Sport as Romance

Some new events for the new year: On Thursday, January 22 at Fescue Gallery in Lancaster, PA, I have the delight to be the featured reader at the monthly Turning Wheel reading series. An open mic follows the reading, so if you’re in the area, come hang, come share, come be in community with a wonderful group of folks. Doors open at 6:30, event starts at 7. I’ll also be part of the Game Changer: Queer Literary Sports Writing panel at the annual AWP Conference in Baltimore, March 5-7. More on that one below!

2026 and all that

I think you will be unsurprised by me telling you I have written half or two-thirds of a newsletter to you at least four times since the last one. All I can tell you is I’m not using any of that material here. It’s a new year, so at least let the words be new. Below is a bit of a grab bag of things.

Thanks to Sara Lippman’s Ungodly Writing Club¹ from the Writing Co-Lab—two weeks of early morning silent Zoom co-working/body-doubling—there have been some new words, some new work on the novel draft I’m trying to finish. It is strange how helpful it is to sit in just that collective space in which I hide as much as I can—camera off, sound off, and even the panel of other attendees minimized into a black postage stamp on my secondary monitor. I didn’t know any of the writers in the most recent iteration, not even on social media, but there came a comfort from seeing the same names appear day after day. In the brief hello/thanks&goodbye of the chat, it was sweet to see who (like me) has an attachment to using a particular color of heart as a reaction. I am always reaching for the aqua heart; there were devotees of the blue and the black heart in the space among the red. A few brave souls do leave their cameras on, and so those are faces that now feel familiar. These little moments of connection feel more and more important.

For all my Heated Rivalry fans in the building:

I’ve also got a queer ice hockey novel, called Heading North. Per the jacket copy:

And if you’re loving Heated Rivalry, there’s a whole host of queer sports novels out there! You can snag Heading North from Braddock Avenue Books or as an ebook from that other place, or you can get a signed copy directly from me! (Just send me an e-mail or use the contact form on my website.)

Heated Rivalry and its series are romance, of course, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read fiction about sports that isn’t romantic in some sense. In Heading North, there are romantic relationships (and more queer joy than the paragraph above might suggest!) betwen characters on the page, but there’s also the romance between the athlete and the sport itself. Sport is, in so many ways, about devotion—devotion to something that will break the heart, the body, and sometimes both.

There’s also the romance in the medieval sense: the three-part tale that gives us so many wonderful questing narratives. In the medieval romance, the hero begins in a moment of harmony, only to have the harmony disrupted by a problem that must be solved (an item retrieved, an antagonist defeated, some knowledge gained). Usually, this precipitates some kind of quest or journey, full of obstacles along the way. Then the hero must return to restore order with whatever was achieved in the quest, whether that was the retrieval of some miraculous cure or the slaying of a mighty foe or learning something about themselves.

Is that not the arc of nearly every season, every game, every athlete’s career? We begin in the harmony—often—of simpler joys: the harmony of play, of companionship, and sometimes basking in the physical gifts of the athlete that shows an aptitude or a felicity for the sport itself. But there is always a disruption, be it a stronger opponent, an injury, a crisis of confidence, or some material loss (of the field, arena, beloved coach, star player), and the quest, made of its internal and external agons, tests the athlete in every way. Even if the outcome is physical defeat, as is often the case, new knowledge is carried home or becomes the spur to the next quest, next season, next adventure. Here, in January, I’m thinking about all of the cyclists who retired at the end of the 2025 season and who are just now, as the new year of racing begins in Australia, experiencing the bodily understanding of that is not me anymore.²

In many of the medieval romances—especially the chivalric romances—there are romantic encounters and sub-plots, and eventually the love story became the heart of the definition. But what is love if not an adventure, and what is sport if not a journey to test devotion?

If you’ll be at the AWP Conference in Baltimore in March and you’re also romantic about sports, put Game Changer: Queer Literary Sports Writing on your dance card.

Some Reading, Some Making

Walks & Weathers: Publishing Experiments, 2015-2019 by MC Hyland

This new collection by MC Hyland is a wonderful thing to read when you’re feeling isolated. The heart of the book is a series of poems written in response to walks taken with friends and strangers over the course of several years. To read it is to walk along and beside. Each poem provides a when and a where, and I will share with you a favorite snippet, which is, fittingly, a Minneapolis poem. From “A Walk, For Presley Martin, By the Mississippi south of 33rd Street, Minneapolis, MN, June 25, 2016”:

The Cadfael Mysteries by Ellis Peters

It’s shocking how late I was to this 21-book series, the last of which was published in 1994 (and the bulk of them in the 1980s), given the subject matter. I don’t read many mystery novels (except when they’re by Libby Cudmore!), but I do love a medieval thing, and the Cadfael mysteries are a treat. The premise: Benedictine monk solves mysteries (mostly but not exclusively murders) in the twelfth century. The books are full of skillful people doing skillful things, which I love. I’ve been getting them three or four at a time via interlibrary loan and working through them as nightstand books (though sometimes a Sunday afternoon will find book & me on the couch and I don’t get up until the book is finished). There’s also a show from the 1990s starring Derek Jacobi as Cadfael. I’ve watched a few episodes, but I prefer the books.

& so much gray yarn

This is definitively the largest spinning project I’ve ever done. This was something like three pounts of wool (a literal garbage bag full—one whole Gotland cross fleece) before I had it cleaned, carded, and blended with some gray merino wool at a local fiber mill. Theoretically, this is going to become a cabled fisherman’s sweater, but I need a wee break from the gray, first.

Be well, take care of each other, and I hope to see you soon.

1  It’s the hour that’s ungodly, specifically. And it’s really not that bad: 6-7:30 a.m. on the east coast. My own personal preference for myself is a start time of 5 a.m., but that’s something I have to work towards right now, as I did not make great sleep-schedule choices throughout the winter break. So, we’re creeping back to where I’d like to be, 5-7 minutes earlier, week by week.

2  Tim Declercq, my favorite pro cyclist, closed out his career on the bike at the end of 2025, at 36, which is a reasonably average number for retirement in the sport, especially for someone who made their living as a domestique, helping teammates to their wins and never taking any for himself. But this season has also seen surprise retirements: 23-year-old cyclocross phenom Fem van Empel retired while still the reigning World Champion, and 33-year-old Simon Yates called it a day less than a year after winning the Giro d’Italia. And, as always, there are scores of riders whose retirements were handed to them as their teams folded or merged/contracted. For Declercq, his next journey walks beside the previous, as he’s joined his former team as a coach, and that’s seemingly long been the eventual plan. For others, the adventure is wild and wide and open.