Greg Oldfield is a physical education teacher and coach from the Philadelphia area where he lives with his wife and daughter. His stories can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, Porcupine Literary, and Maudlin House, among others.
Greg’s essay “Sitting on the Change” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
Your story runs on two different tracks. It focuses on not only your wife's high-risk pregnancy but also Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels' 2009 season. When did you decide that you wanted to connect the two events and incorporate Hamels' season in your essay?
I always knew I was going to write about seeing Cole Hamels in the hospital. From the start that had been the seed of the story. And even though we lived two completely separate lives, that single moment in time felt like the perfect starting point. So in my mind these two stories had always been intertwined. There were many significant events in both our lives before and after that meeting, so the hardest part was finding its placement. It took me almost ten years to actually write the story and piece together. It was a life-changing period, probably for both of us, so I needed time to process my own thoughts and figure out how I was going to tell it effectively. I wanted the story to be a proper tribute to my wife, who taught me about love and strength as she defied odds and the physical stress of battling kidney disease while pregnant, and a tribute to a great player who got completely crucified one year after bringing the first championship to a title-hungry city in 25 years.
I also needed time to grow as a writer. I'd only started writing a couple of years after the events in the story and was years away from starting my MFA at Arcadia. My writing was unrefined and kind of directionless, so I didn't know how to write a story like this when it happened. I learned as much as I could, studied other writers, read dozens of craft books, and eventually I found the confidence to dive in and write a draft.
This was also one of the hardest stories emotionally I've ever written. I do a lot of my writing before school. My office is an equipment closet that stinks like pinnies and used roller blades. I have two small windows on my doors and oftentimes I'm so entranced in working, listening to music, that sometimes colleagues or kids startle me when they knock on the door. While I was writing this story, there'd be days where I'd be sobbing, tears streaming down my face, but I'm chugging along and don't want to stop even though I'm crying. I was always nervous that someone would knock on the door and wonder what was wrong with me.
I'm also as a sports nut, and a majority of my stories incorporate some kind of game or player. It's kind of the way the world makes sense to me. David Peace wrote a novel called Damned United about a European-Cup-winning English soccer coach named Brian Clough who took over his rival club for 44 days before being fired. It's written as a dual narrative between two time periods. I found that approach fascinating, so I've experimented a lot with that technique and this was one where I felt it fit naturally.
Part of why I think your nonfiction is so effective you struck the delicate balance between the emotional story and facts. The level of detail on both the medical procedures and the MLB facts is so specific and well-researched. How did you balance the two?
I'm a huge fan of John McPhee. One of the aspects of his writing that I've always admired is his ability to enhance stories with factual details. He may have even written about this in Draft No.4, which is an incredible compilation of essays about his writing process. The more I read McPhee, the more I understood this type of balance. I'm not a huge stats person, but for this story I wanted those numbers to quantify the situation. Baseball is such a data-driven game that little details like Cole's ERA comparisons, records, and scores were critical. There's a great line in Bull Durham where Kevin Costner's character tells the other players how one extra hit every week is the difference between hitting .250 and .300 in a season. My wife's a Nurse Practitioner and my undergrad was Kinesiology, so the medical terminology had to be accurate or else I'd hear about it. But without too much jargon, both from the medical side and sports side. I went back and read old hospital records, diagnoses, and dates, things I'd wanted to forget. For baseball research, I watched a lot of Phillies games from 2009 and sifted through old stories, which was fun.
Balance was something I had to reel in. I shared a pretty lengthy draft with Leslie Pietrzyk at Barrelhouse Writer Camp last summer. She helped me sort through what to keep and what should go. It had a lot more Cole stats, minor stories about his year and how it fluctuated. I really got carried away. It took a few months of stepping back from the story for me to cut more, but she was 100% right and it made the essay even better. That feedback helped me complete the threads.
When did you start submitting stories? Who are some writers that influenced you?
I'm one of those late-bloomers. I didn't start writing anything until I was 28. My brother and I went to England to watch 7 soccer games in 8 days, traveling from Manchester to London to Portsmouth. I'd read Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch on the flight over and wanted to write a similar book but from an American perspective. There were nights where I was jet lagged or buzzed, writing through half the night. I knew I wanted to be a writer after that but didn't know how. Those 80,000 words still sit in dead files, but I may be revisiting them soon.
I submitted and published my first story in 2016 at 37. I'm now 41. I'm typically a slow writer, often balancing multiple projects at a time, and I had to learn how to finally put some work to the side and finish so I could submit.
The MFA Program Director at Arcadia, Joshua Isard, was the most influential writer I've ever worked with. He'd published his first novel Conquistadors of the Useless right before I started at Arcadia. We had similar interests in sports and are about the same age, so we'd talk about everything from minimalism to English soccer to parenting. I enjoyed his honesty. He could articulate where the writing was working and wasn't afraid to let me know when it wasn't. I was at a point in my life where I appreciated that kind of no BS. I don't know if I would have been a writer at a younger age. I was too sensitive and didn't take rejection well.
My influences are so sporadic. At first, it was probably Fitzgerald and Hemingway. One week it's Márquez and Colson Whitehead, the next week it's Hunter S. Thompson and Amy Hempel. Jim Shepard is probably my favorite short story writer. He wrote a story called "Ajax is All About Attack" that was published in Harper's in 1996 and is in his collection Love and Hydrogen. I have it downloaded on my phone and re-read it often. His prose is so clean, and he always adds subtle humor, which I love. Lately, I've been reading a ton of McPhee and Wright Thompson. I always try to take a piece of something from everybody.