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Dogged Hopefulness
Sunday, December 7, 2008 at 11:06PM Christine Sneed: Writer and Teacher
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By Randy Richardson
You don’t have to be a Cubs fan to experience what it means to be a Cubs fan – the euphoria of when they win and the bitter despair of when they, inevitably, lose. You don’t even have to be human.
Christine Sneed isn’t a Cubs fan – heck, she’s not even a baseball fan. Yet growing up in a household of Cubs fans, she vicariously lived the life of a Cubs fan. And so did her family dogs.
“In my family, baseball season hasn’t truly arrived if there isn’t a dog in the house cowering under a bed,” begins her touching essay, Our Dog Days of Summer, which made its way into Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.
The family dogs – first Zip and later Lily – were protecting their sensitive ears from the curses and lamentations that so often spilled out of her father’s mouth following the Cubs’ many losses.
“I was thinking of captive audiences,” she says, “how fans themselves are more or less captive to their favorite ball clubs, and how household pets are captive to their owners’ moods and whims.”
Writing such a personal piece came surprisingly easily for Sneed. “I think most writers, to some degree, are willing to prey upon their family members,” she says. “Faulkner once said something like, it’s okay to rob your mother’s memory to get the best work – 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies. Not that my parents are that old.”
Even though she's taken the story from her family, she’s not shared it with them – yet. “They’re in for a surprise, and I’m probably in for lots of paternal eye-rolling,” she acknowledges. “When I first wrote it, I worried that my dad would think I was too rough on him for writing about (and possibly exaggerating – but that’s the problem with our memories – like us, they’re imperfect) all of the shouts of despair that flattened our dogs’ ears. But these fur-bearing family members have lived happy lives. He and my mother have doted on them like they are debutantes.”
She also says her father has calmed, somewhat, with age. “Or else Lily is just more used to him,” she adds. “But I also think my father is more resigned to the Cubs not being able to bear their fans’ expectations of a World Series win – at least not after almost a century of dogged hopefulness (no pun intended, not really).”
And it seems that she has inherited some of that dogged hopefulness, too, though she transfers it into her writing, not the Cubs. For a decade, she has been writing “like a madwoman,” mostly fiction, while teaching creative writing at two Chicago universities, Loyola and DePaul, and this year all that hard work paid off when Salman Rushdie selected her story, Quality of Life, for Best American Short Stories 2008. Still, she has higher hopes that one of these days she’ll be rewarded with a book of her own. “I have been hearing about the big New York publishing industry lay-offs, the esteemed East Coast presses that aren’t currently acquiring new books, the general decrease in book sales (except for the Twilight series and Men Are From Mars-type books, right?), the flu epidemic, the nuclear winter, the stock market dives, the difficulty of Britney Spears in getting people to respect her musical oeuvre, and it all looks so damn bleak. But I am going to keep writing and keep hoping like the pessimistic optimist that I have probably always been.”
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