Graywolf Lab

Mac Crane [MC]: I’m thinking about the theme of this issue and the maybe connected phrase “fun and games.” It typically means something non-serious and playful, but when I hear the word game I’m immediately thrown into this hypercompetitive, emotionally and psychologically complicated space, that, to be honest, is anything but fun. Where do you go when you think of games? Is there a specific place you travel? 

Georgia Cloepfil [GC]: I totally agree; There is something belittling about the idea of a game. It’s just a game! is always the comfort leveled at the losing athlete. But if I imagine the next part of the exchange, I see the athlete rolling their eyes and getting no consolation—of course it’s more than a game, we all know that.

For a long time, when I was trying to take myself seriously as a student or a writer, I thought this meant learning to take myself less seriously as an athlete and learning to think of sports as just a game, not something serious people or thinkers engaged in. But now I am more convinced that they are related and even interdependent parts of myself. How do you see your relationships to sports informing your life as a writer?

MC: Oh, totally. I went through something similar, partially because of the jock/nerd dichotomy I internalized growing up and partially, I think, because of the ways in which the literary community reinforces certain ideas about what is and is not worthy of exploration. 

While ideating a memoir about basketball, identity, and grief, I found this question on Quora: “Why are so many intellectuals disparaging of sports?” And the top answer was by a self-proclaimed intellectual (see: professor) who said: “Sports focus on the body, but not on the mind. Intellectuals, by nature, like to focus on the mind.” It’s been years, and I still think about this random man on Quora, how sad and misguided he must be. It always surprises me when people think athletes are just a bunch of empty-headed bodies on a field or court or whatever. 

But to answer your question, I wouldn’t even be a published author right now if I hadn’t been a college basketball player—I really believe that. And not for some corny reason you might give in a job interview, like I learned time management and how to work well under pressure! No, the psychological warfare of college athletics prepared me for the psychological warfare of publishing. I can handle massive amounts of rejection and criticism; I can persevere and push through the unsavory shit like self-doubt and even self-hatred. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing—it’s maddening in a lot of ways. 

GC: I think the self-belief and rigor and obsession that come from a life in sports, from a commitment to games, things with rules and ambition and clear-cut ways of measuring success and failure, is totally foundational to my life as a professional writer—for the good and the bad! 

MC: I want to hear what it was like to write The Striker and the Clock, about the very thing you thought you had to take less seriously. 

GC: In terms of Striker, I resisted writing about soccer for a long time. I didn’t workshop it, I didn’t show many people the writing, because I was ashamed in literary spaces about what I thought might be trivial material. But the writing persisted despite my best efforts and I am so grateful for that. Some of the book’s concerns are still very present in my thinking—how to avoid the trap of familiar narratives that can make sports feel flat? How to write something that resists language at its very core? For me, a lot of the joy of playing (and the pain in some ways) comes from the blankness of it, the black-out feeling of pushing your body to the very limit of its abilities. And I am always interested in writing into what feels unsayable or positioned against language and narrative. 

MC: It’s like you just cut off the top of my skull, removed my brain, and distilled its contents. I want to give you a high five or chest bump over it, over this connection and shared experiences. “How to write something that resists language at its very core.” God, yes. And that should feel counterintuitive, but it doesn’t, at least not in my experience. It’s interesting to play with absence on the page, with space and physicality instead of words. Like, the white space between fragments can easily be a gap between defenders or between you and your teammate. 

GC: I just finished reading an excellent memoir about a much darker subject, and the author poses the question there—is nonfiction or fiction better poised to address the unspeakable? As someone who has written both nonfiction and fiction about sports, I’m so curious to hear about how those experiences differ?

MC: I feel like I lean toward fiction when I have big, unanswerable questions I want to explore. Because I can also invent circumstances in which to ask them without overtly asking them. There’s more room for subtext—in images, gestures, callbacks, setting, etc. But maybe that’s just me limiting myself when it comes to nonfiction, who knows? Plus I have a shitty memory! Either way, writing nonfiction about basketball has been useful for me when I have one explicit experience or one explicit theme I want to write into, when I can see the shape of the thing very clearly, like when I wrote about trying to play pickup basketball with a bunch of men and how alienating, lonely, and humiliating it can be to try to earn their respect so they actually pick me and let me play. How I have to pander to them, be good but not so good that my game is threatening to their egos. But when I started writing my novel, A Sharp Endless Need, I couldn’t see its shape, and I didn't necessarily know its aboutness. But I knew I wanted to pose questions to myself and use the book to answer them through the narrator and those who populate their world. Questions like, “What happens if you throw your entire identity into one thing?” and “What could possibly compare to playing something you love with someone you love?” But the paradox there, of course, is as you said—the very things I’m writing feel beyond language, or rather, must first be translated from physicality and eroticism to the language that readers encounter on the page.

Which brings me to one of my favorite things to talk about ever: the connection between sports and the erotic. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences there!

GC: I am tempted to just throw this question back to you, as the expert and author of the recently released steamy queer basketball novel!! My book was so sexless! I think my experience in my athletic body was mostly about it disappearing, about the ideal feeling of having no body. This relates a lot to what we were saying before—the void of the mind in ecstatic motion. Can it also be mapped onto the body? Mine was often a very painful journey, full of injury and injections. My goal was often to get the bodily pain to disappear so that I could enjoy not noticing it at all.

This sort of comes back to the distinction between games and competition, between play and professionalization. I think the intensity of my devotion to the sport was almost nun-like. No fun, no sex. Ha. Of course it is fun to play, but you know what I mean. 

MC: I do know what you mean . . . but your book isn’t sexless to me! But maybe that’s because I didn’t write it, didn’t live it. I don’t know, maybe there is something sexy to me about throwing your entire self into a passion. Some people never know a devotion like that. Even if it is nun-like, as you say. Speaking of holy devotion, I recently learned about Margery Kempe, this Catholic mystic born in the fourteenth century who had all these visions of God and Jesus and was so in love with Jesus she wanted to marry him and have sex with him. I’m not sure where I’ve been because apparently everyone knows who she is, but I’m just really taken with her lust for Christ. She took something that is supposed to be chaste—religious devotion—and made it erotic as hell. Anyway, you get what I’m saying here. I’m not going to force eroticism upon you, but also, the erotic may live in your devotion itself. 

GC: I love that so much. Well, I did find my experience in sports to be extremely important to my gender expression. I loved the way the uniforms fit, the gear, the specific swagger of each sport. Draped in baggy polyester, sweating. Aside from the political reality of being a “women’s soccer player,” I always felt like my woman-ness disappeared while I was playing, which was really gratifying to me and definitely had something to do with sex, if not just my own adoration of my body.

MC: I’ve had the exact same experience, so much so that I didn’t even realize I wasn’t a woman while playing competitive basketball, because basketball made me genderless. I felt transcendent, like a small god of my own making, you know? Is it jarring for you to step back into woman-ness off the field? What does it feel like to return to a place where your gender is so much more felt? Or unavoidable? 

GC: I still get such a rush of confidence when I step into a sporty context. Playing on rec teams, coaching. What is it about these spaces? It has something to do with the body and the way it is carried and perceived. And while I am lucky not to feel too much tension in regards to my gender in my life off the field, the way it transforms when playing is definitely part of why I still long for soccer and part of my obsession with trying to maintain this part of my identity.

MC: Speaking of coaching, I know you are an assistant college coach, right? I was wondering if coaching gives you the same rush that playing competitively did. Or does it feel like something completely different? I love coaching but it was a rotten replacement for me when I was grieving my college career. 

GC: No, you’re right. It is a terrible replacement. I love jumping in and playing with the girls, I like being in the sun and mud, I like thinking about soccer and helping them navigate their emotions, thinking of all I have learned in my own experience. But as a coach it is important for me to be somewhat emotionally restrained, thoughtful and steady, so that I can be there for the players to lean on during the highs and lows that they will inevitably experience. So in some ways it is the opposite of playing.

I also wonder if the joy of being a player has to do with childhood and youthfulness (which is also a very pre-gender time, at least for me), which certainly disappears when you are in a role of an authority. I write in my book about the first time I got my period in the football locker room and how easy it is, in retrospect, to identify that as the time when the equality of bodies and my own perception of mine was altered, as well as the actual capabilities of my body. I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I think there is something I want to address about the way games and sport connect to youth and innocence (and perhaps the way this is connected to gender)?

MC: Childhood is definitely pre-gender for me too. Ah, take me back. I mean, even how sports tend to be mixed gender until a certain age, it’s like the very act of playing a sport eventually thrusts you into a forced coming-of-gender. 

I often find myself yearning for my childhood specifically as the time before basketball became this corrupt, fraught, damaging thing for me. College was hard, my coach was psychologically abusive, and I came out a shell of the player I once was. The joy was zapped out of the game, but if I travel back to the source of the love, if I remember, with euphoric clarity, the thousands of hours I spent in the driveway with my dad and brother, I can once again access that joy, or at least the shadow of it. 

GC: Man, it is so sad to read that. And it's such a common experience. Sports require such a balance of joy, creativity, and discipline and rigor—if you tip the scales too far one way the experience moves into really dangerous territory. Abuse, pressure, total joylessness. There is something about American culture that cultivates this individualistic, cut-throat environment. As an American abroad it was always expected that we were both big, physical and “loved winning.” Do you feel like you’ve been able to come back to your joy somehow, in your relationship to basketball? To find a space as an adult where you can freely play?

MC: Oh god, I can imagine that being such a weird experience overseas. And, like, you felt a lot of pressure to live up to their expectations. I hate the American way, and even how, culturally, we’ve started pressuring children to choose one sport at like age 7 and dedicate their lives to it. It’s so toxic and misguided. When I was in high school, I refereed 7-and-under soccer and I quit after two games because of how cruel the coaches were—both to their players and to me. You’d have thought it was the Olympics. 

Honestly, I’m still working on the joy thing. But shooting hoops with my four-year-old is helpful and healing. It forces me to be present with his joy and excitement. He pretends to be Chelsea Gray, my favorite player of all time. We take turns color commentating for each other. And I resist the impulse to correct or coach him because I want the sport to be playful and only playful. A site of experimentation and invention and silliness. Even giving him that gift is healing in some ways. If one day he wants to take a sport seriously, I’m here to encourage and empower, but until then, I want us to be deeply unserious.