In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Vicki Mayk, who speaks to how a story sometimes finds us and we are compelled to write.
When people ask me why I chose to write my book “Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas,” I tell them: I didn’t choose it.
The story chose me. In 2009, I had started to occasionally attend services at a church less than five miles from my home. I’d lived near that church for more than 25 years. A lapsed Catholic with bad memories of attending Catholic school, I’m not a person who follows an organized religious or spiritual practice. Nevertheless, I began attending services there.
Just months later, in April 2010, Owen Thomas, the son of the church’s senior pastor, Tom Thomas, died by suicide in April 2010 at the end of his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania. In this age of social media, someone set up a memorial page on Facebook – R.I.P. Owen Thomas. I joined it, even though I had never met the young man with the engaging smile, piercing blue eyes and a shock of red hair that made it seem as if his head were on fire. Membership on the page grew to 3,000. Posts about Owen came from teammates who loved him, from casual acquaintances who recalled his kindness during chance encounters, from high school teachers and Penn professors who remembered his sharp, questioning mind and from members of his father’s congregation who knew him as an impish kid who crawled commando-style under church pews.
The comments and stories people wrote haunted me. I began asking myself: Who was this boy and what about him inspired such love, such loyalty? By that September, something else emerged: Owen was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the traumatic brain injury that was being found in professional football players. Owen’s was a landmark case because he was an amateur player never known to have a concussion.
I’d been a writer for my entire career, first as a newspaper reporter, then as the editor of university alumni magazines. I earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction in my 50s. There’s no question that writing is at the center of my life. Even after years spent defining myself as “writer,” the answer to the question of why I write only became clear after I chose to write about Owen Thomas. I’d never written about sports. Yet I couldn’t let go of the thought that this was a story I needed to write. One day I saw a quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical “Hamilton.” He said, “You have to live with the notion of, If I don’t write this, no one’s going to write it. If I die, this idea dies with me.”
I completely understood what Miranda meant. The story had chosen me and I was compelled to write it. I teach a class for college freshmen called “The Power of Story.” In the class, students learn that neuroscience researchers have proved that humans are wired for story – and are drawn to story almost against their will. Neurons in our brains light up when we watch or read a good tale. I didn’t need scientific research to convince me. It’s been that way for me since I was kid. I love fiction, but for me, true stories became what I most wanted to read and write. Sometimes my own stories, sometimes those of other people. As I researched Owen’s story, I attended high school football games for the first time in more than 40 years, toured the brain bank in Boston where his brain was studied, and sat with young men and women while they shed tears over their lost friend.
I learned I wasn’t just writing a book about football. It also was a book about friendship. It took me ten years, but I never considered giving up because of something that is true for writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: I didn’t want to come to the end of my life with this story in my head instead of on the page.
A former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, VICKI MAYK has enjoyed a 35-year career in journalism and public relations. She has reported for newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and her freelance journalism also has appeared in national and regional publications, including Ms. magazine and The New York Times.
Her creative nonfiction has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station and in the anthology Air, published by Books by Hippocampus. She’s been the editor of three university magazines, most recently at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Her nonfiction book, Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship, and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas (Beacon Press) is available Sept. 1, 2020. Her love affair with football began at the age of nine, when her father first took her to a Pittsburgh Steelers game. Connect with her at vickimayk.com.
Join Vicki Mayk, along with authors Athena Dixon, Berry Grass, and Tim Hillegonds for a Night of Nonfiction (as part of HippoCamp 2020’s virtual events) on Saturday, August 29th, 6pm Eastern. This event is free via Zoom.