SEMO's Robert Hamblin and a semiautobiographical baseball novel

With the 2022 St. Louis Cardinals closing in on a National League Central title and a return to the playoffs, a retired Southeast Missouri State University English professor will speak Thursday in his home state of Mississippi about baseball.

Robert W. Hamblin, a member of SEMO's faculty for half a century, will speak on his self-published novel "When You Can Throw From Deep Short."

The book, while a work of fiction, has plenty of Hamblin's own life journey inside its 123 pages.

"The Black baseball player in the novel — Sonny — is on an integrated high school team, the first one in Mississippi, and he develops a meaningful friendship with Dwayne, a white shortstop," said Hamblin, who quickly admits the "Dwayne" character, the protagonist in the book, is based on himself.

"I wanted to set the book in 1965, the year after the Civil Rights Act was signed," he added, noting at the end of the novel, Sonny is signed to a contract by the Cardinals.

An advertisement for SEMO professor emeritus Robert W. Hamblin's portrayal of Clarence Jordan, a co-founder of Habitat for Humanity. Hamblin will make a first-person presentation about Jordan on Oct. 9 in a North Carolina church.Submitted

In a passage from the novel, writer Hamblin reveals the deep connection Mississippi has with the Redbirds: "Most of the baseball fans in the rural community where Dwayne lived, including his grandfather, were St. Louis Cardinals fans, their loyalty strengthened by the local radio station's being part of the Cardinals' broadcast network."

Hamblin, 83, will read an excerpt from the book and talk about writing at Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany, Mississippi, the birthplace of the late novelist William Faulkner.

Hamblin founded the Center for Faulkner Studies at SEMO in 1989, housed in Kent Library on the Cape Girardeau campus.

The book is available on Amazon.

What's next

The venerable educator will speak Oct. 9 at Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, delivering a first-person account of the late Clarence Jordan, a Georgia farmer instrumental in the founding of Habitat for Humanity.

Ardmore's pastor, Tyler Tankersley, invited Hamblin to embody Jordan.

"We are calling (Hamblin's) talk the 'Cotton Patch Gospel' and he will focus on civil rights, racial justice and how faith informs who we are in the world today," said Tankersley, who led Cape Girardeau's First Baptist Church from 2014 to 2019.