Author Interview with Will McGrath
WILL McGRATH has worked as a reporter, homeless shelter caseworker, UPS truck loader, public radio producer, Burger King chicken sandwich mayo-applicator, ghostwriter, and ghost editor, in slightly different order.
His debut book, Everything Lost Is Found Again, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography & Memoir, as well as the Dzanc/Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize. He has written for The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, AFAR, Guernica, The Rumpus, Foreign Affairs, and Asymptote, among other publications.
TERRY HORSTMAN is a co-editor of the Under Review. His writing has been published by Taco Bell Quarterly, Flagrant Magazine, The McNeese Review, among other publications. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis.
This interview was conducted in person on January 11, 2023 at Gabe’s Neighborhood Kitchen in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The very same establishment where the Under Review was founded. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Terry Horstman: Will, thank you so much for joining me today, especially in this historic location. We are at Gabe’s in Saint Paul, MN, the very same bar where the Under Review was founded.
Will McGrath: It’s a historic venue. I’m sure you guys have applied for historic status here. I’m always happy to be involved with anything Under Review related.
TH: Well you are now officially under review.
WM: [Laughter] Let’s do it!
TH: I want to start by talking about your most recent book, Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces. Same publisher as your debut, Everything Lost is Found Again, with Dzanc Books. Real quick just because I’m looking at it, the blurb on the front reads:
“A bravura feat of bearing witness. McGrath’s all-seeing eye ranges across borders and through wormholes in the culture. These essays illuminate a fractured age with the arc and blaze of signal flares.”
Wells Tower said that about you.
WM: [Laughing again] Yeah.
TH: How does it feel hearing those words from Wells and letting them wash over you?
WM: I was pretty excited when I got that blurb back. He’s a fancy dude. He’s a fancy dude and that’s a nice thing to say. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve e-corresponded with him a bunch of times over the years. He’s a writer who I admire a lot, so I was pretty excited.
TH: Let’s start talking about the essay, ‘The Open Pits.’ I was lucky enough to be at a reading this past fall where you read this essay. Something I love about your essays is that they are often fun, cheeky, and curious while also grappling with intense, real world issues. While this one is maybe the most intense, part of why we’re here together doing this interview, for this particular journal, is that a random rugby hat that is the harbinger for what ensued in this essay.
Tell us a little bit about the context here; how did you find yourself at a diamond mine and consequently at the highest pub in Lesotho, right?
WM: The highest pub in all of Southern Africa. It’s way up in the mountains. It’s not a publicly accessible pub. It’s this pub inside the diamond mine and I had come to this place through a fairly random encounter by meeting a South African contractor. He was not someone I knew. We had a mutual acquaintance.
He saw me wearing a rugby hat and it happened to be his favorite rugby team. He got very excited seeing me wearing this hat and just struck up a conversation. As it turned out, there was a big upcoming match for this rugby side and I got invited to come along to the diamond mine to watch the match with him and some of the other contractors.
Just to give a little bit more context, the mine is way up in the mountains of Lesotho. It kind of feels like you’re on a remote moon base. It’s at least 10,000 feet up into the mountains. It’s very isolated. There’s one road into the place. The roads are barely roads and also along a mountain. We arrived in the afternoon and I knew, ‘you’re going to be staying overnight here to watch this game, you’re not leaving until tomorrow.’
It was a strange situation of essentially being locked into this place overnight. A place where I didn’t really have any business being, and with some people I didn’t know and it quickly became clear, had very different philosophical outlooks towards the world. All based on this random connection of this rugby hat I bought at the airport. I was not a rugby fan. I was not knowledgeable in any way about the sport. It was just a random moment of connection.
At the time, I don’t even think I knew it was a rugby team. I found it in a bargain bin and was like, ‘this looks cool!’
TH: What was the rugby team?
WM: It was Western Province Rugby. Their logo was this delicate little flower, which seemed like maybe an interesting logo for a rugby team?
TH: Surprises all over the place.
So the hat is on your head. You’re an official Western Province Rugby supporter. Where did you meet this individual?
WM: It was in this small town up in the mountains. We made a plan to meet up the following week or a few days later.
TH: What was the invitation? Did he just say, ‘hey, wanna check out my diamond mine?!’
WM: The guy was getting more and more excited telling me about how much he loved this rugby team, as sports fanatics do, and I was just, you know, gamely nodding along trying to pretend that I knew what he was talking about and wasn’t a total imposter. I was also having the thought, ‘this is access to a place I probably shouldn’t be allowed and I’m not going to get access otherwise, so I’m going to play along with this situation and try not to out myself as a totally uninformed American.’
TH: So you never let him know about the true origin of acquiring the rugby hat?
WM: No! I did not. Especially as things became more tense over the course of this encounter that the essay kind of gets into. I really did not want to out myself as an outsider. I had kind of sunk into, ‘I am in journalistic observation mode and I don’t want to disrupt this fragile situation that I’m observing.’
TH: And the “fragile situation” is the diamond mine and how the people who work there are treated. As one place, it’s a complete representation of racism and segregation, particularly in that part of Africa. At one point in the encounter did it occur to you that you weren’t just going to be seeing a rugby game here, you were also going to be subjected to some pretty heinous acts of discrimination?
WM: He took me to the pub in this diamond mine and, as often happens in pubs, people are talking freely. That’s when these other white South African contractors were saying things that were very racially charged and I had that sinking feeling that this isn’t going to be a very good environment to be in. I’m just going to hunker down and ride this out the best I can.
Part of what that essay gets into, ultimately, is asking myself, you know, ‘how implicated am I in this situation?’ I think of myself as a progressive person, but I’m in a situation where the Black employees at this mine clearly associate me with these white contractors and you start to ask yourself questions. We have these fancy ideas of where we stand on positions, but, how do other people see you? How implicated are you? How entrenched are you in these structures that you are a beneficiary?
Partly, that essay starts to ask those questions of, what are my responsibilities? How much am I benefitting from these evil and violent structures in the world? When you started out asking about the rugby element of it…sports are interesting because there’s this fundamental community building element to it. People rally around these things that are subjective and you develop these intense, often irrational passions. But they’re essentially about community identity. That’s how this guy connected with me. He saw me as a fellow member of this community.
You start to ask yourself, ‘what community am I part of?’ To the miners, I’m not part of their community. I belong to a different community. In a strange way, the rugby element wasn’t foreground in my mind when I was writing that essay, but later on, it seemed like an interesting theme hiding behind all of this. Rugby and football, you know we’ve got these sports that entertain us and are built on violence to bodies. They’re sports that are derived on taking entertainment from violence done to bodies that usually belong to people from communities that haven’t had the advantages other people have had. The diamond mine was an echo of that. A place built on labor from bodies coming from impoverished places to derive pleasure and entertainment and luxury. There were these parallels from the rugby element. The gladiatorial entertainment element of rugby and what happens at this diamond mine. The value of extracting labor from human bodies.
TH: You make this discovery before this game starts. Then it’s kind of, ‘all I want to do is leave, but…’
WM: It’s impossible to leave.
TH: Yeah, this isn’t like being invited to watch a game at a bar. If the people at the bar are dicks, you can just leave the bar, call a Lyft and go home. You’re stuck in a diamond mine with these guys, you have to watch an entire rugby game with them and also spend the night with them.
WM: Yeah, and we went to their living quarters to watch the game and they had lavishly provided food and drink. It was like being at a tailgate where everyone assumes you’re on their side and part of the community.
Their assumption is kind of, ‘you’re one of us.’ And in my mind, I’m desperately thinking, ‘I am not one of you!’ But, as a writer and an essayist, you have to ask yourself those questions. ‘Am I one of them?’ I hope not, but this is a question that needs to be explored. Once I got into that mode I started sneaking into the bathroom to take notes.
TH: I feel like as essayists, we’re often telling stories and someone makes the realization, ‘oh this is an essay!’ It doesn’t always occur to you in the moment in your own life because you’re not always thinking in essay mode. There’s a moment before this experience was over that you knew you were living in an essay. At what moment did it click in your head to excuse yourself to the bathroom so you could write as many notes as possible?
WM: I think it was on the walk back from the pub. It’s like this compound way up there. There are all these weird tracks, trails, and shifting earth around this place. The walk back from that pub was when the wheels started turning. I think there’s an element of disassociation there. Like, ‘if I can start to be in “writer mode,”’ it’s almost a way to not deal with the discomfort that you’re in.
TH: Did you enjoy watching this game at all or were you just miserably uncomfortable the entire time?
A diamond mine in Lesotho
WM: I think I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing my emotions. I don’t know if that’s a good writer trait or not. I knew at that moment ‘this is a surreal experience and I’ve just got to try to get down what I can.’
TH: And because you’re you, and you’re a good writer, you wrote about this openly and honestly and the essay gets out into the world. It even gets back to these particular fans of Western Province Rugby in South Africa and they reach out to you again with not quite the same friendly tone…
WM: Yeah, the diamond mine put out a press release essentially denouncing everything I had written. There were people I knew in difficult situations there who I was trying to keep anonymous, so I hadn’t mentioned the name of the diamond mine in a semi-futile attempt to keep it anonymous.
They then put out a press release that said something along the lines of ‘We ARE indeed the anonymous diamond mine and we want to make it clear…’
TH: ‘We ARE the racist diamond mine in question’ I imagine is a wild start to a press release in response to an essay you wrote.
I think this leads into one of my favorite lines of yours from the whole book, “I had never been sued for libel by an international mining conglomerate before. I wondered what the process entailed.”
I assume that wasn’t on your Lesotho Bingo Card when you lived there. At any point were you sitting there like, ‘I really wish I had grabbed literally any other fucking hat!’
WM: I think anytime you get access, whether intentional or accidental, to some part of the world that’s normally cordoned off from public view, I’m always excited for those moments. Ideally, you don’t get sued by a diamond mine, which did not come to pass. They just had to put something out there.
I feel like that’s when your antennas’ really up as a writer, when you’re like, ‘this is an area of life I wouldn’t normally get access to, so I need to be paying attention here.’
TH: Do you still own the Western Province Rugby hat?
WM: I do! I do. It’s very worn down and washed at this point. It carries a little emotional charge to it that’s for sure [laughter].
TH: I think that’s great because, obviously, we’re interested in the type of writing that’s not too heavy handed on the “sportsiness” to it, but the thread is definitely there. With that in mind, another essay of yours that encapsulates sport existing in these hidden spaces and the role it plays in those spaces is, ‘Ballad of the Curtain Jerker.’
A great exposé on the, I guess we’ll call it the punk pro wrestling scene of the Twin Cities, which I didn’t know existed before reading this. I really wish I had. An essay that doesn’t end with you being threatened, so that’s good.
How did you come to find yourself in these church and synagogue basements, beside these pro wrestling rings, and all of the personalities and pageantry that came along with them?
WM: Wrestling in general had been off my radar for many, many years, essentially since my childhood. An old buddy of mine called me up one night and was like, ‘You wanna go see wrestling at the American Legion?’, and obviously I wanna go see wrestling at the American Legion. One of those times when you don’t understand the question entirely, but the answer is yes.
So I went along. The first one was a pro wrestling match set up at an American Legion. Later, during the heart of Covid, I started following this group that was regularly performing at a synagogue that offered this organization their main hall as a big space where people could be spaced out for Covid precautions.
It was just such an uncanny experience. I knew nothing about this and yet was immediately transported back to my childhood of watching crazy pro wrestling matches. I was just like, I need to know what’s going on here. What is this version of pro wrestling? Who are the people doing it? Who are the fans that love it so much? It was a whole world that had been hidden from me and this gave me the chance to dive back into it and learn everything I could about it.
TH: I don’t know if I want to pigeonhole you in anything here, because there are so many great sentences in this book, but, is the opening sentence of this essay, ‘I chugged a beer in the synagogue parking lot’ the best sentence of this whole collection? I mean so many things can happen from there.
[Lots of laughter]
WM: Each sentence is the beginning of a little forking path. There’s an infinite number of possibilities where you can go. That sentence does lead us down to some weird little subculture corners of the world. Those are the things that I love. This essay in this book is sort of a strange, anti-parallel to the diamond mine one.
Ultimately, this essay is all about the community that forms around indie pro wrestling. It’s about these bonds that formed from it that I found wonderfully sincere, enthusiastic, and wholesome. These wrestlers are following their dreams and doing exactly what they want to be doing. These fans are being delivered an experience that is exactly what they want and the kind of communities that build out of a whole bunch of people following their passion with sincere enthusiasm. The whole goodness of community that arises from something like that covers everything good that can come from sports and come from these spaces.
One of the things that was delightful to me was how many fans who were from so many disparate backgrounds connected through this medium. These are human beings who never would have met in life, never would have connected, and then this thing unites them. In this big network of human connection, it’s this weird little node and its own little branch springs off and then here’s this new way that people can be connected to each other.
TH: There’s a braid in this essay as well going back to your experience of watching pro wrestling as a kid versus this version of pro wrestling taking place during a pandemic, in a synagogue or an American Legion.
WM: It’s always nice with these kinds of essays to show that personal connection. There’s some level of a “kind of” journalism with what I’m doing here, but I’m using that essentially in scare quotes. I think most journalists would be like, “no, you are not a journalist,” [Laughter] but it’s immersive and you want to be immersed in this environment.
As a writer, I always want to be trying to show my hand. I think where journalism shows its limitations is its attempt towards objectivity, which I always find to be a pretty phony stance. We’re all subjective people. To pretend like we can really hold ourselves scientifically and objectively removed from these moments of passion, always strikes me as a somewhat false position to take. I try to take the opposite position. I am here. I am in it. Whatever preconceived notions, whatever my limited lens and understanding is, I want to put that out front.
Then the reader can decide how much they want to trust me. I’m trying to lay my cards on the table as far as to who I am and what I know early on. For me, that’s where a writer can gain trust from the reader. By not pretending to be something they’re not. I’m just here. I’m entangled in this and I’m not going to pretend to have some special viewpoint. I have my own faulty viewpoint.
One of the fun things about writing for me, and something that separates what I do from pure journalism, is that I’m always kind of interested in calling into question the narrative authority. That narrative voice, it’s always interesting to me to kind of poke at it a little bit. How much do we trust this person? How much does this person really know? Just as a reader, or a human being in general, that should be one of our stances to the world. With any information we’re being given, there should be a little bit of poking and probing and asking who’s telling this story? How much do we trust this person telling the story? What entanglements do they have?
I try to have a little fun with that when I’m writing, adding that element of poking at the narrator a little bit. It’s especially fun when the narrator is yourself.
TH: And from that standpoint, you don’t know the other people in this essay who you’re now entering into this social experience with. Just by virtue of being there and being curious, you get to know the fans and also the performers, the athletes.
One of whom I want to be sure to highlight is Devon Monroe. A fan favorite for all of the reasons that we have fan favorites, and he’s also this young, queer, Black wrestler in a space that’s been mostly heterosexual and white. He somewhat functions as this hope for a new and more inclusive future, for sport to transcend who we are for the better. What was your experience in getting to know him? In seeing him as a fan and getting to interact with him and with his fans? What is that discovery process like for you?
WM: First of all, I think I spent the better part of a year working on this specific essay and going to these matches. There’s so much material to synthesize. As a writer going into this, I’m asking myself who is the main character? Whose point of view do I want to follow? And the first time ever that I saw Devon wrestle, I was like, ‘this is the star.’
It’s not just because his identity and his positionality were unique in the wrestling world or in white, Midwestern Minnesota. He’s a super charismatic performer and a great athlete. There’s a ton of energy and juice to this person. As soon as I saw him perform, I knew, this is the guy.
What was most intriguing to me, I again had preconceived notions about who the fans were in a wrestling audience. My preconceived notions were, you know, mouth breathing basement dwelling white men. I didn’t expect my obviously very stereotypical, preconceived notion of who the audience was to be proven so wrong.
Devon Monroe aka Black Sexellence. Photo by Rob Meyers (The Growler Magazine)
There was huge fan support for Devon, aka “Black Sexellence.” When I saw the reaction that he would get from crowds I became even more intrigued. Anytime you have your preconceived notions upended, that’s another one of those antenna moments. It’s like ‘okay, I obviously did not have this right and I need to start paying attention.’ Once I saw how the fans reacted to Devon, I knew he was the story.
TH: Wrestling fits in perfectly with that too because it’s one of those sports that has its super fans, but it carries such a stigma with it. A lot of people think “wrestling’s stupid, it’s fake.” We’re seeing a pattern here at the Under Review of us getting great writing about wrestling, in this issue too!
A previous author interview with Chris McCormick, his novel The Gimmicks, has great narrative context on wrestling. It’s almost like it is the sport that’s been bred to smash preconceived notions as soon as you open your mind to the possibility of it doing just that.
WM: That was one of those things that I learned quickly while following this story. Wrestling isn’t fake.
TH: No. It’s not.
WM: Are the outcomes predetermined?
TH: Sure.
WM: Sure.
TH: Is it the only sport that’s ever done that?! No!
WM: No! Of course not.
Are some of the characters invented? Yes. But the feats of physicality that these people are capable of, the athleticism is real and impressive. People in the wrestling world tend to bridle at being called “fake.” There’s really impressive athleticism that’s going on in addition to being told a story.
It’s kind of the perfect fusion of sports and narrative. The sporting world is always in quest of a narrative of some sort. It’s always a long season, so you need a story to carry you through it.
TH: With that in mind, and on the idea of sports in hidden spaces, are you working on anything right now that readers of the Under Review might be excited about?
WM: A thing I’ve been working on and been involved with for a really long time, but am just now really dialing in and getting it all down on the page is this project on this Somali boys basketball team in the Twin Cities here and the community that surrounds it. It’s a community I’ve been involved in and following for a couple of years now and there’s a lot of really cool stories connected to this team and I’m starting to just now move into seeing the kind of shape those stories are going to take on the page.
That’s something I’m really excited about. It’s about community. It’s about passion. Minnesota and Minneapolis to the outside observer might sound like very white places, and there’s a very vibrant Somali community in the Twin Cities here and I’m excited to get some of their stories out into the world.
