Barbara Gregorich

Barbara Gregorich writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She’s on First and the award-winning Women at Play: The Story of Women in baseball are her best-known books. The F Words is her first YA novel.

Twitter: @FWordsYA

Favorite non-reading activity?

Baseball! I grew up playing hardball and dreamed of becoming a major leaguer. At the age of eleven I realized that Major League Baseball was closed to women. Had I been as politically conscious as the 15-year-olds in The F Words, I would have organized kids to protest this injustice. As it was, I decided that if I couldn’t be a baseball player, I would be a writer: baseball and writing were my two passions.

What I would write, of course, was mystery novels, because I also loved the idea of discovering the truth. I didn’t think, back then, that I would write about baseball, but as it ended up, I’ve written a lot about baseball — much of it about women in baseball. My very first book was a novel (She’s on First) positing a female shortstop in the major leagues. But as I was writing the novel, I asked myself if the entire thought of a woman playing baseball was totally fiction . . . or, might women have played baseball in reality, and, if so, could I discover the truth?

Yes. Women have played hardball since baseball was introduced, and during the period from the 1870s through the 1930s they played on barnstorming Bloomer Girl teams. I helped unearth much of their story and told it in the award-winning book, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball.

During all this time, I never stopped loving baseball and never stopped going to baseball games. I’ve lived in Cleveland, Boston, and now Chicago (two major league teams!) and have seen three of these four teams win a World Series. Which only makes me hunger for more baseball!

Is your go-to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?

This is a tough one, because I love sweet and I love savory. But I seldom eat sweet without having savory first, so I will go with the savory. My favorite comfort food is a deliciously rich toasted cheese sandwich. I’m talking either white bread like freshly baked Italian or French Peasant, or ancient grains bread. Thickly sliced. Buttered both inside and out. Topped with a sharp cheddar, the slices of cheddar slathered with a creamy brie or a tangy blue. Griddled to perfection, oozing small driblets of cheese onto the serving platter.

Yes, I make this myself. But more often than not, I can cajole my husband, Phil Passen, into making it: he loves to cook on the griddle.

I’m not sure that food inspires my writing so much as that I’m inspired to put food into all of my stories. What people eat, how they eat it, when they eat it, whether they eat alone or with others — all these things help a writer show both character and setting. In The F Words, for example, Cole Renner barbecues hamburgers in the backyard. This is what his father always did, but his father is serving 120 days in Cook County Jail for leading protests against the closing of public schools. When Cole has breakfast at his best friend Felipe Ramirez’s house, he eats Mexican food: huevos rancheros. And when Cole, Felipe, Treva, and other students are at a mass march for immigrant rights, they smell all the vendor foods and become hungry. They don’t eat while marching, but afterwards they all chow down on pizza. I think that there are similar appropriate food scenes in all of my books.

Not all books are for all readers . . . when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?

Forty pages. If I’m not immersed in the book by forty pages, if I don’t care about the characters or the plot by then, I bail.

This isn’t to say that I start any old book and then bail after forty pages. Good writing and good story-telling are both very important to me, so I always read the first two or three pages before I decide to purchase a book. This two-or-three pages approach eliminates a lot of books, and I’m happy about that because it means I’m more likely to enjoy the books that pass the beginning-pages test.

But sometimes I find that the books fall flat after the first several pages: that’s where the forty-page test comes in. Some of the things that turn me off are: (1) improbabilities in character actions or situations; (2) overuse of weak verbs such as get, was, were, let . . . Yawn; (3) inserting exposition into dialogue, with two characters telling each other things they already know. The latter pretty much makes me put the book down immediately.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing?

I sure wish I could answer by saying, “Yes — I play baseball!” Seriously, though, I weave baskets and I crochet sleeping mats out of used plastic bags.

I started weaving baskets around 2002 or 2003, and learned by taking classes at places such as John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, or through various basket-weaving societies in the Midwest. Basket weavers are everywhere, but because I live in Chicago it was less expensive to travel to the Midwestern classes. I prefer flat reed to round reed, and I love weaving patterns that master weavers have created and published. I like weaving market baskets and catheads and large baskets that sit on the floor (because they’re too big for a shelf). Many people love weaving miniature baskets, about an inch or two inches large. Not me. I think there’s probably some sort of inner-artist connection between my writing and my weaving, in that I prefer larger forms such as the novel and the standing basket.

My mother was a fantastic crocheter, but I was never interested in the skill when I was a kid. Too busy playing baseball every day. In college, though, I took up crocheting, learning from books and by watching others crochet. I went through the whole granny-square craze, making caps, vests, shawls, bedspreads, wall hangings. At some point I gave up crocheting . . . possibly I had made one granny square too many. About ten years ago, though, a friend asked me to try crocheting a sleeping mat, roughly 6’x3’ out of used plastic bags. The mats are for people who, because they can’t afford rent or a mortgage, live on the streets.

A sleeping mat made out of single-crochet stitches is very tight, very cushiony, and very warm. When a person sleeps on one outdoors, the mat helps keeps the ground moisture and cold at bay. Thus the mat helps protect people and keep them warm. After I crocheted my first mat I put it down on the ground and laid down on it, to see what it was like. To my surprise, it was super comfortable.

To date I’ve crocheted 53 of these mats, and I’ve given each to New Life for Old Bags, the organization that collects and distributes the mats to those who need them the most. Each mat uses approximately 800 recycled bags. With each of my mats, I crochet some sort of interesting pattern, so that the person who gets the mat is getting a piece of art as well as a much-needed piece of bedding. One of my favorites was a mat I made in imitation of a Kandinsky painting that I had just seen at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

Until I was four years old, I think I spoke only Croatian, because that’s what my parents and grandparents spoke at home. Once I went to school, I spoke English there and with my friends, and spoke Croatian less and less until, by the time I was twenty, I barely spoke it at all. In high school I learned French, and in college I took Russian and German classes. I think it’s safe to say that while I recognize all four of these languages, I don’t speak any of them — although knowing French really, really helps me in solving crossword puzzles.

Because I don’t speak these other languages, I don’t think in them. But knowing other languages, even a bit, definitely influences my writing. For example, in my two mystery novels, Dirty Proof and Sound Proof, the private eye, Frank Dragovic, often quotes Croatian idioms, and then translates them for the listener. Readers love these idioms and always ask for more — there’s something about other languages and their way of stating things that is fascinating to people.

Notice that I have not taken Spanish classes, yet in The F Words Felipe and Cole throw Spanish words and expressions into their daily conversation all the time. Treva, who tries to pick up Spanish on the go from them, sometimes gets the words right, sometimes wrong. (She has trouble with adjectives and adverbs.) Unlike Treva, though, it was my job as author to get the words and nuances right. I did this by asking Spanish speakers and by checking Google translations. And by listening. I do hear Spanish a lot, and I sometimes ask questions about what’s being said or what particular words mean. You can pick up many things by listening.

For The F Words I had to be certain that the words and expressions were correct. I had intended to hire somebody to read the whole book and “vet” the Spanish, but as it turned out my editor, Marti Gorman of City of Light Publishing, is fluent in Spanish and eagerly and properly corrected my usage throughout the book.

Marti and I are both still chuckling about the scene in which Cole, Felipe, and Treva are planning strategy for Felipe’s campaign for class president. Felipe says they will run some photos, but not inmediatamente. Treva, riffing off what she has just heard, tells him his strategy is brillantamente — but that is incorrect Spanish. In editing, Marti corrected Treva’s usage to brillante . . . only to realize, a couple of lines later, when Felipe corrects the word to brillante, that Treva’s usage was supposed to be incorrect. So Marti had to go back and put in the incorrect Spanish. Having Spanish in The F Words not only makes the story more realistic: it makes it more fun.