Donald Evans
WHEN Fri 2/16, 7 PM
Evans’s debut novel, Good Money After Bad, about a gambler on a losing streak, reflects a world he knew intimately. Set in Chicago during the heat wave of 1995, it’s the story of Chance Skinner, a 26-year-old who lives in Wrigleyville and places sports bets on a daily basis. While Chance resembles Evans at the same age, he ends up donating a kidney to make good on a debt. Evans, now 41, never got that desperate: “I have all my internal organs,” he says.
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The manuscript, which Evans started in 1997 and finished in 2000, drew interest right out of the gate. On the recommendation of Tobias Wolff, who’d been Evans’s fiction writing teacher at Syracuse, mega-agency International Creative Management picked up Evans as a client. But Evans says that when he refused to rewrite certain sections, make them more “wiseguy,” publishers lost interest. Eventually ICM stopped shopping the manuscript.
“At some point I was just routinely betting about $1,000 a baseball game and betting a bunch of games every night,” Evans says. “It seems preposterous now and would’ve seemed preposterous before. But in the moment, it made perfect sense.” Gambling “seemed like a short cut. I wanted to be a writer and a journalist, but I also wanted to travel the world, to have the kinds of experiences and adventures that cost money. And when you’re working at the Lombardian and want to see Europe, it’s hard to figure out how you’re going to do that.”
Evans has settled into a more predictable routine, trying to write every day either early in the morning or late at night. He’s completed a third novel, is polishing up a collection of Christmas stories, and has started a sequel to Good Money After Bad, set five years later. Once a week he teaches public speaking at the Westwood College near O’Hare, and he spends the rest of his afternoons hanging out in the “parent parlor” at Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church in Oak Park, where his son is in a playgroup. Occasionally he gets some action, but he bets like a dad now, with a square in a Super Bowl pool.