Posted by JHR on October 18, 2002 at 11:19:55:
In Reply to: aplogie posted by matt donaldson on October 17, 2002 at 10:52:20:
Matt,
No sweat. Happy to answer what I can, though I wish I had more time to do so, since I travel around the country a lot.
Here's some thing you might find helpful. Please share it with your teacher and the others in your class.
All my best,
--JHR
RITTER, John H.
PERSONAL: Born in CA Education: Attended University of California at San Diego. Hobbies and other interests: "Speaking to teachers, students, and writers at conferences and universities about creativity and the writing process; playing baseball in an amateur league; playing guitar and writing songs; walking the streets, observing people, and walking in the country under the stars at night."
ADDRESSES: Home--San Diego, CA. Agent--Ginger Knowlton, Curtis Brown, Ltd., Ten Astor Place, New York, NY 10003.
CAREER: Writer. Speaker in schools and conferences. Custom painting contractor. 1973-98.
MEMBER: Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, International Reading Association, National Council of Teachers of English (member, Assembly of Literature for Adolescents), Native Cultures Institute of Baja California.
AWARDS, HONORS: Judy Blume Award, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, 1994; Children's Book Award, International Reading Association (IRA), Best Book for Young Adults, American Library Association (ALA), and Blue Ribbon Book, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, all 1999, and Young Adult Readers Choice, IRA, 2000, all for Choosing up Sides; Books for the Teen Age list, New York Public Library, Parents' Guide to Children's Media Award, Shenandoah University, and Texas State Lone Star Book designation, all 2001, all for Over the Wall.
WRITINGS
Choosing up Sides, Philomel (New York, NY), 1998.
Over the Wall, Philomel (New York, NY), 2000.
Ritter's work has also appeared in various periodicals, including Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor.
WORK IN PROGRESS: "A novel about a strange boy who shows up to join a ragged baseball team in order to help them win a crucial game to save their small town."
SIDELIGHTS: "I grew up with my left hand tied behind my back. Well, actually, it was only tied up till I was six or seven." Thus begins John H. Ritter's Choosing up Sides, a "debut tale of epiphany and apocalypse," according to Elizabeth Bush in a review for Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Ritter's 1998 novel introduces readers to the world of fervent baseball, Bible-thumping religion, and a life-altering choice imposed on a young boy with an incredible talent. Ritter's novel is at once morality tale and sports book, but not your ordinary play-by-play sports book. Winner of the prestigious International Reading Association's Children's Book Award as well as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults citation, Choosing up Sides augured a fine career for the new author. With his second novel, Over the Wall, such a promise was fulfilled. As Chris Crowe colorfully put it in a critique for ALAN Review, "With his baseball novel Choosing up Sides . . . rookie YA author John H. Ritter landed a spot on the All Star team. . . . Ritter's second at bat, Over the Wall, will secure him a regular spot in the line up of notable authors writing about sports for young adults."
"I never intended [my books] to be play-by-play sports novels," Ritter told Crowe in an ALAN Review interview. "I'm more interested in using baseball scenes as metaphor, or for challenges of character, or to advance the story. I could as easily set the stories in the world of ballet, were I as knowledgeable in that arena. But the thrust would be the same. Kids dealing with hard choices. To me, that's the definition of YA lit." Success with his first two books meant Ritter could quit his day job and go at writing full time. Working for twenty-five years as a painting contractor, he was ready to give painting with words a larger place in his life.
"I grew up in a baseball family," Ritter noted on his Web site. He and his brothers played one-on-one hardball in the dry hills of rural San Diego County, near the Mexican border. His father, sports editor of the San Diego Union, was a large influence in his love for the game. But there was more than simply sports in the family background. "We were also a family of musicians and mathematicians, house painters and poets," Ritter explained. Originally from Ohio, the family moved to California just before Ritter's birth; at age four he lost his mother to breast cancer. "One thing I can remember about my mom is that she sang to us constantly, making up a song for each of her four children that fit our personalities perfectly. So from her, I got a sense of how to capture a person's spirit in a lyrical phrase."
Another early influence on Ritter was his rural upbringing, the solitude and independence of depending on himself and his siblings for entertainment and friendship. "Out in that country," Ritter explained on his Web site, "the neighbor kids lived so far away, my brothers and I developed a half-real, half-imaginary game where we pitched and hit the ball, then dreamed up the rest, keeping the score, game situations, and full, major league line-ups in our heads." Such games were an early training for Ritter in the art of storyline and plot development.
At school Ritter was, as he described himself to Crowe, a "wild student. . . . A rabble rouser and a contrarian." Ritter was always looking for the exception to the rule, and in spite or perhaps because of this questioning nature, he was also a high achiever. But he had something of a dual personality in school. "I could be extremely focused one day, then get tossed out of class the next," he admitted to Crowe. "As proof, in high school I was voted both the Senior Class President and the Senior Class Clown." Teachers along the way also discovered that Ritter had a way with words, and would read his work out to the class as an example of good writing.
Meanwhile, Ritter's father had remarried and two more sisters were added to the Ritter family mix. Baseball continued to dominate his free-time activities; some even thought he might have a chance at playing pro ball. By the time he was in high school, however, Ritter discovered the joys of song writing, heavily influenced by Bob Dylan and Dylan's working-class perspectives. Graduating from high school, Ritter went to college at the University of California at San Diego, carrying around a little notebook in which he would write lyrics for songs, noting riffs and phrases. At school he met his future wife, but by his second year, Ritter knew that he needed to get on with life, that college was not the place he needed to be at that time. "I knew I had to walk the streets, touch life, embrace life, gain experience," he told Crowe. "I wanted to learn from life. To hit the road like Kerouac, Dylan, and Twain. To have something real to write about." So one spring day he filled out a withdrawal card and left the university behind, taking a job as a painter's apprentice with a commercial contractor he had already worked for during the summers. Working for three or four months per year, he could save enough to travel and write the rest of the year. After several years, he married and had a baby daughter; that upped the work year to nine months. However, Ritter always scheduled time for writing.
Ritter struggled with his writing part-time until the late 1980s when he joined a local fiction group led by YA novelist Joan Oppenheimer. Working in this environment of feedback and comment, Ritter soon grew in his abilities. He took extension writing classes, joined another writing group, and in 1994 won the Judy Blume Award for a novel in progress. Though the novel remained unpublished, it did build confidence in the young writer and opened doors with editors. When he settled down to writing another coming-of-age novel, Ritter opted for a baseball setting. He chose such a background for two reasons: not only is this a topic close to his heart, but also baseball carries a heavy and resonant metaphorical value in American culture. Further influences for his first novel came from the author's personal juvenile experiences with prejudice and bias. Growing up in the 1960s, he watched nightly news reports of the civil rights movement, graphic film clips of marchers set upon by snarling dogs, pummeled by police batons, and crushed by sprays of water from fire hoses. Then came the kidnapings and murders in Mississippi. As a ten-year-old country boy, the world seemed to make no sense. About that same time, a teacher put the word "sinister" on the board and asked Ritter and his fellow students the meaning of the word. When the same teacher revealed that, instead of "diabolical" or "evil", it was simply the Latin root for "left" or "left-sided," Ritter learned another lesson in bias. For him and other baseball players, lefties were highly valued--there was nothing sinister about them. But later in life, these feelings and experiences coalesced in the writing of the novel that became Choosing up Sides.
Ritter sets his first novel in Southern Ohio in the 1920s, and to research the book he read widely on religious movements, the characteristics of left-handedness, and the Appalachian dialect. He visited relatives in the region who helped with interviewing local people to get to know more intimately customs and culture. Also blended into the stew is a story Ritter's father liked to tell, about a buddy who was so fond of tossing crab apples at a telephone pole that ultimately he became a great pitcher.
The novel's protagonist is thirteen-year-old Luke Bledsoe, the oldest son of a preacher. Born left-handed, Luke is, in the eyes of his Fundamentalist father, a throwback, a potential follower of Satan, for that is the hand of the devil. The authoritarian father, Ezekiel, tries to "cure" Luke of his left-handedness by tying that hand behind his back, but with little luck. Luke's father is the new minister at the Baptist Church in Crown Falls, Ohio, and Luke is the new boy in a town that is baseball crazy. The local team won the county championship the previous year and hopes to do so again this year. But for Luke's father, baseball is, like dancing, a temptation that needs to be resisted. Then one day, while Luke is watching a forbidden game, a ball lands at his feet. Throwing it back with his left hand, he amazes the crowd with his distance and placement. He looks to be the natural the team desperately needs to clinch the championship, and everyone sets about trying to recruit the boy, who has quite accidentally built up his pitching arm by tossing apples.
Classmate and slugger Skinny Lappman counters Ezekiel's religious objections by saying that the wasting of talent such as Luke's is the bigger sin. Also enlisted in the campaign is baseball fanatic Annabeth Quinn, for whom Luke has a strong attraction. Uncle Micah, a sports reporter on his mother's side, also plays a part in this conversion, whisking the talented youngster off to see Babe Ruth, another southpaw, play. Finally Luke gives in and decides to pitch for the team, becoming the local hero until a confrontation with his father leads to a violent beating. His father breaks Luke's pitching arm in the altercation, and the boy vows to run away. Tragically and ironically, Luke's father falls into the Ohio River and Luke is unable to throw a lifeline to him because of his broken arm.
The bare outline of the plot does little to describe a book rich in characterization, nuance, metaphor, and dialogue. Ritter did not commit the first-time writer's mistake of flat characterization. Even Luke's father Ezekiel is shown to have his human side; he is not simply a tyrant. Jealous of Luke's bond with Uncle Micah, Ezekiel overcomes his fear of water and takes his son fishing. At one point, he gently touches his son's shoulder with his left hand, indicating to Luke that he too was born left-handed and has had to repress it all these years. The irony of Ezekiel's death is all the stronger not only because he dies because he has broken his son's throwing arm, but also because his favorite hymn for sinners is "Throw out the Lifeline."
Critics and reviewers responded strongly to Choosing up Sides, Bush describing it as a novel that "pits fire and brimstone Fundamentalism against a rival religion--Baseball--and treats both with cathartic understanding." Ritter uses an even hand not only in treatment of theme, but in style. Bush further commented, "leavening the sober elements of this morality tale . . . is the pure joy of baseball and, at least in Luke's case, its redemptive power." Patricia K. Ladd, writing in ALAN Review, felt that Ritter "addresses themes of autonomy and independence common to young adult readers and portrays plot through authentic dialect and well-developed characters." Ladd went on to note that though the tale was, at first glance, "a simple story of realistic fiction, perhaps even a parable," Ritter's use of dialogue, similes, metaphors and imagery all "add dimensions to the plot that leave readers pondering the book's messages long after turning the final page." Kate Clarke, reviewing the title in Book Report, called it an "entertaining and thought-provoking coming-of-age story" about "being true to one's self and choosing how to live." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that, "Despite its somewhat didactic tone, this story offers enough curve balls to keep readers engaged." "Unlike many sports novels, Choosing up Sides does more than offer a mere glimpse of the grand old game of baseball--it takes a deeper look at faith, truth, and individuality," maintained Stefani Koorey in her Voice of Youth Advocates review, going on to dub the tale a "well-designed study of personal choice" and concluding: "With its wide appeal, this first-person story is a recommended purchase for all public and school libraries." Joel Shoemaker, reviewing Choosing up Sides for School Library Journal, also praised the writing and theme of Ritter's publishing debut. "Cleverly told in a colloquial first-person twang, this thoughtful tale of authority questioned and dreams denied will be real enough to many readers," Shoemaker wrote. And in announcing the Children's Book Award in Reading Today, the IRA committee felt that Ritter's tale was laced with humor," and presented a "realistic and inspirational picture of a young man torn between two worlds."
News of the IRA award literally brought tears to Ritter's eyes; it was a vindication of his many years of hard work and perseverance. The author, who writes his first drafts longhand and subsequent drafts on the computer, was quick to follow up this initial success with another hard-hitting novel using baseball as a further metaphor for life.
"Writing a book is a lot like growing a plant," Ritter noted in a letter to a young reader posted on the author's Web site. "It starts with a seed, which is only an idea. But like all seeds, it does have the potential to grow into something interesting if you nurture it and are patient. The seed of the idea for Over the Wall came from my discovery of two facts. One is that twice as many Vietnam vets died by suicide after the war ended than actually died in the war. The other is that fifty times as many Vietnamese died fighting to save their country as did Americans, but there is no `wall' for them that lists all of their names. When I realized how unfair and how self-centered that was for Americans to only care about their own people, I realized that the Vietnam War was not really over for many Americans."
In his second novel, Ritter once again takes an historical setting, though one closer to the present, in a story about a boy's journey attempting to reconnect with his father and discover who he is in the process. There are many "walls" in thirteen-year-old Tyler's life: the literal wall of the baseball field he wants to clear with a mighty slam; the Vietnam memorial wall bearing his grandfather's name; and the invisible wall Tyler's dad has built around himself ever since the death of his daughter--Tyler's sister--nine years earlier. When he is invited to spend the summer in New York City with his cousin, Tyler is determined to make it onto the roster of an all-star baseball team. However, Tyler's explosive temper gets in the way of his obvious talent. With the help of his pretty cousin and with the sage advice of his coach, a Vietnam vet, Tyler manages to navigate the risky waters of this passage. The coach helps the boy reconnect with himself and his guilt-ravaged dad. "By the end," noted Todd Morning in a review of Over the Wall for School Library Journal, "Tyler has gained a level of self-awareness by unraveling some of the tangled stories in his family's past and understanding the intricacies lying beneath the surface of life." Morning concluded, "Sports are just a part of this ambitious work that presents a compelling, multilayered story." A Publishers Weekly reviewer found Ritter's second novel to be a "powerful lesson in compassion," and Roger Leslie agreed in Booklist, commenting that Over the Wall is a "fully fleshed-out story about compassion and absolution." Connie Russell, reviewing the title for ALAN Review, called the book a "poignant and accessible coming-of-age story," while Ladd described the novel as a "profound story of realistic fiction for young and mature adults."
"The driving force behind all my stories comes primarily from finding something that really bugs me," Ritter explained to Crowe. "And so far, it tends to be some sort of injustice. But I refuse to write revenge stories. I hate them. I won't even watch a revenge movie. To me, it's the easy response to injustice, and it lacks integrity. . . . So I try to look for an alternative solution. That's what spawns my ideas." In an interview with Teri Lesesne in Teacher Librarian, Ritter also added insight into the type of novel he enjoys writing: "I don't believe in choosing between character-and plot-driven novels. To me, the greatest stories are a finely woven blend of both. That's what I shoot for. Of the two, character comes easier for me, so I fret more about my plots. That becomes the sand in the oyster--or the ointment--for me. What if a left-handed boy is forced to be right-handed? What's the best thing that could happen? What's the worst? Or what steps, what events would lead an angry and bitter kid to learn to embrace his enemies as a way of freeing himself from the prison of his emotions? How does one get over that wall? These kinds of questions nag at me until I can answer them. That's how my books begin."
Fans of Ritter's first two novels--young readers, critics, and award committees alike--await what other thing might "bug" or "nag" at the author, and result in his next work of fiction. Meanwhile, Ritter carries on with his craft, putting in ten-hour days at the writing desk in hopes of getting just the right word, the right phrase. "I love using that voice to say something I need to say," he concluded on his Web site. "I love the rhythms and the musicality of language. I love discovering a good story, building it, and telling it. And when they all come together between the covers of the book, it's like magic."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES
BOOKS
Ritter, John H., Choosing up Sides, Philomel (New York, NY), 1998.
PERIODICALS
ALAN Review, spring-summer, 2000, Chris Crowe, "An Interview with John H. Ritter," pp. 5-9; spring-summer, 2000, Patricia K. Ladd, "Covering the Bases with Young Adult Literature," pp. 10-17; fall, 2000, Connie Russell, review of Over the Wall, p. 33.
Book Report, March-April, 1999, Kate Clarke, review of Choosing up Sides, p. 63.
Booklist, March 1, 1998, p. 1513; March 15, 1999, p. 1302; April 1, 2000, Roger Leslie, review of Over the Wall, p. 1451.
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June, 1998, Elizabeth Bush, "The Big Picture."
Childhood Education, spring, 1999, p. 174.
Publishers Weekly, April 13, 1998, review of Choosing up Sides, p. 76, May 29, 2000, review of Over the Wall, p. 83.
Reading Today, June-July, 1999, "IRA Names Award-winning Children's Books," p. 21.
School Library Journal, June, 1998, Joel Shoemaker, review of Choosing up Sides, p. 152; June, 2000, Todd Morning, review of Over the Wall, p. 152.
Teacher Librarian, March, 2001, Teri Lesesne, "Complexities, Choices, and Challenges," pp. 44-47.
Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 1998, Stefani Koorey, review of Choosing up Sides.
OTHER
John H. Ritter Web site, http://www.johnhritter.com/ (May 12, 2001).*
###
Follow Ups to the above message: