Charlotte Readers Podcast: The Love of Baseball

In this episode, we meet authors Chris Arvidson, Ellyn Ritterskamp and Caroline Kenna, avid baseball fans who bring the game of baseball to life with their story contributions to “The Love of Baseball-Essays by Lifelong Fans.”

You’ve heard of the boys of summer. Today, we meet some of the girls of summer, dressed in their favorite major league baseball gear and itching to read and talk about that great American game without a time clock.

There is something magical about a summer night at a ballpark, with the bright lights, the groomed diamond, the grass cut just so, and the chants of peanuts and Cracker Jack, “strike three, you’re out” and the crack of the bat that knocks in a go-ahead run for the home team.

We start the magic of this episode with three short readings by each author about Spring Training; The Season; and The Post-Season.

Chris Arvidson is a writer and baseball super-fan. In addition to The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans, she’s the coeditor of Mountain Memoirs and Reflections on the New River, and a co-founder of the writing salon Wordkeepers in West Jefferson, NC. She currently teaches in the English Department at UNC Charlotte, where she’s taught baseball-focused classes including this Fall’s “Baseball in Film.” Chris holds a B.A. from Olivet College, an M.A. from UNC Charlotte, and an MFA from Goucher College. Oh, and she is a passionate Detroit Tigers fan.

Ellyn Ritterskamp edits and designs in newspaper publishing, and teaches practical ethics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she earned a BA and two MAs. She has been on a baseball pilgrimage, having visited all of the home parks in Major League Baseball, the South Atlantic League and the Carolina League. Her visits to the minor league ballparks gave her the insight she needed for her story that educates on the mascots and food of the minors. But she got her earliest education going to Crockett Park in Charlotte with her family.

Caroline Kenna caught the baseball bug watching three boys play in Illinois, Indiana and North Carolina. She is an award winning poet, published in Reflections on the New Riverand  Above the Foldpoetry anthology and in recent editions of Kakalak poetry anthology.She is on the Charlotte Writers’ Club Board and a former newspaper reporter who earned a B.A. in history from King College and a B.A. in journalism from Memphis State University. She talks of her family’s favorite team as “our Cardinals” and she talks of someday visiting all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums.