Interview with Michelle Filkins and Margret Aldrich

In March 2023, 30-year-old Minneapolis-based publisher Spout Press released Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces, a collection of writing by women that “subvert[s] the traditional idea of ‘locker room talk’ [and] illuminates the conversations women share with family, friends, and strangers.”

The editors of the collection, Michelle Filkins and Margret Aldrich, spoke with Under Review editor (and contributor to the collection) Carlee Tressel about the inspiration for the book, the breadth and depth of the stories in the collection, and the process of working with a range of contributors from first-time authors to well-known literary artists.

Proceeds from sales of Locker Room Talk will benefit Her Next Play, a non-profit organization working to develop the next generation of women leaders through sports, focusing on leadership and career skills. You can buy a copy of the book here.

Michelle Filkins is a founding editor of Spout Press and a contributing author to The Evolution of Human Cooperation and Community Development (Lexington Books, 2021) and Creating a Transformational Community: The Fundamentals of Stewardship Activities (Lexington Books, 2017). She is a Little Free Library steward and one of the Daunte Wright Memorial caretakers. Currently she is a professor and reference and instruction librarian at Metro State University in St. Paul. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two teenage sons. Having spent many years playing team sports, she is grateful to all the women who have shaped her life in and out of locker rooms.

Margret Aldrich is the author of The Little Free Library Book (Coffee House Press, 2015), a ten-year veteran of the publishing industry, recipient of an Innovator Award from the Book Industry Study Group, and former Princeton University writing fellow. She has published her work with The Atlantic, Utne Reader, Huffington Post, Book Riot, and others. Today Margret is the director of communications and media relations at the Little Free Library nonprofit organization. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two teenage boys, and she is a member of Kith + Kin Chorus, a service-based community choir.

Carlee Tressel joined the Under Review editorial team in Summer 2022 (Issue 6). She is the author of Rolling On: Two Hundred Years of Blair Iron and Steel (Parafine, 2021) and has contributed work to Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology (Belt, 2020), among other publications. One of her stories (“Wagging Tongues”) and an essay (“Conditioning”) appear in Locker Room Talk. Carlee raises apples, corn, and kids with her husband in rural Indiana.

This interview was conducted on June 16, 2023 over Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Carlee Tressel: So let's begin with this beautiful book. Have you gotten a lot of positive feedback from how beautiful it is, inside and out?

Michelle Filkins: We have! The contributor copies went out, and we've been hearing from contributors, and then others too. That's Leslie Barlow's artwork [on the front and back covers; they are paintings from the series Portraits During a Pandemic]. We reached out to her very early in the process. Her art really spoke to us. It embodied what we wanted to do with this book, what it was like to be working on this book in a pandemic, and how we were all trying to connect. There were certain things that happened in the course of putting the book together that really helped to galvanize what we were doing. Leslie's art is a big part of that.

CT: It’s incredible. As a reader, I think it represents what's in here very well. What inspired you to do this anthology, and why now?

Margret Aldrich: Michelle, can you tell your story?

MF: Sure. For context, I spent a lot of time in locker rooms. I played three sports in high school. That was a place where I found a lot of support. As an adult, I would go to the Y before work, and a lot of the people in the Y were the SilverSneakers, the seniors, and they taught me how to play pickleball. And I would hear these great conversations, get looped into people's conversations, and learn little parts of their lives. It’s just one of those spaces, right? And then the tape came out with Trump’s horrible comments and he called it “locker room talk.” That was in the back of my mind, the way he was using that phrase as a way to justify the kind of misogyny that permeated everything he did.

One day I was in the locker room at the Y, and these two women were having this across-the-locker-room conversation as people do all the time. I think they knew each other from going to the same yoga class or something, but they didn’t [seem] close outside of that space. It evolved from small talk to this really incredibly intimate moment where one woman confided these really painful experiences she was having in her personal life with her son and the challenges she was facing. Her son was incarcerated and she wasn't sure what to do. She wasn't really able to talk about it. And the other woman, without saying much, just walked over to her and gave her this huge hug. And she started crying and said, “I haven't been able to tell anybody about this.” And then, a couple beats later, they both just left. And I was sitting there thinking, that is locker room talk.

I've always wondered about the jokes about women going into the bathroom in packs. It feels like some of the way misogyny manifests is in this scrutiny or wondering what kind of conspiratorial things women are up to. All of those things just sort of galvanized in that moment. That’s when I had to talk to Margret. I've known Margret for a long time. She is really good at being able to see the big picture and provide clarity. As we kept talking, the project evolved from there. It really stems from a moment that was just extraordinary in its ordinariness, because it was not the first time I had witnessed something like that in a locker room. That was the impetus.

CT: From the moment I saw the call for submissions, I thought it was a brilliant subversion of the concept of “locker room talk.” We can reclaim this. Margret, what drew you to join Michelle on this project?

MA: Michelle is a brilliant, wonderful person. Anytime I can spend more time with her, it's really meaningful to me. Michelle touched on two things: women I knew feeling this rage about a politician who normalizes violence against women, and then we were all in the midst of a pandemic. Together, but apart.

CT: I was really struck by the range of contributors when I read the collection. It was invigorating to see that, yes, there were contributors who identify first as writers, and then there were contributors who identify as artists of another kind, and some who maybe don’t identify as writers at all but have these really important stories to tell. I thought that was a real strength of the collection. How did you see that play out when you were working on the book?

MF: I'm glad you brought that up. That’s part of what's always been important to Spout Press. I've been working with Spout since we started as a zine in 1989 and we started publishing books about 25 years ago. Even with the zine, we've always wanted to let people tell their stories and cut through some of the gatekeeping that happens in the publishing world. I think this book is sort of where a lot of the ideas that drive Spout found fruition. It is unusual to have a writer like Kao Kalia Yang next to somebody who's never published anything before. But I feel like in the totality of the collection, all the pieces knit together.

And the stories are really compelling. Contributors with less publication history said the call [for work] resonated with them. They realized, hey, I have the story I want to tell. With a couple of the writers, we were a little bit more hands on with the editing, but I told them what I tell anyone I'm editing: I want this to be your voice. I'm not trying to edit you out of the story. I'm just trying to help you tell your story in a way that is compelling and polished.

MA: I loved the mix of contributors. Michelle happened to know a hairstylist, and I think we would probably all agree that stylists are conduits for women telling their stories in a safe space. So I was thrilled that Michelle knew somebody who was willing to write something for the book.

We also really wanted to include voices from the Women's March that happened after Trump was elected. I knew two Minneapolis women who met on the bus to the march and solicited work from them. They each wrote their own experience of that weekend. I really enjoyed that this wasn't a highfalutin’ book that was not welcoming to common experience.

CT: Tell us about the decision to not distinguish between works of fiction and nonfiction in the collection. How did this serve the purpose of the project or your artistic vision for the collection?

MA: Many different voices and perspectives are included in Locker Room Talk. By placing a work of fiction next to a piece of creative nonfiction next to a poem, the works themselves can be in conversation and highlight the diversity of viewpoints represented in the book, serving its theme and purpose well.

MF: As Margret mentions, we wanted the works in the collection to be in conversation. By not putting limits on our authors, we were able to build the collection in a manner that allowed resonance between pieces, regardless of genre.

CT: I think the sequencing really worked. I felt pulled along. For me, it was like a collection of voices more so than discrete pieces of writing. The visual experience of reading on the page kind of lifted and instead I was just a listener. I loved that.

MF: Margret really captured the emotional arc of the book.

MA: I worked in publishing for about 10 years and during that time, I put together several anthologies. We want the reader to keep going, to not be jarred by something so disparate from the piece before. Maybe they can start to see connections between what happened in one piece with the next piece and see the broader connectivity through it all.

CT: Let’s acknowledge that this anthology is a printed book. Was it important to make sure there was a physical artifact at the end of this project?

MA: It was to me. I guess I'm kind of old school that way. I am finally transitioning to listening to audiobooks, but there is still that part of me that just loves the artifact of a book. And being able to, you know, flip the pages, and share it with someone. I think a bonus piece of this is that you can pass it along to a friend that you think should read it. As someone who works at Little Free Library, book sharing is a really big part of my life.

Michelle and I were so thrilled when we got the finished copy. Part of that was Leslie’s Barlow’s cover art and part was the book design work by Maria Garbe, who did a great job. For me, knowing that all the contributors were going to get this copy and hopefully feel so proud to be in this book. I love to think about that.

MF: I can tell by messages from authors after receiving their copies how excited they are, how validating it is.

I really wanted Leslie's artwork to be able to be front and center. In a physical copy, you can really appreciate that work. It is a collection of voices, somebody who picks it up can browse. It's easier to browse a bound book. Maybe the reader knows the name of one of the authors and they open to that, and then they happen on the next piece. So it sort of encourages that serendipity of exploring a book that you don't necessarily have in a digital format.

CT: Locker rooms are a liminal space–both a buffer and a threshold between private life, where we can be literally and figuratively bare, and public life. That’s something that I really like seeing explored in sports-adjacent writing.

MF: Honestly, when we put the call out, I thought we would get a lot more stories that involved sports. And it's not that I thought it needed to be on the nose, and everything needed to be literal locker rooms, but because my formative relationships with other women, and a lot of my emotional development happened in locker rooms, that was my point of view. Part of it for me was realizing that some of the values that I have, or some of the experiences I attribute to literal locker rooms happen in other kinds of spaces. It was a bit of a mind expansion for me to think more about these other spaces.

MA: As Michelle knows, I've barely set foot in a locker room in my life. I was like the kid who dreaded running the mile in gym class. So Michelle and I come from very different experiences. But for me, the locker room was the bathroom at First Avenue. Molly Elizabeth Fields writes about this in “Bell Bottom Blues.” I mean, that's where I could hang out with other women. Get myself together. You know, touch base on what's happening out there. If there was someone who was dealing with a creeper that would not leave her alone, then the squad kind of protects that person.

CT: In her essay, "Showing Up," Shá Cage touches on "nontalk moments," when women are bonding and caring for each other in ways other than direct conversation. Which "nontalk moments" in the collection have stuck with you? For me, the belly dancing class in Patricia Cumbie's essay, "Ode to the Sunroom," comes to mind.

MF: The piece that stays with me is “Come As You Are” by Becca Williams. The relationship that develops between the advocate and the young woman who is dealing with the trauma of a sexual assault is quiet, beautiful, and devastating. When we were proofing the book, I never made it through that piece without tears. While an entire university armed with policies and procedures continued to fail the young woman over and over, the advocate cultivated a space and an opportunity for healing. Also, the scenes in “The Girl Code” and “Bell Bottom Blues” when strangers notice a woman in need of help in a public bathroom and they take unprompted actions to provide care and support [have stayed with me].

CT: Is the "locker room talk" in this collection as much about creating a place where a person feels comfortable to just be in all their complexity, as it is about what is said in that space?

MF: Yes, and I think it is important to note that women need spaces where they can be real and not worry about trying to conform or to front that everything is fine.

CT: Do you think spaces that encourage authentic sharing and cultivate emotional intimacy exist for men? Can actual locker rooms be one of those spaces for men and boys? While sport is full of opportunities for human connection, emotional expression, and vulnerability, it is also, in many instances, full of hyper-competitiveness, posturing, and bravado—dynamics that foster a culture that encourages "locker room talk" in its original sense.

MA: Seeing my own sons and husband on the golf course together comes to mind. It is surely an opportunity for ribbing and bravado, and a battleground for who gets to drive the golf cart, but the opportunity to spend an extended period of time together is practically unmatched. There is encouragement and there is conversation and there is a true appreciation for one another. It's an outdoor locker room in all the best ways.

MF: I hope that locker rooms can be one of those spaces for men and boys. Maybe that space is more likely to be the locker room at the YMCA, where there is a diverse population, and relationships between gym members develop organically due to familiarity and not in competition. I think for many men it might exist in private conversations in public spaces, like at baseball games. I know that for my husband, attending games is a way to spend time with his friends, or with our sons. I am sure that for men who attend games together, conversation strays from baseball to other more personal topics. Back to the example of the YMCA, I love seeing the same men meet up week after week for pickup basketball or racquetball or pickleball, and I hope that those experiences provide them with opportunities to connect with each other off the court.

CT: The organization Her Next Play will benefit from sales of this book. Tell me a little bit about that organization, and why you chose it for this project.

MA: Her Next Play is a fairly new nonprofit. A friend of mine is on the board and had been telling me about it over the last year or so. When this book opportunity came up, we were thinking about who we wanted to make beneficiary of the profits, and Her Next Play just rose to the top. They really are trying to empower girls, which is something I love. Now that I have kids in sports, I see so many of the benefits: building confidence, working with others, encouraging others, having that sense of self that makes you able to do what you need to do for your team. I love that aspect: sports empowering girls to be leaders.

MF: I think about the women I played basketball with in high school and this mission resonates so much with me–the mental toughness, understanding what it means to compete, understanding teamwork. All of that. That’s something that is incredibly important to me.

I love that Her Next play tapped into the through line between sports experience and success. Success doesn't have to mean being a professional athlete. I mean, let's be honest. I’m wearing my Sylvia Fowles shirt. I’ve got my 2018 signed game ball right here.

CT: YES. Go Lynx!

MF: But those aren't the only opportunities, right? There may not be opportunities in professional sports but those skills bridge so well.

CT: At the time of this interview, we are putting together Issue 8 of the Under Review. I am always refreshed by the variety and the care that is put into the pieces submitted to us. I especially enjoy how our authors approach topics and certain sports that feel like they have been written about and written about and written about already, but in a fresh way.

MF: That’s the editor in you, right? I think the editor in me, and I hope the editor in Margret, is thinking—even when I had Locker Room Talk in my hands—I'm thinking, there could be Locker Room Talk 2, and Locker Room Talk 3. We've only touched the surface.

MA: So true.

MF: And there are so many more stories out there to find, and so many more authors. They each have a story.