An Interview with Ken Hogarty

Dr. Ken Hogarty, who lives in San Francisco’s East Bay with his wife Sally, retired after a forty-six-year career as a high school teacher and principal. He has had stories, essays, memoirs, and comedy pieces published in Underwood, Sport Literate, Sequoia Speaks, Cobalt, Woman’s Way, Purpled Nails, the S.F. Chronicle, MacQueen’s, Bridge Eight, Under Review, Points in Case, Robot Butt, Glossy News, Kelp Journal, The Satirist, and Good Old Days. His novel, Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects, launched to good reviews.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I started writing Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects over thirty years ago. “Blue Chip Prospect” made a timely descriptor then for what seemed like an emerging phenomenon in college football and basketball, national attention on the recruitment of star high school athletes.

Not coincidentally, it was about then that ESPN took off. Early on, and in all sports, the network’s 24/7 talking heads touted blue chippers and spent much time focusing on the recruiting cycle in basketball and football.

The blue chippers (in basketball in that era, think Michael Jordan, while Jason Kidd was the most well-known Bay Area blue chipper) seemed guaranteed to bolster or boost college teams striving for post-season success. Doing so would augment revenue directly and indirectly through the financial commitment of alums and boosters to athletic programs and the schools in general.

When I revisited, redrafted, and completed my story during the last five years, I affirmed that the plot and characters clearly anticipated the “follow the money” ethos manifested today in college sports with naked power-grasping seen in incongruous conference realignments, the outbidding of rivals for star athletes, unequal NIL payments, and the total mockery of the ideal that once trumpeted student-athletes.”

Recruiting’s theme, and that word’s so important in the title, posits that we all get recruited, if nothing else for differing versions of the truth. And the word “prospects,” purposefully plural, also speaks to the novel’s theme in that it’s not just star basketball players getting recruited.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

Thankful, joyful, and fulfilled.

I had an immediate affinity with Ronaldo Alves, Atmosphere Press’s head cover designer. He produced nine beautifully designed covers from which I could choose after we went back and forth about significant details central to the plot. He nailed it, even utilizing another concept we liked at the bottom of the back cover.

The very last detail tweaked on the cover that emerged involved the wristband of the blue chipper dunking a ball. We changed it to green, the color of the school uniforms in the story.

Such attention to detail marked the entire process and highlighted Ronaldo’s interactive attributes.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I actually had a story printed in the San Francisco Examiner before I was ten. I got paid $1 for my story (I remember Goofy and Woofy being main characters) that won that week’s newspaper contest.

My love of literature and stories is eclectic. I’ve been blessed to teach literature and writing to innumerable great students over the years, and even taught grad students how best to write dissertations.

I loved teaching The Odyssey and the Arthurian legends (and spin-offs such as Madeline Miller’s Circe or Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon). The frame in my novel pays tribute to a certain degree to the frame in Homer’s telling of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca.

I sometimes consider that work and its shift of point-of-view in the middle books, along with Shakespeare’s plays with five acts (intro, rising action, climax or reversal, falling action, and conclusion built around a clear conflict), to be the structure templates for much good narrative.

Favorite novelists run the gamut from Faulkner ( “Rose for Emily” is my favorite short story) and Hurston to Allende and Marquez. I’ve recently enjoyed the guilty pleasure of police procedures or mystery series such as the Bosch series by Michael Connelly, the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr, or the James Patterson collections (particularly, the Women’s Murder Club Series, set in SF).

As an educator, I had numerous essays published in publications such as English Journal, California English, and Teacher’s Education Quarterly. Also while teaching, I had four three-week classroom simulations published through a company called Interact. I actually received royalties for them for years. One is still listed on Goodreads next to that site’s notation for Recruiting. An interactive, classroom collaboration to ratchet up book reports with students simulating being literary agents and eventually putting on a book fair, it’s titled Best Sellers.

After my retirement and with the time to get back to the writing I love (though I am still on my local schoolboard), while looking at my novel, maybe about a third- to half-finished but with a direction set at its core, and thinking about another short story I had dabbled at one summer that was almost complete, a friend pointed me to a reprint on the website of John Thorn, the official historian for major league baseball who had been Ken Burns’ primary consultant on his epic nine-part series about baseball. Thorn reprinted an article quoting Merritt Clifton.

Clifton was the editor of a small journal in Berkeley in the early 70s. He printed a short story of mine called “Street Merchant,” a good story that today irks me with its reliance on passive voice. Parenthetically, I had sent it to the Atlantic Monthly, without really having a clue about the prestige of the magazine. Almost a year later, I got a letter from my forgotten submission saying the story had been under consideration all that time and had “just missed the cut.” I wonder if that publication might have set me on a different course in life.

Clifton had talked to me about my thesis. He must have related it to John Thorn when both were involved in the baseball sabermetrics movement.

Seeing MLB’s historian praise my work motivated me to pull out my thesis, update it, edit it, and submit it. It was published in Sport Literate and later earned a semi-finalist designation by Cobalt as they assessed the best baseball writing of 2021. Basically, it claims that baseball became our national pastime because, before recent changes, it reenacted and kept alive our country’s frontier experience.

At the same time and with other shorter-form works getting published, I decided to resurrect the novel I had started years before, which became Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I was a high school teacher and principal for forty-six years while also teaching university classes in English and Education after I earned my Ed.D.

The school I retired from, Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, sent almost all 1,300 students—including our Piro students made up of 100 students whose families lived under the federal poverty line—to four-year collegiate experiences. Before 1987 and when I attended in the 60s, it had been single-gender and was a decidedly middle-class school that mostly produced blue-collar workers such as police and fire personnel. Despite that, during my third year of teaching back at my alma mater, I was the English Department Chair who hired Tobias (we called him Toby since he told us he was named after his father’s Toby mug) Wolff (Leonardo DiCaprio played Toby, for years a creative writing teacher at Stanford, in This Boy’s Life), who taught with me for two years. We also had an assistant football coach on staff that year who would become a famous Super Bowl-winning coach, Mike Holmgren.

Along the way, I taught many brilliant students who became judges, mayors, professional athletes, Olympians, archbishops, writers, professors, researchers, performers, doctors, and lawyers. One former student (Gary Lucchesi) won an Oscar for producing Million Dollar Baby, and another (Kilian Kerwin) more recently won an Emmy for producing Dehli Crime.

Other fun facts about me: 1) My twenty-first birthday was “the day [some people think] the music died”—the day of the Bay Area’s Altamont concert, the anti-Woodstock; 2) I grew up in what today people call the Castro District of San Francisco but was then called the Eureka Valley; 3) A favorite moment as principal, after waiting fifty-two years for the occasion, was dismissing 1,300 students to attend the Giants’ 2010 World Series victory parade; 4) We have a picture in our kitchen of my wife with Mother Teresa when Sally escorted her around the city in her role as the PR person of Catholic Charities [Sally’s a bit taller than the “other saint]; and 5) Sally, who’s among other things still an actress and newspaper theater columnist, has appeared in many commercials—two nationally—but when she took me as an extra on an advertising photo shoot with her to the Napa Valley after I retired, I got chosen to have an expanded part as a classroom teacher, and the resulting image appeared on forty-foot high billboards throughout NorCal.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Having people I love—family, friends, former colleagues and students, neighbors, parishioners—respond positively to it. Ironically, just the opposite is also true: Knowing that in some cases complete strangers might reside vicariously in a world I created.

A former student named Kelly phrased it well: “I imagine it is a real act of intimacy to invite readers into the world you created.” She also called the completion of the novel “a radical act of faith.”

It’s students as perspicacious as Kelly who motivated me also to tell a true story about a high school experience and culture. To my mind, even while every high school has its own culture, most have enough in common to provide the most meaningful common rite of passage in our society. Nailing that, as a former high school teacher and principal gives me great satisfaction.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Since it deals with a high school culture, hopefully not “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd or “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police.

When actually finishing and then editing and re-editing this novel, I struggled with the time period since I had started the novel over thirty years ago and I had left too many details vague when I started reworking it over the years.

Bryce Wilson, an extremely effective Atmosphere Press editor, worked with me to focus on a particular year that I could frame from the present. We went back and forth over numerous opportunities to incorporate details from the specific year 1991.

The research to specify detailing was fun, looking at the music, dress, sporting scene, current events, political situations and many more very specific nuances of the time and place to blend subtly into the narrative.

An early scene in the novel takes place at a high school dance. I actually pulled out an old yearbook from my school to see the name of a dance from that era. The dance was named after the popular dance song, Van Halen’s “Jump” from the 80s. The dance was titled “Jump Around.” That song gets featured in Recruiting’s dance scene.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

As mentioned, the main takeaway is that we all get recruited, sometimes unknowingly, if nothing else for different versions of the truth. It’s a theme that plays out writ large in our country’s current social and political reality. A corollary that also gets manifested in the characters and plot of the novel is that seeming villains might sometimes have backstories that color the choices they make, and heroes conversely sometimes have “feet of clay.”

I imagine my perfect readers to be those who see the truth in philosopher and social critical theorist Paul Ricoeur’s conclusion that fiction is at the heart of the real world of experience.

Those readers would mirror numerous high school juniors and seniors I taught (at that age or grown up), the educators I taught in evening classes at the University of San Francisco, and the many women of color I taught getting their degrees in weekend classes at Holy Names University while working full-time.

All struck me as authentic people who loved authentic stories and wanted to be engaged by them.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I’ve had over eighty shorter-from short stories, memoirs, essays, and comedy pieces published (see Kenhogarty.net) since I retired five years ago. This month I had two other pieces accepted, one a memoir about a student trip abroad to Ireland.

The other is an essay with elements of a memoir (one of the players on that team had graduated and coached at our mutual alma mater, the high school at which I enjoyed a forty-six-year vocation as a teacher and principal) about the 1951 University of San Francisco football team.

That team, even with a small student body enrollment of just over a thousand, was undefeated and would send five members to the Pro Football Hall of Fame while nearly 30% of its players made the NFL.

Its real claim to fame, however, concerns the integrity of the team, its players, and Bill Henneberry, my connection who was the second-string quarterback and the school’s student body president. The team was invited to the Orange Bowl, then one of the four most prestigious New Year’s Bowl Games.

The invite, however, came with the stipulation that U.S.F. couldn’t bring its African American players, Ollie Matson (a perennial all-pro after winning two medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and serving in the Armed Services) and Burl Toler (whose NFL career was derailed by an all-star game injury but who later became the NFL’s first African American referee and then its first Super Bowl referee).

The team said “no” to the invite that promised fame and fortune for them and the university.

I also just finished a full-length play and will have a chapter in an upcoming book in the Historic Baseball Stadium Series, this one about Candlestick Park.

I’m also working with a former student, a three-time Olympian named Shannon Rowbury (who held the American women’s 1500m women’s track record after Mary Decker Slaney and Suzy Favor Hamilton) to help tell her story. Among other rich backstories (Irish dancer; Duke all-American; Nike professional; woman’s activist; multi-cultural marriage), one that surely attracts attention is the 2012 London Olympic finals in which Shannon was one of only two of the eight finishers never nailed for blood doping or running under the aid of illegal substances.

My daughter Erin, who loves my memoirs, has suggested I write a book about a time and a place I lived, the “summer of love” in San Francisco. Who knows, maybe instead of a memoir focusing on that era, I can write a police investigative story set then and there.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

Recruiting’s theme posits that we all get recruited, if nothing else for differing versions of the truth.

My experience with Atmosphere affirms this truth: Its professional staff will help you immensely.

Bryce encouraged me to research and meld details in full from the time period. Ronaldo accomplished magic working through many iterations designing the final product’s front and back cover. Cam and Hayla, Atmosphere Press’s finishers, arranged numerous opportunities to boost the launch and sales of the published novel in areas, and with resources, I wouldn’t have imagined.

My Recruiting Pitch: Atmosphere Press wants you! The corollary? You want Atmosphere!

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.