Even though 2020 has been *A YEAR,* Melissa Faliveno has had some bright spots this summer. The New York City writer released her debut essay collection, "Tomboyland." It’s a deep-dive into identity, zeroing in on gender and sexuality. Faliveno’s complexities unfold as she explores her life growing up in Mount Horeb, digging into her love of meatballs and softballs, her fascination with moths and tornadoes.
The book is a love letter to the Midwest, celebrating its strength and complexities. "Tomboyland" has also been getting a lot of attention, with critical accolades from NPR and Washington Post. As of Tuesday, it was the no. 1 Best Seller on Amazon Kindle in Bisexuality Studies and Midwest US Travel Guides.
Not only does Faliveno write, but she also plays music with the band Self Help and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. And this year, she’s the Kenan Visiting Writer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Another bright spot of the summer? It was when Faliveno talked with WPR’s Maureen McCollum on Aug. 11, 2020 in center field at Olbrich Park Softball Field no. 3. Faliveno calls this her "absolute favorite place on the planet."
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Maureen McCollum: The first essay in your book is called "The Finger of God." And in it, you talk about the F5 tornado in Barneveld, Wisconsin in 1984 that destroyed most of the town and killed nine people. You bring in elements of self-reflection, journalism, religion, everything. Why was this an important event for you to dissect?
Melissa Faliveno: When I think about that tornado, I've started calling it my origin story in a certain way. This tornado that happened in 1984 — I was only a year old — really became this backdrop to my childhood. It took on a mythological quality.
My mom would tell me these stories about that night. My neighbors would tell stories about finding debris in our backyards in Mount Horeb. I always heard these stories about how the mounds — Blue Mounds — protected us.
When I decided I wanted to include it in this book, I was like, "I can't tell this story without talking to the people who are actually there." It's all second-hand and third-hand for me. So, last summer — at the 35th anniversary of the storm — I came back to Wisconsin, went to Barneveld, talked to several people who were there. I had them tell their stories and I didn't really know how it was going to work its way into the essay because it was such a personal story at that point. As they spoke, the story opened up and it took on a brand-new life.
MM: So we’re sitting in center field at an Olbrich Park softball field, a place that you and I have both spent a lot of time. You don't specifically name the Olbrich Fields in the book, but they do make an appearance in the essay "Switch-Hitter."
MF: So that essay, I write about growing up and playing softball in Mount Horeb, traveling all over the state playing softball, even at Olbrich during the Badger State Games. But the actual Olbrich Fields do make an appearance because I rediscover softball as an adult playing on this women's fast pitch league. Our team name was the Beer Battered Broads. It was a huge part of my life here. Our friends and families used to come and grill out in the stands. We had one night that was drag night. We’re mostly androgynous women and we would show up in prom dresses and do prom night. Olbrich has a very important place in both the book and my heart.
MM: "Switch Hitter" is like a lot of the essays within your book. You take this one facet of your life — sports — and you do this deep identity dive while looking through the lens of softball and roller derby… who you were and who you've become because of sports. Can you explain why you decided to write that section?
MF: I started writing about softball and I wasn't really sure what I was writing about. This is how I enter all essays. I have a thing that I'm thinking about or that's obsessing me or a question that I have in my mind and I start writing into it. I don't know where I'm going. And then suddenly, as if by magic, I figure out what it is I'm trying to do or what question I'm trying to ask. I knew that I wanted to write about softball because it is such an important part of my life. I knew it was complex.
MM: You were a big deal in the Mount Horeb world of softball.
MF: In the world of small-town sports, I guess I was something of a big deal. It was my life and it was my plan. I was going to go play D1 softball at UW-Madison. I went to these tryouts at UW-Madison and I choked. The whole trajectory of my life changed. Everything that I expected I was going to do and be, didn't happen. And I took this totally different route and became a writer. I'm really grateful for that, actually.
There's still some grief, though, you know? I grieve for that life: playing the sport competitively and what that did for me as a kid.
But then I was like, "Oh, there's so much more here." The essay was sort of taking these parallel paths of athleticism and girlhood sports. So I get into the ways that we as girls — when we're young — we learn to perform under the male gaze. And even if it's not told to us explicitly, we learn implicitly. Everything that we do becomes about — maybe especially in a small town — about being desired and being attractive and being popular and being objects for boys and sometimes even adult men to want.
So, yeah, it got real dark for a while. It's a pretty vulnerable piece. There are things that I am still freaked out to have in the world.
But the cool thing has been having mostly predominantly women — a lot of queer women — writing me and saying, "Oh man, I identified so hard with this. I feel like you're writing my story." This is such a ubiquitous thing — girls playing sports — but there's so much complexity there, especially within the realm of identity and body and desire. So, yeah, it's been really cool.
MM: One thing that really stuck with me is how you talked about building your body to be a machine. It specifically came up in the high school weight room, where you were building your body to be this strong muscle. Then at other times, you were building your body to be a machine for sex and finding your own power.
MF: That was a big part of it. The way that we sculpt our bodies to fit into this shape that we understand they need to be — in order to be what we think — is powerful.
So I was looking at being a teenage girl and how I felt powerful as a teenage girl in my body, which was being good at sports, going to the weight room, being this total jock. But then also being a highly feminized version of myself where I felt sexy and pretty and strutted around the halls of my high school in high heels and short skirts. I was like, "I am a powerful woman." Well, I wasn't a woman yet, but I thought I was and that felt powerful.
It wasn't until much later in life when I started to inhabit my body in the way that I inhabit it now, which is like much less feminine, much more androgynously. Understanding that that was actually where I felt most powerful and where I felt most at home in my body. So much of that was roller derby and returning to softball and being at home on center field again. It's just this pure joy again, like it was when I was a kid.
MM: What I really like about this book is how you explore some of these details about your life — things that maybe I would consider mundane, like an infestation of pantry moths. I love how you write about them in this beautiful and eventually very empathetic way. Most of us have had pantry moths. You want to get rid of them, but you develop this relationship with them.
Melissa Yeah! I love my moths. I mean, I don't have many more. This was at an old apartment. But that piece I wrote after moving to New York. I was really isolated and really alone and missed my community. But, I kind of liked the loneliness.
My roommates and I did the thing that you do when you get an infestation, which is you try to eradicate them. I had this experience one night where I was in a blind killing rampage. And then I had this moment of empathy for these struggling little creatures.
I was writing about them and they were like buzzing around my lamps, in my bedroom as I wrote. Then one died in a candle and I felt like this deep swell of grief and was like, “Wow, that was interesting.”
MM: So why this particular collection of essays in "Tomboyland" now?
MF: I've actually been working on this book in many stages and forms for about 10 years, some of which ended up in the book, like "Of A Moth" and "Driftless" — two of the earliest ones. But I was writing all sorts of things and I had no idea what I was actually circling around in these pieces. They all seemed very disparate.
But at a certain point — I'd been in New York for several years — I realized that I was writing about home and that was something I really didn't write much about when I lived here. But as soon as I was in a different place and felt like an outsider, I was like, "Oh, I'm writing a love letter to my homeland, in particular Wisconsin."
MM: Why do you think that was? Were you feeling homesick?
MF: It was a combination of things. I was definitely feeling homesick. I really missed my community. I built a really tight community of friends here in Madison and I left them. My parents still live in Mount Horeb and I left them and the rest of my family out here.
But then those other things started happening where I felt like — I write about this in the book, too — I started feeling very specifically the parameters of class and, like, the class that I grew up in.
MM: And not just money, but education?
MF: Yes! I was suddenly around all these people who came from much wealthier families, whose parents had Ph.D.s. I was the first in my family to graduate college. I just felt very aware of those disparities.
Sometimes people would say things — though I don't think they’re meant to harm or even be insulting, but they came out condescending. You know, calling the University of Wisconsin a state school, which totally blew me away.
It was just these weird little jabs that I started becoming really aware of. I started to feel defensive and I started to feel like I wanted to write from this place of like 'outsiderness' and 'in-betweenness.'
And then after the 2016 election — which obviously was horrible — the way people were talking about Midwesterners was like that phenomenon where you can talk badly about your family, but people outside of your family can not. So when people from the coast were like, "Uh stupid Midwesterners voting against our interests," I was like, "Yo, I don't disagree, but you can't say that. You don't know what these people want. You don't know what motivates them. You don't know where they come from, what their priorities are and what they've learned.”
So I felt this strange warring thing where I was like, "I'm so glad to not be there right now." But also, I felt very protective of the place I come from and explicit longing to go back.
MM: In these essays, you lay it all out there, for better or worse. Do you think that more of us should understand the complexities in one another, kind of like in the way you've laid it out?
MF: Yeah, 100 percent. As a country, as a world, we are so divided. In some respects, I feel like some of that division will never change. There's just not going to be unity on some issues and some belief systems. Part of that is what makes the world an interesting place.
But I think that empathy is so important — having empathy for people who don't believe the same things as you do.
There's a way to navigate that so we're not enemies. Even in circumstances where people don't believe — for instance — gay people should get rights like straight people do or that trans people are real. I at once want to throttle them and never talk to them again. But there's part of me that is driven by this need to try to have a conversation and get them to understand what I understand in the hope that maybe they will change their mind about certain things. Or if not change their mind, then have a better understanding of the complexities that people have.
If we take some time to talk to people or read stories, we might learn something. That doesn't mean that we're always going to reconcile. There are still people in this world who I'm not going to ever be friends with, but maybe someone out there will read my book and understand something that they didn't before.
A version of this story also aired on WPR's Wisconsin Life on August 26, 2020.