American Writers Festival

Writing Baseball: The First All-Star Game – American Writers Museum – June 6, 2026

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I wasn’t sure about the logic behind the American Writers Festival pairing journalist and author Randall Sullivan with comedian Joe Kilgallon, but baseball is baseball, and, unfortunately, it’s often funny in Chicago, as witness the Cubs 18-3 loss the day before.

Unbeknownst to me, however, was that the full title of the book was The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads. Not really a baseball book. In fact, the speakers mentioned Babe Ruth only briefly and then only in connection with his popularity.

They named only two other players, Al Simmons and Bryce Harper, the latter not having been born yet in 1933, when the first all star game was played, but apparently named by ESPN in 2022 as the 94th greatest player of all time, which the gentlemen took umbrage at, particularly given the omission of Simmons (who played in the 1933 game) from the list.

That said, it was an interesting session, with FDR; former Chicago mayor, wrong place, wrong time Anton Cermak; and the Depression being prominent in the discussion, which ended 10 minutes earlier than I thought it would, perhaps to allow time for a nasty phone call to ESPN.

American Writers Festival – Chicago Cultural Center and American Writers Museum – May 15, 2022

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I’ve delayed writing about the American Writers Festival because first I wanted to watch the animated Love, Death & Robots on Netflix. Huh?

I went to the festival primarily to see my favorite living science fiction author, John Scalzi (which reminds me, Willie Mays celebrated his 91st birthday earlier this month), whom I first discovered at an AWM program in October, 2018, at which time I had yet to read any of his books (Scalzi, that is – I don’t think Mays has written anything, but he sure could do everything else). Since then I’ve read all 16 of his novels and one of his short stories.

But I didn’t know, until I saw Scalzi at the festival, that five episodes of L, D & R were based on other stories of his. So, I now also can recommend those, with a special shout out for When the Yogurt Took Over.

I was planning on going too to two other programs at the festival, but a staff member at the museum wouldn’t let me go to the ready room to annoy, I mean say hello to, Jennifer Keishen Armstrong (it wan’t a cold call – she does know me, honest) before she came out to do her live Dead Writer Drama podcast, which then caused me to lose interest in staying to hear her and later Peter Sagal and several of his closest friends for them to tell me how to write comedy, as if they could. This was not unlike how the actions of a couple high school teachers caused me to lose interest in studying for years. Also, I was lazy.