INTERVIEWED BY PAUL MASSIGNANI

Wyl Villacres is a Cubs fan. I’m a White Sox fan. Staying true to the spirit of the rivalry, we began our dialogue by consciously (or unconsciously) tweaking each other. I misspelled his name as “Will” in our first email, and he responded by spelling mine as “Pall.” Could the animosity between north and south sides even poison the autocorrect on our phones?

We met and talked on the neutral grounds of writing fiction, free from jabs about 108 years of losing for the Cubs, and bullet holes in the seats at Comiskey Park. His chapbook Bottom of the Ninth is now available from WhiskeyPaper Books. A prolific writer, award-winning activist, and active force in the Chicago lit scene, Wyl was gracious in giving up some time to talk love, death, baseball, and the state of the writing world.

PAUL MASSIGNANI: I’ve read other literary pieces about, or sort of about baseball, and one thing I like about yours is that it’s not a love letter to the game. It’s more about hope, and the moments of weakness when hope seems lost. Death, the ends of relationships, Chicago, the Cubs, baseball, what are the connections between these things, for you?

WYL VILLACRES: Well, yeah, I feel like the obvious answer to give at this point is, growing up a Cubs fan, you sit there and watch your team lose and lose. You gotta learn to deal with hopelessness and try to find some beauty in it, instead of being depressed all the time. I think, bigger for me than just that, I was born in a hospital about four or five blocks down the street from Wrigley, my childhood home is at Ashland and Addison, about six blocks from Wrigley. Me and my wife, our second apartment together was three blocks from Wrigley. Our current apartment is half a block from Wrigley Field. When you grow up in this kind of environment, it stops being something that has that kind of novelty that a lot of people have, coming to Wrigley Field. It becomes just part of your life. You learn that during a Cubs home game, there’s the annoyance of, “I can’t find a parking spot,” you know, “I can’t get to Taco Bell because the line’s out the door,” as much as you see the excitement of the game. You know, I’m a die-hard Cubs fan, but I find myself saying, “God damn it, Cubs, I wish you weren’t here right now, so I can go to sleep.” What was it, last night, there were helicopters flying above my house until midnight. It kinda permeates your entire life. While all these things are going on, you always have the Cubs in the background. When I broke up with the girl between my wife and I breaking up and getting back together again, we had these super-serious conversations walking down the street, going around Wrigley Field. While we’re having these heavy talks, the Cubs always seemed to be right there. And so, baseball isn’t just about, you know, going and watching a game. It isn’t just about batting averages, on-base percentages, and slugging percentages. All that is there, too, but for me, baseball is part of my life, even off-season.

PM: What was the first impulse you had when you began to write this collection? How did it come to be?

WV: So, Hobart Pulp, which is one of my favorite online magazines, they do offline, too, but haven’t done a print issue in a while, they had a call for baseball stories. Obsession with the Cubs is an understatement. My apartment at the time, when I started writing this thing, from my bedroom window, I could see the back of the historic scoreboard, with the Cubs logo and the flag, and in the mornings I could see the flags go up for the game. I didn’t have to check the news, I just looked out my window to see the W flag or the L flag. It was all at the beginning of the season. So Hobart had a call for baseball stories. A couple of years before that, I had started a story about a pop-fly that never came back down, being like, “Oh yeah, that would be a fun story,” and the whole time I was writing it, it was just all about the pop-fly, and I spent more time on the magical aspect rather than the human aspect. A couple years went by, and I started changing how I wrote. I thought,”What would be appropriate for the humans that are watching this thing happen?” I already had something started, so I thought,”Cool, I’ll jump on this,” had a great time writing it. It was right at the beginning of the season, when anything was still possible for the Cubs. I pounded it out, sent it in, got it published, and then I was like, “I had such a good time doing that, I have to do more.” Ended up writing a bunch of them, and then there was a call for submissions from WhiskeyPaper for chapbooks, and I was like,“Man, I have these six baseball stories, I can write up three more and have something to send out.” I saw the opportunities, and wanted to jump on them.

PM: “Fifth: Foul Ball,” is about baseball. Right in the middle of the book, hemmed in by all the relationship carnage, floods, and an homage to your father, here’s this fantasy piece about tearing apart Steve Bartman. He’s the walking personification of the Cub curse. He unwittingly sabotaged a team and city’s hopes, when they were just a step away from victory. In “Deadball Era,” the same kind of ruination happens in a relationship, at a moment when it could go either way. Is breaking that very human tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory something you’re figuring out with this collection?

WV: I think that might be more of an unintended consequence. Particularly with the Steve Bartman piece, I don’t know if I should admit to this, but that was the absolute last piece I wrote for the collection. It took the place of a different story, and is not one of my favorites. I have an obsession about Steve Bartman, especially, that just will not die. I want to be on record as saying I don’t blame him at all for the 2003 collapse. I put that blame on Moises Alou. That dude needed to chill. He lost it, and that’s what got the fans into it, that’s what got the pitching staff to give up eight runs in one inning. It wasn’t even the last game of the series. We had another game we could have won. We were up two runs in the fifth inning. It was not Steve Bartman’s fault. But I had just watched his 30 for 30 (ESPN documentary series) and was just like, “Hey, what if I did this thing and it all went differently and then it killed everybody?” It’s an interesting idea of trying to salvage something.

I think most of the characters in my stories veer more towards just accepting what’s happening, more than actively trying to do things. Particularly with “Deadball Era.” It’s almost one of those stories that’s kind of about the narrator rolling with the punches. I feel like that was more of what spoke to me when I was writing it. In “Suicide Squeeze,” the whole story was supposed to be about rolling with it. Being able to watch something without getting your hopes up, without doing whatever you can do to continue a sort of hopeful outlook or helpful outlook, or being there no matter what, because for me, that’s way more what being a Cubs fan is like. This season is amazing, we’re going to the National League Championship Series. We’re the third-best team in baseball, and just beat the two that were better, but still, I’ve suffered through enough losing seasons. I was gonna be here, I was gonna be just as big of a fan even if they lost 111 games. That’s part of being a Cubs fan. It’s about having resiliency, more than trying to change the outcome of things.

PM: Maybe it’s like loving, where you are who you’re with, no matter what. Chicago itself is having some tough times. Moody’s downgraded the credit rating, climate change is bringing down the wrath of the polar vortex, violence is up, the newly-elected governor of Illinois is a Republican. People who love the city, though, love it deeply. Is it that commitment to something you love something that you’re called to, even in the face of losing?

WV: Yeah, I mean, you’re not going to win every time. That’s true for baseball, for everything. An undefeated football season, the Patriots just did it a couple years ago. An undefeated baseball season just doesn’t happen. Losing seasons happen. Bad teams happen, bad calls happen. That doesn’t mean you stop loving the game, because you don’t get to win as much. People lose. Not everyone’s a winner. For 108 years, the Cubs have been the lovable losers, and my great-grandma went through her entire life not being able to see them win. Sometimes you lose, and I think accepting that, knowing that’s something that can happen, lets you have more wiggle room to enjoy other things. Talking about Chicago, you watch one mayor sign away all the parking rights and you go, “Well, there goes half of our revenue,” and you get to watch our credit ratings drop, the other mayor shuts down all the mental health clinics, it’s cold half the year, and you go, “Yeah, this place sucks!” I don’t think this place sucks, as much as it’s, “That dude is fucking up my city.” If I’m looking at the Cubs, Lou Piniella comes in…that guy couldn’t lead my team to victory. You associate with the place, and you let the shit that happens just kinda happen.

PM: Something I noticed about your writing style, in the eighth piece about Virgie grieving her father, is that it’s very compact and pared-down. The dialogue is almost like you’d remembered it that way from a dream. What draws you to write these scenes like that, and to pair it with magical realism?

WV: So, actually the portfolio class I took at Columbia College, one of my last classes in my undergrad, Marcia Brenner was the teacher, she was the one who introduced me to flash fiction. It was always there, I think I had tried to write one piece before, but it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t really complete, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I started broadening the scope of what I was reading. I started reading Etgar Keret, and that changed my world, how I read. I got way more involved with the online lit scene, and found WhiskeyPaper Magazine, the press that’s putting out my book. They’re a flash-fiction journal. I fell in love with them. It changed the way I was writing. Part of the reason I love flash fiction, short stories, and punk songs is because they’re short and compact, but they still have the same amount of energy and emotion in them as something much longer will have. It was off to the races from there.

That’s why I try to fit as much as I can into scenes, but keep them very slim. You learn to pick out what’s the most emotional, the most impactful part of a scene and focus on that, and throw some of the other stuff away. One of the things I still get in my MFA workshops is that I don’t set up enough of the scene for people to see it, they want more description of the place. My reaction is, always internally, because I’m not going to say this in a workshop, is that it’s not about the place, it could be anyplace. I’m trying to focus on this one exact detail, and I think that works for me sometimes. I’m sure sometimes I’m totally wrong. As far as my dialogue, going back to Etgar Keret, that’s how I learned this style of writing, flash fiction. I learned from reading magical realism stuff. I’m Latino, I don’t know if that popped up enough times in the book. I’m Puerto Rican, and one of the things about Latino writers that comes up over and over again is that, very frequently, they rely on magical realism to tell their stories. Part of it is connecting to my roots and my heritage. I always feel a little bit stronger of a connection to my people when I can pound out a flash-fiction story with some magical realism elements in it.

PM: In a some of your other work, like the One Throne essay about pedi-cabbing, and the McSweeney’s piece about white MFA writers, there’s a palpable frustration with racism, and the social hierarchy it’s packaged with. Money and opportunity, or the lack of, is tightly interwoven with racism, and clearly something you’re passionate about. How do you see the state of the literary world as we speak, when it comes to equality for writers of color?

WV: Ooh boy. Alright. So, the shortest answer I can give you is that it’s fucked up. I say that not in a negative way, which is how a lot of people might hear it.  The better answer is that the literary world is an early adopter of the more p.c.-inclusive lexicon to acknowledge writers of color. Writers who don’t come from higher socio-economic classes. A lot of good is happening. I have a buddy, Justin Dougherty, who runs a press called Jellyfish Press, and he’s also one of the managers for SunDog Lit, and Cartridge Lit, and all three of those, their mission statements is, “We want to publish disenfranchised voices and writers of color and women writers and queer writers.” I think that’s awesome. But then on the other end of it, you still have AWP, which has their own specific racial issues, where you have whole panels on disenfranchised voices that don’t have disenfranchised voices on them. Or when they go for very specific things, like there was a military writers’ panel at the most recent AWP that didn’t have a single active service person on it, or former service person. There were no veterans, just military wives and a military reporter, which I think is hilarious. You also have these big discussions that are led, about submission fees, and about VIDA Count and about trying to have as much inclusivity as possible. I have a ton of problems with all this. I’ll go point-by-point. Just a tiny bit of background.

Before I was into fiction writing, I was trying to get into journalism. I was arrested with Occupy Chicago. I was an activist before I was a writer, and won activist awards for writing. This is going to be something I blabber on about. One of the things I think is the worst barrier for disenfranchised voices is submission fees for magazines. A lot of people will charge a $2 fee to try to discourage people from scatter-shot submitting to everyone, without thinking about what they’re doing. What the fees end up doing, though, is putting up a barrier for people who have to think about every single dollar. It prevents them from reaching an audience that their voice needs to reach. One of the unfortunate realities of fiction writing is that the audience is generally white, generally middle-to-upper class. You have these black, brown, yellow voices that don’t get to have a place in the conversation because of the submission fees that prevent them from getting into the magazines. Everyone gets confused about why magazines are full of white male writers. For the pedi-cab piece I wrote for One Throne, it was their first issue, they hadn’t published a word yet, but I wanted to take a chance on them, partially because it was a free reading fee. While I was writing that, I had to pay attention to every single dollar I was giving. So that’s one thing.

With inclusivity, not only are the reading fees putting people off, but I firmly believe magazines have the responsibility to go find writers that aren’t being broadcasted. That you 100% have the responsibility to go out and look for queer writers, you 100% have the responsibility to go out and look for writers of color. It’s one of those things that, you can’t just put the impetus on the writers of color. You can’t eliminate all your reading fees and say, “Okay, where are all the brown people?” You have to put in the work to find them. A lot of these people are well-intentioned, a lot of these people are well-mannered.

One of the things I was most frustrated about, and why I wrote the McSweeney’s piece, was because I was in an MFA setting, you cannot find a more liberal setting than an MFA program, it’s where the leftists go to breed. But you have all these people who, well-intentioned though they may be, are still falling trap to micro-aggressions, still falling trap to over-generalizations, the “Why aren’t they,” the “Not all white people,” kind of mindset. That’s society at large, but it’s also because there isn’t enough mirror being turned back on the writing world, saying, “Look at how white you are, why aren’t you helping?”

People, if you give them a chance to write, if you give them a chance to read, to be heard, they’ll react positively to that. There’s always that bullshit of like, “Well, we’re going to close down this library over here, because we don’t have the funding for it, the one with the least traffic, but that’s the one with the least traffic because the people don’t have the chance to get there. Why not put more resources into the community to make it a draw, and then you can have a higher readership. You can have a higher patronage. You can put on events, and make that a safe space for people.

PM: That’s a lot to digest.

Also, I read that you’re a registered Republican, in a footnote to your SunDog Lit piece on the Charleston shootings. What GOP principles do you believe in, and how do you separate them from the caustic running dialogue of the Trump crowd?

WV: Oh, absolutely none. I am a registered Republican in that when you vote in the primaries, you register for one of the two parties, well, one of three parties. You either do Independent, Democrat, or Republican. I got this from my mom. She’s a very wonderful lady, but she’s also a registered Republican, in that we use our Republican voices to fuck with the GOP. Every year, when it comes to primary time, we vote for whoever we think is the absolute craziest, or the one with the absolute worst chance of winning. So in 2012, I voted for Ron Paul in the Republican primary. I’d vote for Ron Paul every time, because he’s just the right level of crazy that would never have a chance. This year, I’m voting for Donald Trump, 100%. If he gets the nomination, whoever he runs against is going to crush him. If he gets the nomination and wins, I’m all about that, too, because he’ll totally just destroy the country and we can start from the ashes of the fires he leaves behind.

I always try to find somewhere I can pick out an agreement with this, that, or the other. I believe in the second amendment, but not in the way that Republicans believe in the second amendment. I feel like, if we’re going to be hard-line Constitutionalist about it, there should be no limits on what you can get. If you want to go out and buy yourself a tank, you should be able to go out and buy yourself a tank. If you want to go buy an F-11 fighter jet, go fucking do it, because the whole point of it is to put down a tyrannical government, which you can’t do with a .22 caliber pistol. What you can do with a .22-caliber pistol is kill a whole room full of people who are unable to defend themselves, and that’s pretty fucked up. I feel like it’s gotta be either all or nothing. I guess that would be a way of saying that nothing is the better option, but if I had to pass my Republican test, I think that’s the best I can do.

PM: The tone of Bottom of the Ninth is open, vulnerable, and tender. The honest moments of weakness are cutting and real. What did you learn about yourself, and about close relationships, when you wrote this?

WV: Well, I mean, one of the things I’ve always tried to put into my writing, as a whole, is honesty. When I’m writing fiction, I don’t think that anything shouldn’t be true. All writing is true, even if it’s fiction. What that truth and that honesty is about is something totally different than, “It’s a true story and it actually happened.” One of the things I was trying to get at with this book was to shed more light on things I wanted to talk about, but didn’t know the right ways to, in a thing that wasn’t fiction. I don’t know if I necessarily learned anything about myself and my relationships in it, but I was trying to work through and contextualize some of the things I felt. In “Deadball Era,” I feel like we’ve all had those moments when you look at someone and you just go, “I don’t know what I want to do right now. I don’t know if I want this to be a thing that lasts forever, or something that ends right now. This feels like a moment to end it.” It’s one of those things that, depending on where you are and who you are, and what the light looks like, it can sway your entire view of someone else.

I frequently found myself, if I had a male character and a female character in the same room together in a story, there was something between them romantically. I have a lot of female friends. I have more female friends than male friends. I guess I identify with women better than I identify with men. Most of those relationships? Non-romantic. So I was trying to figure out, okay, “How can I talk about these feelings of love for someone? You truly do love someone, you would do anything for them, you would die for them, but you don’t want to date them. You don’t want to get married to them. How does that work itself out? Why do I have these relationships with women, without them being romantic? Can any of us have relationships that fall into our sexual preference, without wanting to have sex with them?” The Steve Bartman piece, we get anger, irrational anger, why do we act on it? What is in us that makes us do these things? It was more me hashing out my feelings than it was discovering them. I’ve gone to enough therapy to be able to recognize them.

PM: The book starts and ends with a flood. What’s being drowned, what’s being washed away?

WV: When I wrote “Wally Pipped,” I finished it and I was trying to write about that moment when you found something out, and the knowledge of it just slowly killing you. You have this moment of weakness, you have your headache, and you’re replaced. What is it like to know that you were the one who came right before the legend, the way Wally came before Lou Gherig? That you came before the one that worked? How is that going to feel, physically? It feels like slowly drowning. You can see the problem, you’re watching it happen. Soon it’s gonna be over your head, but for right now, you’re still above the water line. When I was dealing with that feeling, it felt like the story wasn’t quite complete at the end. The relationship wasn’t meant to be, but there was more to that feeling. So when I was going through the book and trying to fit together all my pieces, I thought about, well, what about the moment before? One of the things I always try to look at when I’m writing is, “Am I looking at the right moment?”

Frequently, I think, especially in MFA and bachelors’ programs, and creative writing classes, you start in one moment, you end at the end, and frequently, the stories that don’t work, one of the things that could fix them is if you just moved the timeline backward or forward. You’re just not in the right moment. You’re ending in this moment, when so much more meaningful stuff happens after it, or all the good stuff happened before. You’re not getting into the meat of it, when if you just slide the timeline over, you’re getting there. I thought about, so, you’re drowning because you have this knowledge that you’re the one that came before, you were the one who didn’t work out, what happens right before you realize that? I slid it back for Bottom of the Ninth, had these two characters fighting, and the water starts to rise.

Unlike in “Wally Pipped,” it doesn’t get up to them, it doesn’t drown them, but they’re watching it rise. It’s what happens in that moment before, that’s what I was trying to get to. For me, when those two characters were in tandem with each other, at least in the same spot, it became this much bigger feeling that kind of gets at the hope before the crushing defeat. You get to the, “What happens after,” you get to the, “What happens during,” you get, “What happens before.” A lot of my characters are being flooded with things. In “Suicide Squeeze,” you have Virgie, kind of the opposite, where her blood is leaving her instead of drowning her, but this kind of deluge of liquid is the turning point. The Steve Bartman piece turns into this kind of this big shower puff of blood, a deluge that comes and takes everyone away. Even in “4-6,” there’s no physical flood in that, but this dude had a flooding of emotion when he’s reading his dad’s journal entry. You finally get to the point where he reads what his dad said about him on the day he was born. All these characters are drowning in the weight of their moment, and I thought it was really nice to have that be the way it began and ended, and being my through-line.

PM: Kind of along the lines of what you said about acceptance, water and a flood is something you can’t fight, you have to just let it take you where it’s going to take you.

WV: You can’t fight water.