Joseph Mills Pulls Back the Curtain on the Lives of Soccer Moms and Dads in “Bleachers: fifty-four linked fictions”
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:10:57 — 65.1MB)
In this episode 158, we visit with Joseph Mills, author of “Bleachers: fifty-four linked fictions,” stories about what happens in and around youth sports.
Shaindel Beers, author of “Secure Your Own Mask,” Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, says “in Bleachers, Joe Mills pulls back the curtain on an oft-ridiculed segment of society, the ‘soccer mom’ (or dad!) and reveals the deeper recesses of the human psyche. The realization that to have a child is ‘the death of the self,’ that some days the best you can do as a parent is ‘just be there,’ and myriad other epiphanies. From Pre-Game to Post-Game, from ‘Aging’ to ‘Zidane,’ there are life lessons for player and parent.”
Joe starts the show reading one of the stories titled “Broncos,” where one mother wonders why teams couldn’t be more honest about what they call themselves.
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About the Author:
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has published six collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Exit, pursued by a bear which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. In 2019, he published his debut collection of fiction, Bleachers, which consists of fifty-four linked pieces that take place during a youth soccer game.
Mills also writes criticism, and non-fiction. He edited the collection of film criticism A Century of the Marx Brothers. With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries, and his essay “On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie” won the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition.
He holds degrees from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California – Davis (Ph.D.). Despite these, he cannot master barre chords on the guitar. Nor do they earn him any respect from his children. His daughter insists that he isn’t “a real doctor” since he doesn’t work in a hospital, and his son is puzzled as to why anyone would want an autographed book from him, saying, “It’s not like your LeBron James.”
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More Praise for the book:
I am not sure I have encountered a writer who can so completely, and continuously, blindside me with a smack of emotion as Joseph Mills always does. Reading several of these stories, I was nodding along, thinking yep, yep, yep . . . and then WHOA. I found pieces of myself in so many of the parents, and so clearly identified other family members and people I know in some of the other characters. I love the connections between the stories and how he perfectly captures life as a parent. This is simply fantastic.
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