Cribbage keeps aspiring St. Paul writer occupied

A headline in the Onion's back-to-school edition caught Jordan Wiklund's eye and made him chuckle.

"It said something like: 'Master in Fine Arts fails to sell anything' and I said to myself, 'That's going to be me.'"

Wiklund grew up in Duluth, majored in English at Luther College, works as an editor for a Minneapolis publisher and is earning an MFA at Hamline.

The Onion headline prompted him to do a self-analysis and reconsider his fiction-writing dreams. He realized he reads nonfiction, so he created a list of topics he could dig into that would keep his interest. He filtered out everything until one word remained:

Cribbage.

He played the card game with his dad growing up, counting his 15-twos, 15-fours and moving his pegs up and down the 120-hole board used to keep score.

"I don't live in the fever dream of the game," he says. "But as a subject to write about, it's fascinating."

He doesn't have a publisher, but he does have an agent, a cribbageland.com website, a presence on Twitter and Facebook and a mushrooming collection of anecdotes. When he read about Somali pirates holding a British couple hostage, allowing cribbage as their lone leisure activity, Wiklund e-mailed the dockmaster where they keep their boat.

"I told him I didn't want them to recount their whole ordeal, I only cared about the cribbage," he says.

Two days later, he was doing an e-mail interview.

"I don't care about the strategy, but I'm trying to answer the question: Why does the game endure?"

He's traced cribbage's history to the early-1600s when a "rake and scoundrel" named John Suckling II created the game. He's learned that a captain of a nuclear submarine dealt the perfect 29 hand once. Belief in good omens keeps that cribbage board residing aboard the longest-serving nuclear sub in the U.S. fleet.

"I'm casting a wide net and trying to get the best stories from very different cultures," Wiklund said.

He attributes cribbage's revival among his fellow twentysomethings thusly:

"We all want to get away from our screens and interact face-to-face with someone," he said. "Cribbage takes 15 minutes and it's competitive, but not antagonistic. Families don't sit down and play poker. They play cribbage."

As his business card says: "There are only two types of people in the world ... Those who love cribbage and those who don't know how to play."