Quan Barry was born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s North Shore. She is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the recent novel We Ride Upon Sticks, which O: Oprah Magazine describes as, “Spellbinding, wickedly fun.” The New York Times described her previous work, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, as “deeply affecting.” Her third novel, When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East, follows a group of Buddhist monks as they search for a reincarnation in the vast Mongolian landscape; When I’m Gone will be published in spring 2022 by Knopf-Pantheon. Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was the first ever Writer-in-Residence at Forward Theater who produced her first play, The Mytilenean Debate this past spring.

Terry Horstman started playing basketball as a child in Minneapolis and grew up to become the all-time lowest scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. A dubious record, but one that can never be broken. His writing has been published by or forthcoming from Flagrant Magazine, The McNeese Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, The Growler, Eater, USA TODAY Sports Media Group, Unplugg’d, and he once Googled ‘submission guidelines for The New Yorker.’ He is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Hamline University and a co-founding editor of the Under Review. When not writing, he is probably eating buffalo wings, at a dive bar, or yelling about how awesome something is (possibly all three). He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis.

This interview was conducted on Thursday, May 12, 2022 over Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and length.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Terry Horstman: For any of our readers who haven’t had the chance to read We Ride Upon Sticks yet, could you pitch the book for us?

Quan Barry: Yeah, sure! We Ride Upon Sticks takes place in 1989 in the Massachusetts town of Danvers. As some people know back in 1692, Salem, MA was much larger and incorporated a lot of towns on the North Shore of Boston. Danvers was actually a part of Salem called Salem Village. It’s true a lot of the events that sparked the Salem Witchcraft Trials actually happened in Danvers, which then became its own town in the 1700s.

I grew up in Danvers. We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers high school varsity field hockey team as they have a rags to riches season. At the beginning of the season, they’re losing games, they’re disheartened, and then they decide to maybe dabble in a little witchcraft and their season turns around. So we follow them as they try to make it to the state championship in Worcester.

TH: Thank you so much for that. In preparing for this interview, I found the video you made for the Boston.com Book Club discussion, which really helps set the scene. I think the book is an ode to so many things, but particularly the 80s in general. All of the hair references, the mall bangs, the claw, it’s [the era is] for sure its own character. Were you intending to write a book that was a tribute to the 80s and that time and culture or was that just naturally part of it due to the time it’s set in?

QB: Yeah, I knew I wanted to write about the 1980s. I have to admit I dislike doing research [laughter] and I played field hockey in 1989 in Danvers, MA which meant I didn’t have to do a lot of research, so I knew it was going to be set in that time period. I knew if I was going to write about the 80s-because a lot of people feel very nostalgic for that time period-myself included, I knew that I had to move beyond the pulp culture and also show the ways in which the 1980s were not very enlightened; the misogyny, the homophobia, and those kinds of things. So I knew that I wanted to have the fun aspects of it, but in order to do it justice I also had to look at the things about the 1980s that weren’t great.

TH: You mentioned you played on the field hockey team at Danvers high school. Danvers is a real place. The Falcons are a real team that was a big part of your childhood. I’m thinking about the team aspect and how interacting with your teammates is such a big part of the experience. I know from the Boston.com video that the coach in the book is the only full character based on a real life person, but how did the culture and behavior of the fictional 1989 Danvers Falcons in the book, mirror yourself and your teammates in real life?

QB: Each of the players have a little bit of me in them. Some of them have more me and some of them have less me, but I’m definitely a bit of a puppet master in a sense that I recognize myself in all of them. It’s true, I mentioned our beloved coach who in real life was named Barb Damon, who passed away the year before the book came out in her 80s. Once she had passed away that meant that I could lean into the fact that that character has many attributes that she had. As far as [the other characters] when the book came out I was in Danvers and gave a reading and a lot of people from the team came and asked me about it.

It’s funny, the characters that people most ask me about are secondary characters. People have asked me about (the character) Log Winters, the football team captain (in the book). People are like “Is Log so and so??” I think people from my high school probably do know who that is [laughter]. Ultimately in the book, he’s a kind person.

Even if there are [characters] who are loosely based on folks, I hope that I didn’t portray anybody in a way that they wouldn’t want to be portrayed as. In all of my books, there’s always kind of a collage of many different people who go into one character. Having said that, there could be anywhere from 10-30% [taken from real life] maybe even a little bit higher and then the rest is just imagination.

TH: In terms of the actual writing process when it comes to characters, do you think about the way people in your life will perceive them or react? Is that ever a voice in your head while doing the actual writing? Or is this something that every writer just has to deal with?

QB: This book is my third novel. My two other novels are set in Asia, I have a new novel that’s set in Antarctica, so in my fiction world this book is kind of pseudo-generous in the sense that most of my characters are not people that any of my family or friends would easily recognize in any way, shape, or form.

Having said that,, I’m also a poet and a playwright and it becomes more of an issue for me, and I think a lot of writers, in the world of poetry, which is seen as being a little more “nonfiction-y” in certain kinds of ways. It gets trickier there. I recently also had my first play produced. My sister came to see it, and the characters are nothing like our family, but the landscapes [were familiar] and there were a few jokes that some of the characters make that my parents make. My sister recognized those kinds of things.

In the long run, because I’m writing things that are hopefully big-hearted, it’s never been an issue. It is there in the back of my mind with poetry, but in other genres, not so much.

TH: We mentioned that you literally played field hockey and the team that is the center of We Ride Upon Stick. You once mentioned coming to the Midwest only to realize field hockey isn’t really played in Wisconsin. Growing up in Minneapolis, I was aware of field hockey’s existence, but my knowledge of it ended there. How big is field hockey on the east coast and what was it like to play field hockey as a kid?

QB: When I was growing up, girls couldn’t play ice hockey. Now that ice hockey is a possibility for girls, I don’t know if that’s drawing more [than field hockey]. Though ice hockey is played in winter and field hockey is a fall sport so there may be a crossover.

I went to a public school. I think field hockey is maybe sometimes seen as a private school kind of thing. There’s unfortunately probably a little bit of a class issue involved with it. We talk about it in the book a bit, but in the 80s, you wore shin guards and a mouth guard. That doesn’t protect you when the ball is flying around very fast and it’s a stick game! Nowadays, happily, I do believe girls wear more protection, which there should have been when we were playing but there wasn’t.

After this book came out, I looked at some articles about my high school field hockey team–unlike in the book, we were an actual field hockey powerhouse back in the 1980s. We had many conference wins. We’d often win our particular conference and then move on. The year I was there we did make it to the state championship. I’m sure this happens with many sports, but when you have a strong program, it just builds. You just know when you get into junior high, like, “yeah field hockey is the sport to play because the high school team is really good.” It just builds on itself.

TH: We actually did publish a field hockey essay in our last issue, so field hockey is appearing in back-to-back issues now. Good to hear that there was no witchcraft needed for the Falcons to be successful in real life.

In thinking of the struggles and problems of the 80s, many are obviously and unfortunately all too prevalent still: homophobia, misogyny, gender identity, racial identity, and more. The book acknowledges that these young women are going through this together. How did telling their stories through the element of a sports team (and that togetherness) help as a way to confront those struggles?

QB: I think that was just the way I always envisioned it. I knew before I even started writing it that every chapter was going to focus on a different game as the Falcons play a different team. I also knew that every chapter was going to focus on a different character, and I knew that I wanted to present a range of issues that face young women. I knew that this is the character and this is going to be her issue.

I also get really nostalgic about team sports and the 1980s. I watch my friends’ kids play sports now, I don’t want it to be the kind of thing where every generation says “Ahhh you kids, it’s not the same!” you know. But I’m also a swimmer and I grew up swimming in the 70s, which means that my stroke is a 70s stroke. Now there are all these things you can do to modernize your stroke and make it better. I hired a coach before the pandemic to try and teach me the new techniques. I mention it because this swim coach that I hired, he’s kind of this local legendary swim coach, it’s like $100 an hour for a lesson and these are during the day and I would see who he was coaching before and I would see who he was coaching after me, and it was always like kids. So there would be parents in the stands, who had taken their kids out of school to go to a swim lesson and pay $100 an hour to send their kids to a swim lesson. That’s just very foreign to me having grown up learning to swim at the Y.

I think that that example is just kind of what has happened to high school sports in many ways. I was at Dick’s Sporting Goods recently and saw that you could buy a bat for like $500! It’s like what is going on? Who is spending $500 for a bat for their kid? But it is very prevalent.

So that’s a long answer, but I just get very nostalgic when I think about team sports in the 80s. I do feel like team sports really shaped so much of who I am. In ways that, at the time, I couldn’t have known. It gave me a lot of discipline. It taught me how to be part of a team. I was not the superstar at all. I was honestly probably the worst one on the team. At least the worst of the starters. So it taught me how to be bad at something. It taught me so many things and when I see these friends who I’ve known for 30+ years, we all talk about how it never occurred to us not to be friends. We were a team.

TH: It’s very clear from the beginning of the book that this is an ensemble cast/collective voice narrative. Were you always approaching the book with this omniscient narrator telling the story game by game and player by player in mind? It sounds like that’s how you always saw it, but also, what is the difference in writing in that form as opposed to writing in regular first-person?

QB: I always knew it was going to be in first-person plural. I was thinking very much of the very famous novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides. In The Virgin Suicides, it’s a group of teen boys who tell the story of a group of girls in a family. The boys collectively tell that story. So I always knew it was going to be first-person plural. I didn’t know who was going to be the plural telling the story.

At first, I thought it was going to be the entire school telling the story of this girls’ field hockey team but it was too unwieldy. Then I thought, well maybe, it’s just the girls freshman team.

I went into high school when I was 13 years old, and some of those senior girls were 17 or 18 and they could drive. We idolized the older girls on the team. There’s a whole different world between 13 and 18. So I thought it was going to be the freshman girls team that told the story, but I couldn’t [justify] why there would be a freshman girl in certain places to know certain things.

I have had people ask me, ‘who is the voice?’ My joke is there’s no “I” in “team,” and the same thing goes in terms of telling the story. I do feel in the final paragraphs at the very end of the book, the voice expands and it’s bigger and I don’t want to say who I think it is because I think the reader can see it as being who they want, but I do see it as expanding beyond the team.

As far as the differences are concerned, I’m a very intuitive writer so I don’t overthink things. It’s the kind of thing where if I had overthought writing first-person plural, I would have been in a world of pain. If you start to think about it, you can work yourself into knots. So I just don’t think about it.

In some ways it’s funny, because in my life, I probably use the royal “we” a lot when I do just mean “me.” So it’s not that odd for me socially to use the plural. I think it’s because I’m trying to include people when I do it. It wasn’t difficult for me to write in that first-person “we” voice.

TH: Well if you do ever decide to write from the perspective of the freshman players looking up to the varsity, I would love to see it. It’s true in high school sports, the difference between being 14 and being 18 is just so vast and crazy.

I want to talk a little bit more about the witchcraft angle. Obviously, part of your childhood growing up in the town where the Salem Witchcraft Trials literally occurred meant you didn’t have to do a ton of research I imagine. Growing up there, was that history part of everyday life? What’s the culture around it and what is the town’s relationship to that part of history?

QB: It’s interesting because again, there’s Danvers and there’s Salem. In Salem, it drives their tourism. So when people come, they go to Salem. There are museums and there’s a lot of kitsch. It’s widely known. There’s a scene in the book, it’s actually my favorite chapter, when they go to Salem for Halloween. That chapter is loosely based on things I actually saw in the 1990s of people actually protesting Wiccans. The Wiccans were having a memorial parade and there were people there protesting and screaming at them about “suffer not a witch to live” kind of stuff.

Salem used to be kind of seedy, but since the early 2000s it’s become, I don’t want to say Disneyfied, but they figured out a way to market themselves in a way that’s now this tourist mecca.

That’s what you see in Salem, but then in Danvers, it’s more like “we don’t want to talk about it.” There are still people like the Putnams. I knew lots of Putnams growing up and historically what happened there was bad. There are things around town. There are markers. There’s a memorial now, which didn’t used to be there. It’s right by the soccer field. It’s crazy. There’s a soccer field and then there’s this huge witchcraft memorial.

There is also a foundation where the original meeting house was. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is there, which more and more people know about–Rebecca Nurse was the oldest woman hung during the hysteria. You can go and visit her home. As kids, the witchcraft trials were part of the curriculum through elementary school. You would go and visit the sites and then read about it, but it wasn’t a huge deal. I was just the kind of kid who remembered that stuff.

TH: How did it come to you that Emilio Estevez would be the harbinger of the dark magic that powers the Falcons in the book? Was he the main boy crush for the real Falcons in 1989?

QB: I’ve mentioned this in interviews, a friend of mine had two predominant posters in her locker. One of them was Emilio Estevez. The other one was somebody whose name we couldn’t pronounce. We were always like “Oh my god! Keen-oh Reeves is so cute!” It’s the idea that because Keanu Reeves is still (mainstream) and has a huge career, it’s not quite as funny if it’s him. It needed to be somebody who had been huge, but is not in the public eye so much any more. So it just made sense that it would be Emilio.

TH: It was really funny for me since I know Emilio Estevez as the head coach from the Mighty Ducks movies. He’s a revered figure here in Minnesota, but not for being the hot go-to actor, but for coaching peewee hockey so that was really fun for me.

I do want to talk a little bit about your first play being produced, which you’ve mentioned. What has that experience been like and just as someone who is a poet, novelist, and a playwright, is your writing process different across those three different forms?

QB: Before I even start I usually know what the form is. I do have some short stories from long ago that I have reworked as plays. It’s interesting. They do influence each other. I talk about it with my students because my students are more and more interested in writing in many genres. I strongly encourage writers to write in many genres because you discover things that you maybe didn’t think were possible.

I am not funny in my poetry. I could not write a comedic poem to save my life. If I stuck to poetry, which would have been fine, but I wouldn’t have realized I have this whole other skill set. I can actually write comedy. I can actually write these other things. Other genres allow me to just do stuff that I maybe can’t do in another particular genre.

TH: Quan, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Is there anything you’d like to promote in closing?

QB: I’d like to say in closing that some people like to say, because it is a feminist work that We Ride Upon Sticks is a book just for girls/women. I actually think it’s a great book for men too. Because it deals with all kinds of issues like body image and consent, and other things like that. I think it’s a gentle way for men, young men, whatever, to learn about their own responsibilities to women.

Interview with Quan Barry

the Under Review is an online literary journal committed to publishing literary fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction with a sport slant, nod, backdrop, or undercurrent.