was to write a blog, they claimed. That sounded like a great deal of work. I would have to rent space on the Internet and post new writings regularly. What could I think of to write a blog about? And, thus occupied, when would I find time to do my real writing?

It preyed on my conscious thoughts. My Tuesday night mentor Jerry Peterson said, “Well, you might try writing a blog just for its own sake. Don’t think of blog posts as just a way to promote your writing. They might actually be your writing—or at least, part of it.” 

launched a blog in April 2019. I called it “Reflections” and defined its focus as “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.” 

You see, I had figured out by then that all my writing is about plumbing the depths of the past. My genre preference of historical fiction might have been a clue.

I soon found that, keeping that focus in mind, I do find topics to blog about, week after week. It can take a whole day or more out of my writing week to do the blog. But I enjoy it, and people read it. 

Thus far I’ve blogged for more than four years, for a total of perhaps a quarter of a million words.

Jerry was right. Blogging is writing. It stands on its own.

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This post—a particularly long one—is titled, “Confessions of a Literary Lion.”

Pause a moment to reflect, Fair Reader. 

I set out, in January 2016, to become a writer of fiction. In pursuit of that dream, I found I had to do several things:

  • I had to write fiction. Not sporadically, but with regularity and dedication.
  • I had to attend conferences and classes to learn how to write fiction.
  • I had to join a writing group and learn how to use astute critiques to improve my work.
  • I had to spend quite a bit of time reading other people’s work and crafting astute comments to help them improve their work.
  • I had to plunge into social media to build a platform.
  • I had to write a blog—yes, to boost my visibility (platform), but also simply to spread my  writings abroad. To reach people who might never read my historical fiction.

Oh, and besides all that: To learn the art of fiction, to learn the trade of marketing, and to better grasp that past which I am so eager to share with those who inhabit the present—I had to read a great many books. Books of well-written fiction. Books of poorly written fiction (learning what not to do!). Books on how to write. Books on how to get published. Books on how to sell books. Books of history and biography, surveying the terrain of the past. Books that zero in on specific past events and settings that relate to the story I’m writing. And by the way, books read for the sheer joy of reading, which I have always done. 

I have become one of the leading customers of the glorious South Central Wisconsin Library System. I’ve become a patron in good standing of Amazon and local independent bookstores.

All the pursuits mentioned above, in the aggregate, are so sedentary that I find I need a determined effort to get regular exercise. Yet I wouldn’t trade this life for anything. 

However, one must face the fact: I’ve become a Literary Lion.

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This fait accompli of Lionhood became clear to me in mid-2020, with the Great American Novel still unpublished. I posted a blog series titled “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.” 

I considered it a public service to writers. If you know you must become a Literary Lion even before you have any tangible sign of literary success, it puts things in perspective. 

The main thing it puts in perspective is that, if you’re serious about writing, you give it your all. 

You will soon be neck-deep in drafts, revisions, critiques, reviews, conferences, events, relationships, and books. You may as well buy an ascot, a smoking jacket, and a briar pipe, because you’ve become Mister Writer (soon to be Mister Author)—or Miz, as the case may be. 

At any rate, you may stop asking people, “How do I know if I’m really a writer?” 

Just suck it up and get on with it. 

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When this Buddha-like moment of Enlightenment came to me, it was on the whole a good thing, because it prepared me to dig in and take the next major challenges in stride.

You see, while undergoing a Gregor Samsa-like metamorphosis into something both fascinating and repellent (note the high-class literary allusion there, Gentle Reader?), I had been diligently pecking away at the Great American Novel. 

I finished the first draft—“finished” in the sense of typing “The End” at the bottom—in late summer of 2019. After a period of extensive and exhaustive revision, I felt it was ready, under the title Freedom’s Purchase. So early in 2020 I began querying agents and publishers to see if they would read it and publish it.

Here’s how the publishing business works: You don’t just send somebody the whole manuscript of a book. That’s asking them to commit hours or days of their time to reading something they never heard of before. All agents and publishers receive hundreds or thousands of queries a year. 

So the procedure is to send a brief query letter giving just a brief description of the book’s contents and your own qualifications as a writer. Some agents and publishers want a one-page plot synopsis in additon. Some want an author’s biography or resumé. Some want to see the first ten pages, or the first three chapters, of the text. You send them exactly what they ask for, and then you hope they will ask to see the whole manuscript.

Mostly, they don’t. On those rare occasions when they do, it’s cause for rejoicing. 

But be prepared to receive a rejection.

Among the rejections I received for Freedom’s Purchase were two that included a sentence or two of explanation why they passed on the opportunity to publish my book. One said the story “just didn’t feel big enough” to succeed in today’s very competitive book market. 

The other said, “I’m afraid I’m going to take a pass on this one. The plot as described in the query had not begun to develop in the first 50 pages, and I frankly lost interest in the story at that point. You might want to consider rearranging some of your chapters, assuming the escaped slave story did eventually materialize, and have it interspersed with the character/scene development that was all at the beginning.” 

When you have been in labor for years to give birth to an 80,000-word manuscript based on a furtive gleam in your mind’s eye, it can be hard—I mean, disappointing—to read such words. 

However, they can be very much worth reading, because it can be just what you need to know. 

A light bulb went on in my head.

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All I had to do to make the story publishable was take it apart completely, throw out most of the best passages, reinvent the entire structure of the plot, make a minor character into a major character, ignore previously-received advice about the need for a unitary protagonist, invent oodles of new plot developments, and rewrite the whole thing from the ground up.

That’s all that was needed. And, Gracious Reader, you must understand—on account of the two informative rejections, I could see how to do it, except for all the details I would have to make up as I went along.

It would be the work of a year or more. It was disheartening. I felt defeated.

But I was now a Literary Lion. The Lionhood membership card came to my rescue. Becausethis latest twist in the saga of my novel begged to be blogged. I wrote,

My two helpful rejectors had made me realize something: I had gotten so good at query letters and plot summaries that when professionals read my book, the manuscript did not fulfill the promise of the synopsis. . . .

I would love to believe that I wrote a terrific novel that these dolts simply aren’t discerning enough to appreciate. But I would be a fool to stand on my greatness and fail to hear what these astute individuals are telling me. 

What was I to do? Upon reading my blog post, the great Christine DeSmet, book coach par excellence, sent me an email. I did not save her exact words, but they were to this effect: “You can do this, Larry. Don’t give up.”

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Being a Literary Lion, I confess, has its burdens; but there are great benefits as well. One of them is the opportunity to receive precious encouragement just when you need it.

I did not give up. I spent the year that it took to completely remake Freedom’s Purchase. Christine not only encouraged me, she helped me with many valuable insights about story, plot, and narrative methods. When I was done, I had a book that was at least 500 percent better than before, and a new title: The Maelstrom.

The first people I queried were the two publishers who had given me the informative rejections. I explained that although I sent them something before, the Maelstrom was a whole new book, and wouldn’t they like to read it?

One of them declined. The other, Daniel Willis of DX Varos Publishing, a traditional small press publisher in Denver, Colorado, said: “Send it.” 

Dano read it, he bought it, he published it August 23, 2022. A year ago tomorrow. With a new title: Price of Passage

We had a wonderful launch party for the book at Mystery to Me bookstore in Madison. Lots of hoopla among my friends and confidants. 

The next day, I was once again just a struggling writer. Yes, a published author, with a book to sell. But the state of publishing today is that the author must do almost all the selling. While working on other literary output. And balance it all.

I already had another book—a middle-grade historical novel about my old short-story hero Izzy Mahler. Children’s books are not in Dano’s wheelhouse, so he declined the opportunity to look at it. I’m still trying to find an agent or editor who is interested.

Meanwhile, I’m working on another book. A World War II novel. That’s all I’ll say, because it’s not very far along. 

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So here are some things that have been added to my Literary Lion duties:

  • Book fairs. On certain weekends, I pack up a box or two of Price of Passage copies and go someplace to pitch my sales canopy and hawk my book, one copy at a time, to interested readers. I sold seventeen copies last weekend to people in Middleton. New Glarus, Waunakee, and Verona are coming up.
  • Bookstore visits. Sometimes I just pop into a local independent bookstore and pitch Price of Passage to the owner or manager. They don’t always agree to stock it, but sometimes they do, and I’ve sold some copies that way.
  • Speeches. I’ve appeared at the Sun Prairie Public Library and a Norwegian-themed women’s book club called Gudrid Circle. I’m scheduled to speak September 30 in Stevens Point at the Central Wisconsin Book Festival. These speeches are also opportunities to sell books.
  • I’m still a member of a writers’ mutual-critique group—two of them, actually, one meeting monthly and the other biweekly. By default, I have become the convener/moderator for both of them. I guess because I’m a Literary Lion.
  • Recently, I added Substack.com as a venue where my blog appears, in addition to my own site at LarryFSommers.com. It’s an experiment. I don’t know if I’ll gain readers or not, but at least people who read my posts on Substack will have an easy way to sponsor my writing with a cash donation. We’ll see what happens.
  • I’m considering finally reading The Iliad and The Odyssey. In translation, of course. I need to understand heroes better.

There’s always something new and different in the life of a Literary Lion.

I’m pretty sure this is not how Shakespeare did it. Or Walt Whitman. Or Agatha Christie.

But it’s how I’m doing it.

Stay tuned.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Neighbors to the Rescue

I like to chop wood. Maybe it was my early training as a Boy Scout. Or those tales of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack in the big woods, got to me. 

Could it be I was moved beyond prudence by the poetry of Robert Frost?

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

—“Two Tramps in Mud Time”

At any rate, I’ve always enjoyed swinging an axe.

Robert Frost, 1913. Unknown photographer. Public Domain.

This year, however, the task threatened to overwhelm. From wood-gathering efforts chronicled here and here, I had more than enough fresh honey locust in my backyard, needing to be split.

We don’t use those big, round logs mentioned in Christmas carols (“See the blazing Yule before us, falala-lala, lala-lala!”). Logs must be halved, quartered, or even eighthed, to fit our small cast iron stove. Apart from mere size, wood ignites quicker when it has a cleft inner surface to feed the flame. 

An Intervention

I started to split the honey locust, and some river birch from the same source, with my trusty axe. 

My neighbor Dick rented a hydraulic splitter. I helped him use the splitter on his part of the take. I had never used one before, and it’s impressive, the ease with which it shivers great logs into small ones. It’s a good job for two people—one to horse the logs onto the splitting bed and one to push the lever that makes the machine go. 

A small part of my bonanza.

Need I spell it out? Dick did the heavy lifting and I provided the wrist action. A fair distribution of labor, agreed. But I was beginning to think I’m an old man, needing to be spared exertion.

When we had reduced his logs to splinters, he offered the use of the machine for mine.

“I actually enjoy splitting them with my axe,” I said. “Good exercise.”

“Well—”

I grinned. “However, some of my logs are too big and heavy to split easily by axe. So I gratefully accept your offer.”

Fooboo the dog inspects split logs.

We wheeled the machine to the back end of my garage. In a half-hour’s time we split the biggest and baddest of my logs down to halves or quarters. Plenty of logs remained to be split the old way, gratifying the woodsman inside me.

We hitched the splitter to the back of Dick’s car, and he towed it back to Home Depot.

Since then I have used my axe to make three face cords of split wood. That’s probably enough for now, as we head into winter. Tons of prime honey locust still await the axe. It will keep me busy all winter, whenever the snow is low enough.

Why Is This Important?

Ordinarily, the way people keep warm is their own concern. It’s hard to excite others about it. 

There may be curiosity value in historical heating methods. Someday perhaps I’ll tell you what it was like to live in a house heated with a coal furnace, what one had to do—and it was the child’s lot to do it—to keep the flames alight. 

Tom Thompson, Man With Axe, 1915. Public domain.

But this year’s saga of my firewood husbandry is of possible interest only because it shows our dependence on one another. Some of our wood was a gift from my friend Jack. Some was a gift from our neighbors Nick and Shelly, who no longer needed their honey locust tree. 

In processing the huge logs down to burnable firewood, I had help from my neighbor Ben on one side, and my neighbor Dick on the other side. 

They say firewood warms you twice—once when you split it and once when you burn it. But the warmth of working with friends and neighbors is not to be discounted.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Making Firewood

Hardships bring us back to the essentials.

Bereft of people to see and places to be, I turn to the dwindling wood-pile in the rack along my garage wall. 

A couple of years ago our friend Kevin rebuilt our old miscellaneous junk depot, making it into a newly inviting sunroom. It’s an awkwardly long space with a lot of windows but no connection to the furnace that warms the rest of our house. So Kevin installed a cast-iron woodstove at the far end of the room.

The author at work by his woodstove. Lacey the spaniel as Sancho Panza.

That woodstove has become a great blessing to Your New Favorite Writer. It means I can write in the calm of our sunroom in warm weather, in the cooler times of spring and fall, and even in the deepest part of winter.

But the cost is: Procuring enough firewood and splitting the logs to stack for drying and burning.

Into the Trees

Old-timers say firewood warms you twice: First when you cut it, haul it, and stack it; and second when you burn it.

I like to get logs for free, rather than pay money. From time to time, someone in the neighborhood has a tree felled; usually this work is done by hired arborists. If the homeowner does not want the wood, the wood cutters must haul the logs to a dump for disposal—an added expense I can lighten for them by taking some logs off their hands. It never hurts to ask.

After hauling a few heavy, 4- to 6-foot logs home in the back of my SUV, I need to cut them to fireplace lengths. I use a small, seven-pound Stihl chainsaw with a 14-inch bar. Small beats large where chainsaws are concerned. Schlepping a 23-pound, 20-inch murder machine around a tangled logjam will knock the stuffing out of you in half an hour. Very few men or women who are not woodsmen by trade can put a large chainsaw to good use. And fatigue will make the urban lumberjack a danger to self and others.

The essential tool.

The timber is sawn, ideally, into 16-inch segments; then the real fun begins. Logs need to be split (1) so they’ll dry more efficiently, for the bark holds moisture in; (2) so they’ll fit conveniently in the stove; (3) so they’ll burn more readily as flames lap at their exposed innards; and (4) so Your New Favorite Writer may enjoy the satisfaction of cleaving a pillar of wood with the bite of a sharp axe.

Verse in the Vernal Heat

Robert Frost in 1941. Fred Palumbo photo. Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Public Domain.

Robert Frost waxes lyrical over chopping in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud-time”—

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

Scavenging for wood seldom brings me “good blocks of beech” that fall “splinterless as a cloven rock.” Quite often I’m using, by turns, my axe, a heavy splitting maul, or even wedges and a sledgehammer to demolish a twisty, knotted specimen of brutish maple or fruitwood with desperately cross-tangled fibers. It’s frustrating to try to smash such a godforsaken glob of sylvan perversity to flinders.

Larry the logger levitates lumber. Jo Sommers photo, used by permission.

But, ah! when I do score a nice chunk of straight-grained hardwood—such a joy to plummet the steel down upon it and pick up the halves on either side, to set the halves again on the chopping block and knock them into clean, glistening quarters. If you have ever done this kind of elemental work, then you know the peace it bestows.

Splitting wood adds rest and harmony to the soul.

Some of my neighbors use hydraulic splitters that can shiver a timber to its component parts in seconds. I have no quarrel with this efficient practice. I just like my way better.

Pride of Axemanship

Frost mentions a pair of bystanders who watched him at his beech-splitting chore: 

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.

So there’s that, too. Pride, you see, rears its ugly head. I am proud of the little wood lore I have gained over my 75 years on God’s green earth, starting as a Boy Scout and continuing to the present day. Whatever small skill of axemanship I possess has been earned through uncounted hours of practice on “the unimportant wood.”

Let us say, rather: The importance of wood may be more in its first warming than in the second.

A beautiful Danish woodpile. Photo by BKP, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Owing to my amateur status as an axeman, and also to the amateur status of some of the trees I scrounge, my woodpile is far from a thing of beauty. Unlike those geometric wonders of forest engineering you see gracing the pages of coffee table books, my woodrack has all sorts of bent and twisted knots and gnarls, wood of all descriptions protruding rudely to snag the sweater of a careless passer-by. It’s almost disgraceful.

But here’s the thing, Gentle Reader: I intend to burn up all the evidence.

The motley wood in my garage.

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The menace of this season’s global pandemic, with its mandated idleness, has simply led back to roots, and branches, that are dear to me for their own sake. 

Here’s hoping you likewise may find blessed paths to pursue as we patiently await good tidings from our common future.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Flim-flammery and the Long Foul Ball

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost.

Something there is, in us, that prefers to deny boundaries. 

I don’t know whether this is only American or universal. But when faced with limitations, hemmed in by rules and customs of society, or bound by mere laws of physics—our minds skip sideways, embracing whatever solution is beyond reach and all the more attractive for that.

Lottery Mindset

Lottery promotion in Dickensian London. Public Domain.

Think about this when you’re in line at the Kwik-Trip waiting for someone ahead of you to buy a Powerball ticket. Don’t imagine he or she is longing to get four dollars or seven dollars back on a two-dollar bet. It’s the big jackpot that draws wagering interest—the forty-gazillion-dollar, once-in-many-lifetimes win. Never mind that it’s all but impossible.

For the same reason, fifty thousand spec scripts are registered each year with the Writers Guild of America. The chance of success is slender, but fifty thousand people see themselves on stage at the Academy Awards. They see that so clearly and convincingly that they write 120 pages of screenplay—a hard thing to do—in case it may come true. 

This urge to shoot for the moon is, not coincidentally, the theme of many Hollywood films, which often feature, again not coincidentally, flim-flam artists.

A pair of examples: 

Flux capacitor. Photo by JMortonPhoto.com  & OtoGodfrey.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • In Back to the Future, Marty McFly is a lad stuck in a doomed cycle of frustration at home and humiliation at school. It’s a cycle from which he has no chance of escape—except that his friend, Doc Brown, has invented a Time Machine. Now, Dear Reader, the beauty thing about a Time Machine, for a screenwriter, is the many strange plot twists you can set up and pay off—as Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale realized when they wrote the script. But the beauty thing about a Time Machine for the character Marty McFly is that you can escape the bounds imposed on you by the Space-Time Continuum. All you need is a Flux Capacitor and a DeLorean. How cool is that? You might think Doc Brown, inventor of the Time Machine, is some kind of a flim-flam artist. But you would be wrong, due to Exception 7a of the Screenwriters’ Rules of Plot Etiquette: “If an eccentric inventor somehow finds his way around the Laws of Physics . . . Well, that’s okay, then—because he’s a Scientist!” 

But my main point is, we love the story because Marty cheats the normal rules of reality and (SPOILER ALERT) hits a home run.

  • On the other hand, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, in the MGM film of that name, clearly is a con artist. He is nothing but a carnival trickster, transported to a fairyland where he bamboozles the locals into thinking he’s something special. When Toto the dog gets too curious, Oz desperately pleads, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” But it’s too late. The jig is up. He is exposed as a fraud. But, wait—He solves the besetting problems of the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. Three up, three down, just like that. Then, he takes Dorothy Gale back home to Kansas—which is all she’s ever wanted, anyway. So maybe he’s not a fraud, after all. That would fall under Exception 7b: “If an inveterate charlatan somehow solves real problems by the Power of Suggestion . . . Well, that’s okay, then—because he’s a Psychologist!” (Or maybe a Meteorologist; cf. Burt Lancaster as The Rainmaker.

Again, the point is: We love the story because Dorothy solves her problems not within the dull, inelastic boundaries of her life, but by escaping to a magical world where she gets a magical fix. Case closed.

Inside Baseball

Hermann R. Muelder. Special Collections and Archives, Knox College Library, Galesburg, Illinois. Used by permission.

How can all this fail to bring to mind the late Hermann R. Muelder? Muelder was a distinguished professor of History at Knox College, but he was also well-known for his campaign to eliminate the outside-the-park home run from the game of baseball. “The home run takes less skill than a well placed hit that a fielder can’t get to,” Muelder said. “You don’t have to know anything about baseball to hit a home run. You just have to be strong.

“Nothing happens when a homer goes out of the park. All the fielders stand there, helpless. There`s nothing they can do. There`s no finesse in a home run. I want to see finesse returned to the game.

“The bunt is more interesting than a home run.”

Another of Muelder’s arguments: “Baseball is the only game in which it is the person—and not the ball—that does the scoring. And that is essentially the game. The home run violates that principle.”

Sadaharu Oh, world record holder for “long foul balls.” Photo by Mori Chan. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Dr. Muelder’s argument was logical to a fault. Its essence was that the game consists in how well the players make use of the ball within the field of play. The beauty of the thing lay in its exquisite timing—the duel between pitcher and batter and the race between fielder and base runner to determine the score. Removing from the field of play the object of all this dueling and racing extinguished the whole point of baseball. To cure this outrage, Muelder proposed that if you should happen to belt one over the outfield fence, it would simply be a long foul ball. On the other hand, if you hit the ball so cunningly, and ran so fast, as to score an inside-the-park home run, well—THAT was real baseball. Exempting the ball from any possibility of defense was the only thing Muelder wanted to outlaw. 

Despite the obvious logic of these arguments, baseball has not yet criminalized the outside-the-park homer. 

I think that’s for the same reason we admire Marty McFly and plucky Dorothy Gale: We refuse to tolerate a situation in which our limits are absolute. 

There’s got to be a way to beat the system. Anything else would be un-American.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)