Interview: R.M. Clark, The Secret at Haney Field by Kell Andrews

A few weeks ago, Booklist Online released an annotated list of the top 10 sports books for youth of the year -- and all of them featured male protagonists. After an outcry, Booklist published a list of sports books featuring girls and women -- well overdue in a summer where one of the top real-life sports heroes was Mo'ne Davis, the 12-year-old Philadelphian who became the first girl to earn a win and to pitch a shutout in Little League World Series history.

So now, with the Major League Baseball postseason approaching, the time is right for The Secret at R.M. Clark, The Secret at Haney Field  MB Publishing, 2014Haney Field: A Baseball Mystery, a new middle-grade novel by R.M. Clark that features a 12-year-old girl who is a baseball savant.

When April O'Day wins a job as a bat retriever for the Harpoons, her favorite minor league team, a perfect summer seems assured. But who are the ghostly "shadow players" she can see on the field after hours? She and her best friend work to uncover a mystery that touches some of the least glorious days of American baseball history.

April is an appealing character -- funny and smart, with encyclopedic baseball knowledge that makes her indispensable to her favorite minor league baseball team -- and the baseball action goes right into the dugout. April's wry voice is a perfect match for an eerie mystery with a satisfying conclusion and a touch of nostalgia. 

R.M. Clark is the author of Center Point, an adult thriller, and another middle-grade timeslip mystery, Dizzy Miss Lizzie, which will be released in November 2014 by Writers AMuse Me publishing. He was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

Most of the books you write are middle-grade. What about the age group appeals to you? 

There's an honesty to middle grade fiction that I find refreshing. The characters at this age have fewer distractions (like relationships, jobs, cars) than older characters, so they tend to stick to the issue at hand. I find it very easy to keep a middle grade plot moving along. Plus, you can add wacky stuff like aliens and time travel and it's perfectly fine with the audience. But my biggest reason for writing middle grade is because the voices in my head speak to me that way. I guess I'm just wired for it.

You obviously have a strong love of baseball. What is your own background with the sport and how did you bring it into The Secret at Haney Field? 

I played from Little League through high school and two summers of American Legion baseball. I damaged my shoulder after my senior year, so I began coaching. I put in three years as an American Legion coach, starting when I was 19. Years later, my sons started playing and I coached both of them up through the ranks, from age 5 to 16. Plus, I've always considered myself to be an amateur baseball historian. I watched the Baseball documentary by Ken Burns multiple times and I love that baseball is full of colorful characters. One day I decided to create some of my own.

In this book and in Dizzy Miss Lizzie, there's sense that the past is not over and that's it's close enough to access. There's also a strong New England flavor. I'm curious whether those two things are related. 

They are. In practically every New England town I've been to there are houses and buildings and other structures that date back to the 1700s, sometimes the 1600s. They call to me. Those bygone days want to be remembered, so I find a way to incorporate New England history into most every story. We can learn a lot from the past, so I make it happen.

Baseball is often perceived as an all-American game, and it's interesting to see how the history of the game intertwines with darker aspects of American history, such as segregated baseball teams within the larger context of segregation, discrimination, and limited opportunities for black Americans. Why did you choose this as a theme? 

 I think the overall contribution to baseball history by players in the Negro Leagues is still under valued. There were so many talented players who were good enough to play in the majors years before Jackie Robinson but were kept out due a "gentlemen's agreement" by the white owners. Many of the owners and baseball executives who blatantly supported segregation and discrimination and brought great dishonor to the game are still considered bastions of the sport. In this book I wanted to use a more modern example of a "gentlemen's agreement" and show that people can change for the better not by changing the past, but by honoring it.

Despite its imperfections (and maybe because of them), there's a lot that young people can take away from a game like baseball. What what do you hope young players gain from the sport? What do you hope young readers take from your book? 

Baseball is a team sport that relies on individual achievement. There's a unique fairness to it in that everyone gets their chance to contribute (there's no crying or hiding in baseball). Most importantly, it's fun! As for my book, I hope to show that you're never too young to impart wisdom and you're never too old to accept it. When the past comes back to haunt you, make amends and become a better person for it.

Thanks to R.M. Clark for his answers. Now what are your favorite middle-grade sports books, featuring protagonists of any gender?

The Best Middle Grade Sports Books by Michael Gettel-Gilmartin

Those of you who know me well know that I am the paterfamilias of a family of thespians. My boys have always made a beeline for the stage, the lights, and the greasepaint. So, it was with some surprise that I found my eldest glued to the football World Cup. (Where I come from originally, it is always football. What is this soccer of which you speak?) No, he wasn't rehearsing for a role. He was actually being a fan.

My own personal favorite sport is tennis, and I can while away many an afternoon watching the ball whiz by on the lawns of Wimbledon. And when the Olympics are on--summer or winter--you won't catch sight of me except in front of a screen, ready to holler at sprinters, swimmers, and slalom skiers.

What is undeniable is that sports is a big part of life--for better or worse--and so it stands to reason that reading books with sports themes would also be popular, especially with those who are often labeled "reluctant readers."

I did a bit of internet snooping, and I am here to report that the sports genre is alive and kickin'--especially if you're into the "big" sports of basketball, baseball, football, and football (okay, soccer.) There are not, it appears, many middle grade sports books about cricket, lacrosse, or tennis (boo hoo.)

The giants in the field are Matt Christopher, (whose sons continue producing books under his name--Matt Christopher himself died in 1997); Dan Gutman, and Mike Lupica. I have also enjoyed novels (which I have reviewed on my Middle Grade Mafioso blog), such as War and Watermelon by Rich Wallace, which has a rich football theme, and Ultra by David Carroll, which tackles ultramarathon running.

I also really enjoyed Guys Read: The Sports Pages--and if you click the link, you'll see how much I particularly adored the baseball stories by Anne Ursu and Chris Rylander.

The main point about all these novels and stories is that, although they have sports at their foundation, they are often about so much more. War and Watermelon, set during the Vietnam War, is also about flirting with girls and dealing with the fall-out of an older brother being eligible for the draft. Ultra also deals with war and loss.

The internet has a number of sites with great lists of sports books for kids. Two of the best are Sporty Girl Books and Guys Read: Sports. You might also enjoy the transcript of #MGlitchat's discussion of Writing About Sports. The consensus was that TANGERINE by Edward Bloor was a masterpiece, with soccer/football at its core.

Speaking of football/soccer, it's time for me to return to watching the World Cup with my newly sports fanning son. Let me know in the comments if you have a favorite sports-themed novel which you think I should read!

Times They are a Changing - Kids' Lives in 2013

We writers for middle grade aged readers try to portray contemporary characters accurately in our fiction, but it takes careful work not to confuse our own memories of being children with the actuality of kids’ lives in 2013. Yes, kids are still kids, and friendships and family relationships haven’t changed all that much, but day to day life has changed. I’m always fascinated by museum displays of artifacts from different time periods, those everyday objects common then, but largely gone now, and with them, the time people spent using them. How many kids these days have sling shots or decoder rings or even baseball bats?

My observations only deal with what I see in my world, which is largely made up of suburban middle class families, so the following won’t hold true with large parts of the U.S., and certainly not of the bigger world. I thought it was important to consider these things though, because when I write a collection of characters, I want them to seem as real as possible. So here are some of the differences I’ve noticed in many kids’ lives now versus even ten years ago:

Luckily, kids still play with Legos. Legos made up an important part of WILDFIRE RUN and I based that on knowing just how many kids were and are obsessed with them. Kids still play with other toys too, but toys are competing with other distractions and scheduled lessons and practice.

There is more time on organized sports and more concentration on doing just one type of sport. It used to be that soccer or swimming had a season, and when the season was done, the child was done with it for the year. Now, even ten-year-olds can and do play soccer or swim all year on leagues and elite teams. If you have a character intensively involved in one of these sports, you’ll have to figure out to work in the time commitments in your stories.

The same holds true with dance, gymnastics and ice skating. For example, by the time a dancer is about twelve, there is quite a lot of pressure from most dance studios to commit to coming two or three times a week, and to participate in extra shows or competitions. Skipping a practice is greatly frowned upon, and kids are supposed to manage their homework so they don’t need to take a night off from dance to study.

Family involvement in sports is often a requirement as well, as parents coach and sell snacks and monitor their offspring at all day meets. I’m always trying to figure a way to get parents out of the picture when I’m writing a story, but parents are far more present now than they used to be, especially in sports.

When kids do get together for some free time, what they do in that time has changed too. Group video game playing is a very common activity, particularly for boys. It used to be years ago, a kid who wasn’t good at basketball or baseball could often feel left out. Now it’s the kids who don’t have the latest video games or who aren’t good at them.

Then there is youtube. A group of kids together with a computer will often end up watching youtube videos as a social activity. I was just recently clued in to the existence of youtube stars, ordinary people with entertaining vlogs who have collected huge followings.

There are more ways for kids to find things that interest them. While you can view the time they spend on the internet as a curse, for some kids, it opens up a world to them they might not have discovered otherwise. I know kids who have become fascinating by cartooning, writing fan fiction, making short films, learning how to decorate cakes, even making their own chain mail for fun, all by discovering other people doing the same thing on the internet.

These things are only a few observations, and I know I’m missing many. So if you are writing contemporary kids, what else have you noticed about their lives now that could add believable details to your stories?

~ Dee Garretson

How Do You Stay On Top of it All?

Wow. What a busy weekend I had. My daughter's sixteenth birthday was yesterday (Happy Birthday, sweetheart). It was the Divisional Round in the NFL playoffs. I had to drive my other daughter to dance and back. I had to meet a blogger friend to exchange some books way down in the city. I had to whirlwind clean the house and vacuum up all the dog hair because the gateway inside our router had died, and AT&T had to send a technician to replace it.

There was other stuff too, and I'm not complaining, because I'm very fortunate to be able to do all these things, have a roof over our heads and so on, but it got me to thinking. Thinking about writing, being a father, having a day job, and still wanting to find time to do things I enjoy, like watching football. Luckily, I had recently finished another round of revisions on my novel, because I definitely would not have gotten any writing done this weekend, even if I'd wanted to. Also luckily, I no longer had teams I really care about involved in the playoffs (Vikings, Falcons), because if I had, I would have had to miss much of their games, with everything else that was going on.

So, to carry this comparison over to writing, I want to talk about how to find a balance. How to make the time to get it all done. We all have different strategies. Taking the laptop along to soccer practice is something I've done. Converting a friend's manuscript so that I can read and critique it on my Kindle is another. Skipping TV, or even writing or revising while the family is watching is another.

I'm also very fortunate that I have a job where I can get some writing and blogging done from work. My shift starts at 6 AM, though, so it means that I get very little sleep during the week. I suppose that's another way to find the time. Sleep less.

Lately I haven't even had the time to work out in the afternoons, which is not something I want to allow for long, but it just goes to show you that you can't always find the time for everything you want to do. Ideally it would be wonderful to be enough of a full-time author for it to pay all the bills, but I think we have to recognize that such a thing is very rare, and most of us will have to suffer through other jobs.

Those of you who have all these things on your plates, how do you manage it? Or even if you don't have a full-time job, but your time is short because our kid's lives are so full of commitments, and caring for a home can be a full-time job, how do you handle it and still find time to write?

This is a question we talk about a lot, and I know there really is no easy answer, but it's been on my mind lately, and it's always nice to hear about the strategies friends use.

Sports, Kids, and Books

I have to apologize for these terrible photos, but I only recently upgraded to a phone with a decent camera, and I don't have the steadiest hand. Anyway, this is my daughter, Madison, and my nephew, Bryce, at their very first NFL game.

We live in Atlanta, so it's a Falcons game, but we're from Minnesota (well, sort of) so we're Vikings fans. It was a pretty good game, but that's not really my point.

The point I want to make, is that I think sports, whether professional, collegiate, intramural, or just community organized, are a great way for kids to get exposed to many important things in life. Things like teamwork, respect, sportsmanship, pushing ourselves to succeed in spite of pain and/or fatigue. There are a lot of great lessons to be had from sports.

And the great thing is that sports, especially if the kids are participating, but even if they're just watching a game, don't beat you over the head with those lessons like ... some other venues for education.

I love that sports give kids an opportunity to learn things for themselves, without someone having to tell them anything. Showing is always better, right?

So anyway, after the game, it got me to thinking: what are some great young adult and middle grade books about or with sports in them, that maybe aren't exactly sports books?

I suppose I'm not the most widely read when it comes to these kind of books, but I couldn't think of many, so I figured I'd come to you guys. I mean I really enjoyed My Dog Skip (both the book and the film) and I suppose there is some mention of sports in both, but it's not really the kind of book I'm thinking of. The film The Sandlot would be a great example, but I don't think that story is also a novel, or at least I've never read it.

I did find a decent list, which you can read: here, but I was hoping our wonderful Project Mayhem readers would be able to recommend some books they'd actually read. Do any of you have a young adult or middle grave novel you can recommend that has sports in it?

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. Here's one more photo, just for fun: