Here are two not-so-official truths of making journalism:
(1) If you stay in the job long enough, you’ll write so many stories that you’ll forget many of them altogether; (2) If you stay in the job long enough, you’ll write a few stories that change you.
Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to a class of journalism students at the University of Montana taught by the great Jule Banville, who I interviewed for this newsletter. The students wanted to know more about music writing, which dominated much of my early career. It isn’t often that I have a reason, or the time, to dig into those baby-journo archives of mine. I was truly blown away by some of the terrible writing I was given permission to publish, on music and other topics. And yet, I was also surprised by how spirited those early stories were, full of experimentation and voice.
Back then I relied on the old saying: “write what you know.” At that time, what I knew best was music, so I wrote about music. Of course, there is much contention about this adage: in 2018, LitHub published the thoughts of 31 authors pecking away at whether or not writers should only write what one knows1. On that topic, Toni Morrison said:
“Don’t pay any attention to that. First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know.”
There is much discussion these days of what is and isn’t appropriate for someone to write about. In journalism, if you’re not from a place, maybe you shouldn’t write about that place. But if you want to, or your boss is making you, how can you do so without helicoptering into that community? On the other hand, if you know too much about a topic, have you formed an opinion that will cloud you from writing about it without bias? If you’re not a part of a certain group, can you possibly understand the experience of that group — especially if that group is a marginalized community? In white, cisgender-dominated journalism, I’m glad that this conversation is happening; it should be constant.
For me, the inclination to “write what you know,” eventually, shifted away from music and into “write what you want to know.” I rival cats in the curiosity realm, and one subject unexpectedly sparked my curiosity (and that I would not-so-secretly very much love for an editor to hire me to write about again2). That topic is wrestling.
Yes, I’m talking about that wrestling: the showy entrance songs, the dramatic storylines, the spandex costumes, the good guys, the villains, the thrown chairs, the die-hard fans. I love it and I had no idea how much I could love it until the year 2010, when I stumbled upon a group of Insane Clown Posse fans (juggalos, another longtime fascination we will leave for another newsletter) outside a music venue in Spokane. They were handing out flyers for an upcoming wrestling show to the line of waiting ICP fans. What resulted from this moment was one of my favorite stories I’ve ever worked on.
Of course, looking back at it now, I would do almost everything differently about the story I wrote about that group, known then as Spokane Anarchy Wrestling. (To be clear, they were not anarchists, I think they just thought that sounded scary.) Wrestling was not something I knew. Because I wasn’t writing what I knew, I treated the story like a full-blown investigation. I tracked the members of the group for months, attending practices in the rain as they repeatedly slammed themselves into the grass at a park. I learned what a suplex was, a hurricanrana. I interviewed its members over coffee and, of course, watched their well-attended shows, held in a dirt yard off the freeway. I remember being so confused at first: wrestling isn’t real, so why would anyone care to watch it? How could they cheer on characters in fights they knew were predetermined? I truly knew nothing.
Eventually I came to understand why wrestling compels people. For fighters, the sport can be about being seen as one wants to be seen. It can be about revealing to the world a part of themselves that is the most true, but felt hidden or repressed. In that way, I realized a wrestling match is like a kind of complicated burlesque show, filled with performative violence. And for many of the members of the group I wrote about, being a part of it meant being cared for by a community.
One of the SAW guys had conjured up something of a cowboy persona for himself. In the ring he was tough, rugged, emotionless, stalwart. But in the reality far from the ring, the man’s entire world had splintered apart after his wife and children died in a house fire. How do you recover from that kind of devastation? Can you? SAW cared for him through his grief by putting him in the ring, and cheering him forward. We have all heard stories of people grieving, then being taken under the wing of a church who helps them through loss. But a wrestling group? I’d never conceived of such a thing. It turns out the feeling of being kicked-around is universal. And this was the part that changed me, made me see these men (because, at the time, they were all men) as so much more than cartoonish characters. This group made one man feel like he could live again.
Backstage with SAW that summer, I saw how caught up in the hero/villain storylines everyone was. It was a world all their own, and when they were in it, there was nothing to think about beyond the walls (well, fence) of their dirt arena. When one match exploded and seemed to evolve from a choreographed drama to an actual fight, no one could agree about what was happening. Was it real? Was it fake? That scene makes up the last part of the story I wrote, and what I remember most, after all these years, is how concerned all these people were for the young man at the center of the fight in question, who they perceived was being victimized by a bad guy who went rogue. The group rallied around him, faces bleeding, making sure he knew they were on his side. He was their good guy. A hero in their world. I was taken in by the drama. I think maybe they fooled me into believing.
It’s been years now since I’ve written about wrestling3. I did it once more, for Portland Monthly, about a group called Blue Collar Wrestling. Whereas SAW had practiced a style of “hardcore” wrestling that involved cheese-grating each other’s faces and smashing fluorescent bulbs over heads, Blue Collar talked a lot more about the roots of the sport in the Rose City, and an obligation to keep that history alive.
I was not thinking about wrestling last week when I went to see the journalist Casey Parks speak about her excellent memoir Diary of a Misfit with Adam Davis from Oregon Humanities. Davis began by asking everyone in the crowd to recall a time when you felt a strong sense of belonging with a group. Then he asked one more: to think of a significant instance where some aspect of our identity made it harder to feel a sense of belonging. I thought about grief and loss, and the ways society kicks us around.
For the rest of the evening, much of the on-stage discussion centered on what true community feels like. Parks shared crushing aspects of her early life growing up queer in the south (which are at the heart of her book). She spoke about the strange feeling of recognizing a place as your home while not being accepted by it, and the inverse: that in Portland she felt accepted, but aspects of it will never quite feel like home.
She talked about how community accepts you when you are vulnerable and raw, navigates your highs and lows beside you, your ups and downs. It brings you Milk of Magnesia. It squabbles with you, and still continues to show up.
That stuck in my head, and a few nights later, as I watched the incredible new-ish documentary series on Netflix, called Wrestlers. What Parks said about community and vulnerability came into my mind.
Before I spent that summer with wrestlers 13 years ago, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a community who cheered people up to the top rope (or rooftop) and told them to jump, knowing that’s what the person needed. All I could see was one man’s vulnerability in front of a crowd and the potential for him to get hurt. It took me a lot of years to realize that when he stood there, tears and blood streaming down his face, everyone cheering, that was a good thing. He was exactly where he intended to be.
In just a couple of weeks, the paperback edition of When the Moon Turns to Blood will be out in stores. And for those of you who have read the book already, I wanted to make sure there was something for you in it. This edition has one more additional chapter, an 18-page afterword called “The Bottom of the Abyss.” Here’s a little preview of it.
You can pre-order the book from any of your favorite retailers. Here’s a link to Powell’s, my hometown store.
Another gem, from Meg Wolitzer: “People say, ‘Write what you know,’ but for me it’s more like, ‘Write what obsesses you.’”
A hilarious footnote of this story is that I, a person who does not understand the rules or appeal of most sports, won a sports reporting award for this story from SPJ.
Have you read "One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing" by Katherine Dunn? She was a Portland author. I haven't read it but am going to see if it's in the library. You've gotten me a little curious about the sport.