For this interview, we looked all the way back to issue seven, to talk to one of its fiction contributors, John Glass.
Your short story, ‘Fall Ball’, uses as a backdrop a 1988 Atlanta Braves baseball game. It’s gritty, dusty, nostalgic end-of-summer: a great read this time of year. What do you think it is about baseball that makes for such good scene-setting?
Baseball has so much history to draw from. That’s why it works great in fiction settings. The game was literally designed for the Civil War era and yet it is still being played today, everyday, all over the U.S. The ideas and visuals that can be drawn from baseball are endless.
The protagonist in ‘Fall Ball’ wants to learn Spanish. As a teacher of Spanish yourself, do you find yourself writing in that language as well as English?
No, I really don’t. I used to dabble with Spanish poetry a little, even scratching up a few sonnets for an old girlfriend in Guadalajara. But no, writing in English is hard enough.
What drives you to submit fiction to literary magazines like Structo?
I liked the ‘newspaper format’ of Structo and that is one thing that attracted me to it.
You have a daughter who must be about six by now. Do you read any of your work to her?
Ha, slowly, bit by bit, yes. I had a poem published recently that captures a brief incident of us in NY, and I take a lot of pride in that publication. But yeah, I’ve read to her a few short things, here and there. It’ll happen more as she gets older.
What are you currently working on?
My playwriting! I have a youth play business that has been consuming enormous amounts of time: www.studentplays.org. That, along with a new story framed around Bigfoot.
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Read John Glass’s short story ‘Fall Ball’ online at Issuu right here.