Matt Holsopple: So, you’re an ODU MFA alumnus. What do you think are the benefits and drawbacks of an MFA program?

Greg Larson: The soft skills you learn in an MFA are incredibly valuable. However, you’ll learn just as many bad habits you’ll have to undo outside the program. That’s because there’s a little bubble we exist in the MFA that is not the real world; it’s also not the literary world. It’s only one small subset that nobody outside of it even knows about.

You mentioned bad habits there: what habits are you referring to?

In general, MFA programs place too much emphasis on the words and sentences, and not enough emphasis on the actual narrative arc. For context, I work full-time as a copywriter for an AI company. There’s a copywriting concept called the open loop: it means you give the audience just enough information to make them ask a question in their head, but that question is left unanswered until the end. The audience will feel a need to close that loop. The MFA world generally has zero consideration for the audience. The writing you’re doing in an MFA program is for yourself, and the audience is the workshop, which is the worst audience. There’s not enough emphasis on the narrative thrust of a story.

What did you value most about the program?

My thesis was Clubbie, which turned into something really valuable in my life. There was also a lot of stuff I wrote that I had to recognize as just getting reps in. Me tinkering with a piece over and over again––then trying to place it in some literary journal nobody’s going to read––that was not as valuable to me as just getting in as many reps as possible.

Did Clubbie start out as a single essay then grow into something greater? Or did you know from the get-go you were going to write about this topic?

I knew from the get-go that I was going to write Clubbie. But, when I started drafting essays for it, they were more exposé than narrative. I was trying to write it like a journalist, so Greg Larson wasn’t a character in it. I was trying to be an objective observer of the space—integrating all these statistics and showing off all this research. After a few drafts with that framework, a classmate in workshop said it’s very obvious to me that Greg wants to be one of these players, yet he hasn’t made himself a character in this story. I didn’t want to be another person writing a memoir, but I realized I was the main character of this story.

I really loved the humor in this book. Is that an aesthetic choice for you? Where does that come from?

I’d say the humor is probably a defense mechanism, but it’s also the way I had to approach the baseball world. It’s a goofy place where a lot of wacky shit happens. If you don’t have a sense of humor about it, it’s going to eat you up. I’m not sure if that’s an aesthetic for me, but if you asked any of my professors from grad school, I bet they’d be able to pin that irreverence as my voice.

If you had the chance, would you change anything about Clubbie? What didn’t make the final cut?

If I were to go back and rewrite it, Clubbie would be way more of a love story. I’ve had a lot of readers say that they felt like the end was really abrupt, and I can see that. When I wrote it, there was an aspect of that love story with my girlfriend at the time I just did not have the guts to dig into.

But there was a lot that wasn’t included. When I first started shopping it around, Clubbie was 95,000 words, and I made the choice to cut it down to around 77,000. I originally had lots of research about stuff like Jackie Robinson and the integration of the game. For example, the guy that Jackie Robinson replaced on the Dodgers went to my university, and I used that as an intro. I cut most of that, because it was so far afield of where the story was going—and no reader gave a fuck. Both readers and agents told me that it was too slow, and they were right. A mentor of mine once told me, start the story late and finish it early.

How did you approach research for Clubbie?

I did two main types of research—the stats and the journals I kept. In hindsight, I kind of cringe at the stats. All those numbers were in service of a very narrow demographic of readers from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) world that turned out to be very loyal to the book. They’re basically the most diehard baseball fans. I pored over so many box scores and play-by-plays with those guys in mind.

But most of my research was the 280-plus pages of journals I kept for those two summers. I would say I have the fortune of having them, but it wasn’t fortune that made them so much as raw effort. I literally catalogued full conversations in those journals, so I would say that was the most important research to me.

I read that you’re also a stand-up comedian. Can you talk about that?

It’s one of those things I knew I would regret if I didn’t try it. I first took the stage when I was 19 years old at Joke Joint Comedy Club in the Mall of America parking lot. I wasn’t old enough to even be in the club, so I’m not sure what prompted me to get up there. I’ve always been the class clown and a smart ass, which is probably just the natural side effect of being the youngest of five boys. I had been doing it on-and-off for literally decades before I realized it was just a self-sabotaging behavior. I was spending my time at Shenanigans nightclub on a Friday night when I should have been at home either sleeping or promoting my book.

When did you realize you wanted to become a writer?

I don’t exactly remember the moment I became a writer, but I do have evidence of it. My elementary school had this publishing house in our library where you’d use glue sticks and some cloth on cardboard to create a little book. I found this book I made about a bunch of pirates on the open sea. As you flip through it, you see a picture of Johnny the pirate along with one small sentence about him—the picture takes up 95% of the page. The next page, there’s a little more writing and a little less picture, then the next is also a little more writing and a little less picture. Then, about halfway through the book, you can see that I’m drawing and describing a bunch of flying turkeys the pirates are trying to catch. Then, there’s no picture whatsoever—I just gave up on drawing. The words on each page expanded until the point that I realized I literally could not draw it well enough with pictures, so I had to draw it with my words.