John Travis, Author, Publisher, Baseball Player, and Activist
Steve Beisner -- October 2, 2008
Last month Ink Byte sat down with John Travis to talk about his recently published novel, Pitching in the Dark, about baseball, his activism on behalf of the mentally ill, his role as a small publisher, and his activities in support of New Orleans area writers.
Pitching in the Dark begins as a sports story, but quickly becomes much more. It's protagonist, Kirk Ogham, is a struggling minor league pitcher playing in the Mexican baseball leagues to revive his career when he receives a call from his sister. Their mother is about to be released ("deinstitutionalized") from the mental institution where she has been since Kirk and Eileen were kids.
John Travis
Thus begins John Travis's novel, an honest exploration of how personal goals and family responsibilities play against each other. The novel was awarded the Hackney Literary Award for the Novel in 1999.
Although the novel is unmistakably fiction, Travis drew from his knowledge of mental illness within his own family and from his years in professional baseball. Like his fictional protagonist, John Travis was a master of the curveball, but was considered too small in stature for the big leagues. John's short-lived athletic career was baseball's loss, but a gain for the New Orleans literary community.
It's a measure of the confused nature of publishing these days that despite the Hackney award and the efforts of a talented agent, the book was not picked up by any major publisher.
Because he'd worked so long on the book and because of his fierce belief in the importance of the issues raised in the story, John decided to publish the novel with iUniverse, which makes the book available through online and conventional book wholesalers, but shifts most of the responsibility for promotion to the author. John says that he would have preferred a major publisher, but that "you don't live forever" and he's satisfied with his current arrangement.
John is an active supporter of the New Orleans chapter of NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill), and has made arrangements for the organization to received $1 for each copy of the novel sold. He is also exploring the possibility of using the novel in some of NAMI's programs. The New Orleans chapter of NAMI has a web site at http://www.namineworleans.org/.
John was born in post World War Two Oklahoma, but the family moved to Huntsville, Alabama where he grew up. He became hooked as a writer when his first grade literary efforts were praised by his New York Irish father, who John remembers as being economical with his complements.
Travis graduated from the University of West Georgia, but has lived in New Orleans for almost thirty years. He's spent short amounts of time in several smaller Louisiana towns as a working journalist, including time at newspapers in Franklin, Hammond, Covington, and Mandeville.
John is also a publisher, himself. His father ran the business for 20 years from Tuscalusa, Alabama, before his son incorporated his reconstituted Portals Press in New Orleans in 1994. Portals Press publishes mostly poetry, some fiction, but unlike many small publishers, does not (yet!) publish non-fiction.
Responding to questions about the problems of operating a small publishing business, John said, "Distribution is the big issue, and that translates to a money problem. Splitting the considerable production costs between author, publisher, distributor, and retailer is tough."
John is working on another novel and a collection of short stories. You can contact him and see the entire Portals Press catalog at the Portals Press website.