There are many sites about baseball cards on the internet. The most interesting one is Cardboard Gods where Josh Wilker takes cards from his youth to tell stories about his life. If you’re a fan of baseball, great writing and baseball cards from 1975-1981 then this is a must-read site.

For the uninitiated, please explain what Cardboard Gods is and what you seek to accomplish with this blog.

JW: Cardboard Gods is a site about my childhood baseball card collection. I guess basically I’m telling my life story all tangled up with highly subjective celebrations about the players I grew up idolizing. I have for many years tried to write something every day, and keeping the site going has helped me strengthen that practice. When I started I wasn’t sure if I was going to have enough to say for a handful of cards. Actually, I still often worry that I’m repeating myself or disappearing up my own rectum. But my hopes are that I can continue plodding along until every last one of the cards that came to me as a kid has been celebrated. I’ve got a long way to go.

One of the many impressive things about Cardboard Gods is the honesty of the writing. This may seem like a silly question for those who’ve never written about themselves, but how hard is it to be that honest with your life, especially when dealing with shortcomings and illegal activities?

JW: I’m pretty self-absorbed, so I guess in some ways by this point in my life writing about myself comes without too much internal resistance. I am often disgusted with my self-absorption, but actually I think in those cases I’m just frustrated that the portion of raw material of my life that I’m trying to write about at that time hasn’t yet shown itself to have any buoyancy or balance or humor. I can sometimes feel writing about shortcomings becoming something of a schtick, which is not really that honest, so that’s something I have to try to push past. I figure the illegal stuff was all pretty minor and happened a long time ago and was of the hurting no one but myself variety, and if I’m misinformed on that then I’m willing to finally admit that everything I’ve written is pure fiction.

Because you put so much of yourself in your writing, a stranger like me feels he knows all about your life. Are you a closet extrovert or is this some type of Hasan Elahi thing of guarding your privacy by making it something no one wants because you don’t have it anymore?

JW: I think I try to follow the lead of the books that have been the most important to me in my life, and most of those have been first-person narratives: The Basketball Diaries, Jesus’ Son, A Fan’s Notes, The Catcher in the Rye, Jonathan Ames’ books, Bukowski’s books, most of all Kerouac, a guy who believed everyone should try to voice their innermost thoughts. Why not? But actually for many years my main difficulty as a writer has been to stop imitating their style and even their stories, so I try to focus on the details of my own life as a way to break free of that.

Another thing I like is the history of your relationship with your brother. It doesn’t parallel my relationship with my older brother yet I understand completely. How does your brother feel about being in the public eye and is there any chance of a collaboration between you two at some time?

JW: It’s definitely a central relationship in the writing on the site, probably the central relationship. After all, the cards all exist because my brother started collecting cards and I always wanted to do everything he ever did. He’s always been very supportive of my writing and has even chimed in from time to time on the site, often with stuff that makes me laugh. I’d love to get him more involved, but I think he’s got his hands pretty full right now with a couple little future card collectors.

You alternate between doing one-shot pieces on a particular card and weaving a series of chapters on various cards that may or may not be related on the surface. What are the pros and cons of each style?

JW: They’re both a pain in the ass! I end up doing a long series every once in a while because it gives me some momentum in the writing on a day-to-day basis, so I’m not starting from scratch every day. But near the end of one of the long series I start to feel like I’m juggling ten hatchets or pulling a sack of loose barbells up a hill. O, if only I were writing a few stupid observations about Rich Dauer instead of trying to explain the entire Vietnam War! But those Rich Dauer-type one-offs are equally difficult at times because it’s hard to know where to start.

I like the series ones and was wondering if you would comment on a couple of them. The Elysium series with Richie Hebner and the ballplayers/figures in your life that passed on that ended up being a reflection on turning 40 was wonderful. Can you give any insight into the creation of that series and how happy are you with how it turned out?

JW: I can’t really remember how I started in on that one, but here’s a typically clueless and whiny reference to it in my journal: “Now I have to write a story on my blog called Elysium because I wrote the first chapter yesterday.” Below that statement is an outline that bears little resemblance to the actual series. I probably got started on the whole thing after staring at my Richie Hebner card for a long time and thinking about how he’d been a gravedigger, and like you say meanwhile my 40^th birthday was looming. The first sentence is a riff on the opening of The Inferno, so I was hoping if I plunged into the underworld I’d eventually grope my way up toward the light, like Dante. Death really scares me. I figured maybe if I tried staring straight at it I’d become more at peace with it or something. It didn’t really work, but I did feel like it reaffirmed my gratitude that for the time being I’m on this side of the grass. I also liked the surprises that came upon me as I was writing-my old dog, my grandfather. It was good to see them again.

Earlier this year you posted a series of cards from 2008, rather than ones you had from childhood. These were ripped cards that you found in an unusual location and these clearly gave you joy. As a card collector, I would only find sadness if that happened to me. What was it like using cards from today and should we expect any more current entries in the future?

JW: Yes, it did give me joy to find those. I can totally understand how a true collector would react like the Indian in the old “don’t litter” ads from the ’70s. Obviously, I love cards, and part of me feels all cards should be as protected from this world as possible. Another part of me is powerfully drawn to a beaten card. Like the Violent Femmes say in “American Music”: “It reminds me of me.”

I haven’t written about all of those fractured found cards yet, so since they’re part of my collection now the ones that haven’t been written about are in the giant roiling queue along with all my other uncelebrated cards. I don’t know in what other ways more current cards will find their way into the mix, but one nice thing the find of those new cards did was loosen me up from my former rigid orthodoxy about only writing about cards from my childhood, so anything’s possible.

You have a combo entry on Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, the ballplayers who swapped wives back in the 1970s, and related to your family’s own experimentation in the same time period. This was obviously a pivotal moment but whenever you reference it - your writing always seems to be in favor of the idea, if not the execution of it. Do you have any contact with Tom today and do either your mom or dad have a “try for more” approach to life today? Would it be fair to say that you spent part of your life “trying for less”?

JW: Tom, the man who began living with our family when I was a toddler, and who helped raise me, remains another father to me. He and my other two parents have always been pretty amazing to me in the way they put their love for their family first while simultaneously daring to do things in new ways. Their lives are quieter now, but they continue to show me how to, as you put it, try for more. My mom has always been particularly daring. By contrast, I’ve always felt that I was pretty timid, but then again I’ve also based my whole adult life on trying to be a writer, which is mostly just stupid (see: my debts, my puny bank account) but also possibly at least in some way a “try for more” that I hope my parents could be proud of.

Any guy on the street can have a blog about baseball cards but the writing in your blog is what has drawn you such a following. Recently, you compared Darrell Chaney’s expression to that of “a corrupt medieval bishop”. I feel good if I can come up with a phrase like that in one out of every 10 pieces I do, yet you seem to have two or three of them per entry. What’s the secret to turning a good phrase?

JW: I wish I knew! I do like figurative language a lot. One of my favorite books, A Mother’s Kisses, by Bruce Jay Friedman, is so loaded with great figurative language that I practically weep with gratitude when I read it if I’m not already weeping from laughter. I spent a long time trying to write the exact same book, so maybe my figurative language muscles grew a little. I think I’m also really oriented toward figurative language because almost all my senses are shot. I have iffy hearing, terrible eyesight, I’m color-blind, and I have an almost non-existent sense of smell. Things have to be like other things for me to get them, because I can’t really sense them as they are.

Since this is a blog (somewhat) about baseball cards, I have to ask the obligatory - what’s your favorite card and favorite Topps set?

JW: The ‘75 set, the first one I collected, is my favorite. Garish, strange, dramatic. I can’t really pick a favorite card anymore. If I was forced to choose one to keep while all the others perished, I’d be tempted to pick one at random, just to see what I came up with. The first card ever featured on the blog was picked that way, and it was Mark Fidrych, which I thought was a good sign. If I did pick at random, I’d probably be hoping I magically selected a Yaz.

I first found your site when it was linked to at BTF, a site comprised of both very intelligent and very judgmental people. The feedback on your site is 99.99 percent positive. Did you have any concerns about your personal reflections being mocked and/or ripped apart when linked there, or at any other site?

JW: Funny you mention that, because I had to stop reading BTF comments on my stuff. It was mostly positive, which I found very gratifying, but there was one rapier-witted commenter who kept puncturing the more florid passages in my writing. It shook me up. At first I was angry with the guy and fantasized about reducing him to tears with some cutting remark and then decking him, then I finally was able to let it go with the should-have-been-obvious thought that not everyone is going to like what I do, even if they’re in the microscopic minority of people in the world who like baseball and are willing to take a peek at a depressive’s self-obsessed baseball card rants. Also, I think he may have been right. Sometimes I can blow some pretty hot air.

Several times, people have asked you if you had any plans to collect these essays on baseball cards and life and put them together in book form. Is there any chance we’ll get to see you at a Cardboard Gods book signing in the near future?

JW: I don’t know about the near future, but I’m working on it. Not much I love more than books.

Finally, when are we going to see an entry on Lee Mazzilli? You have some New York ties and it seems odd that you haven’t written about him yet. There must be some angle you could work about the local kid on a rotten team who was adored more than he should have been and whose biggest contribution came when he was traded. Either that or how he was hosed out of the 1979 AS Game MVP Award.

JW: Yeah, I love Maz. He’s surfaced in a couple posts, I think, certainly in the one on Len Randle. I promise you, as long as I keep avoiding the final visit from Richie Hebner, I’ll get some words down about Lee Mazzilli one of these days.

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I’d like to thank Josh for taking the time to do this interview. I can’t stress enough how good this site is and if you go to Cardboard Gods, you’ll spend quite a bit of time there. Josh has his past entries categorized by team, so you can go back through his archives in an easy format.