With a swing of a field hockey stick, a little bit of witchcraft and a whole lot of humor, Madison author Amy Quan Barry makes spinach taste delicious in her new novel, We Ride Upon Sticks.
That’s because her rollicking story of a girls’ high school field hockey team’s 1989 season isn’t just about big hair and teenage angst. By looking at those years through today’s lens, there’s plenty of social criticism that fits into the book as easily as a pile of homework fits into a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
“I think of my book being filled with spinach the way you put spinach in a green smoothie but hopefully you can’t taste it,” says Barry, a professor of English at UW-Madison since 1999. “Hopefully because the book is fun, people will see the social criticism but not think they’re being preached to.”
We Ride Upon Sticks tells the story of, literally, a magical season for the Danvers (Massachusetts) High School field hockey team. The Falcons (in the book) had always been a struggling, hard-luck squad but a whopping two victories the season before and some strange happenings at a summer field hockey camp give the team hope that the forthcoming season could be different.
This belief leads to a vow that the players record in an Emilio Estevez notebook, and as success finds the Falcons, they feel the pull of Emilio demanding more from them. A little bit of chaos ensues, but, improbably, the winning continues.
It’s Barry’s second novel, following the critically acclaimed She Weeps Each Time She’s Born. She also has four published volumes of poetry. We Ride Upon Sticks, released March 3, is already gaining praise; USA Today listed it as a “5 Books Not to Miss” and it is getting other national attention. “The prose style is neon and the laughs do not stop,” New York critic Molly Brown says. “I feel like the author wrote the entire book with an evil grin on her face.”
Barry knew very quickly her book would be different than her poetry and her other more lyrical novel, and that its tone more resembles hers in real life.
“If you get an email from me, this book is pretty much what it sounds like,” says Barry, whose rapid-fire conversation doesn’t seem too far removed from the high school girl she was in the era in which her book was set.
Barry taps into a lot of her life for the story, though she says it’s not autobiographical. She grew up in Danvers and played field hockey, which is popular for girls and college women on the East Coast. Danvers, once called Salem Village, was the epicenter of the events in 1692-93 that saw 19 people hanged after young girls accused them of practicing witchcraft.
“For a while those girls in Danvers were the most powerful people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that was the only power they probably would ever have in their lives,” Barry says. “So I thought about taking that same group of girls and putting them 300 years in the future: What kind of options do they have? How can they come into power?”
Although she was not a sports fan as a kid, Barry wanted to tell a sports story through female eyes to offset the more common boys’ and men’s sports stories. That, coupled with the time period, set the scene for the “spinach” part of the book. Nostalgia locks the ’80s into a goofy time of synth music, parachute pants, and hairstyles that qualified as sculpture but, really, how true was that?
“I really enjoyed rethinking the ’80s in general,” she says. “You’ve got the John Hughes movies and we can look back at them now and be a little critical. There’s subtle racism and homophobia that was just accepted. It was like, ‘Ha ha, we’re going to laugh at the effeminate boy.’
“I had a lot of fun reaching beyond those things to reconsider what somebody’s life would have been like in the 1980s if you were living what people thought was a storybook life that wasn’t.”
Each of the book’s chapters delves into the lives of one of the team members, told in a first-person voice that varies. There’s AJ, the African American girl who endures “well-meaning” remarks that are actually racist; Boy Cory, the only boy on the team who lives in fear of the school bullies; Becca, the large-breasted girl who has to navigate everyone’s assumptions about her.
It's enough to make anyone rethink their high school years — to ponder the backstories of the people you saw every day, finding empathy and understanding by seeing it all through mature eyes.
Barry’s next book is set in Mongolia and is about Buddhist monks in search of reincarnation. She’s also pondering a book to be set in Antarctica and maybe dabbling in science fiction.
For now, she’s immersed in witchcraft, field hockey and the world of the 1980s. It’s a comic combination, Barry says, even if her work never goes that direction again.
“The idea of rethinking things through a critical lens after time has passed — was it really such a good idea to have hair like that?” she says. “You can’t help but laugh.”
