Ruth McHugh-Dillon (RMD): What have you been able to gauge from people’s responses to Personal Score, through Q&As at events or otherwise?
Ellen van Neerven (EvN): At Melbourne Writers’ Festival, lots of people came up and they just wanted to yarn, and I haven’t had that with a book before. Every single person who came up to me wanted to tell me a story about how sport affected their life. And it was just so interesting – and amazing. I realised, ‘Oh, this is an “issues” book, it’s different to poetry’. I think the book’s done what it intended to do, which was leave the reader with lots of their own questions. And not even questions that I could have come up with, but different kinds, layers on layers. Obviously the sports world is so fast-moving, there’s a game every week, the conversation is on what’s always happening in the moment … it just keeps going.
RMD: But it seems as if Personal Score has given you the chance to do something more? A longer form, deeper thing, instead of just commenting on the news.
EvN: True, yes. I think it can be a trap to be constantly reactive. Because then you don’t get a chance to dig deeper and think about things in context. Of course, getting stuff out there in the moment is really good, but we also need to sit with the things that take longer to brew.
RMD: I don’t know if this resonates with you, but it seemed that so much of the book was pushing through or against dichotomies – between sport and the rest of life, sport and the arts, sport and being left-wing. At one point you write, ‘Talking about sports is a way of talking about life’. I wonder if there’s an aspect of this book that gives people – arty, queer people – the chance to embrace their love of sport, while still feeling conflicted about it.
EvN: I think maybe that’s what the response in places like the Melbourne Writer’s Festival shows. It’s giving people permission to talk about sport – and as you said – it’s consciously making that space. Where they can recognise, ‘Oh yeah, I love sport too.’
RMD: Like ‘coming out’ about sport.
EvN: Yeah, exactly. I feel in some ways Melbourne is a city where you could do it more easily than in other cities. Because lots of people love their AFL footy – or the tennis – no matter what else they do. It’s very much a sports-forward city.
RMD: Though I can think of friends for whom there’s a lot of trauma about sport because of being queer and the experience of exclusion. So there’s a chance to reclaim sport: it’s something we do as well.
EvN: Well said. And if that trauma goes unresolved and untalked about, it can create these layers of shame. So I really agree, thank you. I’m glad this book touches on that.
RMD: I’m also really interested in its form. Personal Score has the ‘issues-based’ stuff, as you said, but it combines that contemporary commentary with memoir and poetry. It felt like you were breaking down binaries to explore different kinds of pleasure in the body, different ways of using your body. Was that a conscious intention?
EvN: I think it was conscious. And for the reasons you’ve described: I really wanted to queer form and explode it in a way that would match my intentions. I wanted to match the form because I was doing so many different things, and normally I would have had to choose. Well, what are you going to focus in on, and with what form, what container? Is that going to be very straight longform journalism, or history, or memoir, or poetry? And I didn’t want to choose.
RMD: Is a lot of that pressure to choose about selling it? There’s a question about how visible the book is in a store, and where it belongs, which relates to what you just said about resisting the straightness of categorisation.
EvN: Yeah, I think so. You have to put it somewhere and so I’ve gone into bookshops and I’ve seen Personal Score alongside the autobiography of the Formula One driver, Fernando Alonso. That’s kind of interesting. I don’t know that it necessarily fits there, but then – is it a sports book? Or is it just non-fiction? What is it?
RMD: Do you want to define it?
EvN: I don’t think so. I’ve gone down that track before, where people tried to define Heat and Light – as a short story collection or a novel with stories, or speculative fiction. I feel that as soon as you put a label on it, you trap it a little bit. I let other people do that. Sometimes it sits well and sometimes it doesn’t. But I realise it’s always in relation to other books and what’s going on. When I was at Auckland Writers’ Festival recently, they called it a ‘sports memoir’, and I thought, ‘I guess it’s a sports memoir?’ But it’s very obviously non-traditional – for someone who is not a professional athlete to write a sports memoir.
RMD: When I hear ‘sports memoir’, I think of a now retired elite athlete who’s had a certain trajectory: overcoming a particular struggle, being at the top of the game, and now writing a book about it. Whereas you’re unpicking that arc. The memoir aspect of Personal Score is also about letting go of playing, and about the physical damage, as well as the emotional toll, from not feeling fully safe in the place that should have been safe for you.
EvN: You’re so right actually. The arc of the sports memoir – the ones that are most likely ghost-written, most likely from a commercial publisher, and that also get adapted into movies – it typically involves a person with some sort of tough backstory and then they get into sport, and sport is a safe place, sport is where they can excel. People love them because of what they do.
RMD: Despite everything. Despite race.
EvN: Yeah, exactly, it’s their utopia. And then often when they talk about retiring, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have to cross this threshold, from the place where I was loved.’ But they get to exit that utopia, and still be loved for who they are. What I’m talking about is how sport is not always a place where people like me can be safe from the start. So it’s pushing against that narrative. And, as you said, also about recognising some of our friends who just had to step away, exit abruptly, for whatever reason.
RMD: Or who could never even step in, in the first place.
EvN: Yeah, or they put a toe in and then had to go out. Later in life, some of them reclaim a love for sport. Or a love for fitness or whatever. But some never do.
RMD: I played soccer when I was a kid, up until I was about fifteen. A lot of people in that girls’ team stopped around that age. In my twenties I’ve come back to playing futsal, and there’s lots of people on my team also rediscovering it. But if you didn’t ever have an experience of sport feeling good, you can’t reclaim it. Or maybe you can get there, but it’s much harder to connect?
EvN: Yeah, absolutely.
RMD: That’s also why I think that your book offers an interesting intersection of different people’s experiences. As you said earlier, some queer people have been surprised to see themselves in it, or connect with it, given that they don’t identify as a sports lover. But I also think there’s a lot there for people who already love sport, and who might engage with queer critical theory for the first time. There’s so much in it that’s – more simply – about pleasure and joy in sport and the land.
EvN: I hope so. I have a friend, Samantha Lewis, who’s an ABC sports journalist. And she endorsed the book. She gets it, particularly queer stuff. We had a lot of conversations about the piece in the book ‘Trans Sporting Utopias’ that centres the voice of trans people, their relationship with sports. And she said she got a lot out of that, which I was really grateful to hear. In terms of how she approaches subjects. Sometimes – like you would know with journalism – it can be unethical, how we get people’s stories, get people to tell their stories, stuff like that.