(Image Credit: Boaz Joseph Photo)

Last week W. P. Kinsella returned to Semiahmoo Peninsula to celebrate his 80th birthday and his new book THE ESSENTIAL W. P. KINSELLA.

One of the Semiahmoo Peninsula’s most famous former residents returned last week to celebrate a milestone birthday.

Famed writer W.P. Kinsella – author of numerous short stories and novels, including Shoeless Joe, which was later adapted into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner – celebrated his 80th birthday Sunday afternoon at an invite-only gathering in Newton.

Kinsella, who now lives in the Fraser Canyon, also took the occasion to celebrate the launch of his newest book, The Essential W.P. Kinsella, which celebrates his decades’ worth of work as well as the 25th anniversary of the Field of Dreams movie.

Read the rest of the article at PEACE ARCH NEWS.

(Kinsella in 1986 photo: cbc.ca)

Also SENIOR CITY provided a profile of Kinsella in honor of his 80th birthday.

Born May 25, 1935 in Edmonton Alberta, until age ten William Patrick Kinsella was home-schooled by his mother until his family moved to Edmonton and he was enrolled in the 5th grade. He married first wife Mildred Clay in 1965, and they moved to Victoria B.C. in 1967; they had 3 children before divorcing in 1978.

Kinsella didn’t go to university until he was 35, in 1970. He completed his BA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria in 1974, and 2 years later enrolled at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, working towards obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in English degree from the University of Iowa (completed in 1978). In his biography on the writinguniversity.org website, he says “I quickly fell in love with the state—with the rolling fields of corn, the dense humidity, the tall bamboo canes thick as hoe handles. I had never seen the dazzle of fireflies before.”

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From 1983-1998, Kinsella wrote and had 1 book of poetry (co-written with Ann Knight); 5 novels, and 12 books of short stories, published. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) in 1993, and in 1996, an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film was granted to a film based on his short story, Lieberman in Love.

In his 2015 collection of short stories, The Essential W. P. Kinsella, along with the familiar themes of baseball and native Canadians, is a new theme – aging, and love and loss in senior years. Kinsella recently said he had only one regret about his writing career: “I wish I’d started earlier,” in a March 2015 interview with Richard Warnica of the National Post.

Read the rest of the profile at SENIOR CITY.

For more info about THE ESSENTIAL W. P. KINSELLA, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Thomas Canty.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story.