Mick Cochrane

By Lisa Littlewood

In Mick Cochrane’s novel, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, Molly, an eighth grader, turns to baseball as both an escape and a means of understanding the pain brought on by the death of her father just six months prior.  As her mother retreats deeper and deeper into her grief, Molly struggles to find a way to hold onto her father’s memory and turns to baseball, a pastime the two shared together. She eventually finds acceptance on the boy’s baseball team with the knuckleball (a pitch that ‘flutters like a butterfly’) her father helped her to develop.

While this is Cochrane’s first novel in the Young Adult category, it is his second book in which baseball becomes a method for dealing with difficulties. His first novel, Sport, (which is intended as adult fiction, but includes a 12-year old narrator named Harlan) tells the story of a young boy whose father becomes absent and whose mother was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Harlan also finds respite and acceptance on the baseball field.

When asked if there is a personal connection the theme of baseball as a method for figuring out life Cochrane admits to being an avid baseball player as a child. “When I was a kid that was my passion and preoccupation. Baseball was an imaginative world of sorts. There is all of this history and lore —it’s an alternative universe. As a writer you look for things you know a lot about.”

Cochrane is a transplant to the Buffalo area from St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives here with his wife and their two teenage boys and has been teaching writing at Canisius College for 20 years.