The Pitch

Last year, the movie Field of Dreams inspired me to begin writing on Substack. In one of my first posts, “Field of Lucid Dreams,” I explained how I thought it would help me achieve my dream of publishing my novel.

When I finished writing the post, I walked through the library and a book caught my eye, a tiny an old paperback crammed in on the bottom shelf. It was called Lilies in the Field.

First published in 1962, and written by William Edmund Barrett, it’s about a group of German nuns trying to build a church on a farm just west of the Rocky Mountains. A man named Homer Smith happens to drive by as they toil away in the field, and he agrees to help them.

This, to me, was incredible. I’d just decided to launch my Substack because of Field of Dreams, a movie about a man who hears a voice that tells him to build a baseball diamond on his cornfield, virtually in the middle of nowhere, just like the German nuns building their church. And I believed that Substack would help me build an audience for my novel, because that’s how I interpreted the film’s most famous line: If you build it, he will come.

The nuns were building it - and he came.

And wasn’t this just like my way of writing about coincidences? I sit there, trying to build a text, so to speak - and I wait for them to come.

Excited by this discovery, I took the book home to read that night, though I was still wrestling with doubts as to whether releasing my Collection of Coincidences on Substack would actually strengthen the pitch of my novel.

At that time, I’d also been struggling for months to write a decent query letter, another key element in my pitch to publishers. The hardest part of the letter, for me, was finding a list of comparative titles: books similar to mine that came out in the last three years.

Eventually though, I discovered the writer, Elif Batuman. Her 2022 book, Either/Or, was very well-received, and it had enough in common with my novel that I felt it would be a good fit for my query letter.

One day, I decided to look her up. For whatever reason, I just typed her last name - Batuman - into Google, and as I typed, a list of suggested words appeared on screen. One of them was bitumen.

I clicked it.

Bitumen is an immensely viscous constituent of petroleum […] the material is commonly referred to as asphalt. Whether found in natural deposits or refined from petroleum, the substance is classed as a pitch.

A pitch?

Pitch is a viscoelastic polymer which can be natural or manufactured, derived from petroleum, coal tar, or plants. Pitch produced from petroleum may be called bitumen or asphalt, while plant-derived pitch, a resin, is known as rosin in its solid form.

How ironic. Elif Batuman was the name that had somehow found its way into my pitch, of all things.

Not to mention, Field of Dreams, where this story really began, was all about baseball - a sport centered around the pitch.

Now, when I read the Wikipedia page for Lilies in the Field, I learned that it was based partly on “the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga, originally located in Boulder, Colorado.”

I clicked the link on St. Walburga, where I came across a legend about her burial site in Eichstätt, the German town where she was the patron saint:

Her remains were placed in a rocky niche, which allegedly began to exude a miraculously therapeutic oil, which drew pilgrims to her shrine. The bituminous oil, called Walpurgis oil, was said to exude from her bones ...