{"id":129910,"date":"2020-07-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=129910"},"modified":"2020-05-20T22:08:46","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T02:08:46","slug":"the-girls-on-the-hockey-team-are-witches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-girls-on-the-hockey-team-are-witches\/","title":{"rendered":"The Girls on the Hockey Team Are Witches"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Until reading Quan Barry\u2019s latest novel, We Ride Upon Sticks<\/a><\/em>, I had no idea the 1692 Salem witch trials hadn\u2019t actually taken place in Salem, Massachusetts. The hysteria emerged in the nearby town of what was then called Salem Village, and is now called Danvers. \u201cHonestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming,\u201d Barry writes. In We Ride Upon Sticks<\/em>, Barry\u2014a Danvers native\u2014places us in 1989 amongst a coven fueled by Pat Benatar, peroxide, and dark deeds scrawled in an Emilio Estevez notebook. Her witches? The 1989 Danvers High School Women\u2019s Varsity Field Hockey team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When the novel begins, the team has suffered a lot of losses. Suddenly, in the summer of 1989, they start winning. Their goalie has taken matters into her own hands by pledging herself to the powers of darkness in an Emilio Estevez notebook, and one by one, she convinces her teammates to join her. The girls\u2019 actions get steadily darker as they chronicle their misdeeds in the notebook simply referred to as \u201cEmilio,\u201d who \u201cwould become a record of our offerings, a shadow book documenting our efforts on behalf of the dark.\u201d They keep winning\u2014and the girls start thinking collectively. But despite their shared thoughts, the girls occasionally remain capable of keeping secrets from one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excess of the decade wafts over the story like hairspray (\u201cAve<\/em> the \u201980s! The only thing bigger than our hair was our outfits\u201d), although Barry doesn\u2019t neglect the ways in which things were worse for women, queer people, and people of color (\u201cWhat did our mothers call it? Bad sex. What would our daughters call it? Rape\u201d). The girls\u2019 individual coming-of-age stories weave in and out of their collective identity, through field hockey and ritual and \u201980s aesthetics, everything escalating as the team fights through the season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Quan Barry was herself a member of the 1989 Danvers Field Hockey Team. She is the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You\u2019re Born<\/em>, as well as four poetry collections, most recently Loose Strife<\/em>. Over the phone, we talked about DIY witchcraft, self-advocacy, collective power, and which \u201980s heartthrobs are still crushing it (hint: it\u2019s Keanu).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Deirdre Coyle: We Ride Upon Sticks<\/em> is written in first-person plural, the field hockey team\u2019s collective \u201cwe.\u201d To me, this point of view seems daunting, but it felt very natural and appropriate in the story. How did you decide on this point of view?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quan Barry: <\/strong>Obviously there are a few examples of \u201cwe\u201d plural voices in literature, probably the most famous one being Jeffrey Eugenides\u2019<\/strong> The Virgin Suicides<\/em>. In that book, you get a group of boys who are watching this family of girls, and this group of boys tells the story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I always knew that I wanted [We Ride Upon Sticks<\/em>] to be a first-person plural voice, I just wasn\u2019t sure whose voice it was going to be. When I first started writing it, I thought that maybe it was going to be the entire school watching this girls\u2019 field hockey team, but that didn\u2019t quite work. And then I thought that maybe it was gonna be the freshman team. Oftentimes with sports, you have a freshman team, a junior varsity team, and a varsity team. I remember being a freshman girl myself, and usually what happens is that the freshman girls are just, like, obsessed with the senior girls. They just seem so much older, like they\u2019re adults, and they can drive. [The freshmen girls] sort of stalk them in various ways, and know all kinds of things about the senior girls. But when I tried doing that, it became very obvious very quickly that I couldn\u2019t really explain why these freshman girls would have certain access to certain scenes or why they would know certain things. And then I realized, “Oh, it\u2019s just the team itself. They\u2019re the ones telling the story”\u2014my joke being that there\u2019s no “I” in “team.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also think that, finally, making it first-person plural adds a sort of witchy element to the book. Not only is it first-person plural, but there\u2019s also some collective thinking that happens along the way, and first-person plural allowed me to have that sort of otherworldly element in the book as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DC: It\u2019s very eerie in all the right moments. The girls write their pledges to \u201cDarkness,\u201d \u201cDearest Darkness,\u201d rather than an explicit \u201cdevil\u201d or other figure. What made you decide to keep this darkness broad and vague?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n