In Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books), Viktor has high hopes of playing for the NHL in America. When a plane crash kills all his teammates, including his secret boyfriend, Nikolai, Viktor is left alone to gather up his grief. There is no triumph over pain, but like any aging athlete knows, learning to live with the hurt makes room for growth, joy, and even hope.
Carl Lavigne spoke to Holly M. Wendt about the expectations placed on queer authors to represent themselves in fiction, and how to navigate tired and harmful tropes.
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Carl Lavigne: Heading North follows a closeted Hockey player, Viktor, who loses his boyfriend Nikolai in an accident. As queer people we’re very familiar with tropes of “bury your gays”—how can we subvert or challenge them, when grief and death are so prevalent in our communities?
Holly M. Wendt: It is cruel what I have done in this book, and so early too. We meet Viktor and Nikolai in some of their most hopeful moments. But then this is a book that puts grief center stage. This is for two reasons: the inspiration for the novel is the real life 2011 Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash where an entire Russian hockey team died in a plane crash. But it is important to me that Nikolai does not die because he is queer, he is by happenstance part of this mass tragedy, which is made more tragic by his relationship with Viktor. That was gut-wrenching to do, but that was always where the book began. And not to give away the ending, but this is not a book without hope. There is queer joy, and that’s important to me. Queerness is not the cause of grief. Viktor shares this grief with his family, his teammates, and their surviving family, and in some way, awful as it might be, grief brings people together in some interesting ways as well.
CL: Much of the book is set in Russia. Why did you choose this backdrop? America has plenty of anti-queer bigotry, and hockey isn’t the only sport rife with homophobia. So why hockey?
HMW: Hockey is the only sport of the men’s big four, (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) in 2011—the genesis of this book—and now also in 2024 where there is neither a current nor former player who is gay and out. If you’re lagging behind the NFL in terms of places people feel safe to come out, there is something going on there.
A year after the plane crash in 2011, the You Can Play Project was founded by the Burke family, in honor of their youngest son Brendan Burke. Brendan was the equipment manager for the University of Miami Ohio ice hockey team and an out gay man who was very vocal about combatting homophobia in sports. He tragically died in a car accident. And the Burke family is a hockey dynasty family–if you throw an octopus you’ll hit a Burke in ice hockey. Individual hockey players—not the NHL as a whole—were the first to speak up in support of the project, and it was Brooks Orpik—who played for the Penguins, my favorite team—who was the first one to actually say the word “gay” in a You Can Play ad. He said he would be happy to have a gay teammate. So this idea has been inextricable from novel since I began.
In the tradition of literary sports books, baseball is widely represented. There are not as many about hockey. Some key examples are Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse and Lynn Coady’s book The Antagonist, which using hockey in some interesting ways, and now we have the Fredrik Backman Beartown universe. It’s really just a small handful. So I thought there was room in the literary space for this. There is room in the real world because the NHL is not ready to have this conversation, though it is happening anyway. The Nashville Predators have an out player in their minor league system, but he’s never played an NHL game, so that dubious statistic remains in place.
When I started writing book I needed the most intense pressure cooker for a plot I could find, and it was hockey in Russia in 2011 with the Sochi Olympics on the horizon. I wanted to push that further. I’m happy to read books where nothing happens for 200 pages, but not every novel can withstand that. I love ice hockey and this was the book I wanted to read, and no one had quite written it yet.
CL: What do you make of the contradictory attraction between queer people and sports/fandoms that disparage and exclude them?
HMW: I don’t know if it’s ice hockey’s particular blend of almost chivalric violence, of a sense of “I must protect my brethren”. There’s something wildly appealing there. I also wonder if it’s in part because of how hockey can dissolve the self. If you listen to a hundred hockey interviews you will almost never hear a player say “I”. It is always “we”.
And so there is this enforced community—which is also probably part of the problem in the NHL. You are not allowed to have a personality, and if you do, you are probably not long for this league. The best players of their generation are like the most boring people. And I say that as a career-long Sidney Crosby fan. You are not supposed to draw attention to yourself as a player. Good, bad, or nothing, you’re not supposed to differentiate yourself, and that makes progress hard. Maybe that is part of the appeal for queer people. To avoid difference and abjection by assimilating into The Team. I’m not “me,” I’m “us.” “We’re all friends because we’re wearing the same shirt” is a powerful feeling for someone who has been otherwise ostracized. There’s something wonderful and freeing about that.
CL: You know, I wondered if your answer might be about projection. Like in the way some queer people are desperate to prove that certain pop stars are gay, because maybe their superstar queerness will affirm our own mundane existence.
HMW: Well, I will say there are people who want to ship players with each other. But these are real people with real lives. Please don’t send your slashfic to their wives.
CL: Oh god. This reminds me of those same type of fics that appeared in bandoms for Panic! At the Disco and My Chemical Romance. Members of the band, who would later come out as queer, were aware of them, but were deeply uncomfortable with the depictions and projections of narrative and identity.
HMW: At the same time, I understand the desperate desire because we’ve all done the math. We know statistically one of the players is one of us. Why aren’t they allowed to say it?
CL: You don’t share an exact identity with your main characters. Did you ever feel pressured to present queer characters who were “more” “acceptable”? Or maybe more “familiar” to straight audiences?
HMW: I felt absolutely no pressure to “straighten up” anything in the text. Several other people asked my publisher why they picked this book, and they hadn’t seen a book ask this question before. “What does queerness look like in this sports landscape?” And Viktor is about as directly a jock-stereotype as one can get, so I don’t think he’s a challenging character for audiences to work with. No one suggested we take the spicy parts out. –
I was nervous about backlash to the book simply because the book was set in Russia—a la the Elizabeth Gilbert problem from a few years ago. But that hasn’t happened.
CL: One of the book’s main concerns is how the human body functions. Could you speak to your process in presenting the story this way?
HMW: I have a very complicated relationship with having a body. I love sports but I’m so bad at them. I have none of the gifts Viktor has. He’s wholly dedicated to being an athlete. His body is the way he identifies with the world. He has very little conception of the self beyond “I play ice hockey.” His body is also the locus of queer desire, which complicates his identity as an ice hockey player. Having to deal with grief so publicly magnifies that even more.
He’s also very tall. He’s six foot eight, which is unusual for the NHL. He cannot disappear. He is always visible in a crowd. If he could evaporate any time he is not on the ice he would. What is it like to deal with a body that is the center of all you want and also the source of all your problems?
CL: Heading North does not follow what we might think of as a typical sports narrative. Almost all the action takes place off the ice rink. Where do you see your work located in the landscape of sports literature?
HMW: On the bookshelf of my dreams this book would sit next to Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Sports are part and parcel of it, but it’s more about what it means to be an athlete than the outcome of the games.
Part of that was being aware of the largest audience my book might appeal to. Sure, I wanted this to hold up to hockey people’s scrutiny, but there’s not a great literary tradition of hockey novels, and I knew my readers were more likely to be readers of queer and literary fiction: people who don’t care who wins the game! A lot of the action is in the arena, but not in the game. The story is bigger than the arc of a single season. It’s about relationships and belonging. Most of the sports books I love really only stay on the field for a third of the time, or less. Nemens’ The Cactus League takes place entirely during spring training, where there are games but none of them matter, and that’s the beauty. It doesn’t matter until it’s your spot on the team at stake.
CL: This is like in Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida, where the stakes are Division 3 regional wrestling, with no audience, no one cares, except the narrator who is deeply and dangerously obsessed with the results of his matches. Ultimately his obsession is his undoing, even as he succeeds.
HMW: The engine is that narrative voice! Who cares about the wrestling matches? I would follow this madman anywhere.
CL: And the otherwise low stakes exacerbate the desperation of that voice.
HMW: I get it! I teach at a D3 school. It’s life or death, because athlete as identity is such a powerful driver. They don’t know what else to be, and come age 22 they might never get to be that again. It’s over.
That’s part of Viktor’s inner struggle. If I can’t be this, what will I do? Who will I be when the “we” is gone?
CL: You sold your novel to a small press, without an agent. Could you talk through why you made that choice and what the journey was like?
HMW: I tried tenaciously to publish traditionally. I got some excruciatingly lovely “almosts”. One resulted in a desperately useful piece of feedback which precipitated a humongous revision—the revision that eventually was published. The obstacle I kept coming up against was the issue of genre. This is a hockey book. It’s indisputably a queer book. Its style is literary. It has romantic relationships in it, but doesn’t behave as a romance. It’s a little bit sexy! And agents told me they just didn’t know who the audience is. That was really hard to hear because I am the audience!
I had the good fortune to meet the publisher of Braddock Avenue Books at Sewanne Writers Conference. Like really briefly. Just “Oh that guy seems competent and cool.” Some years pass. I read a few of their books: Siân Griffiths’ Scrapple and Curtis Smith’s Lovepain, that I thought were doing some really interesting things. I submitted the manuscript in 2019. Then we all know what happened in 2020. I heard back from them in spring of 2022. They apologized for the delay and asked if it was still available. Which was fantastic. But then I had the heartbreaking realization that I had to look at it again for the first time in three years. What if I hate my book? I didn’t. Yay! Thought I made many sentence-level rewrites. I was very grateful for Braddock’s support through that. It was a long process. I worked on this book for eleven years.
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Holly M. Wendt is the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023) and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College. Holly is a former Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and their writing has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Jentel Foundation, Hambidge Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and others. Their prose has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
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Carl Lavigne is from Georgia, Vermont. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in LitHub, Guernica, Joyland, and other venues.