On a Thursday morning in late April, two sections of “Athletes in Literature” gathered in the Proctor Room, the conference room upstairs in Brown Dining Commons overlooking Carr Field, the Blackwater River valley, and the Proctor Ski Area beyond. Students sat in the morning sun that angled through the full-length windows, focused on the videoconference screen, like baseball players in ready fielding position, waiting to react to the crack of the bat. For the first half of the spring trimester, Melanie Maness's English Seminar had been reading The Cactus League, Emily Nemens's debut novel, a fictional account of a single spring training season in Arizona. On this morning, they heard directly from the author.
Emily reflected on the road from concept to publication. The first iteration of The Cactus League, written while Emily was enrolled in an MFA program at Louisiana State University, was a collection of standalone stories. It won her an award and quickly earned her an agent. And then, as she put it, "we couldn't sell it.” It took two more years of working on the manuscript to find the through-line. Jason Goodyear, the star left fielder for the fictional Los Angeles Lions, became the thread that pulled the chapters together into a novel.
Some of Emily's research came from her own life and love of baseball: trips to Arizona for spring training with her father, who grew up walking distance from Yankee Stadium and introduced her to the Mariners as a kid living in the Seattle area in the late 1980s, when Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson were household names. Other parts came from secondary sources – documentaries on the Dominican baseball pipeline, medical papers on Tommy John surgery, and a conversation with the organist at Fenway Park, whom she met at a party.
The conversation touched on the novel as social commentary and a microcosm of American society in 2011 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. "If I can use the very specific example of this moment in time, this place in time, this subculture, to say something about a larger community – that felt like a really exciting opportunity,” she told the class.
The book is written almost entirely in close third person, with the narrator, Emily said, “on the team with whoever the protagonist is” in a given chapter. She wanted each chapter to have the feeling of its own inning, with its own distinct hero. Mel's class had been working with that structural conception through an exercise called “Dynamic Duos,” where pairs led the class on a single inning, treating it as both a story and a chapter.
In the middle of her Clutch book tour, Emily described the lessons her first novel taught her. The first was iteration – not resting on what she had already accomplished, but deliberately pushing herself to “make the sentences sparkle” through a more ambitious use of imagery and figurative language. The second was resilience. She took it personally that the story collection version of The Cactus League would not sell. Reworking the manuscript and writing her way to a stronger book built what she called a greater capacity for when the writing gets hard. "Writing is hard, and the writing process is challenging," she told the class, "and I think I'm a little bit more resilient in terms of when the going gets tough." Thanks to Emily Nemens (@emilynemens) for her generosity with our students, and to Mel for bringing this conversation to her class.
A Gift Across Generations
Melanie Maness
When I consider the steps that led to Athletes in Literature students reading The Cactus League and to interviewing Emily Nemens in the Proctor Room, I revel in the universe's kismet. In January of 2025, I polled my students and asked them for the final form of literature they wished to study in the spring. It was time to place the book order, and I wanted their buy-in and insight. I’d recently gifted Jaimal Yogis’ Saltwater Buddha to our schoolwide summer reading program, and I saw an opportunity in this opening. As the poll results rolled in, I noticed a pattern. Over and over, the students mentioned their favorite genre as sports mystery. I took this charge to my local bookstore and scoured the shelves. I read six books in February that (kind of) fit the description. Alas, I didn’t find the perfect fit. I shared my findings with the students in class, and they were quick to find a solution. They told me I would write the book and that I should start right away. I laughed, and they didn’t, and so I applied to Bennington College’s MFA program (@benningtonwritingseminars) last summer.
When I was accepted in the fall, I was elated, and when the school assigned Emily Nemens as my advisor, I was stunned; in truth, I gasped. In the spring of 2020, Emily’s debut novel, The Cactus League, hit the shelves. At this stage of the game, we were learning remotely, and I read the book with a few students who selected it as their independent read. I marveled at the story and prose, but when we were in person again, I returned to our regularly scheduled curriculum, AKA Saltwater Buddha. As I thought about it, The Cactus League, definitely existed in the realm of sports and mystery, and now I would learn directly from this author and editor. Check out Emily Nemens’s credentials on her website. She’s a big deal.
At my first residency in January of 2026, I met Emily in person in our cohort’s workshop. Turns out genius can also reside with humor and humility. Her notes on my manuscript are revelatory, and buckle up, the reading and writing learning curve is steep. For the last three months, we’ve worked together on short stories, annotations, reading lists, and more. One of the taglines for Bennington’s MFA program is "Read 100 books and write one.” I knew just the book I wanted to teach Athletes in Literature this spring, and Emily agreed to drop in virtually from her Clutch book tour. Each student created a couple of questions for Emily, and the forty-five minutes we spent together flew by. They asked about the origin story of The Cactus League and her interest in sports. They really wanted Emily to choose her favorite chapter/inning or character, but she drew parallels to favoring a child, and the room understood. When we returned to the classroom after our talk, the conversation was rich and engaging, and the students kept returning to Emily’s words.
My big takeaway? All of the wisdom that you impart to your students could hold you accountable one day, but meeting Emily Nemens was a gift that one generation of Athletes in Literature students gave to another, and in my book, that’s a grand slam.
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