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Sunday Series: Vicki Mayk on Why I Write

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.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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.

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Q&A with Antonia Malchik, author of A Walking Life

“We walk to find our prophets, our guides, our ancestors, but ourselves most of all, and through ourselves, we find one another.” ~ from A Walking Life

Antonia Malchik's A Walking Life cover image

When I first learned of Antonia Malchik’s new book, A Walking Life (Da Capo Press, 2019), I thought, Good timing! It’s summer, I’ve got a few hikes planned, I’ll be reminded about the health benefits of walking–physical, mental, emotional. I took my time reading, savoring even the contents page with chapter titles of Toddle, March, Stumble. What I found as I moved deeper through the pages, though, was much more than a book on the simple, almost medicinal, act of walking.

Malchik has done her work curating a rich selection of research on history, science, culture, and philosophy and has built an intricate story about humanity–our innate desire to put one foot in front of the other, the disconnect we experience when we ignore that desire, and the joy and healing when we embrace it.

I can’t rave enough about this book. In fact, I’ve been talking it up for weeks, quoting it here and there. I’m thrilled to host Antonia Malchik for an interview and am giving away a copy of her book to one lucky reader. Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th, noon, for a chance to win A Walking Life.

Now, welcome Antonia!

Christi Craig (CC): Your book, while centered around the simple act of walking, is rich in information on history, culture, philosophy and takes the reader down a winding path of discovery, insight, and new understandings. How did this book unfold for you as an author?

Antonia Malchik, author of A Walking Life

Antonia Malchik (AM): A friend once described the structure of my essays as being as like fish scales. I tend to think of them as mosaics. I love taking stories and research that seem widely disparate, and diving deep to find out what connects them. A Walking Life added an extra level of complexity for me because there is a ton of detailed scientific research about things related to walking, from how we walk, which should be almost physically impossible, to the connections between vestibular impairment in children and their hippocampus development. I had to figure out how to convey that information in ways that were factually correct but narratively interesting.

That was actually really hard. I kept going back to the scientists I’d talked with to make sure that metaphors I used to, for example, describe the process of infants learning to walk or the paleoanthropology of disability weren’t misleading in the way they explained the science.

But at the same time I didn’t want to publish what I think of as a “study dump,” which I ran into a lot while researching: briefly present an idea, then give lengthy descriptions of the study behind it and repeat that process for hundreds of pages. I think that’s the key difficulty of science writing. Humans need metaphor and story to make sense of our world, but science relies on precision. Science communication has to combine those things without either muddying the science or boring the lay reader.  

On a broader level, I spent a lot of time sifting through the articles, books, and scientific papers I’d read, trying to find the threads that connected stories and themes across the arc of the book. I didn’t know where to begin because walking is a massive subject that affects us at every level of our lives, but I had to start somewhere and trust that the story would show me where to go next.

My friend Bethany Bell, who’s a journalist for the BBC, had reported on a situation at the border of Austria and Hungary, where Syrian refugees were waiting to be allowed into Austria on their way to Germany. I remembered that she’d posted photos on Twitter, including one of the Red Cross’s pile of donated shoes and others of abandoned shoes. It kept hitting me that humans have been subjected to war and environmental devastation over and over and over, and no matter what we’ve built as individuals or societies, we’re often free to take only one action, which is to walk away. When Bethany described the situation in more detail to me over Skype, she said something similar, so that’s where I started.

My mentor Alan Weisman told me before I began writing that the number one thing I should do was to constantly question and push against whatever my biggest assumption was about the subject. My biggest assumption was “walking makes us human,” so I tried to push against that from any angle I could think of. It led me in a lot of unexpected directions. Like, I knew that disability would be a central subject in the book — that was important to me because almost no book about walking even mentions disability — but didn’t know I’d write so much about community, loneliness, and the future of digital technology.

CC: A Walking Life covers a range of topics from social capital and the importance of walkable cities and towns in creating stronger communities to the power of healing walks through a labyrinth or organizations like Warrior Expeditions founded by military vets and their Warrior Hike (to “walk off the war”). There’s so much we could discuss in this interview and so little space on this tiny blog. One section that stands out to me as the heart of this book, the power in walking, is your first time in a labyrinth. You write, “As a person who is less spiritual even than she is religious, if that’s possible, I tend to be skeptical of any spiritual or religious practice that claims to put us in touch with the divine, much less with ourselves.” What follows is an amazing moment for you. Would you share a bit of that experience here?

AM: I’m still untangling that moment! I stumbled across a labyrinth at Norwich Cathedral in England, and knew I should walk it, since I’d researched labyrinths but had never been to one. For some reason I had an urge to walk around the outside first, and as I walked I began to form a question — how do we, or I, walk in the world as vocal and visible defenders of justice, say, and cope with the fear that inevitably comes? I think about this a lot because my paternal grandparents in Russia had survived so much under Stalin without giving up their ethics and commitment to honesty. Where did their strength come from?

As I entered the labyrinth, my footsteps slowed down as if compelled, almost like I was for the first time aware of the gravitational pull of the planet dragging me back, making me pay attention. It was eerie. As I walked the labyrinth, an answer came, which was simply, “Be the light.” Not light from above, but light from below, which I’m not sure makes sense to people. It really was a powerful experience. I keep trying to recapture it as I walk around my hometown, or in the woods. I have to slow my steps down a lot to reconnect with that feeling.

CC: I love the walking resources you offer on your website, from local & national walking groups to meditative practice resources. Do you have a favorite resource you refer others to often?

AM: Through a friend, I came across the work of a walking coach and change facilitator in Holland named Donja de Groot. She has a set of walking meditation cards that I ordered from her and love using. They have different prompts for questions to carry with you as you walk, especially walking in nature. She doesn’t advertise them, but I believe still sells them if you email her. I like how versatile they are, how I can just pick one up on my way out the door and have some guidance if I’m struggling with something, or just want to be reminded to slow down. This is her website: http://dao2change.com/Home/.

CC: What are you reading these days?

AM: A clerk at our local bookstore recommended N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction. They’re some of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and led me to finally read Octavia Butler. For nonfiction, I’m just starting Jane Brox’s Silence (her book Brilliant on the history of artificial light was incredible) and am slowly working my way through Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Classics are a go-to when I need some recentering — I just reread Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, which had a big impact on me when I was 20, and am about to start Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which I haven’t read since high school. And a local friend recently started a book club. We read Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, which was just as heartbreakingly beautiful as I remember, and we’re now reading The Overstory.

CC: Favorite pair of walking shoes or accoutrement?

AM: I invested in a pair of Frye boots several years ago that I pretty much live and die in. They’re incredibly comfortable and I hope will last me the rest of my life. Good socks are the real key, especially if they’re fun. My sisters have bought me socks every year for holiday and birthday gifts for decades now, and they get increasingly silly. Which is good. Life is too short to wear boring socks.

Antonia Malchik has written essays and articles for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, GOOD, High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity, is published by Da Capo Press, a division of Hachette. She lives in northwest Montana.​ Read more about Antonia and her work on her website.

Don’t forget! Enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th (noon)
for a chance to win a copy of A Walking Life.

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Q&A (& Giveaway) with Author Patricia Ann McNair,
And These Are The Good Times (Side Street Press)

“I know what you are thinking…What does one thing have to do
with the other? I know what I am thinking: everything.”
~ from “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
(And These Are the Good Times, by Patricia Ann McNair)

There’s a beautiful article up on Literary Hub by Sarah Minor, about quilting and embroidery and the structure of story. Near the beginning, she says, “the narratives we live inside are never linear from the start. Our stories are patterns of experiences, a few knit together and the vast remainder discarded as scrap.” Those patterns, those scraps, shape us. But only after careful consideration are we able to see the effects. In the late-night hour, in the reordering of things, the narrative becomes clear. “We see best, perhaps, from some distance,” as Patricia Ann McNair says in one of the essays from her new book, And These Are The Good Times.

A collection that explores and observes her past and her present, And These Are The Good Times (Side Street Press, September 2017) illustrates exactly what Sarah Minor speaks of. McNair begins and ends her book with a study of her father, his identity and his influence, and the stories in between unfold in the way that memory unfurls: in a cluster of images, through a series of sounds and smells, by way of a familiar place.

And These Are The Good Times is a book for readers and writers alike. As a reader, you cannot walk away from these essays without reflecting on your own joy, sorrow, or mystery; as a writer, you cannot help but return to page after page to underline and asterisk the reminders of why we write. Because every experience–good, bad, strange–becomes a piece to the puzzle of who we are, how we are in relation, and why those questions matter.

This Q&A with Patricia Ann McNair is one I’ve been eagerly waiting to share. In her interview, McNair talks about the writing and the stories and the gift in putting our thoughts on the page. Plus (as is my custom), there’s a giveaway! Enter HERE for a chance to win a copy of And These Are The Good Times (deadline: Tuesday, October 3).

Now welcome Patricia Ann McNair!

Christi Craig (CC): Your first book, Temple of Air (Elephant Rock Books), is a collection of short stories; This book, And These Are The Good Times (Side Street Press) pulls together an amazing collection of essays. How did moving from fiction to nonfiction stretch you as a writer or buoy you as a person…or, vice versa?

Patricia Ann McNair (PM): I am often moving back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, grappling with a lot of the same concerns and questions. You are such a good reader, Christi, and a supporter of my work; I imagine you see a number of the same themes and situations in The Temple of Air and in And These Are the Good Times. Loss. Loneliness. Desire. Wonder. You know, those things that all of us carry with us into our days. And while the focus of my stories and of my essays are not all that different from one another, it is how I shape them that is.

I don’t know if I believe this absolutely, but I think I do, and I often say it to my students, to myself: in order to be complete, fiction (short story, novel) needs to have some sort of change. Sometimes that change is in the character, sometimes it is in the situation. Sometimes it is in the reader. As a reader, you understand or see things just a little differently than you did when you started the story. That change is what makes fiction feel done—even when the ending is ambiguous or open.

Nonfiction, particularly the essay or the brief memoir, to my mind, does not have to present that same sort of change. The sort of nonfiction I am interested in, the sort of essays, at their heart tell stories—like my fiction does. But what I am drawn to is not just the story, but what I make of it. Or perhaps more accurately, what questions these stories lead me to. In many of the essays in Good Times, I tell the story of my father dying when I was fifteen. In one, though, this story leads me to wonder about why I am drawn to jukeboxes and taverns and charming drunk guys. In another, my father’s death sparks my curiosity about virginity, about the connections between sex and grief. In another, I am drawn to the role of coffee in my life. In nonfiction, what matters to me are the questions, what the recounted events make me wonder about, consider, reflect on. I don’t come up with answers in the same way I often do in my short story. I come up with more questions. Nonfiction, like real life, does not provide easy answers.

Fiction says: This happened. Nonfiction—well, the personal essay at least—asks: Why did this happen? How do I respond?

To the last part of your question, Christi—how does this stretch me as a writer or buoy me as a person? When I first started to write fiction, I was on the lookout for story. What happened here? What might happen if this happened? As I write more nonfiction, I find that I am curious in a slightly different way. What happened yes, but also why did it happen? And why does it matter that this happened? I am drawn to story still and always, in real life and on the page, but I am also so very interested in what is underneath, behind, and inside of the story and the storyteller. I love to wonder. We are in a strange time right now, when a lack of curiosity seems to be held in the highest regard in the highest office of our country. Now, more than ever maybe, I think it is important to wonder, to question. Why did this happen? How do I respond?

CC: “Nourishment” and “The Storied Life” are two of my favorites in this collection, and they pair well together: the first focusing on living in the moment and the second turning that gaze inward, gathering these moments, “never quite sure when they will present themselves…unbidden at times…dragged out from the murky shadows of memory.” Living, gathering, reflecting–the life of a writer but also the key to experiencing our days in full. What are some other ways, besides writing, in which you reflect on “ordinary moments” or everyday nourishment?

PM: I would like to say that I am one of those writers who wanders the streets of her ordinary life reflecting, weighing, mulling over. You know, the stereotype of a writer who shuffles through her days in a fog of reflection and creation, stopping to smell the flowers, to consider the rise and fall of that butterfly’s flight. Unfortunately, I have to push myself to get to that place. I am a planner and a worrier by nature, and it isn’t unusual for me to be in a moment—say walking on the beach path that hugs Lake Michigan across from my city apartment—and to start to think about a vacation I want to plan when I can walk by the ocean! I could be totally digging a fabulous meal, and instead of totally digging the fabulous meal, I will be thinking about this other, future fabulous meal I can imagine somewhere else! And wait, did I remember to lock the door? Do I have enough toilet paper? Will I catch the bus in time to get downtown for class?

What I am saying is that it takes practice and patience for me to settle in to life’s ordinary moments. I am a journal writer; I have been since I was nine. And this (almost) daily practice allows me to do at least two things that are good for my writing and for my attempting to—as you say—experience my days in full. I can write my way through my worries, my distractions, as I put them on the page. And once I have done that (figured my budgets, made my lists for the day) I can begin to turn my observation outward, away from the cramped spaces of my worried mind.

Look out the window: what does the sky look like today? Catch a glimpse of a family photo on the wall: when was that? What mattered to me then? And if I can write my way to this point of observing, remembering, imagining, I sometimes can carry that with me into my day, too. Let go of the worry and the plan.

Here. Now.

Being quiet helps. Terry Tempest Williams said “Silence is where we locate our voice.” Yes. So I turn everything off. Sit, watch, look up and out.

CC: You’ve lived many places but have returned to your home town of Chicago. What do you love most about the city?

PM: Oh man, you have picked the right time to ask me this question. We have just moved to a high-rise apartment that overlooks the lake and is just a little over a mile from the hospital where I was born. I can see the beach where I used to go as a girl to meet boys. And it is summer, but not a brutal, hot, humid one. The lake breezes are fresh, and the city is out there, people riding bikes and swimming and partying on the lakefront. The other day my husband and I went out for a walk and it was about 8 AM on a Sunday morning. We passed a group of people who were of African descent, and they were dancing and singing, and shaking rhythm instruments. Nearby were folks in white, gathered close to the water, and some were in robes, gowns. It looked as though they were about to engage in a baptism. A little ways further on, people were getting ready for a family reunion, handmade signs told us so: “_______ Familia. Aqui.” And they had set up a complete sitting room under a canopy. Luxurious couches and armchairs and cocktail tables you would see on some rich guy’s deck. A circle of older Asian people were doing Tai Chi, reaching for the sky and toward one another and moving over the grass. There is this couple we pass regularly, a man in off white linen and a colorful vest and fez, his wife in a bright red or blue sari. There is so much diversity here, so many people doing so many different and interesting things. The many different languages you hear on the subway, the temples and churches and ethic markets and restaurants. Why wouldn’t someone love this place?

I am particularly aware of how this enriches my life right now, after the recent brutalities and ugly intolerance in Charlottesville. At a time when too many people voted for someone who promised to keep out “the other,” who will not call racism and xenophobia and small-minded bigotry what they are, worthless and evil and dangerous, I am thrilled to be in a place where others—where we all—can thrive.

CC: What are you reading these days?

PM: I am in the last pages of Megan Stielstra’s The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. You know Megan. In fact, it was Megan who connected us some time ago, right? It is a collection of essays, with a few recurring themes and motifs, but primarily it is about fear and overcoming fear. It is exuberant and optimistic and I am reminded of what I always knew about Megan (she was a student of mine some years ago, a friend now) she has an unlimited capacity for joy. Joy is all over these pages. Love. Hope.

Right under that book on my nightstand is Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, by Donna Seaman, Booklist’s Adult Books Editor. Donna has such a curious and thoughtful mind, it is a pleasure to hang out with her in these pages.

Next up will be Code of the West, by Sahar Mustafah, a fabulously talented writer who I had the honor of advising on her thesis (this collection of stories comes from that project.) She is a writer to watch.

CC: Most days, you wake up, and your first thought is _____________?

PM: A year ago, most days: Is that coffee I smell? Most days since last November: Please. Make him stop.

Patricia Ann McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing of Columbia College Chicago, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award as well as a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the Year. McNair’s The Temple of Air received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors (US) Finalist Award. And These are The Good Times: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things), from Side Street Press, is on bookshelves today.

McNair lives in Chicago with her husband, the visual artist Philip Hartigan (www.philiphartigan.com), and their cat Pablo.

Check out her Events page to see when she’s reading near you.

And Don’t forget: ENTER the GIVEAWAY for a chance to win
a copy of And These Are The Good Times!