Ladd Mitchell introduced himself to the Community Voices audience to share his first novel, Theory Markspurn. After running a label in California and touring with the band Park, he's returned home to launch his authorhood with a story of a high performing athlete and how the pressure is fracturing her health.
Transcripted by AI with human editing for readability.
Randy Eccles:
This is Community Voices on 91.9 UIS. I'm co-host Randy Eccles. Today we're going to look at an area author who has just finished their first novel and we're really looking forward to learning more about it. Ladd Mitchell, welcome to Community Voices.
Ladd Mitchell:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Randy Eccles:
So first, Led, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How did you decide you wanted to write a book?
Ladd Mitchell:
I am originally from the Springfield area, and I'm primarily a musician most of my career. I play in a band called Park, and we were on a small label in Santa Barbara, California called Lobster Records. From about 1996-2007, I was a professional touring musician. During that period, there's a lot of downtime. I spent a lot of it reading and starting to write. After the band ceased operations in 2007, we're still a little active these days, after that I started getting into fiction writing and wrote a couple of test novels just for myself, to see how that went. I felt that I had the ability to do a self-published one, so that's kind of what led me down the road of starting the project of Theory Markspurn.
Randy Eccles:
You headed out to California with your band, Park, for a little while. Was that hoping to find yourself in the scene that would see it explode?
Ladd Mitchell:
We had realistic expectations of that. We had some friends who were in bands that got really large. From seeing how that process worked, I knew I didn't want ever to be in that position.
Randy Eccles:
It's a good thing to know. Not everybody realizes that.
Ladd Mitchell:
Yeah, the perks and drawbacks to both.
Randy Eccles:
I'm glad you pursued that part of the dream. Now, you have a new part that you're making reality. This is your first book, self-published.
Ladd Mitchell:
Correct, yeah, my first self-published book.
Randy Eccles:
Where is it available?
Ladd Mitchell:
It's available primarily on Amazon. If you go to Amazon and type in Theory Markspurn, the book will come up. Or if you go to lcmitchellwrites.com, it'll be available there as well, it links back to Amazon. It's available in both e-book and paperback formats.
Randy Eccles:
Although your name is Ladd Mitchell, you're going by L.C. Mitchell as your byline on your novels.
Ladd Mitchell:
Correct, that is my author name.
Randy Eccles:
You just mentioned the title of the book, Theory Markspurn. Theory is the primary character of the story. How did you come up with that name? It's unusual.
Ladd Mitchell:
I get asked that quite a bit. I came up with it by trial and error. Earlier drafts of the novel, I had a placeholder name for the character, and I knew that wasn't going to be it. I wanted something that would pop out. You see athletes with very interesting names. I always wonder if the parents did that on purpose. Netflix had a special about a quarterback, and his name was Spencer Rattler. I think they did that on purpose. I knew it had to be a name that would catch the ear. I used the law of letting it come to me because the harder I try to think of this name, the more elusive it was. It'll come when it's supposed to come. I found it laying there, seemingly in a pile of other names. I was like, "Oh, I can use that and that should be the character's name. I had a bunch of other titles for the book, and my wife said this should be the title of the book because it's an unusual name.
Randy Eccles:
Interesting that the character's name was one of the latter parts of the creative process and it was the thing that stood out for the title of the book.
Ladd Mitchell:
It's like thinking of what color the house is going to be while you're building the house. It doesn't matter, but it's one of those things that you approach at the very end. That's what I did. That's what worked well for me.
Randy Eccles:
We have the book here. You mentioned it touches on athletics. Give us a sense of the setting of the book.
Ladd Mitchell:
Theory Markspurn is about a D-I college athlete, Division I. In her last season of her collegiate volleyball career some inexplicable happenings occur, and she can't really reconcile those. She must go on this self-journey of why she started playing the sport in the first place. What she discovers is that those reasons aren't as pure or as simple or innocent as she imagined. She goes on this journey of self-reflection and self-discovery and it's painful. She must go to some dark places, and she does those on her own as most people do. Athletes, probably have a harder journey with that because they're the equivalent of the modern-day gladiators and we don't want to see them in a weak light. She must go on that journey and it's, as Jung would put it, a journey into your shadow self.
Randy Eccles:
Volleyball — are you an athlete or big volleyball fan? How'd you choose that as part of the setting?
Ladd Mitchell:
I played sports in high school, but my wife played volleyball throughout grade school, all the way up through college, and then some semi-pro ball. The way I landed on volleyball was we'd always watch games on TV when they're available. With the popularity of the sport growing, it's a lot more available now. In 2018, specifically on December 15, 2018, is when I first got the idea for the book. I watched a college match between Stanford and Nebraska in the NCAA finals. We're seeing this finished product of these two teams playing. I kept thinking this is probably an echo, a tiny echo of what goes on behind the scenes. We're not seeing all the struggles, all the strife, all the things that these amazing athletes put themselves through to perform on this center stage. I wanted to explore what that looked like.
I remember I went home and asked my wife 30 questions about volleyball. And she was, "Why don't you read a book and satiate your curiosity that way? I couldn't find one, a good fiction volleyball book that touched on the subject and the things that I wanted to know about. There's a lot of coaching material out there. There's a lot of juvenile young adult material. I thought I'll try to tackle that. I started talking to coaches and ex-players and professional players and journalists. I started that journey. One of the first people I talked to was who I feel was is a prominent figure in the volleyball world. I told them this idea. There was a very long pause and they said, "Don't do that." What I heard was, "Don't do it because you can't do it." But what they were really saying is have realistic expectations of what you're jumping into because you're going to do a lot of work for possibly not a lot of payoff. I understood their point of view. I trudged forward with it and five years later, here I am. We're almost six years later, here I am with the finished product.
Randy Eccles:
So, this effort has taken you five years.
Ladd Mitchell:
Yeah, it took a lot. It took only three or four months to write the first draft and then several years to rewrite it and re-hone it. The original draft was 150,000 words, and I got that down to 86,000. That was a process, getting it down to that. deliverable, digestible amount.
Randy Eccles:
But it sparked your curiosity about volleyball and launched you into research?
Ladd Mitchell:
Absolutely, I wanted to make sure that I understood the struggles that were going on behind the scenes that I believe and know at the collegiate program level. Those mental health struggles are dealt with quickly by the coaching staff. At the public level, I didn't know if there's still a hesitancy to bring those up. That's what I wanted to explore.
It's coming out into the light more now. For example, there is a player for Penn State who was the freshman of the year last year who helped Penn State win the national championship. This year, coming back as a sophomore said, "I can't do this. I need to take a break." I thought that was one of the bravest things to do. Ironically, I looked up how many words in the English language for brave we have or like words. It's over 300 but help is not associated with any of those. Because help is one of the bravest things anyone can ever say. That took a lot of bravery on that player's part.
Randy Eccles:
Tthis applies across the board, beyond volleyball, to anybody in athletics or in pursuit of a dream like music or art. You put pressure on yourself, or you look for perfection. When I lived in Arizona, somebody thought their child was going to be a great baseball player. They'd move to Arizona just to put them in these semi-pro leagues to make sure their kids got every opportunity to be the greatest pitcher ever. That's a lot of expectation we put on people.
Ladd Mitchell:
It is. Another theme piggybacking off what you said, in the book is there are reasons why we do all the things we do. We select the passions that we select. We sometimes run so fast and so hard that we forget why we're running in the first place. That's a common theme with Theory, where she's a wonderful player, but to the point where she's so driven and so homed in on what she wants. Which is to be a professional volleyball player and then hopefully an Olympic athlete. She's so homed in on that; it almost alienates her from her team.
Being a high-performing athlete, she doesn't understand why other people don't have that drive. And it's this reason that comes up in these inexplicable events, that I won't give away, in the book that drives her towards the reason she started doing all this stuff in the first place. A lot of the reasons why we choose our passions is probably an attempt to heal some kind of trauma from the past in some instances. Not all instances, but there's a reason why we do all this stuff.
Randy Eccles:
Every story has to have conflict.
Ladd Mitchell:
Absolutely.
Randy Eccles:
Trauma is a handy one when you're writing something to be able to explore.
Ladd Mitchell:
Exactly, yeah.
Randy Eccles:
When you started writing this, how did you figure out this conflict? Because you must have a conflict, you have to have a beginning and middle end. How did you explore that? How did you figure out how to put that together?
Ladd Mitchell:
I knew I needed to have a conduit for Theory, experiencing the conflict of not being a perfect person and a perfect athlete like she wants to be. In that degree, she's a flawed person as we all are. But that's what attracts us to characters in the first place is they have these flaws. I knew I needed some kind of conduit for that. I thought of the idea of a book within the book. So, in the story, she finds a book that just appears out of nowhere. In that book, which she starts reading, there's a parallel self of her. But that doppelganger gives in to every inhibition that she fights. She starts to become jealous of this other her. That's the conduit to which she starts experiencing some change and trying to figure out why she started tracing back to why she started playing this sport. It was tough doing that because what gave me the idea was athletes are under all this stress, high performing athletes even more because they're cut from a different cloth. Having that pressure could create a rift within her as it does in most people. She experiences that through this book that she is reading.
Randy Eccles:
The book almost provides a parallel universe for her.
Ladd Mitchell:
Correct.
Randy Eccles:
Tell us more about the characters in the book. It seems mostly centered around Theory Markspern, who is this athlete. But who else is around her? Who supports her? How does that work?
Ladd Mitchell:
She alienates herself, almost on purpose, from the rest of her teammates, which is not the norm. When you're a high-performing athlete, just an athlete in general, your teammates are your family. She tends to push everyone away. There's a setter on the team named Jen McDonald, and she's the exact opposite of Theory. Theory is very reserved. I wouldn't say proper, but professional. Jen is absolutely disgusting as a person, and she pushes Theory to be a different version of herself. There's also a character in the book, a professor that Theory has academic conflicts with. Because there are some professors, I'm not saying all, but look at institutions of learning and sports might get a little bit too much attention. They might target athletes and say, "I'm going to give this person a hard time because they're here for sports and not for academia." That relationship with her and that professor is cat and mouse, but they learn how to respect one another. They actually end up helping each other quite a bit because she knows he has a lot of life experience. He's A Vietnam veteran and has experienced his own trauma. He guides her through the process of, or gives her some pointers, on how to go through her own trauma.
Randy Eccles:
I don't want to give up the nature of the book, but anything else you think folks should know about the book before they go and read it?
Ladd Mitchell:
My hope for the book and what it delivers overall tells people to slow down because we run so fast and so hard that we're so scared of slowing down. Having this perceived emptiness chasing us, to catch up with us, and to sit with us when that emptiness really is nothing more than a false fear. Fear is only full of what we put into it. I would hope that people would get out of it. Slow down and take one thing at a time. We don't always have to be running so fast and so hard to achieve this proverbial finish line that's really not a finish line. It's just the start of something else.
Randy Eccles:
Theory is set in an Illinois school?
Ladd Mitchell:
It's a little tricky. The school she's at is fictional. It's called Petrusio University and it is in California. The book she is reading is set in Illinois.
Randy Eccles:
For those who love Illinois and central Illinois, that's a nice tie for us to have. We appreciate you coming in. We've been talking with Ladd Mitchell, the author of Theory Markspurn, his first book. The author name is listed as L.C. Mitchell, which I'm sure is Ladd C. Mitchell or something like that.
Ladd Mitchell:
Yeah, that C is for my middle name.
Everyone should give the sport of volleyball a huge, firm nod and look at what those great, amazing athletes are doing. It is a sport that is growing in popularity right now, as it should be. If you're not familiar with volleyball, go to a high school game, go to a college game, go support the two new professional leagues that are out now. They have a smattering of teams throughout the country. If you live in one of those areas where those teams are available, go support those teams and help grow the sport of volleyball because it is an amazing, amazing sport.
Randy Eccles:
Set it up and spike it. Theory Markspurn, available at Amazon. We look forward to seeing how the book grows.
Ladd Mitchell:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
