* Q&A with Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh, a former sportswriter with the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published Sort of Gone, a collection of poems centering on the career of a veteran pitcher, both on and off the field.

She took a few minutes to discuss her craft with the bookshelf in an e-mail Q&A:

* * *

Bookshelf: Why did you chose poetry over prose to tell your story?
Freligh: In early 1998, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I found I couldn’t write fiction to save my own life. I was nearing completion on a novel in stories as well as on eight or nine newer stories, but the prospect of immersing myself in all those words seemed impossible. At the time I was the marketing director at BOA Editions where I was reading all these wonderful poets like Kim Addonizio, Lucille Clifton, and Dorianne Laux. They were writing about the simplest things—feeding the cat on the back porch, for example—and managing to make the experience both inclusive and moving. So I started writing poetry and the early poems in Sort of Gone are what came out.

Bookshelf: Did you consider other formats, or did you always have poetry in mind?
Freligh: It was always intended to be poetry, though you could argue that some of the poems in the book are really short fictions. Also, many of the poems are written from the point of view of a limited omniscient narrator rather than the confessional “I” that drives much contemporary poetry. It’s wasn’t so much a choice as just the way it came out.

Bookshelf: When it comes to the craft of writing, do you constantly edit, go through multiple drafts, or do you find first shot is best shot? Do you agonize over every word, since there are obviously so many permutations?
Freligh: I scribble a lot in notebooks. After a while, when I’ve forgotten what I loved or hated about it, I’ll type it into the computer and then start fooling around. I love the sounds of words, the physicality of words. I fool around for a long time, but it’s not agonizing. It’s a luxury I didn’t have when I was a sportswriter writing on 15-minute deadlines. I would read what I had written the next day and be full of regrets at having to be good enough.

Bookshelf: Was the ballplayer based on an actual pitcher?
Freligh: While the character of Al Stepansky is largely fictional, some of his experiences are real—or “ripped from the headlines,” in the words of Law and Order. The poem “Minor League” is based on a real incident that I heard about secondhand. Some minor league players who lived in the apartment building next to mine had a wild party one night during which a player punched a hole in the living room wall. He was far too drunk to risk a trip to the emergency room, so he “cast his hand in masking tape,” just like the poem says. I don’t know if anyone signed it; that’s the fictional part.

Bookshelf: Tell me about your career as a sportswriter.
Freligh: I started out at a very small daily in Illinois. From there, I went back to graduate school at University of South Carolina where I got a Master’s in Mass Communication. I spent a couple years in Fort Myers, Florida, covering the Miami Dolphins, the Kansas City Royals, who at the time had their spring training complex in Fort Myers, and the Fort Myers Royals of the Florida State League. From there I went to the Philadelphia Inquirer where I covered Penn State football, boxing, Olympic sports, and tennis.

Bookshelf: Do you think that experience helped in this book, or did it make no difference, since the mediums are so different?
Freligh: I think any writing, if it’s going to recreate experience rather than just report on experience, demands that the writer pay attention. Whether you’re writing sports or a sestina, you’re recreating a world for the reader. And it has to be a very particularized, non-generic world, so you better pay attention.

Bookshelf: What is the significance of the title, Sort of Gone?
Freligh: It’s the title of one of the poems, so named because the rather eccentric pitcher in the poem offers up several equivocal observations prefaced by “sort of.” I also think of it as the “sort of” netherworld where a ballplayer finds himself at the end of his career. His body has retired, his mind has not. He’s “sort of gone.”

Bookshelf: Who were your “poetic” and sportswriting influences?
Freligh: Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio, whom I’ve already mentioned. Jane Shore. Perhaps the biggest influence was B.H. “Pete” Fairchild. His book, The Art of the Lathe, blew me away and continues to do so. His poem “Body and Soul” is undoubtedly the best baseball poem ever written. In sportswriting, John Ed Bradley. He’s a writer who occasionally writes sports.

* * *

A review of Sort of Gone appears on NPR’s Only a Game Web site.