Interview with Holly M. Wendt

In Issue 9, we published a review of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023), the debut novel from Holly M. Wendt. The book is a skillfully rendered ice hockey story about a young defenseman from Russia pursuing his dream to play in the NHL. It is also–and maybe first–the story of a young queer man grappling with a devastating and disorienting personal loss made even more difficult by the cultures he’s living in.

Just ahead of the anniversary of the book’s release date, our fiction editor, Carlee Tressel, had the chance to talk with author Holly M. Wendt. Their conversation took a deep dive into the craft considerations—and total surprises—that shaped the story, the golden age of sports writing on the Internet, and why Holly can’t not write about baseball (even in a book about hockey). This represents just a narrow swath of the sports writing landscape they covered. 

The conversation was conducted and recorded on November 1, 2024, via Zoom. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Holly M. Wendt is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College and the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). Holly is a recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Jentel Foundation, and the Hambidge Center. Their work has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Four Way Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. A member of the Sport Literature Association, Holly is a former Baseball Prospectus contributor and contributing editor for The Classical. Their sports-based nonfiction has also appeared in Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, The Rumpus, and Sport Literate.

Fiction editor Carlee Tressel joined the Under Review editorial team in Summer 2022. She is the author of Rolling On: Two Hundred Years of Blair Iron and Steel (Parafine, 2021) and has contributed fiction and nonfiction work to Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces (Spout Press, 2023), Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology (Belt, 2020), among other publications. Talking with writers about their work is one of Carlee’s great joys, right up there with quoting old Sportscenter commercials and playing Knockout with her kids on a bedroom door hoop.

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Carlee Tressel: Holly, I reviewed your novel, Heading North, for Issue 9 and genuinely loved it. I want to talk about the book and also limit any spoilers for readers so they can go experience the story for themselves. What was your initial inspiration or motivation for writing Heading North? 

Holly M. Wendt: I love this question. The big impetus was an actual real-life event: the 2011 Lokomotiv Yaroslavl air disaster. An entire Russian hockey team and coaching staff were killed when their plane crashed shortly after takeoff. One flight mechanic lived; that was it. And I immediately couldn’t let that go. The hockey world mourned very publicly. All the memorial celebrations and fundraisers for the team members’ families were very public. It got me thinking about the families and their grief and what it would be like to have it all be an international spectacle. There was also a wonderful outpouring of support. Players across the NHL were involved. Teams put Love for Lokomotiv stickers on their helmets, wore arm bands, and so on. But also, these players were spouses, fathers, friends, and the living had to go on with their lives. 

And then of course almost immediately the conversation turned to what would happen to the games because they were a team in Russia's highest level of hockey, the KHL. Obviously none of those games could be played in that season, but what about the next year? They immediately had to start planning to replace an entire team. The business angle of it coming in hard on the heels of that grief. There was the part of my writer brain that wanted to settle under something like that and chew it over and think, How would that feel? And then because my writer brain is also terrible, What would make it worse? That's where [the protagonist of Heading North] Viktor comes in. He is the player that literally gets on the plane and then leaves the plane before it takes off. That happens early in the novel, so I don't feel like that's too much of a spoiler. What would it mean to lose everyone in that way and then have to go on?

So the plane crash happened in 2011, and by 2012 I had started writing. Kind of at the same time, the You Can Play project was founded. It is an organization dedicated to eradicating homophobia in sports and was actually founded in memory of Brendan Burke, who was the son of major hockey personality Brian Burke, a former general manager and player in the NHL. Brian has held nearly every job you can have in ice hockey, and his youngest son, Brendan, was the equipment manager for the Miami University (Ohio) men's hockey team. Brendan was an out gay man who had really strong feelings about the problem of homophobia in sport. Brendan was unfortunately killed in a car accident in 2010, and shortly thereafter the You Can Play project was founded. 

The ice hockey world responded really well, which was sort of shocking. Some NHL players were among the first professional athletes to throw their voices behind the project, and at the same time, now in 2024, the NHL still does not have an out current or former player. [Editor’s note: In July 2021, Luke Prokop became the first openly gay player under an NHL contract. He was a third-round draft pick for the Nashville Predators in 2020 and is currently playing for the American Hockey League (AHL) Milwaukee Admirals. While not on the Predators’ roster, he remains a prospect in the organization.] And so I was also thinking, What's going on that the NHL is behind the NFL in terms of having queer representation, though we have players who are willing to say I would support a gay teammate? So those two ideas coalesced in my mind pretty quickly, and then I was writing.

CT: Taking all these things that you were thinking about, where did you start? Did you start with the situation? Or did you start with the relationships between and among the characters? 

HMW: For me, it's a little bit of everything at once. I don't plan. I don't outline. The minute I start doing that—because it's a really good idea to outline things and know where you're going—the minute I know where I’m going, I stop wanting to go. Yeah, which is a terrible problem for a writer. So I just started to put Viktor in motion. I think the first pages that I was writing were basically the lead-up to the plane crash: Viktor in Russia on his team trying to figure out how he's going to make the bump up to the NHL. The current opening of the novel did come quite a bit later when I realized I needed to have Viktor and Nikolai together on the page for this whole thing to work. It was just getting Viktor in motion, and then as he started doing that, I started to encounter the people who were important to him, and the anxieties and all of that. 

CT: So Viktor is one of two point of view characters, and Nikolai is his lover. His great love, I would say. I appreciate how everyone is connected in multiple ways in this story, a dynamic that feels very true to the sports worlds I know. Nikolai’s stepmother, Liliya, is the other point of view character. Tell us why it was important to have both Viktor and Liliya as point of view characters.

HMW: Viktor was always the major main protagonist of this novel. But there used to be another protagonist who is now a character that doesn't even have a name in the book. It's someone who is mentioned once offhandedly and that's it.

CT: Oh wow. That's really cool from a process standpoint.

HMW: There was a humongous process of revision in which I threw away half of a book and then had to figure out what was happening. But that narrator also existed, I think, for many reasons. When it came time to replace that narrator, it was with Liliya. Otherwise, there are no women in this book with the exception of Viktor's mom, who barely appears, and that felt wrong. If I was in the process of building a sports world that rang true to life but also reflected a version of reality I wanted to see in the world, which is to say a more inclusive sports space, God, there had to be some women somewhere! So the idea of Liliya Aleyev as the general manager felt really interesting. 

Writing entirely in Viktor's point of view  was pretty claustrophobic because he is hockey and only hockey very intently, and doesn't really have any other experiences in his life. Liliya offers a little bit more perspective. She's also in a really difficult position. Her father is the owner of the team, which is how she has this privileged position to be the first woman general manager in the NHL. But it's a double-edged sword because she knows she has one chance. This is it. If she screws it up, she's never getting another job at this level. Viktor feels very similarly, and of course neither of them can ever talk about it with each other because [of the dynamics of their [leveled relationship].Between Viktor and Liliya, I could get to all the places I needed to in this book 

CT: The breadth and depth of relationships in the book were really satisfying and complicated the plot well. To name a few of these relationships: parents and children, several examples of that; lovers; partners and spouses; teammates; coaches and players; staff and players. The tapestry of people and their connections is really marvelous. Was there one relationship, one pair or group of characters, that in the making of the story particularly surprised you or illuminated something for you?

HMW: Viktor and McTavish.

CT:  I'm so glad you brought them up!

HMW: McTavish Norquay is Viktor’s new teammate in San Francisco and defensive partner on the ice. I thought McTavish was going to be sort of my Letterkenny hockey dude stand-in. Then when he got on the page, he was just all heart and had really exciting energy. Once I got halfway through the book, I’m like, I have no idea what he's going to do next. And it's going to delight me no matter what is going to happen. So McTavish, for me, in many ways was part of the beating heart of this book.

But the most surprising figure in this book for me entirely was Kirill [pro hockey player, Liliya’s husband, and father of Viktor’s lover, Nikolai]. I don't want to spoil anything, but quite literally I had no idea what [Kirill] was going to do until he did it.  For anyone who is writing a project, I hope you will have a character like that who just appears on the page and makes things happen, because if it were up to Viktor, everything would be passive. And that would be exceptionally boring. So a lot of the writing process for me is getting characters to act because I tend to write a lot of introverts. You need a character who's going to show up and make things happen and Kirill Stepnov is that person in this book.

CT: Something I really enjoyed about the story was that most of the places and team names were fictionalized. There are some recognizable real-world places named directly (like St. Petersburg, Russia, and San Francisco), but the NHL and KHL teams are fictional. Tell me about your decision to do that. 

HMW: Some of that was to ensure that I had as much freedom to do whatever. I didn't want to upset anyone, frankly, by borrowing a real team name. I imagine that people would be trying to map fictional characters onto real people. If I make up the whole place, then I get myself a little bit of leeway. I can shape the landscape in a way that feels important to me. To create the San Francisco Pilots, I thought, Oh, I bet it would be very cool to invent a hockey arena that’s on the edge of Golden Gate Park so that you can see it from under the bridge. I stood under the bridge once in actual life and listened to that sound of the wind coming under it. I thought, this has to be in the book. It felt like a really stark and enjoyable landscape. I wanted to get that in but also, one of those things doesn't exist there, so if I make it up, then I can also craft scenes that fit into the place a little bit better. 

Emily Nemens does something very similar in The Cactus League where she invents the Los Angeles Lions. There are already lots of baseball teams in Los Angeles, but simply by saying the Los Angeles Lions, now everything is possible. You can do whatever you want with that location with that team. 

You're also not beholden to a history. [In Heading North,] the Pilots’ history plays into the story, but I’m not stuck with actual [San Jose] Sharks history. If I have an invented team then I can invent a history and lean on that a little bit and use that to help explain why some of the characters do some of the things that they do. 

CT: The way fandom works, you the author can't possibly imagine an individual's attachment to a team or a team brand. I can see why you would want to skirt those associations completely. 

HMW: I never want to distract from what the book is actually doing with little ticky tacky things like, Do I have legal permission to describe the logo of this thing? Those are problems I don't need. 

CT: I knew we wouldn't get through this conversation without me reading directly from the book! This will be a lead-up to talking and thinking a little bit more about identity, which is such an important part of this story on several levels: thematically, but then also how identity and tensions around identity drive the plot, too. 

This [excerpt] is about a third of the way into the book, when Viktor and his teammate, McTavish, are having a private conversation at the apartment they share. McTavish is essentially confronting Viktor about being homophobic, but the irony is that Viktor himself is gay but hasn't told McTavish or anyone else on the team. So McTavish is gently telling Viktor to accept a team staff person who is gay. Do you think that's a fair description?

HMW: Yes, exactly. 

CT: [Reading from Heading North, pages 90-91]:

Finally McTavish drops his hands to the table. “Five-seven, [he is] your team. As much as [teammates] Case or Edi or Big Petey A. The Pilots need everyone to make this work. You wouldn’t let anyone give me shit for who I am.”

McTavish means the things he’s told Viktor about, so much worse for his father and [uncle] Fletcher, but that McTavish still heard: the whooping calls, the hand popping against the mouth, the slurs McTavish won’t name but Viktor can guess. He knows, at least, what fans in [Russia] screamed at Fletcher every time he stepped on the ice. What it meant that McTavish had a great-uncle who'd played hockey and died in a residential school far from home and family. It’s a history Viktor doesn’t fully understand, but he knows about sinking into sport, hoping whatever was gained there could make up for another kind of loss. 

When I first read that, I slapped the book shut and let it marinate for a moment before I copied down that last line. I thought it was a crucial moment in the story, and it says something about the way we talk about identity with each other, as people. Plus it gets at the convergence of sport and identity, a theme in many works of great sport literature. So there are several ways we could go with this, but my main question is, how were you thinking about culture and identity when you were crafting these characters?

HMW: That specific moment points at the inherent racism in hockey that is historical and also very much current, which non-Russian players frequently experience while playing in Russia or players who are from the more diverse populations, and the ways in which people are ranked or separated based on these differences. It’s an ongoing problem in hockey. You only have to pay attention a little bit, particularly to youth hockey in Canada, to hear some pretty horrifying stories. [The passage] is also very much a nod to Richard Wagamese’s just transcendent novel, Indian Horse, which is a literary fiction ice hockey novel that is all about the horrors of the residential school system, while it is also a love letter to hockey and a testament to all of hockey's problems at the same time.  So in some ways, it was a small homage to that hugely important novel, but also [imagining] what would be a factual difficulty for Viktor to experience as a white Russian player. Indigenous identities in Canada might be out of his concrete realm of understanding, so he is able to acknowledge he doesn’t get it but knows that it's important to try. And then also feeling the same way about what he thinks his teammates will think about him. 

When Viktor goes to a rookie training camp with the [San Francisco Pilots], he's surprised at how diverse the room is. For maybe the first time, he is seeing multiple Black players, a Latino man as a trainer. There's [an out gay man on the staff.] So to have Viktor reacting with a little bit of reservation about some of those things felt that it would be true to his experience. The reason McTavish thinks Viktor is homophobic is because McTavish has some stereotypes about Viktor being Russian: Why wouldn't Viktor be homophobic if he's from a place that has laws [against homosexuality]? And so McTavish is trying to bring Viktor into the fold of the team culture while also making some assumptions about Viktor. Meanwhile, Viktor is almost hiding behind that like a shield—if they think I'm homophobic, they will never suspect I'm gay—but it also does him damage.

CT: It sounds like these important cultural considerations and tensions rose organically from the characters themselves. Would you agree with that, or was this part of the aim you had in shaping these characters? 

HMW: It very much came organically. Again, it’s my lack of ability to plan as a fiction writer. I didn't know what anyone was going to say until they said it, and then the other characters simply had to react. The good news is that I find that whole process endlessly entertaining, so I will just follow characters around and listen to them talk forever. So those things rose pretty pretty naturally. Of course there was revision, and once I figured out how a character was, then I could sort of backfill and develop certain gestures or postures a little bit differently and hope that that would create a fully consistent iteration of those characters and their attitudes throughout the book. 

CT: Here’s a nerdy sports literature question: Did you always know Viktor was a defenseman? 

HMW: I love this question so much. Yes, he was always a defenseman because I think there's something really romantic about the idea of defense. It's why the catcher is my favorite position on a baseball team. I think there's something noble and self-sacrificing—and occasionally idiotically self-sacrificing—about it. Viktor was always that because it's also less flashy. It draws less attention. We are much more likely to talk about the people who are scoring lots of goals than the people who are preventing them. It suits Viktor very much to be out of the limelight. 

I think there’s a greater philosophical divide between how you use your defenseman or what kind of defenseman you are: Are you stay-at-home defense, and your only job is to block shots? And that includes sometimes just laying down on the ice and letting a puck smack you in the ribs. Do you stay close to the net? Do you have minimal offensive responsibilities? That's one way of thinking about defense, but then there's also offensive defensemen. The Kris Letangs of the world, the Erik Karlssons, where they score a lot of goals and they tend to be quicker, more mobile. They can get up the ice to contribute offensively and then they have to get back to cover if the play swings the other way. 

Viktor has that skill set for being a very large man. He is quite quick and so that's an option for him. But his difficulty is that he is playing for a coach who does not believe in that as an option and sees him as a large person who should hang around the net, block shots, and crack skulls, which is also not really part of Viktor's desire in hockey, but he gets that put on him. I was really interested in the philosophical difference when you have a coach who is not using a player in the way the player is best suited, which is another tension point for the book. It was also a way for Viktor to think about legacies. His best coach and mentor was also a defenseman, so Viktor was thinking about owing a certain amount of sacrifice to that memory, which was useful to me. And I just have a soft spot for the defense.

CT: You clearly have a vast and detailed knowledge of hockey and also Russian hockey. How did you cultivate that?

HMW: So the great news is that well before I started this book, I had the good fortune—though it doesn't feel like good fortune right at this very second—but the good fortune to be a Pittsburgh Penguins fan as a Pennsylvania kid. My favorite player is Evgeni Malkin, and so I've been following his entrance into the [NHL] and his experience as a Russian-born player, including navigating English. I listened to his early interviews as he was seemingly learning the language on the fly, as opposed to studying it in school for many years, and learning what those cadences sound like and what happens to the grammar. I listened to other interviews in the Geno generation, like Alex Ovechkin and a number of other well-known Russian players to get a sense for attitudes around player positioning, which would inform Viktor’s expectations for playing. 

Also, when I started this book, it felt like the golden age of sports coverage. In the 2010s, there were so many great online sports writing platforms and all the blog communities: Sports on Earth, SB Nation, fan blogs, The Classical, Grantland. ESPN was pumping money into producing content. There was ESPN The Magazine. Sports Illustrated was doing all these interesting things, and the teams themselves were really pumping attention into social media, making sure they were streaming even rookie camps and training camps. We could watch a scrimmage on a Tuesday at two o'clock in the afternoon. We could just watch people practice. In the holy years of hockey Twitter, there was this wonderful hockey community. The Penguins’ equipment manager ran this Twitter account and he would just post snapshots of his days like, sewing tags onto jerseys, making coffee at 5 a.m. Here's me setting up the fans in the locker room to dry gear. Here's all the rugs we take with us to away stadiums so that our stuff is all branded no matter where we are. Just being able to get all that knowledge so openly was crucial for this book. So I was able to just benefit from simply the way sports coverage was happening basically until the mid 2010s when there was that disastrous pivot to video that killed so much of sports writing. Now we have all of the legacy media outlets pivoting away from real coverage, and it's all exceptionally sad if you love good sports writing. But for those years it was so, so good.

And when the NHL lockout happened [in 2012-2013], and there was no NHL hockey for a little while, the Russian games were still being streamed if you were willing to sort of wade through dodgy streaming sites and languages you didn't speak (like me). I could watch Evgeni Malkin playing for Magnitogorsk at five in the morning and listen to the game cadence in Russian. I don't speak Russian, but watching all those games, I could figure out what was happening. The ice is a little bit bigger. The play unfolds slightly differently. So just by virtue of the Internet, I had access to so many different things that were necessary to build the fabric of this novel. 

CT: I feel like now is the time for me to confess that I have very limited hockey knowledge. But coming to the book as a reader with very limited hockey knowledge didn’t matter. I felt I was in a world that I was already familiar with somehow. I think that's a testament to how you told the story and how you used details. 

HMW:  I assumed that most readers of this book were probably not going to be rabid hockey fans first, so I wanted it to be a book that was legible to anyone. 

CT: Earlier in this conversation, grief came up. Let's go there, because grief is a really important presence in this story. I would love to hear your thoughts about the way grief functions vis-à-vis Viktor's hockey life, and more broadly, the way sport and grief interact and converge. I, personally, find sport—in real life and in art—to be such an interesting vehicle for addressing grief, experiencing grief, and sometimes avoiding it. 

HMW: I think it's all of those things together. Particularly for Viktor, hockey is in many ways the source of his grief. It all stems from there. If he were not a professional athlete, his own personal grief would not be under a spotlight. If he were not a professional ice hockey player, the fact that he is grieving his male lover's death would not be as big of a deal. Hockey is also the place that he avoids those things, sublimates the grief, compartmentalizes it. I thought that was an interesting storm for him to weather. The same for Liliya. Hockey is her job. Hockey is also the cause of most of her problems, and all her personal relationships are tied up in it, including Nikolai's loss and Kirill's reaction to all of that, which is a different kind of grief but is still very much grief. 

But it's also really difficult to make grief interesting on the page because at a certain point, readers absolutely lose patience with it. It is not interesting to watch someone be sad for 300 pages, but I have lots of characters who are sad for 300 pages. So what do we do? They do different things. Viktor goes running. You change the interior grief into some other kind of action. Kirill wanders around Russia carrying his dead son's ashes. 

CT: Liliya hits the heavy bag.

HMW: Yep. Sneaks into the training room and goes to town. So it’s trying to figure out ways of externalizing that at least a little bit. It also helps with that sense of claustrophobia that we keep coming back to. It could be very easy to just get locked inside the mind of any of these characters and then the book doesn't move forward.

CT: I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up: In the middle of this beautiful “hockey book” is an elegant paragraph about baseball. Viktor is watching a Major League Baseball game on TV to distract himself. Was this a nod to one of your other great sports loves? How did this paragraph come to be?

HMW: Basically, I was unable to keep from writing about baseball. [CT and HMW laugh] It had to happen. Baseball was my first great sports love. It was the first sport I ever wrote about. My writing about baseball made the hockey book possible. When I started to write about sports for external eyes, it was for The Classical. David Roth accepted my pitch to go write about spring training, and then the piece was published and people were like, I like that! And I was like, Am I a real writer now? It had a huge part in bolstering my writerly confidence. After some time doing that, I thought maybe I do have a leg to stand on here. 

I'm always thinking about baseball as essentially the most literary of our sports. I think it's got the best novels. There are so many really beautiful baseball novels. I think it also has to do with baseball's very languid relationship with time and the fact that it's a team sport, but really most of the time it's an individual trial. Like in the moment Viktor watches on TV, there's a pitcher who is not having a great time. You know if you're a pitcher and you are going through it, no one can help you. There is nothing anyone can do to make you pitch better or to make the strike zone expand. It's just you at the center point of the game and everyone is looking at you and watching you fail. There's something appealing and excruciating, the isolation of that. Roger Angell writes about that really gorgeously in a couple of essays. The one that I'm thinking about is “The Interior Stadium.” He has a long passage about the loneliness of baseball, and as Viktor is watching this game on TV, he's thinking about that and sort of the loneliness that he is feeling because hockey is a very team-oriented team sport. The five players on the ice plus the goalie are sort of intimately connected every shift. They're even crammed together on the bench. You look at a hockey bench and they're touching because there's not enough room for all these guys and their big pads. It's a very physical game. When you're playing you're always running into and running up against other players. So even though Viktor is in the midst of all this contact, he's also feeling very alone in it at the same time. And so baseball becomes kind of a proxy for that.

Also, as a Russian player, I don't imagine that he has much experience with baseball prior to coming to the U.S. And so just trying to figure out what is this? What is this thing that they like here? And thinking about the connections that exist between sports teams in the same city. But also, I just could not imagine setting a book in San Francisco and not having the Giants show up in one way or another.  

CT: Recently, I had a conversation with someone who said he first pursued writing so he could write about sports. I thought that was interesting. Which came first for you: writing or sports?

HMW: I have always been interested in sports. I come from one of those families that all of our emotional relationships are played out through discussion of sports and how many deer did you see on your drive home.

CT: That feels very Pennsylvania.

HMW: Yes. And so sports were always part of my life, but I was always a writer. It didn't occur to me to put those two things together until I wrote a baseball story when I was in grad school, but before that, my real writerly first love is historical fiction. So I was not expecting a hockey novel to be my first novel. But now that it happened, I'm super delighted because this is the hockey novel I had always been hoping to read.

So, no, I had been a writer for a long time, but I think it also took me until that kind of golden age of Internet sports writing to realize that other people were doing it. It wasn't until then that I discovered Roger Angell and the knowledge that Annie Dillard used to play softball really intensely and realizing that sports writing can be more than just who won and what happened, great cultural touchstones, like John Updike’s Ted Williams essay. It took me until I was 30 to realize those things existed. I didn't know anybody who had a New Yorker subscription until I was deep into the grad school world. And then to see that Roger Angell has been doing this exact thing that you're in love with for a thousand years… So for me it was writing first and then realizing you could write about sports beautifully. You could write about sports in a way that connected to things other than just what happened, who had the big hit, who had the big play. When I figured out that that was possible, I just sort of jumped all in.

CT: Is that how you would define the difference between sports literature and sports writing? How do you make that distinction? 

HMW: I'm bad at the distinction. I do think if someone says sports writing, I immediately think nonfiction. Most of the time I do think of journalistic coverage, but I'm also really interested in creative nonfiction, where writing about sports also overlaps with memoir or cultural criticism. All of those things still feel like sports writing to me probably because I came to it from that angle. I started out writing sports for The Classical, which was built by a group of people who are now still doing really exciting things—some of the original writers from Deadspin who are now doing Flaming Hydra and Defector—and doing all of these things that are sports, but mostly actually cultural commentary, cultural criticism, and memoir. That for me was what sports writing really could be. I had some exposure to that. And I had a great sports fan friend in high school who gifted me with a Sports Illustrated and an ESPN The Magazine subscription in the 90s, and we would cut things out of them. She would tape in all the [Jaromír] Jágr pictures in my high school locker, and I would cut out all the Michael Jordan stuff for her. Every once in a while there'd be a really good feature, and I would think, oh that's neat. But if I think “sports literature,” then poetry and fiction can be part of it. There's also nonfiction as well, but I think “literature” really says now fiction can be part of the conversation in a way that “sports writing” doesn't to me. 

CT: You're clearly a fan of hockey and of baseball, and growing up, sports was a central topic in your family. Are there other ways that your personal experience with sport has made its way into your art?

HMW: I think the most significant has been in terms of lens—and that’s as someone who has played a lot of sports with intense passion and no real athletic ability. I played softball from age 8 to age 21 when I actually aged out of all the local fastpitch leagues. I played field hockey in middle school. I played one year of really awful soccer where I could run around really good, but I couldn't kick. [There was] a lot of disorganized ice hockey on ponds and local rinks. I’m really bad at all of it. My limited athleticism makes it so I have to think about playing in a way that gifted athletes don't have to. Whereas if you have more marginal skills, you're always trying to think of, okay, where are the small advantages that I can exploit? In my case, I was a pretty good defensive catcher, and if I could get on base, I could steal a base. But getting on base was just like the world's worst. I couldn't see the ball very well. It was all very comical, but it has helped me pay attention to sports much more fully. It has encouraged me to be more imaginative. But yeah, I think the fact that I was not very good at sports has actually helped me in [writing about sports].

CT: Do you feel like you're being seen as a sports writer or a hockey writer now? 

HMW:  I don't think I have enough notoriety to be recognizable like that. But I have been so honored by the way readers have reacted to this book. I've had such a wealth of really generous and insightful reviews and interviews in the year since the book has been out, which I didn't expect. Do I think every writer in the world would love to see their book in more readers’ hands? Yes, of course. You know, Sidney Crosby, if you want to read this book and put it where people can see it, I would love that. 

CT: Sidney, you should pick up Heading North. It’s great. 

HMW: But it's been just really nice to hear lots of readers say, I don't care about sports, but I really like this book. Because again, I think most of my readers are coming at it from the literary fiction angle or here's a queer book, as opposed to, I wish to read a hockey novel. 

There are not that many hockey novels out in the world. I mentioned Richard Wagamese's novel [Indian Horse], and of course, there's the Fredrik Backman Beartown series that was very popular and got a show and Lynn Coady's The Antagonist which is kind of a comic treatment of hockey. But it's not like baseball in that there's a new baseball novel every five minutes, and so to have people respond positively to a sport that's still a little bit niche and is probably not what most of my readers would choose at first blush has been really great. Also to hear, Oh, I didn't know that sport could do this; I didn't know that these kinds of stories were available. That's been just such a joy.

CT: Do you imagine you will write more sports fiction?

HMW: My current novel project is not a sports fiction book, but I do have a book sort of hovering in my soul that is another sports book. Or the one if somebody else would just write it then I wouldn't have to. So if anybody out there wants to write a really, really great cycling novel, I want to read that really badly. I’m currently working on historical fiction, but there's also always an essay that's percolating in me that is sports-connected in one way or another. I feel very passionate about thinking about athletic pursuits, and I'm a passionate fan, so thinking about fan experience is also really important to me.

CT: Besides a great cycling novel, are there other sports-connected projects you really want someone to write? I love asking writers this question because I believe so many of our Under Review readers have one of those stories in them ready to be written.

HMW: I would very selfishly just love to read more hockey stories. Because why not? I would also love to read a good curling novel. I love curling. I think that would also be a really great challenge to figure out how to narrate the actual in-game circumstance in a way that's dynamic and interesting. All of those sports that have the honor dimension– like golf where you must self-report your score, like curling where you burn a stone if you accidentally touch the rock and it's supposed to be taken off the ice, which requires a great deal of honesty and integrity on the part of the athletes themselves. I think that's really interesting. Basically things where you have to be accountable to yourself in some way. And then you put that under the pressure of it being a very small world. With something like curling or cycling where there's not as much bandwidth, there's not as many different arenas of competition, how much more intense does it feel when you know this is one of the few big shots for the year. Or the Olympics only come every four years, so what does that do when you only have one shot where you're actually competitive in that thing, sort of the scarcity of time?

CT: In addition to your writing and teaching, you are also a fiber artist. How does that work inform your writing work?

HMW: I think the fiber artistry actually enables a lot of my sports habits, because if I am sitting down to watch what will be like a six-hour cycling race, I can be like, No, I'm not just screwing around watching sports. I'm spinning yarn. I'm knitting a sweater. I’m weaving. I’m productive. And so those things are kind of constant companions. 

I do think there's something related to the work of the body being really good for the work of the mind, so I do cycle a bit. It's a wonderful way to clear out the brain, think about things. If I'm walking or hiking, I’m doing a lot of good work creatively. I figured out most of the problems of Heading North while in the gym. I have never been a more dedicated gym rat than when I was working on this book because Viktor was so present in my brain. While I'm in the squat rack, he's like, I understand this place. That’s where that voice really came alive. So I think there's something really valuable for writers in finding some kind of physical practice to engage the body, the hands, etc.—whatever lands within your ability sphere—to get out of the brain a little bit. I think that might give us better creative access in various ways.