Interview with Chris McCormick
Chris McCormick is the author of The Gimmicks, (Harper, 2020) and Desert Boys (Picador, 2016), winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, and Ploughshares. He grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert, and earned his BA from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned his MFA and won two Hopwood Awards, he’s now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Terry Horstman grew up in Minneapolis and is the all-time lowest scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school basketball. His writing can be found at A Wolf Among Wolves, Taco Bell Quarterly, The Growler, and various other publications. He is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Hamline University and is the executive editor of the Under Review. He is currently at work on his debut book, which is shockingly about basketball. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis and is probably wearing an NBA Jam t-shirt.
This interview was conducted over Zoom during the middle of the Stay-at-Home order of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been edited for clarity and length. The full version of this interview will be released on a future episode of With the Call, a new podcast presented by the Under Review.
Terry Horstman: Our guest for our author interview for this second issue of the Under Review is Chris McCormick, author of The Gimmicks (his debut novel) and also the short story collection Desert Boys. Chris, thank you for joining me today.
Chris McCormick: Thank you, Terry. I really appreciate it.
TH: We’re recording this on Monday, April 20. It feels like the 4,000th day of quarantine. How have you been holding up so far?
CM: You know it’s been relatively good. I can’t complain when there’s so much pain out there with joblessness and health issues. My fiancé and I had to postpone our wedding in May. That was kind of heartbreaking. But so far it’s been manageable.
TH: I think just because of the situation we’re all in, we’re really feeling the lack of sports right now. I think a lot of people listening to this and who read our journal probably wouldn’t mind a shelter in place if they had live sports to follow. We’ve gone through big global tragedies before, but even with 9/11, sports were gone for about a week and then they served as a thing for everyone to rally around. It’s just weird that we’re here among all these COVID cancellations and really not that much time has passed since Kobe Bryant passed away. I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but is 2020 already the worst sports year that’s existed?
CM: There’s no way to spin this into a hopeful situation. I’m sure there’s been worse years for individual sports, with certain scandals. Across the board, I can’t think of a year that’s been washed out and more depressing than this year. Particularly what is so depressing is it had so much potential to be such a good sports year. There were so many amazing storylines. As a Los Angeles native, as a Laker fan, and as a Dodger fan hoping to get revenge on the cheating Astros. There were so many things I was looking forward to with this sports year and it just feels stolen.
TH: I want to talk about Kobe for a minute since you are a big Laker fan. What was that day like for you as someone who was a fan of the team and followed his career from the day he was drafted through the day he passed away?
CM: I was nine years old when he was drafted. I grew up with him as the icon of Los Angeles sports. As the guy we all emulated on the playground and the guy whose jersey we wore. He was kind of the embodiment of not only skill and otherworldly talent, but also potential itself. Unlike Jordan, where we grew up with the ‘UnbeataBulls’ and Jordan had already cemented himself as the greatest of all time by the time I was old enough to be aware of sports. His legacy felt set in stone. Kobe represented potential. I think we kind of sensed, at least I did, that we were going to witness his greatness continue to unfold for the rest of his life. That idea of potential is what made his death so shocking. It seemed anti-Kobe to be killed in a way that was so out of his control.
Like a lot of people I just sort of stared at the screen and the headline and just refused to believe it. I’ve been trying to think about it and intellectualize my way through my grief. It feels at some levels kind of ridiculous to be grieving someone I don’t know and who means so much to so many people. You know, how could he mean so much to me? But it really feels personal. I still haven’t grappled with exactly why, other than he was the first for me. He was the first icon who showed me what it means to master your craft.
TH: He had so many differences to Jordan. He certainly wore the flaws in his game more transparently than Jordan, but he probably also had as close to the global reach that Jordan did. I cried when I found out. I wouldn’t have expected I was going to cry. It’s hard to put celebrity deaths into perspective. To call it grief. As I mentioned in my notes to you, this is a type of celebrity death that we’ve never dealt with before. The NBA started in 1947. Most of the stars from that era are still alive and the ones who aren’t died of old age. I think Len Bias came to mind for a lot of people, but we’ve never seen someone’s full career play out and still be so young in the scheme of things. It really felt like grieving without a template.
CM: Absolutely, and we haven’t mentioned yet that Gianna is a big part of our grief. And to talk about potential, she had so much talent as a basketball player, but I think she had the ability because of her lineage, because of her charisma, she was going to potentially change the WNBA and elevate that league to the stature and respect that it deserves. She had the potential to change our culture’s relationship with that league. Not to mention the human element of a father desperately trying to protect his daughter and being unable to do so. It’s just beyond, I mean I cried so much. I’ve almost tried to stop thinking about it on purpose to avoid thinking it somehow has anything to do with me, but it really does. It really does have something to do with all of us. You mentioned earlier that global aspect of Jordan’s game, but Kobe grew up in Italy and he had sort of this cosmopolitan aspect to him that felt truly global. He was polylingual. He was just extremely intelligent and sophisticated, but he also had the Philadelphia roots and an American swagger. In a lot of ways he really felt like the first global athlete. His death feels personal and universal at the same time and that’s part of why it’s so difficult to comprehend.
TH: Let’s get into your book. I’m a big fan of the writing podcast First Draft with Sarah Enni. She always asks the writers she speaks with to pitch their books and I’m just going to directly steal that tactic because I think it’s a good place to start. Can you pitch The Gimmicks for us?
CM: At the heart of the book, is a disappearance. Avo Gregoryan is this Armenian-born professional wrestler, who after a couple years in America, traveling the territories with his manager, Terry ‘Angel Hair’ Krill, disappears out of thin air. Years later, Angel Hair is retired in the Pacific Northwest trying to live a quiet life, and he gets a knock on the door. It’s an Armenian woman named Mina, who grew up with Avo in Soviet Armenia in the 1970s. She figures she knows the first part of Avo’s life and that Terry knows the American years of Avo’s life, and so together they embark on a journey to figure out the third part of Avo’s life. What happened after his disappearance? What was the true nature of his disappearance?
We learn that it has to do with his cousin, Ruben--they’re so close they call themselves brothers. Ruben’s been somewhat militzed by his fervor, by his indignation, about the Armenian genocide, which happened two generations before. Turkey has still denied the genocide ever taking place. 1.5 million Armenians killed or disappeared, and Ruben’s rage at this injustice leads him down a dark path of vengeance. Then we realize Avo’s disappearance is connected to Ruben’s path.
TH: I want to start with the professional wrestling angle, which is what initially drew us to your book. Not that I would ever call this, ‘just a sports book,’ but we are always looking for novels that have a sports entry point or some other kind of sport element to it. I love the professional wrestling thing too. There’s a stigma around professional wrestling. We see Angel Hair deal with this stigma at various parts of the book. He’s confronted as being a fraud and that his life is fake. One of the fascinating things I’ve heard you talk about before is that professional wrestling is reliant on the viewer’s willingness to suspend their disbelief. How did you discover that pro wrestling would be an effective tool for telling this story, especially since belief and disbelief are thematic elements to every part of the book?
CM: It really came down to a gut feeling I had that my early obsession with professional wrestling as a kid wasn’t superficial. It wasn’t just about being entertained. I had a sense that there was something deeper about the sport that drew me to it. So I knew I was going to write into it in some way. There was something about the sport. I hadn’t articulated it yet, but as I wrote the book, some of the deeper meanings of the sport to me are connected to my own Armenian-ness. My mother is from Armenia. Especially when it comes to the question of being accused of having a pain that isn’t real. Pro wrestlers are constantly called fake. The sad irony is they put themselves through so much pain and so much torture in order to protect the person they are fighting in the ring. They are going through a lot of pain in order to protect the other person. So it’s really disrespectful, I think, to call a pro wrestler fake. You can call the sport pre-orchestrated, or performed, or choreographed, but what they do is not fake. It’s not the right word for it. Something about that indignation compared to the accusation of pain being fake for the Armenians by Turkish authorities who claim they’re lying about the Armenian Genocide.
There was something underneath the surface and I knew that those two worlds were so far apart when it comes to human cost and tragedy and tone. And I thought this is either going to fail tremendously or I’m going to find something very surprising about believing pain connected in these two ways. That was the ambition.
The other thing I’d say about professional wrestling is that it’s a dramatization of justice. There’s a good guy and a bad guy and the bad guy wins sometimes. The crowd could be so indignant and outraged, and then that would be used to set up the next match. The storytelling aspect of justice, injustice, vengeance, and all of that stuff seemed fruitful for the story I was trying to tell on a more consequential level with the Armenian Genocide.
TH: One of the quotes I want to pull from the beginning of the book on this idea of professional wrestling is when Angel Hair tells Avo that, ‘Pro wrestling is the true American pastime. What was the American Dream if not for the ability to trade gimmick after gimmick until you’ve gotten one over?’ Is this reflective of your relationship with the sport and does Angel Hair’s logic here hold up with professional wrestling in 2020?
CM: I’m really curious and I want to hear your opinions about this too, actually. There are different ways to think about the American Dream. One way to think about the American Dream is that it’s a meritocracy. That no matter where you were born, what you look like, where you come from, if you work hard enough and are good enough at what you do, then you can succeed and build a good life for yourself and your family. The meritocracy idealism plays into a lot of people’s ideas of baseball as the American pastime, or football. Sports that have a more meritocracy-based life. In pro wrestling, the winners and losers are determined by the booker. It’s all been pre-arranged. It’s about who is going to sell the most tickets. It could be a good guy. It could be a bad guy. The idea is you have to get a reaction. The worst thing in wrestling is being boring and not getting a reaction. You can be loved, you can be hated, but you can’t be neither. It’s not a coincidence that our president is in the wrestling hall of fame. He was in the main event of Wrestlemania not that long ago. Anyone who is a professional wrestling fan isn’t surprised by his political success or political discourse. The goal is not to be loved or to be helpful or to be productive. The goal is to get a reaction. If you control the discourse then you control the power. It’s a more cynical way of thinking about the American Dream than meritocracy, which is an idealistic way and some would call naive. I have not fallen into either camp, I think it’s more complicated than either of those situations.
When I think of the American Dream myself, it’s not so much about meritocracy, but about the ability to start over. The ability to reinvent yourself. I’m the son of an immigrant so I was raised thinking on what it means to become an American, to build an American life. That’s what professional wrestling is. Your gimmick is your persona, your character. And if you’re not getting a reaction from the crowd, you go back and say I need to reinvent this thing.
There’s something about that question of reinvention and performance that I find more American than anything else. When I think of The Great Gatsby for example, I think The Great Gatsby is a pro wrestling novel.
TH: Wow. I love that!
CM: Gatsby is his gimmick. Jay Gatsby is not his real name, that’s his gimmick. He’s performed this sophisticated east coast class in order to win his love because his previous gimmick, his truer self, wasn’t effective at that. So when I think about the American Dream I do really think about the question of reinvention, but it’s not as easy as that even. That’s maybe true to some extent, I think it’s the writer’s job to evaluate, to say, ‘okay, that’s true, but what are the costs of that reinvention?’ We can think about what are the benefits of that reinvention, that capacity to reinvent yourself, but at what cost does it come to give up your previous self? What’s lost in that transaction? Then of course, questions of privilege and who gets to reinvent themselves and who gets told how to assimilate, how to reinvent themselves in a way that’s deemed acceptable by the mainstream culture. It’s a complicated, theoretical place. If I had tried to articulate that in the book, the characters wouldn’t have come off as people, they would have come off as examples. So it was really important for me not to have a totally developed idea of what I thought. I just wanted to have a sense of the questions I was asking. And not a sense of the answers I was trying to provide. I’m still in that space of raising these questions, hopefully getting people thinking about these questions, and just getting comfortable in that uncertainty.
TH: I agree with a lot of that. I’ve heard sports described as the ultimate meritocracy. It’s true to an extent. In theory, you keep working hard, keep improving, you keep moving up. But America is absolutely not a meritocracy. The meritocracy of sports applies to only the very, very privileged, who are born into a situation that can either benefit off of that setup or exploit it. More so than other sports, professional wrestling is definitely more reflective of American society. I don’t know if it’s the American Dream, but definitely I would say it’s reflective of the American ethos.
Let’s transition to sports fiction written for adults. I’ve discussed this with our mutual friend Geoff Herbach before, and Meghan and I talk about this all the time when discussing the fiction we want to publish. There aren’t a ton of contemporary novels with even the slightest sports angle in books written for adults. There are thousands of young adult and middle-grade novels that have sports elements or are entirely about sports. I’d say The Art of Fielding is the one famous contemporary novel that I can think of, which is about so much more than baseball, but has that baseball entry point. This year in addition to your book, I’ve read The Cactus League by Emily Nemens and I enjoyed it for a lot of reasons. I would put both of your books in the same category as I would The Art of Fielding. Both are very different books in a lot of ways, but both scratch that same sports itch I’m always looking for in compelling fiction. Do you have any thoughts on why we don’t see more novels like these that have sports angles as a driving force in storytelling?
CM: It’s such a great question. You sent me a note about this and I’ve been thinking about it for a few days and I still don’t have a great answer, but it is a great question. There’s a couple hypotheses that I’ve come up with. My first reaction is that sports are a young person’s thing. They’re played by young people and in order to play at the highest level you have to start playing sports at a very young age. There’s something naturally that suits the sports narrative with a coming of age narrative. So there might be something to that with why you see it so successfully done in YA. Then I started thinking about all the novels in the mid-century. There were a lot of adult novels and high literary novels about sports, particularly about baseball. There’s a great literary tradition about baseball. I’m glad Emily Nemens’s novel seems to be doing a great job of advancing that tradition.
It seems like it was a huge subject matter for mid-century writers. So there are lots of examples, but I started cynically thinking that the publishing world is just maybe not made up of sports fans.
TH: I think there’s something to that. For sure.
CM: I think so. I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being snobbish, but there’s something about sports that might seem anti-literary in some ways. That all of the immediacy and fun of sports, if you intellectualise them in a book, you kind of remove all the fun of sports and then what’s the point? To be able to do it well, to depict why a sport is physically and literally wonderful and magical and a craft and an art form, without sacrificing the thematic power of what it means to be part of a team. I’m thinking of Netherland by Joseph O’Neill about cricket players in Central Park in New York. There are ways that sports in American books are at least a reflection of the American culture of the time. So, maybe we’re just at a period where it’s just not a pressing window into American culture, but I’m curious about your thoughts.
TH: There are certainly people in publishing who are sports fans and who are getting sports books published, they just mostly seem to be nonfiction books and written for adults. I focus mostly on writing nonfiction myself so I don’t have an easy answer when it comes to fiction, other than that our entrypoint into sports almost always happens when we’re children. Sports sort of function as an escape, but they also function as a vehicle for us to dream. People say they want to become a professional athlete when they grow up when they’re children, and as we age, we are no longer asked ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ That question is not really at the forefront of novels that are written for adults.
Putting labels on things makes it difficult too. The characters in The Art of Fielding are freshmen and sophomores in college, for the most part, so, now knowing more about the publishing industry than the first time I read the book, I think some people would argue it’s, “High YA” and not technically a novel for adults, which I think is a silly thing to argue about.
I think there is room, though. I think sport as story can be used just as effectively in fiction as it can be in nonfiction.
CM: The challenge of writing good fiction about sports is that the best stories in sports are the best because they couldn’t have been written. There’s something just so pure about a story emerging out of sports, and circumstance, and chance, and skill. The moment you fictionalize it and contrive it, you lose a lot of its magic. That’s why I love professional wrestling when it’s done well. Because it’s hard to tell a good story in a sports setting that’s contrived, when the best stories in a sports setting are not contrived.
TH: I have to say I felt about every different emotion through the course of reading this book, but I have to mention the resounding anger I felt while reading about the Armenian Genocide, which also quickly morphed into shame as I realized I knew almost nothing about it prior to reading the book. Ruben provided my first education on the details of the Armenian Genocide. I don’t recall it being mentioned in a single history class I ever took, which feels fucking egreious. What do readers who may not be familiar with the Armenian Genocide need to know? And what is the process for tackling something so personal to you, but also something so criminally underrepresented and misrepresented?
CM: Yeah, it’s that last word that should spark our conversation. It’s not an accident that the Armenian Genocide isn’t taught. It’s designedly and purposely obscured by the Turkish lobbyists in Washington D.C. There’s a lot of money at play in keeping the genocide murky and making it seem like, ‘Oh, who knows what really happened? It was the fog of war. WWI was ending. The Ottoman Empire was falling and there was civil war between the different tribes…’ No. There’s ample evidence, and thankfully it is historical consensus and has been for 50 years that this was an orchestrated attempt to annihilate the Armenian population in what was Western Armenia and is now Eastern Turkey.
I too feel that sense of indignation and wish that people knew about it. Of course, I don’t know about every tragedy that’s happened, I learn about atrocities that I feel ashamed to not have known about too. I really hope that nobody feels I’m trying to educate anybody about the Armenian Genocide. It’s part of my heritage with my mother coming from Armenia, and my growing up with stories from the genocide, and I needed to express that aspect of myself.
TH: Well if you have time to stick around for a few more questions, I’ve set aside a few more fun discussion topics to lighten the mood after discussing genocide.
CM: Absolutely! Thank you for noticing. Let’s lift it up.
TH: Who is your favorite all-time wrestler and why?
CM: I’ve been asked this question and I feel like I give a different answer every time I get asked. I had to watch so many interviews with old wrestlers to get a sense of what life was like as a wrestler on the road in the 70s and I learned a lot about the psychology of a wrestler. Brett Hart, the infamous wrestler from Canada, has a system of how to rank wrestlers. He says in order to judge a wrestler, you have at least three categories: 1) their in-ring skills, their wrestling abilities. 2) their abilities on the microphone in an interview, to convey emotion and connect with the crowd. 3) their physical appearance and their look. I would add 4) their ability to make money, which maybe is a result of the other three. If I think of those four categories, who would rank the highest 1-10, for me it’s Macho Man Randy Savage.
I think Randy Savage is the most unique speaker on the microphone. He’s just so high-energied, weird, and unforgettable. His ring skills are tremendous. His athleticism is amazing. His look is unforgettable. His cowboy hat and his frill jackets and his weird ski goggles! Like, why is he wearing skiing goggles?
TH: What do you currently miss the most about sports?
CM: This is maybe going to sound like too obvious of an answer. I miss going to the bar, having a beer, and striking up conversations with the bartender and the people around me about what is happening on the screen. It is the only method of connecting with strangers that I know of at this point in my life. It’s so much fun and I miss it so much.
TH: Exactly! I love how I can become best friends with someone for an hour just by sitting at a bar and watching the same events unfold together.
CM: Well, we’ll have to watch basketball at a bar together then when all this is over.
TH: Count me in! Don’t count on me cheering for the Lakers, though.
Thank you to Chris McCormick for taking the time out of his quarantine to be part of this issue of the Under Review. The book is The Gimmicks. It’s a remarkable read that our whole team enjoyed from cover to cover. Purchase it from your local independent bookstore today!
