Q. The Only Game, the first book in the new Home Team series, is much more than a baseball book. It’s about family, friendship, teamwork, loyalty, and picking yourself up after getting knocked down. What do you hope readers will gain from reading it? What discussions do you hope to spark?
A. What I always hope they’ll get, and something I speak about as I go across the country talking about my books to my readers. Anybody can get knocked down. It requires no talent, no spirit, no heart, no courage. We can all be world champs at getting knocked down. But it’s how you get back up that shows the world all those qualities. And more than anything, we find out something else in this book, particularly in the relationship between Jack and Teddy: that there is nothing more powerful in this world than a random act of kindness.
Q. With which character in The Only Game do you most identify and why?
A. I probably identify with Teddy, who’s overweight and out-of-shape at the start of the book. I was always a good athlete, never picked on, or bullied. But I was always the smallest kid in the game. It makes you find strength in yourself you didn’t know you had. It’s like one of my favorite writers, the English playwright Alan Bennett once said about writing: The fun of it is finding out you know things you didn’t know you knew.
Q. Since this newsletter is for librarians, tell us, in a few sentences, your best librarian story.
A. As a child, even in the summer, I would go find a quiet place in the Oneida (N.Y.) Public Library, and sit on the floor, and read. I just loved being surrounded by books. One day a librarian, I forget her name from a thousand years ago, asked me what I was doing back there. “Reading,” I said. She smiled and said, “No. Dreaming.”
Q. You have been writing for middle-graders for more than a decade. Why do you enjoy writing for this audience?
A. It is one of the thrilling challenges of my life to try to keep up with my own readers, who are so much smarter and funnier and hipper than I was when I was a middle grader. When my first book for young readers, Travel Team, hit as big as it did, my wife said to me, “Are you going to be happy from now on writing this type of book?” I told her I was. She said, “Good. Because of all the things you’ve done in your career, being known as somebody who got kids to want to read will be the thing you’re remembered best for.” I’m starting to think she might be right. As usual.
Q. What would be your advice to a student who wants to be a writer?
A. Read. Read constantly. Read anything that makes you dream the way I did in the stacks at the library. And then write as often as you can. Keep a journal. Listen to the way people talk. Look at the world around you and describe it, and your feelings about it, as well as you can. When I was 10, I was already writing adventure stories in longhand with myself as the main character.
Q. Who were some of your favorite authors as a child?
A. I loved reading the Chip Hilton books, written by a famous American basketball coach named Clair Bee. They were also about loyalty and friendship and kids trying to do something great in sports. It just took me a while in my own life to figure out that I should be writing this kind of book. I’ve got no werewolves or vampires or wizards in my book. Just regular kids getting knocked down and getting back up and trying to do something great in sports. I think I’ll stick with that.
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