Windmill’s Writers | An Interview with James M. Maskell

Olivia Kuch: What was your inspiration for writing [“In the Backyard”]?

James Maskell: This piece started out as a much longer essay that I was working on for a class. I’ve been teaching for twenty-one years and I wanted to get a second masters once my kids were a little bit older. I was in a creative nonfiction workshop class at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, and it was a twelve to fifteen page essay. My dad had had a stroke a few years earlier, so I suddenly had to become a caretaker for him. It was a completely different element of our relationship. That essay was really about me having to take care of him all of the sudden, and I interspersed different moments of our relationship going back to me being five, nine, fifteen, twenty-five and then forty and forty-five. This piece that you are reading now was just one little scene that I used near the end of that original essay. I looked at all of our conversations as being like the conversations we used to have when we played catch. I had submitted that piece to a couple of journals and there wasn’t really much interest in it. I don’t know if I was sending it to the wrong publications, but then I looked back at it and I thought that some of these individual vignettes could work with some adjustment on their own. This was one I just carved out and restructured a little bit. I tried to make it a stand-alone piece, and I was happy with the way that it came out, so then I sent it your direction. 

OK: Amazing, I’m very glad that you did! That’s a beautiful story about your inspiration for it. The fact that it came out of a bigger piece and that you were able to carve this out of it, it’s very cool that you were able to break down your piece like that. 

JM: My dad was still around when I started writing that, but he has since passed. He passed away about two years ago. I first wrote it at the beginning of his significant decline, so it has a very different feel to me on its own as it is now. It's a celebration of the moment rather than looking back at what I used to have. That makes it more meaningful to me. It’s not “Oh no, look where I’m at now, I’ve got to take care of an ailing parent” it’s “Look at the memory that I have.” 

OK: That’s beautiful. Writing this during that time, do you think that that helped you process everything that was happening with your dad? Was it very cathartic for you? 

JM: Absolutely! I’ve been writing a lot for the past three or four months. I really picked up how often I write. I make myself write every single morning before I go to work. I wasn’t doing that before because I was so busy taking care of ailing parents. With both of my parents gone, now I use that time productively for myself to write about the things that I have experienced over the last several years. Writing about my relationship with my parents has been very healing. It’s a very soothing process for me. 

OK: That’s awesome that you’re able to take the emotions that you were having and convert it into writing. It’s a very healthy way of dealing with this, and I think that’s beautiful. 

I wanted to know why you chose this particular moment to write about? Why this particular conversation with your dad about striking this kid out? What was special about this piece of advice for you? 

JM: I look at it more as not so much about striking the kid out, it was about the game of catch and just tossing the ball back and forth with him. Those were some of my favorite moments growing up. Of course, I did that with my son too. I remember being in a sporting goods store and hearing a kid ask his father if they could go home and play catch and the father said he was too busy. He was more focused on himself and I kept thinking “go home and play catch with your kid. That’s gonna go away at some point and you have to embrace those moments.” That’s what my dad did, and that’s what I always tried to do. 

OK: That’s really wonderful. What was it like diving back into that memory? It’s very vivid. Was this something that you were able to pull from your memory and you can see it clearly, or is it more “Yes, this really happened, but let me add in some things”? What was that like to recreate this scene? 

JM: The conversation itself I remember pretty vividly, and it’s largely in its original form, certainly the original sentiment. It was just really about crafting it. It was about using imagery for me, and what it sounded like and what it felt like. I really tried to focus on the snap of the ball in the glove and the sounds of the fields. It’s a very auditory piece I think, and I think I was really inspired by the sounds of baseball. I always loved baseball as a kid, I try to watch it when I can as an adult when I have time. It takes a lot of time out of your day if you’re going to watch every game of a season. But there are very distinct sounds that help recreate the moment for me. 

OK: I think that’s what drew me to your piece so much, because my dad also loves baseball and grew up playing baseball. I never played, but I always played catch with him anyway just because I found it fun. I think what I liked in the piece is that I was able to immediately get transported back to my own childhood backyard. It felt like your story, but I think anyone who is reading will immediately be transported back to their own backyard, playing catch with their dad, or whatever it is they did with their dad. It’s universal in a lot of ways. 

You mentioned that you were in a creative nonfiction workshop. That essay that you mentioned at the beginning of this interview, was that your first attempt at creative nonfiction, because I know in your bio you say you write poetry and short fiction?

JM: No, I mean I had worked on a bit of writing here and there that I never really finished. I never got into the idea of trying to publish my work until fairly recently. If we look back fifteen to twenty years ago, I was spending a lot of my time on the sidelines watching my kids at the soccer and baseball fields, trying to grade essays in the meantime. As a high school English teacher there’s always a pretty hefty workload; if I had free time I felt like I should have been grading essays. I’d try to write here and there a little bit. There were pieces of stories and essays that I had chipped away at and not really ironed them out. I didn’t think about publication until only a couple of years ago. When my kids got older I had the chance to become an English student again, and that’s when I went back and got my MA in English at Bridgewater. I tried to take a lot of writing workshop classes. It was so much fun to sit down with other people that were excited about writing, and to get feedback from them. They would help me look at different ways that I could approach a character. It was super exciting to be thinking about a character in my way, and then hear someone else say “How about if you happen to do this?” I had a couple of professors who tried to talk to us about the publishing game. They told us the kind of things we should expect and the scams to look out for and avoid. They told us to really dive into a journal and make sure that we like it before we submit our work, and that’s what I have been doing recently.

OK: Going off of that, do you have a favorite genre to write? Is there something that you gravitate more towards, or is it just whatever you are feeling more in the moment? 

JM: There’s some humor that I worked on that I still need to iron out. Teaching in public schools could be very absurd at times, and I have a series of stories that I work on from time to time. I have this character in mind that is a fictionalized version of me and some of my colleagues, and I love working with that and writing these humorous stories. I haven’t really sat down with that and tried to polish it and get it ready for publication just yet, but that’s probably where I have the most fun quite honestly. 

OK: Well, whenever you finish it and are ready to publish it, please send it over to Windmill because we would love to read it!