#but living in football country is rough on a hockey girl

[puckinghischier]

and when i buy a quinn hughes jersey even though i live on the southeast coast of the u.s. then what?

no canucks game to wear it to? no problem! we’re sporting that bad boy in the grocery store

[lizzieraindrops]

Your chance to make the sun rise thrice (Chapter 2)

a river that still runs (8803 words)

Beth Childs has come to Helsinki to meet her best friend Veera for the first time in the Herbs on the windowsill universe, an alternate timeline where the original Helsinki massacre was prevented and DYAD routed by Clone Club Alpha’s successful publicity stunt back in 2001. Veera Suominen and Niki Lintula survived and decided to live in a little apartment together as qpp’s. Numerous Leda clones worldwide are now in contact via a secure online network that Veera maintains. 

Note: This chapter is a bit heavier than the rest of the AU. Beth is still struggling with a lot of the same challenges in this universe, even if the events causing them are somewhat different because of such early canon divergence. But the whole point of this story is that things can end up okay no matter how rough it's been. She's getting the help she needs and she's gonna be alright. That said, warning for soft discussion of past abuse, the effects of trauma, depression and anxiety, and some suicidal ideation. And of course, lots of love and learning how to heal, with support from her best friend.

Fun fact: Veera's username is 3mika, and she always sets her font to the precise warm turquoise of hex color #2299aa. She thinks she's hilarious, and she's right. 

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Part 1: Herbs on the windowsill

Part 2: Someday colors

Part 3: Your chance to make the sun rise thrice  |  Chapter 1  |  Chapter 2  |  Chapter 3

***

Beth wakes on a squashy couch that isn't hers. Morning-soft sunlight pours through the window above her, bouncing back off the walls to fill even the shady corners with a warm secondhand glow. Her limbs are soft, splayed under unfamiliar blankets and sinking into the cushions. She doesn't move yet.

The apartment. Helsinki. Beth's really here. She holds herself still, letting the truth sink into her. She half expects the usual anxious tension to clench her into a ball the instant she moves a muscle, but it isn't there. Neither is the invisible weight that so often pins her immobile. She still wakes frequently with both of them holding her body hostage, keeping her muscles unmoving but restless, even in sleep. Right now though, they're gone. She just lies there, soft beneath the window.

It's quiet but not silent. The occasional car on the little road outside chuckles as it passes. A soft rush of water echoes through pipes in the walls, running toward an early riser in another unit. These sounds fall strangely on Beth's Toronto-bred ears, isolated in the stillness of this of this little apartment on the outskirts of the city. Still, the early-morning atmosphere settles comfortably into her jet-lagged bones, murmuring a rhythm for her to sink into. The temporal upheaval of a transcontinental red-eye and a series of exhausted naps yesterday have left her a little unbalanced. And yet, here she is waking up with the day, and the ground under her feels so much more stable than she’s used to.

Beth breaks her stillness with a deep, deep breath that she can feel expanding all the way down to her feet. She stretches, too, but soon pulls the toes that get exposed back underneath the warm, scratchy blanket. The cushions of the old couch creak a little in complaint as she shifts, but her limbs remain supple. For a time, she just observes the sensations. Then, her awareness spreads beyond the couch and the window to the rest of the room.

All around her, an oddly blocky pattern covers the walls. It's one of the first things she noticed when she walked into the apartment yesterday afternoon. The pattern isn't wallpaper like it appears at first glance, but actually a multitude of small photographs. Most of them are unframed, but taped up in crisply aligned rows. In them, she sees the same face infused with a hundred different lives. Just above her, a sleeping, slack-jawed redhead with bulky headphones around her neck sprawls on the very same couch Beth's laying on now. A few rows down, a brunette and a blonde with their long hair in matching wild waves are leaning all over each other and grinning like devils. One of the few framed photos shows a girl with a hospital-short buzz cut and a delighted expression, sitting in front of what looks like a mouthwatering strawberry shortcake. Beth can see at least six others in the background behind strawberry girl. Among them are Mika with her unmistakable scars and Niki with her bright blonde hair, their arms around each other's shoulders.

Morning light glances off the glossy surfaces of the photos on the west wall. The particularly bright reflection off one of the framed photos draws Beth's eye. With a tiny jolt, Beth recognizes one of her own selfies beneath the glass. In it, she's wearing the same old turquoise blue sweatshirt that's spilling out of her suitcase next to the couch right now. Underneath it, she's wearing her track gear, so the photo is at least two years old. She'd had to quit cross-country so she could try to get the shitshow her life had become under control. She vaguely recalls sending it to Mika a long time ago. It's strange to think that her presence has been in this apartment for so long.

She's here. In Finland. Staying with Mika – Mika - and Niki. Far, far away from everything.

Sprawling on the couch she slept on with a sigh as if she hadn’t a care in the world, Beth can't believe she's really gone and done it. She's run so far away that there's an ocean between her and her problems. It’s so much better than she's dreamed, even if it's only for a little while. It’s worth it, even though she'll be going back far too soon. For the first time in years, it feels like she’s where she’s supposed to be right now.

It had all started out as foolish idea she'd floated one Saturday morning, months ago. She hadn't been serious at all. She'd woken up so relieved at not having to get up and go to work, until she remembered her weekly therapy appointment with a hopeless groan.

Putting off the genuinely daunting prospect of hauling herself out of bed, she reached out to snag her phone from on top of her dresser, checking to see if she'd heard from Mika overnight. After all, Helsinki was nine hours ahead, so Mika had already seen most of the day that was just beginning for Beth. They talked so often these days, since they'd first made contact over two years ago. Rarely a day passed without touching base. But there wasn’t anything since Beth had checked last night. She took it upon herself to send the first message of the day.

runwaterblue: god, i dont wanna get up and deal with any of thsi shit today

After her world fell apart, after finding out about Project Leda, after realizing that all her nightmares and more were real, after her father...

runwaterblue: wish i could come visit u and get away form everything for awhile

Mika replied almost immediately.

3mika: you can

It was evening in her time zone, but to be honest, Beth had no idea if she had anything resembling a regular sleep schedule. The girl was always online.

3mika: though you really should go to your appointment. you always feel better afterward

runwaterblue: howd you know i have therapy today

3mika: you always have an appointment saturday afternoons

runwaterblue: yes but how do you remember that? i cant evne remember my own appts lmao

3mika: you mentioned it months ago when you switched from sundays to saturdays

Beth shook her head with a smile. Mika was so good with details.

3mika: anyway. you’re welcome here, if you can get here

3mika:  it would be great to see you

3mika: Niki wouldn't mind. we've had a bunch of Ledas visit us here, it's always fun

3mika: except that one time Dani and Ary got into a fight over football. some French-Italian team rivalry thing. that was not fun.

Beth laughed. It was funny how Mika was so good at making her do that, even on days like these. She leaned back against her pillow and held her phone over her head without sitting up, being careful not to drop it on her own face. She'd done that before. More times than she'd admit.

runwaterblue: i was kidding. id love to visit, but idk how id get there

runwaterblue: u should see the americans go off abt their football lmao. they're nerly as bad as the hockey freaks here

3mika: pls no

3mika: no more sports. it was a year ago and I’m still exhausted

3mika: sports are banned in this apartment.

Beth snorted. Mika wanted nothing to do with sports of any kind, and with Beth's athletic record, the topic had become a point of mutual teasing between them.

In so many ways, they were such different people, DNA be damned. Mika was reticent where Beth was outgoing. (Or at least, Beth had been. She was never quite sure how to think of herself these days.) Clone drama aside, Beth had been a pretty average Canadian high schooler. She got reasonable grades, played a few sports, and kept mostly out of trouble because there would be hell to pay if she didn’t. Mika was a brilliant homeschooled autistic orphan who had been raised in near isolation by her guardian after surviving the hospital fire that marked her skin for life. Beth mostly listened to pop music, and where no one else could hear, the occasional classical symphony. Mika held fast to Finland's weird obsession with death metal and dabbled in literally everything else.

And yet, Mika understands Beth like no one else does. And it's not just because they've both been through all this Project Leda bullshit. Though Beth doesn't know what she would have done without Mika to help her through that, too.

Beth won't ever be able to forget the moment that everything changed. Recognizing a her own face from the mirror on the evening news stopped her in her tracks, as something in her gut caved in with the hollow certainty that it wasn't her. Then face after face flickered before her, a flipbook barrage of déja vu. Blonde and smiling. Scarred and pensive. Braids and piercings and a rakish grin. Beth was rooted in place as people she had never been wearing things she had never worn said things she was never supposed to know.

That utter strangeness on the screen immediately seeped into her life like an oil slick into a river, tainting every thing she thought she knew with clinging uncertainty. Her father was inexplicably even more upset about it than Beth was, yet adamant that they shouldn't look into the matter. But it was already too late to stop herself from thinking. With slow horror, the truth of what exactly his behavior must mean dawned on her. And yet, even with the desperate growing certainty about who her Leda monitor must be, it was hard to believe that he could be anything other than her plain stern father.

He was always a bit strict and overprotective - probably well more than a bit, she realizes these days. But she’d thought that's just what it was like to be a cop's daughter. He'd never done anything really extreme, nothing beyond the firm discipline any kid could expect. He was just not a man to be trifled with, that was all. So until everything she thought she knew shifted that day and threatened to topple every assumption she’d built her life on, she had never truly dared to cross him.

Outright daring him to say to her face that he wasn't her monitor was probably considered a step beyond trifling. He did not take it kindly.

Two months later, Beth and her mother were living in an apartment on the opposite side of the city. It took two months for the two of them to lay plans to leave together, for good. For two months, her every move was watched. She spent two months knowing there would be hell to pay if she didn't give the performance of a lifetime pretending everything was fine, even while sirens blared inside her day and night. Two months was more than enough to teach her things she never wanted to know about the hidden marks fear leaves on the body.

Even after she finally escaped, her life was in tatters and nothing made sense. It wasn’t just the sudden jarring discovery of Project Leda, or the crisis it had forced her to confront. It was learning that, deep down, she had known that she’d never once felt free. She’d unconsciously kept herself from knowing to avoid exactly that conflict of wills that she’d known she would lose.

Trying to come to terms with what had happened and how it changed everything, Beth was continuously losing her balance. Questioning which parts of her life had been screwed over by her father and which by being part of some ridiculous supervillain science experiment was like trying to stand on two kickboards in a pool. She couldn't find her footing, and all she could do was try and stay afloat. She had to repeat her whole junior year of high school that she lost to this shitshow, while starting over at a new school, and only barely scraped her way into senior year. Now that she knew how honestly terrible she'd been at judging who in her life she could trust, it was as hard to talk to old friends as it was to make new ones.

Therapy helped her start sorting out what she was feeling, and how the environment she’d grown up in was really not the healthiest. She hadn’t realized how much she’d learned to doubt her own perceptions. That made constructing any kind of new understanding of her situation an uphill struggle. And of course, her therapist couldn’t help her confirm anything about a human experiment that was so illegal it had been an international secret. As she continued to stumble forward, Beth even started doubting her former certainty of the identity of her Leda monitor. She questioned herself and everything she knew until she wanted to scream with frustration or weep with confusion. The floor of the counselor’s office could have been mopped with her tears. It was, quite literally, driving her mad.

So, finally, Beth had taken up the invitation on the banner of every Leda news feature to "Contact the secure, clone-run Clone Youth Group Network (CYGNet) for answers by emailing info@cygnet.org."

She wanted something concrete that would help convince her brain to stop reenacting these head games that warped her reality. It still insisted on playing through the patterns it had been taught, even in its teacher’s absence. She needed something that could brace her against the ideas that she was really just paranoid, overreacting, accusing, that this was all her fault for making a big deal out of nothing. Even with his other faults (cruelties, her mind whispered) aside, at least his involvement with Project Leda was unforgivable, and she wanted proof of it. Maybe if she had that, she could stop being mad at herself for not wanting to forgive. And if anyone had that proof, CYGNet would.

Maybe it was just because of the sheer blunt honesty about her motives, or the inescapable vulnerability of the message Beth sent, but Mika had replied to her within a day. And she'd been so gentle about it, too, enough to make Beth later question where the stereotype of autistic brashness came from. Then again, over email, Mika had all the time she needed to compose her thoughts and lay them out as softly as she wanted. She didn't have to spit them out as fast as she could to keep pace with a quick and painfully overwhelming world.

Hi Beth Childs,

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through. I still don't know how they got away with doing things like this for so long. I suppose people will always find ways to be cruel. But we've survived this long, and the whole point of CYGNet is to help us all heal. The experimental network has been dismantled, and we are assembling resources to help us. We've brought mental health professionals on to the project to develop custom programs for our needs. We can make them available to you, if you are interested.

I attached scans of some of your files that we recovered from DYAD. There are a few case reports with the signature of the person you asked about, spaced throughout your lifetime. There are also financial records with his name in the list of paid employees. He was without a doubt part of the Leda monitor program. I can provide all of the documentation that we have related to you, if you like, but I thought that would be too much all at once. I know these are hard to look at, but I hope they help let your mind rest. They are very real, and every awful thing we have experienced was also real, no matter how they tried to convince everyone that we were making it all up.

Please take your time with these, and stay in contact if you want to. You can join our mailing list, if you want to know when we have new information or new resources available. We're here for you.

And hey, if you just want to talk to someone who knows what it's like to deal with all of this, I'm here, too. You can reach my personal inbox or IM me at wiz.of.dos@cygnet.org. It'll be okay.

-Veera

Beth had started crying before she even finished reading the letter, much less opened the attachments. She cried so often these days. She only knew why half the time. But this time, it felt like the tears were extracting some of her pain as they left her, instead of just overflowing from the unending wellspring of her directionless distress. All of this was real, and someone else knew it.

Though she was grateful beyond measure for her mother’s untiring support, they were each other’s too-close, ever-present reminders of what they’d survived, trying to act like they weren’t, trying to convince each other and themselves that they were okay. Beth had needed something else, too, something until now unnamed.

This was a handhold, a backstop Beth didn't know she'd been desperate to find. It wasn't just the confirmation of what she’d concluded about her father. The ability speak plainly to someone she didn't feel the need to pretend around was an exhale of a breath held too long. At least one person in the world not only understood, but really and truly didn't want or expect her to act like any of this was normal or okay, or that she would ever be the same again.

Veera – or Mika, as she often went by online – made good on her offer of a sympathetic ear. Their correspondence started off with awkward, grammatically correct messages about the less painful details of their lives. Mika told her about the farmer’s market three blocks away where she went walking early in the morning before it got busy, and the plant stand there that her best friend and roommate Niki (also a Leda) had to ask her to stop buying so many succulents from.

At first, Beth tried to chatter like she used to, but there were no safe subjects. What had happened had touched all of her life. Normally, she’d talk about school, or sports, or her friends. But she was trying to start all over again at a new school with all the struggles that came with it. She didn’t have the time or energy for sports anymore, and talking about them hurt, now. Running used to make her heart sing. But no matter how she tried, there was no joy in the motion anymore. To top it all off, it was as hard to connect with old friends from her old life as it was to try and make new ones. She spent most interactions either doubting her own character judgement or dreading the moment people recognized her Leda face from the news.

She didn’t know how to talk about any of it to anyone. Maybe she could have if it had been just the clone thing or just the dad thing. But the two were inextricably entangled, and she still couldn’t even explain it to herself. It was all unbelievably horrifying, and any time she tried to be honest about it, people ended up disbelieving or horrified. Shocker.

Maybe, though, it wouldn’t be weird to talk about it with Mika. Mika already knew the worst. Beth didn’t have to hide that hurt from her to keep from shaking her world, or to keep her dismissal from hurting Beth. Maybe that’s what was hurting the most: the feeling that even after escaping, she still had to pretend to be okay. That compulsive stifling feeling choked her whenever it bubbled back up. On her bad days, a simple “how are you?” could reduce her to a blank face plastered over a raw tangle of emotions held motionless her own iron grip.

But Mika mentioned having bad days, too. Days came where she was too scared and nightmare-weary to do anything but make herself some tea and soak up some sunlight in the safety of home. Beth could casually say things like after those two months, i still twitch every time i hear a door open, and i wish my body would quit feeling like it doesn’t exist, my legs feel numb. It barely broke the surface of what it was like in her head, but was discomfiting enough for people that she held her tongue at school.

Sometimes, Beth got tired of constantly thinking about all this shit and tried to lighten things up. On one comically disastrous occasion of cultural exchange, she liveblogged Mika her attempt at eating the infamous Scandinavian lutefisk, along with an audio recording of the incoherent horrified noises she made after tasting it. In return, she received a recording of someone, presumably Mika, laughing harder than she’d ever heard anyone laugh before. It made Beth smile. Not many things did, back then.

Slowly, as the formality fell away from their transcontinental conversations, their heavier stories seething below the surface seeped in. Beth had been in therapy long enough now to know that she couldn't just recklessly unload on people the way she did in counseling sessions. But a counselor couldn't always provide the same kind of unspoken solidarity that someone in the same boat could.

Bit by bit, slipped into the chats that were becoming a daily occurrence, they talked about monitors, about what the experiment had really all been for, why that both was and wasn’t important, and how they'd discovered they were a part of Project Leda. Putting words to the pain hurt, a lot. But the ability to lay out long-unspoken truths in front of each other, knowing they were believed in the way that only people who have shared something can, was a healing kind of pain instead of the festering one Beth had been living with.

The two of them had more in common than they'd thought, growing up a world apart. Beth's experience raised under the subconscious wariness of her father's hovering thumb felt a lot like what Mika described growing up largely isolated with her former guardian. But sometimes, whenever they realized that something they'd both thought was normal was pretty not, they got a good laugh out of it despite the weight of their pasts. Mika seemed somewhat accustomed to her normal being considered pretty weird, so she usually took the revelations in stride better than Beth did. Beth wouldn't find out for at least a year after meeting her that it was because of her Asperger's, since it was a topic Mika seemed quite sensitive about.

Mika explained it once, in a conversation full of long pauses on her part and watching the typing icon disappear and reappear on Beth’s. The way she put it, it just meant that her brain worked a bit differently than most people's, processing sounds and sights and all the information it took in at different speeds and with different emphases. The difference could turn everyday things like the sound of a refrigerator running into a splitting headache, or something as simple as the soft texture of her favorite jacket into a kind of bliss. That alternative way of processing also extended to things like words and emotions as well. Sometimes, it took her longer than the world was willing to wait to process them into something that made sense. It often made communication tricky, trying to compensate for the gap in mutual understanding with most people. The world and the people in it could be so overwhelming sometimes, so fast and bright and full of noise and uncertainty and bewilderingly arbitrary social conventions. But the biggest challenge was other people expecting her to do everything the same way they did, ignorant of the fact there were any ways to exist other than their own, and completely oblivious to the fact that she was already putting in at least twice as much effort to communicate with them as they were with her.

And yet, even coming from such a different perspective, Mika gets it. Beth says sometimes i dream of drowning and its not a nightmare and i wake up not knowing how to feel, and Mika says I still dream of burning and wake up not knowing which fires are real, and they both say yeah. And they sit there across the world from each other knowing these things, knowing that it doesn't fix anything. And yet, it does change something. Nothing's any better, really. But somehow, the knowledge that someone else understands makes it a little easier to bear.

And that's just it. Somehow, without ever even having seen her face, Mika sees Beth clearer than anyone. All of her, all the ugly parts she hides so that they can't hurt anyone, and all the good parts that she also hides so that nobody can hurt them or take them away from her. Mika sees all of that and then just tells Beth another story about the Northern Lights she sees on the regular. Apparently, in Finnish, they’re called "fox fires." Beth hardly ever sees the aurora, living relatively far south in a bright city. But her stories about life in the metropolis by the lake intrigue Mika as much as the tales of the twisting green lights do her. And Beth can talk about something lighter again while not having to pretend that the heaviness isn’t there, too, even while she’s just once more trying and failing to explain poutine. For her, the weight never really goes away. But the effort of pretending she’s not carrying it takes more out of her than the weight itself. Mika understands that.

Maybe that’s why Beth had talked it over with Mika first, even before her mom, when she was considering taking a gap year after she hopefully managed to finish her senior year of high school. (God, it was so hard to think about English or math or whatever when just that morning she’d woken from a nightmare about being back in a not-home house that she never escaped.) Beth's mom had been so unbelievably supportive of Beth's recovery, even while she herself was adjusting to the wrenching change in both of their lives. It was both inspiring and a little intimidating. If her mom managed to run a household and raise a daughter all on her own, even while trying to heal from her own trauma, how could Beth not do her utmost, too? She was grateful to be able to talk to Mika about it, to get a reality check from someone who both understood her situation intimately and didn't make Beth feel that pressure of expectation. In the end, Beth did decide to take a year or two off before considering college, and her mom was again nothing if not supportive. Beth figured, after this entire mess, she deserved some time to herself to work on sorting her shit out, and her mom agreed.

After graduating with reasonable if not flying colors, Beth worked a series of part-time and odd jobs that didn't stress her out too much, letting herself focus on her own healing. In between her mom's support, seeing a counselor regularly, and the security of having a friend she could really trust, Beth felt like she was making progress. Slow progress, sure, but progress, nonetheless. Considering that she had seventeen years' worth of lies to unbelieve and emotional trauma to finally acknowledge, Beth figured that there was only so much she could do in the three years she'd had.

Her days were still hard. Getting sleep and waking up and eating and even just existing were still so fucking hard sometimes, and it was horrible. Some days, the thinnest sheet trapped her in bed like it was a car pinning her down. It felt so stupid for such simple things to be so hard. But then her therapist would remind her that that’s what mental illness and trauma was, that this was what the wounds in her mind and heart made her feel like. And once in awhile, sun broke through the shadows, and she had a day that reminded her what an okay day felt like – that okay days existed. That more might.

Now, she’s here, lying in a bright living room so far from home, with her dearest friend in the next room. She’s comfortable, except for the knot in her neck from sleeping oddly on the couch. The soreness pales in comparison to the usual tensions that are so strangely absent. Beth can’t remember the last time she felt this okay. She’s not steeling herself to go to work. She’s not dreading the next conversation with her mother that goes quiet as they both remember awful things they don’t mention. She’s not bracing herself for the next time her brain runs rampant worrying about whether she’ll run into the subject of her restraining order somewhere in the city and have to wonder if he'll honor it.

None of that reaches her here. There’s something about this quiet little pocket of space. It’s overrun with a proliferation of potted plants, from the sprawling lacy-leafed monster in the corner, to the fern peeping out of the kitchen, to the vine cuttings spilling out of an oddly familiar leaf-shaped glass bottle on the sill. Sunlight streaks through leaves and windowpanes and across the colorful patchwork of rugs on the floor. In the midst of it all, Beth is held by a palpable aura of gentleness. It holds her so softly that she doesn't need to hold herself in. It's like the layer of caution that she always keeps wrapped between herself and the rest of the world has simply dissolved away. In this moment suspended in morning light, she is okay.

She feels safe.

The realization undoes something in her. She feels the tears starting, and she expects the taut tension of involuntary stifling that always comes with them to return. But it doesn’t. She lies still and soft on the couch with the water creeping over her cheeks, breath occasionally catching but flowing freely. She savors it in the quiet.

The soft thunk of an ill-fitted door opening breaks into her odd reverie. Mika’s up. Beth sniffs and scrubs at her eyes halfheartedly, but she can’t hide them right now and she doesn’t want to. Mika notices immediately, and comes trotting over with quiet steps, leaning forward all concern.

"Beth," she says softly. She shifts from foot to foot like a nervous cat, watching Beth with enormous eyes. Beth has never met anyone else with such an intense stare. Or maybe it's just the fact that Beth knows beyond all doubt that she's being looked at by somebody who really sees her in her entirety. It's like she's staring right into Beth's soul. But Mika was able to do that long before they saw each others' faces. They've shared so many thousands of words over screens and seas, so many emotions that have gone otherwise unspoken, so many too-early mornings and too-late nights on the fringes of each other's dawns and dusks.

“What’s wrong?”

Finally, a flash of that sick tension runs through Beth’s body. It’s been okay when Mika has asked that before, when it was just silent letters on a screen. But out loud, the question falls on her ears like every well-meaning inquiry she’s ever had to scramble to find an acceptable answer for. The strain begins to cinch tight around her again like coarse ropes across barely-healed skin, ready to compel her to replace the truth with something safer. Her arms and legs tied, she begins to freeze, railing against herself for tainting the softness, the safety of this place.

"Beth." Mika says again, softer but more urgent.

In the gap between thoughts created by hearing her name, Beth seizes the chance to redirect them to the present. She clings to the welling in the corners of her eyes, the warmth of the sun caressing her back. The leaves of trees whisper outside the third-floor window in a mild breeze. The brightness spills over the sill and across Mika’s asymmetrical, half-craggy face and lights up tufts of her short hair as she steps closer. The couch dips as Mika sits down next to her, tilting Beth toward her.

Without meeting her eyes, Mika lifts a hesitant hand that hovers in the air between them, uncertain yet reaching. Her gentle palm falls onto Beth's forearm as softly as a floating leaf. The fingers curl around Beth’s arm just below the wrist, firm but not tight. Comforting.

The softness surrounding Beth seeps back into her, saturating her. As the memory fades like a ripple into water, the tension slackens. But it leaves her shaky, with traces of a familiar ache in her neck muscles, one that goes deeper than the simple stiffness from the couch. She sucks in a few unsteady breaths while Mika gives her arm a gentle squeeze.

“Sorry,” Beth says in a small, awkward voice.

Mika tilts her head. “Why?”

“Uh, I didn’t mean to bring all – this mess, in here.” Beth rubs the back of her neck with her free hand. “It’s so... soft, and okay, and – I don’t wanna ruin it,” she says, trailing off into a mumble.

“Hey.” Mika moves her hand from Beth’s arm to her shoulder. When Beth looks at her, she’s looking right back. Mika's eyes dart down to the floor for a moment, but then return to hold Beth’s with deliberate steadiness. “It’s alright. It’s like this here because we wanted it to be safe to be messy. You’re not ruining anything.”

“... Oh.” She’s steadied by Mika’s fingers curling around her shoulder, by the tendrils of sunlight spreading across her head and back and arms. Mika’s voice is small but steady, and somehow it comes from the same throat that makes that huge pealing laugh. It’s so strange how they sound nothing alike. Until yesterday, Beth hadn’t heard her voice since the lutefisk incident. They’d mostly kept to text and pictures. It had seemed easier, the way it gave them both plenty time to think before they spoke through their different uncertainties. Beth was already planning her trip before they realized that they’d never actually called each other. By that point, it sounded like more fun to meet in person the old-fashioned way.

"I'll make you some tea." Mika abruptly stands and lets go of her. Beth is sad to lose the contact. She flits across the room toward the kitchen in her soft cotton pajama pants, complemented by yet another black graphic tee for yet another Scandinavian metal band Beth's never heard of. Or at least, she'd never heard of them before Mika, who has something to say about all of them, and now Beth knows more than she'll ever need to.

Mika moves in and out of view behind the half-wall that separates the little living room from the kitchen. The fronds of the fern on the counter make a green rustling as she brushes by them. It sends soft feathered shadows waving across the wall opposite the window. Beth hears the rush of water boiling out of sight, and soon sees steam rising from the mug that's being handed to her.

"It's hot," Mika says unnecessarily. She sits down next to her again, this time leaning into Beth with her arm. Beth’s glad for it.

"Have you ditched the bags and gone loose leaf?" Beth says, eyeing the fragments of bright green leaf free floating in her mug.

"It didn't come in a bag. It came from the window."

"The window?"

"It's basil tea. For the fear and pain. Five large fresh leaves in two hundred and fifty milliliters water. We grew it here."

Beth takes a cautious sip. It's surprisingly sweet, and the savory smell of the steam rising from it curls into her sinuses. The aching in her head and neck begin to relax. It's unfamiliar, but it feels like home should, just like everything else here.

"Thanks," Beth says. On an impulse of craving closeness, she leans her head onto Mika's shoulder with a sigh. The sensation of contact deepens as Mika leans against her, too.

Beth holds the cup close, fingers wrapping around its warmth. She takes another sip and gets a bit of leaf stuck in her teeth. The way she scrunches up her face trying to dislodge it pulls a tiny laugh out of Mika.

“You don’t have to be okay here,” Mika whispers. “You can just be. That’s what we do.”

Beth finds her eyes wet again, but she smiles while she sets her mug down and wipes them away. “Kinda already wish I could stay here,” she says with a chuckle.

“... That’s probably not impossible.”

“Really?” Beth asks wryly. “Not even twenty-four hours, and you’d already be willing to put up with me?”

“Twenty-four hours and twenty-seven months.”

Beth melts a little even while waving the idea aside. “I wasn’t serious.”

“I know, but... weren’t you looking at the school here?”

“I mean, yeah, but... really, my mom just thought I deserved a break to get away for a little while. She’d saved up a bit, and I didn’t want to make it a big deal or anything, but she really wanted me to. She knew I wanted to come see you. Checking out the school was mostly an excuse. I know it’s a great place, but... I don’t really think it’ll help with what I wanna do.”

“What do you want to do?”

Beth sighs and leans back, looking at the ceiling. Mika follows her so that they’re still shoulder to shoulder, and pulls her feet up to tuck them in cross-legged.

She flounders for a moment, trying to find where to begin. She hasn’t told anyone this yet.

“This Leda crap has been kind of awful, right? It’s screwed so many of us up. But there’s only, what, a few hundred of us? And that’s not the only reason things get messed up.” She swallows. Her eyes trace irregularities in the ceiling: a knot in an exposed wooden beam here, a sealed and repainted crack there. “Kids like me are a dime a dozen. There’s so many people out there going through hell, just because they got stuck with people who are hurting so much that they hurt other people. And then they go on and hurt more people. It’s a cycle that’s really fucking hard to break.”

Breaths that have become harsh force her to pause and let them lengthen again. A touch on her knee draws her eyes down to a hand resting on it palm up, offering. Beth takes it. Mika squeezes her fingers in reassurance.

“When I was little, I wanted to be a cop like my dad, did you know that?” Mika, eyes wide, shakes her head. “Yeah. That was always my plan. I used to think he was so brave. Wanted to be just like him.” She shudders. Mika grips her hand, steady. “Even if I could do it better than he did, the system is still full of people like him. It’s broken. I couldn’t – I can’t end up like that. I can’t keep being a part of this shit. I want to actually help people.

“I never thought about it before I met you, but the people you brought in to do therapy programs and all for CYGNet? They’re amazing. The stuff I’ve gotten from them has helped me so much. And I don’t know what I’d do without my regular therapist. These people really help people like me. Like all of us. Those are the kind of people I wanna be like.”

Beth’s voice drops and becomes small and secretive, but firm. “I’ve been looking at the social work programs at home. There’s some really good ones at the uni near where mom and I live now. And that’s the city where I grew up. I know how things work there. I know it won’t be easy, but. I could really... do stuff.”

Silence stretches. Beth looks at Mika, only to be completely thrown off by an expression she can’t make heads or tails of. “What?”

Mika’s face is blank yet soft, only barely hinting at her thoughts in the faintest crinkling of her eyes. It’s funny, how quiet her face is most of the time. Beth never would have guessed, going off her online impressions of her. Mika’s so expressive and eloquent with her written words. In person, she is much more subtle. But even after only a day spent around her, Beth is already starting to see how her movements speak volumes in a language of their own. The flickering of her hands flares to life with excitement. The casual shake of her head tosses her hair out of her eyes even when it’s not in the way, like she’s clearing the slate of her mind. And much like Beth these days, she goes very still and tense when she’s getting uncomfortable or overwhelmed, the way she did after a particularly loud whistle at the train station. It shows in her shoulders. They’re soft now though, and she just watches Beth and squeezes her hand once more.

“You’re really amazing, you know,” Mika says.

“Wh- huh?”

“Well.” She looks away and turns their hands over, but doesn’t let go. “After the awful things you’ve been through – nnnh! Don’t pretend,” she says, looking back sharply as Beth begins to protest that she didn’t have it that bad. Mika knows her so well. Beth can’t help but laugh a little. “After all that, you just want to help people. All I ever want to do is get away from them, most of the time.”

Beth quirks a brow at her with a bemused grin. “Really? Because setting up and running an organization that provides mental health resources and extremely important information to a few hundred people is a really shit way to not help people.”

“I never talk to most of them! And CYGNet only has one hundred and thirteen members, not hundreds.”

Beth rolls her eyes with an exaggerated motion. “Yeah, so, you’ve somehow convinced, what, a whole freaking third of a huge group of scared strangers to trust you?”

“A lot of that was Niki and the press team, she’s way better at talking to people th–”

“And you’ve been careful enough and clever enough to keep them and all the information you got from DYAD safe and secure? I can’t even imagine the organization and, and cyber-security and whatever the hell else you put into all this. That you still put in. And look what you’ve done. You’re helping so many people. You found something only you could do, and do it really damn well.”

Mika looks down into her lap, half her face flushed. The raised ridges and swirls of the scarred side are pink, but not as dark. Her shoulders curl in a little, but she doesn’t pull her hand away from Beth’s. If anything, she holds on a little tighter.

“You don’t have to like talking to people to help them. You don’t have to be someone you’re not,” Beth says gently, then pauses as a new thought occurs to her. “Why did you talk to me?”

Mika gives a tiny shrug, eyes still downcast. “You reached out to me. Most people are scared, or suspicious, or hard to talk to, but you were just... honest. You told me exactly what you needed, even if that meant sharing your painful secrets with a stranger. I...” She trails off, looking toward the closed door of Niki’s bedroom. She blinks slowly.

“It reminded me of something Niki said a long time ago. When we first met. We didn’t trust each other at first. But when things got bad, we needed to, and she just... We’d only known each other for a day. She told me a true story that people had called her crazy for, and trusted me to believe her. And when I told her about... my Asperger’s, about being autistic, she just told me something about herself, too, another thing that a lot of people get cruel about when they know. This was back before she came out, too. She was hardly out to herself, then, really. But she told me anyway. ‘Secret for a secret,’ she said.”

“She’s really special to you.” It’s not a question. How could it be, with the sheer softness of love rounding out every syllable and making Mika melt into the couch and into Beth’s shoulder.

“She’s... yes. She’s my family.” Mika looks out the window, and the bright light dances over her nose. “I don’t remember ever having one.”

Beth slings an arm around Mika’s shoulders and smiles as she curls closer into Beth’s side. “Looks like you’re part of a pretty big one, now,” she says, waving a hand at the dozens of photos on the walls circling them.

“I guess so.”

“No need to guess. The evidence is right there. And I’m right here.”

Mika turns those huge eyes on her again. She’s done that multiple times now, even though Beth knows she rarely looks people in the eye. Eye contact is too much, most of the time. She describes it as too intense, too distracting, too intimate. Meeting those eyes – so like Beth’s own, but filled with such a different kind of light – Beth thinks she understands a glimmer of it. If every eye she met were as overwhelmingly expressive as Mika’s, Beth probably wouldn’t meet them all either. It keeps taking her by surprise, coming across their eloquence in an otherwise quiet face. Caught by that gaze, every emotion that lives in it touches Beth. Right now, it’s soft with adoration but shaded with a gradient of doubt. The width and depth of Mika’s eyes reveal a clear view of a vulnerable, aching, healing heart that spent eleven years starving for the love it needs and still hasn’t forgotten the famine.

It might be breaking Beth’s heart. No wonder Niki is always showering her with hugs and kind words and gentle hands on rounded shoulders. Maybe one of these days, Mika will have spent long enough finally getting to soak up all that affection that she won’t look at Beth like this when she says the simple truth.

“Hey. Here I am. Really.” Beth’s voice is a little choked up. She pulls Mika into a proper hug with both arms. Mika squeaks in surprise at being squeezed so emphatically, but returns it all the same. God, but she gives the best hugs of anyone Beth’s ever met. All contact and even, firm pressure and steadiness. “It’s so damn good to see you. I can’t believe you’re...” real, Beth thinks but doesn’t say. I can’t believe I didn’t imagine you. I can’t believe you’re just as kind as your words. I can’t believe how good it feels to be around you. “I can’t believe I’m really here.”

Mika doesn’t say anything. For a moment, one of her hands leaves Beth’s back to fiddle with something, then comes back to give her a little squeeze that Beth returns.

Beth’s phone buzzes a notification behind her on the little glass-top table next to the couch. The table’s wooden base is a round blob carved into the shape of a very fluffy and very ugly sheep with curly horns. Beth’s arms loosen from their embrace as she turns to look at it, bemused. No one but Mika really messages her except for her mom. But if it’s morning here, it’s about time for bed at home. She checks it, just to be sure she’s okay.

But it’s not from her mom.

Mika reaches out to gently grasp her forearm again as Beth shoots her a quizzical look and opens the message.

3mika: I'm glad you're here.

Beth's heart quails.

To think, that her darker days might have kept her from ever being in this moment. Beth might never have gotten to this point, hurt but healing and here. Here, she's seven time zones and an ocean away from the cycle of pain she grew up in, barely aware she needed to escape. She might well feel safer right here in this crossroads of time and place than she has at any other in her entire life. It's a realization that's as humbling as it is nourishing.

Already, the distance this journey has taken her has given her so much perspective. She wasn’t sure, before, whether the work she’s been considering was just a response to what she’s been through – or just a way for the cycle to keep her within its spiral. But she’s seen what Mika can do, what Beth could do one day, if she keeps on.

It won’t be easy. She’ll go back, and deep-seated memories will try to drag her back into small dark places. But being here, even for only a few hours, has already changed her. She can change, and she can grow, and she is already tapping into new strengths that her past has yet to reckon with. She is here, right now, in spite of all of it. And today is not a dark day.

“Me too, Mika. I’m glad to be here, too.” Beth’s tongue stumbles over the name, because she’s never said it out loud before, only read it on a screen.

Surprise sends Mika’s eyebrows up and her eyes wide again, like she’s never heard it before, either. Maybe she hasn’t. She tilts her head again like a question, touching her ear and looking at Beth.

Beth grins. “Mika.” A smile blooms on that curious face, lighting it up. She’s the one who pulls Beth into a hug this time, and it’s both fierce and soft. When she lets go, she leans into Beth’s side again and they stay like that, arms over shoulders and comfortably curled up together, soaking in the warmth of each other’s presence like leaves drink in light. The simple sweetness and companionship of it soothes Beth’s heart, seeking its way into the aching crevices. It’s an odd feeling, both seeping inward and flowing outward, trickling all the way through her until it warms her cold toes in a way that feels both new and strangely familiar.

A long, sleepy yawn announces that Niki’s awake now, too. Soon, she comes out of her room stretching her arms over her head. Mika reaches a hand out toward her to wave in greeting, though she leaves the other arm draped over Beth’s shoulders. Niki smiles at them. That kind smile, too, adds to the warmth washing through Beth. Her feet practically itch with it, and with a growing sensation of déja vu. She fidgets her toes against the floor as Niki walks over to brush Mika’s outstretched hand like a touchstone.

“How'd you sleep? Isn’t that couch the comfiest?” she says to Beth.

“Well, I’ve got a crick in my neck, but I still slept better than I have in years.”

Niki turns her sunny smile on Beth. “Good to hear it. Weird, though, I nap there all the time and my neck’s always fine. Huh. Anyway, I think I might make waffles. You two want some breakfast?”

Mika nods, but doesn’t let go of Beth yet. Beth is lost in thought, trying to remember what that light, floating feeling in her feet reminds her of.

“Sweet.” Niki ambles toward the kitchen and bends down with pursed lips to peer at the fern perched on the counter. “Hmm. You still look a little pale. Let’s get you some more sun.” She brings the plant over to the living room and is fussing over settling it on the sheep table when it clicks for Beth. A physical memory washes over her, for once welcome. She lets it fill her, refreshing like a deep breath of cold morning air her lungs are suddenly hungry for. She flexes her calves and ankles, her legs remembering the joy and freedom of stride and strike. Her bones are finally recalling how they once carried her with ease, even while they're adjusting to the new weight of who she's become. Fully alive again for at least this moment, her soles are practically prickling with the desire to eat up ground.

“How about you, Beth? Do you like waffles?” Niki asks, fluffing the fern’s crinkly green leaves. Mika squeezes her shoulder.

Beth grins and plants steady feet on the blue rug in front of the couch. “Save a few for me? I think I might actually go for a run first.”

[ledenews]

Chris Thoburn: Running for a Reason

When you meet Chris Thoburn, you discover two things about him quite quickly. One, he’s a big fan of sports. His extensive and varied resume in the industry can attest to that. But two, and more importantly, Thoburn is a lover of people, not just in their stories, but in how his life can affect theirs in a positive way. That’s why he’s spent the majority of his adult life giving back and doing for others as much as he does for himself. His career in the sports industry has gone from sales and broadcasting, to sports information duties, play-by-play announcing, and a bit of writing. He knows the importance sports play in people’s lives, and he’s happy to be a small part of it. But away from his profession is where Thoburn really shines. He’s a volunteer fireman for the Colerain Fire Department. He’s a youth leader at his church, and he coaches youth sports, helping to start the indoor roller hockey league in St. Clairsville. What drives him the most however is distance running, specifically, running for others. Thoburn runs to promote two causes that are near and dear to his heart, and he admits that if not for that purpose, he’d hang up his running shoes and call it a day. Those types of people are rare, ones who put others before themselves and lead by example. The trick is to follow them.

Your post-graduate life is full of careers in sports, from broadcasting and play-by-play to sports information, even the sales side of the industry. What got you into it, and is there one aspect you enjoy more than others?  

When I was doing my internship with the Wheeling Nailers, Craig Bommer told me, “To be successful in sports broadcasting, it's always a plus to have a sales background.” So, during my internships, I learned a lot about building relationships. I actually don’t like the word “sale.” I consider it relationship building and helping companies further business with our products. I’m also forever thankful for all the staff at Wheeling Jesuit when I was there. They let me do so much in Sports Information and helped me land my first full-time job at Oklahoma State. The Cowboys were coming off the Big 12 Championship in football and just recruited Marcus Smart for basketball, so excitement was high all around the area. The cross-country team also won a National Championship while I was there, and being a runner, that meant a lot to me. I enjoy the broadcasting the most. I’d sit there at a very young age, turn the TV on mute, and commentate the games on my own. Even at times during my internships with the Nailers, Tulsa Oilers, Oklahoma City Barons, and Washington Wild Things, I’d bring out my recorder and call a period or inning for my resume tapes. It brought me to where I am today. I absolutely love high school and college football. Being able to broadcast local high schools is a dream come true. People keep saying, "We want to see you on ESPN," and I said I’m fine just where I am. In my hometown, calling games for our hometown teams. If the opportunity presented itself at ESPN, of course, I’d consider it, but I’m so blessed to be back home. Broadcasting is my definite number one.

You grew up in the Upper Ohio Valley and worked a bit here before your time in Stillwater at Oklahoma State. What brought about that change and then what ultimately brought you back home?

I started applying for jobs in January before I graduated from West Liberty, and nothing ever came about. I started working at UPS and then over at Wheeling Jesuit. Finally, after applying for two years after graduation, I got one of the greatest phone calls of my life from Adam Hauka, and I owe so much to him. We chatted, and he gave me my big shot, my chance. and of course I was going to go. It’s just so funny it came a few months after I was sitting there rooting on Oklahoma State to beat Andrew Luck and Stanford in the Fiesta Bowl. My main job was customer service and retention for Football, Baseball, Softball and Women’s Basketball. However, I had so many opportunities in Sports Information, PA announcing, broadcasting, and other duties. We’d be here all day if I listed all of those, but I’m forever blessed for that opportunity, and those were some of the best times of my life. Unfortunately, while I was there, I also received one of the worst phone calls of my life when my mom told me her cancer returned, and it was Stage 4. I didn’t know how long she had left, and she’s the most amazing woman ever, so I actually called Craig Bommer again, and a few months later I was able to return home and work with the Nailers while spending four more years with my mom and reconnected with a longtime friend and eventually married her. She’s the love of my life, and everything happens for a reason. Momma Thoburn was at the wedding too, and we got to do the Mother/Groom dance and just had a great night of celebration.

A few years ago, you began training to be a paramedic. You also volunteer as a youth coach and youth leader at your church. Have you always felt compelled to give back, and what specifically appealed to you about these different rolls?

I wanted to give back wherever I could to my community. Unfortunately, the paramedic path didn’t work out for me. I do hold a Firefighter card, but I was in a rough place after losing my mom and some other mental health problems I was having. There’s no excuse; I just failed, and I let a lot of people down. I help where I can on fire calls. My home church gave me so much and supported me so much throughout my high school years and even when I moved away. When I moved back, I met someone who became the best man in my wedding. Working next to him for those years was the best. It broke my heart when he and his family moved back to Alabama, but his wonderful wife is proudly serving in our U.S. Military, and when duty calls, they have to go. The roller hockey coaching is awesome! Believe it or not I only played roller hockey one year and was terrible at it because I was on ice so much. The St. Clairsville Rec Center called me about starting up a developmental league, and of course if anything can grow the game of hockey I wanted to volunteer. I’ve met some amazing people through that league, and it means a lot to me. Being a former hockey player and growing up in my church youth group really made me want to give back to people who gave so much to me. Because of the COVID-19, the roller hockey league was canceled this year, so I’m hoping we can pick back up next year. 

Chris and young Milana Zatolochenko pose for a picture at Thoburn's office. When Thoburn runs, he wears his #TeamMila shirt to raise funds and awareness for the girl he calls his "hero."

You’ve gotten into distance running, representing both Team RWB and #TeamMila. What got you involved with both of these groups and what way can others help out? 

Distance running is in my blood. I ran my first 5k at 10 years old and my dad ran for WVU, so it was something I was destined to do. I got out of running for a while and was in a very bad place health wise. After a scare that landed me in the emergency room, I decided to change my life around, but I vowed to use my running to help others too. I met Milana, nicknamed Mila, during my time with the Nailers and found out she had a severe motility disorder, the same disorder as the little girl from Miracles From Heaven movie. So, I started Team Mila to raise funds for her. It started as just local races, but then expanded into other states including the Team USA Olympic Trials in Atlanta this past March. Running for someone renewed my passion for not only running but for life in general. She saved my life. Her parents Maggie and Stephen are some of the strongest folks I know. I’m a better person because of them. I found out about Team RWB while at races. Of course, I’m a huge supporter of our current military and our veterans. When I learned that it was a civilian/veteran organization I really wanted to do my part in helping our local veterans. We do monthly socials, weekly rucks, and runs. We also fly the Eagle on our shirts at races. Usually how I’ll do it so I can support both, I’ll run with my Team Mila jersey and then during post-race will throw on the Eagle. The day that running becomes about me, is the day I hang up the shoes. It’s all about Milana and our veterans.   

Chris met the love of his life Jennifer after he returned from Stillwater, Oklahoma. They married in 2015 and Thoburn credits his wife with allowing him the time to train to keep up his race regiment.

Speaking of running, despite the pandemic cancellation, you still completed both the Ogden Newspapers 5K run and Half Marathon on Memorial Day Weekend? Was it important to you to keep with tradition? Or was it a good day to train without an official race, so why not participate on the course you originally planned to? 

Last year, I had my first ever DNF (Did not finish) in a race and it’s haunted me so bad. So, after the cancellation, I was still more motivated than ever to get back out there and run that course. Now, yes, partially this one was for me, but also for my superhero Milana. I badly sprained my ankle on mile 7 last year, but I was so discouraged and upset that I couldn’t get up and finish, but mostly that I let my superhero down. This year wasn’t about a medal. It wasn’t about a time. It wasn’t about tradition. It was about redemption and it felt great. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of me.  It’s been extremely weird during training. I honestly don’t know when my next race will be. I’ve shifted my focus to Atlanta and Myrtle Beach in 2021. They are back to back weekends and I’m up for the challenge. I’ve completed numerous half marathons and nine full marathons. My goal for 2021 is to complete one more full marathon and my first Ultra Marathon. I will never settle for where I am. I want to get better each and every day. My favorite quote is “Success is never owned, it is rented, and the rent is due every day.” This is more than me, it’s for a little girl that needs our help. I want to thank Mila’s family for letting me run for her, my wife Jennifer for allowing me the time to be out on the course or track training, all my training partners, and of course all the supporters of Team Mila.  Read the full article

[junker-town]

20 sports movies we love that will ease your boredom

WireImage

It may be hard to find real sports to watch right now, but there is an ABUNDANCE of great fictional sports at your fingertips.

Televised sports are on hiatus for the foreseeable future. It’s a tough (but obviously necessary) blow, considering we’re all stuck inside with little to do, and sports would be the perfect diversion right about now.

Thankfully, there are hundreds, or possibly thousands, of sports-centric movies available to wile away the hours. Some might even be convincing enough to get you to yell at your screen, or feel the inimitable catharsis that comes from watching your team (the good team, obviously) win.

Below are some of the SB Nation staff’s go-to sports flicks, with information about where to stream them included. The majority are also available to rent via Amazon, YouTube, Google Play and the like.

Hot Rod (2007)

Available on Netflix, Prime and Pluto.

Insofar as failing to jump over things with a moped is a sport, Hot Rod is about sports. It’s an extremely dumb, pleasant movie with no stakes whatsoever, and it is my number one.

— Seth Rosenthal

Yes, it’s hilarious — but even more importantly, it has the ability to absorb you before you realize it and not let your mind wander out of its grasp. Distraction grade: 10 out of 10

— Will Buikema

Creed (2015)

Available to rent

Too many Rocky sequels to count, but this one really engages with the mythos around the character and who gets to take part in that myth. Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson are two of Hollywood’s brightest stars, and while it’s frustrating they were not awarded like Sylvester Stallone for their performances, all three are terrific here. Also: unlike the original Rocky, this movie recognizes that boxing includes dodging and blocking as well as punching!

— Pete Volk

Goon (2011)

Available on Netflix.

You could probably analyze Goon for commentary about how we glorify violence in hockey, or you could sit back and enjoy a genuinely hilarious movie. It has everything you want in a hockey film. There’s a dim-witted but lovable bouncer who gets a chance at a hockey career in the minors, and a grumpy Quebecois prodigy with a physicality issue. There’s gratuitous blood and gore, and Liev Schreiber getting into fights, and a hint of bromance. There are even cameos from former NHL players, and one from current Dallas Stars forward Tyler Seguin in the film’s 2017 sequel, Goon: Last of the Enforcers, which is also on Netflix.

If you don’t mind some exaggerated violence and slapstick comedy (and particularly if that’s what you’re into), I highly recommend it. Plus, the soundtrack slaps.

— Sydney Kuntz

Bend it Like Beckham (2002)

Available on demand with Starz and DirecTV

It’s funny, it’s sweet, and the fact that you’ve definitely seen it before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it again. It made Keira Knightley an international star, and Parminder Nagra picked up the FIFA presidential award. Beyond the film, it represented a crucial moment in David Beckham’s relationship with his country. He’d gone from villain in 1998 after that red card against Argentina, to hero in 2001 after that free kick against Greece. Eight months later this came out, and canonized him as a national treasure.

— Andi Thomas

High Flying Bird (2019)

Available on Netflix

What better to watch during a period without basketball than a movie about basketball personnel that takes place during a time of no basketball? High Flying Bird, shot entirely on iPhone by Steven Soderbergh, follows a top rookie and his ambitious agent during an NBA lockout, as they try and change the owner-heavy economic structure of the NBA.

— Pete Volk

Escape to Victory (1981, also just known as Victory)

Available on demand with Cinemax and DirecTV

Sylvester Stallone is an Allied solider in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. So is Michael Caine. In there with them, for some reason, is Pele, Bobby Moore, Ozzy Ardiles, and half of Ipswich Town’s 1981 UEFA Cup winning squad. And wouldn’t you just know it, they have to play an exhibition against a handpicked German side, for reasons of propaganda. Will they escape … to victory?

— Andi Thomas

Goal of the Dead (2014)

Available on Shudder

”Some kind of a riot. They are burning cars.”

”Given the refereeing, no wonder.”

French football superstar Samuel Lorit faces off against his hometown team in a cup game. His formerly adoring fans now all despise him. And then a tainted steroid injection turns pretty much everybody into zombies, straight from the 28 Days Later school of hard-running mouth-frothers. Good blood-soaked fun, if probably a bit too long. But then all films are too long these days. Return of the King won a million Oscars, and that didn’t have a ‘roid-raging zombie kicking a man’s head off his neck and into the goal.

— Andi Thomas

Fighting with My Family (2019)

Available on Prime and Hulu

Maybe the only worthwhile WWE Studios release ever? I’ll await the flame from fans of The Marine 5: Battleground in the comments. What would have otherwise been yet another vanilla sports inspiration story is elevated by a terrific cast, led by newly Oscar-nominated Florence Pugh.

— Pete Volk

The Damned United (2009)

Available to rent

An adaptation of a brilliant but bleak novel about Brian Clough’s doomed spell at Leeds United, the film dispenses with most of the book’s harrowing existential loneliness and discovers a surprisingly soft-hearted buddy story underneath. Michael Sheen disappears uncannily into his role, absolutely nailing Clough’s astringent self-possession, but Colm Meaney almost steals the film as Clough’s nemesis, Don Revie. A reminder that English football, back in the ‘70s, was a strange, drizzly place full of strange, compelling people.

— Andi Thomas

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Available on HBO, Kanopy and DirecTV

One of the best American documentaries. Also one of the best movies about dreams, who crushes them and how they evolve. It is also one of the best movies about race and poverty in America. All in all, this is one of the best movies about the allure and grace of basketball. A phenomenal film!

— Pete Volk

Horse Feathers (1932)

Available via the Internet Archive

I grew up watching the Marx Brothers with my dad, and I would be remiss not to mention this college football-centric classic. Turns out the “amateur” status of college football players was a joke in the 1930s, too!

— Pete Volk

Minding the Gap (2019)

Available on Hulu

Only tangentially about sports, since the group of kids at this documentary’s focus are skateboarders, but this is one of the great modern American documentaries about growing up, difficult friendships and toxic masculinity. Highly, highly recommend.

— Pete Volk

Starship Troopers (1997)

Available on Showtime, CBS All Access, DirecTV and Vudu

There are several reasons Starship Troopers is memorable — the broadly written anti-nationalist commentary! The exploding bugs! The co-ed showers! That one fight scene soundtracked to Mazzy Star’s ��Fade Into You,” for some reason! — but space football is the only one that fits with our theme. In the future, America’s favorite sport is played in high school gymnasiums on old wrestling mats. There are no special teams or roughness penalties. The ball is Nerf’s rough approximation of a baked potato wrapped in foil.

Johnny Rico, our protagonist, wins and is escorted off the field a hero. Roughly 20 minutes of film later, he’s left to die on an alien planet. Shit’s real, yo.

— Christian D’Andrea

Rush (2013)

Available on HBO

If you liked Ford V. Ferrari, you’ll probably love this. Retelling the true story of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda’s intense Formula 1 rivalry, Rush has fantastic racing scenes and benefits from focusing on the wildly different personalities and approaches of the two rivals.

— Pete Volk

A League of Their Own (1992)

Available on Showtime, and very often randomly on cable

It almost feels redundant to list this classic, which you’ve probably already seen once or dozens of times. But if you have seen it, you know it holds up better than most of the feel-good, strings-swelling-styled sports hagiographies of the 1990s. A more-or-less accurate retelling of a vital and often ignored part of American sports history, conveyed via an all-star cast and too many quotable lines to count. The “hard” may be what makes it great, but there’s nothing hard about watching this iconic and genuinely uplifting movie. (I also wrote more about it here.)

—Natalie Weiner

Speed Racer (2008)

Available to rent

One of my favorite movies of all-time, taking many aesthetic cues from anime and seamlessly bringing them into the live-action world with breathtaking visual effects. Speed Racer is visually explosive and a delight for the senses, with a grounded conflict at its core (a family business getting bought out by a heartless corporation). In my opinion, this is sports + movies in their best balance with each other.

— Pete Volk

The Heart of the Game (2005)

Available to rent

A hardscrabble team works diligently to overcome the odds, with a few twists. The movie centers on a girls basketball team from Roosevelt High School, 10 minutes from where I grew up in Seattle, and the star of the team gets pregnant. Bring tissues.

— Natalie Weiner

Uncut Gems (2019)

Available to rent

No movie better captures the anxiety of being a sports fan, or the bad decisions you make because of your fandom. Also sports luminaries Kevin Garnett and Mike Francesa deliver excellent performances. My favorite 2019 release! Louis wrote more about it here.

— Pete Volk

Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2006)

Available on Starz and DirecTV

This is the height of me on-my-bullshit, but please allow it: Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White are generational action stars, and this entry in the excellent Undisputed series shows their singular talents at their best. White plays an ex-boxer framed for a crime and sent to prison, where he fights for his freedom in an underground MMA ring. Adkins plays the terrifying Yuri Boyka, the reigning prison champ. This is so up my alley it’s not even funny, and hopefully it’s up yours, too!

— Pete Volk

More Than a Game (2008)

Available on Starz

It’s very easy to take LeBron James for granted. After all, he’s been doing otherworldly things in the NBA for almost two decades now. Sometimes it just seems like he’s always existed, like he’ll just be inevitable forever. At a time when we’re (hopefully temporarily) deprived of watching him play basketball, it’s worth revisiting this great documentary about his origin story. Yes, he overcame seemingly insurmountable odds, but the part that sticks with you is the people around him — those who believed in him completely, and who he has been just as loyal to in return.

— Natalie Weiner

[how2to18]

CRABAPPLE, PRICKLY GOOSEBERRY, bittersweet, and devil’s walking stick — are these the names of thorny old monsters in some dark children’s fairy tale? Nope. They are simply the flora that vine the paths of the forests and hollers of the Smoky Mountains. A brave five-year-old girl named Ernestine must journey through these persnickety snatchers in the early morning shadows in order to deliver mason jars full of fresh milk to the neighbors who live far away. It is 1942, and the husbands are away at war. The wives and mothers run the farms, raise the children, milk the cows. These country neighbors take care of one another in their time of need.

This is the framework for Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s Ernestine’s Milky Way, an achingly poignant tale of independence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned neighboring as seen through the eyes of a strong-willed little girl in the wartime South. The illustrations, by Emily Sutton, brush the pages like the powdered wings of butterflies. There are sturdy rock houses and old wooden fences, hand-sewn blankets and dusty banjos, everything surrounded by watercolor bursts of soft country colors — trees, leaves, grass, and plants. Flowers and vines are like their own characters. The facial expressions of the people make you ache for home. Any city-dwelling child is bound to look up at the parent, or teacher, or sibling, or babysitter reading them this story and ask, “Can we please go the woods tomorrow?”

I met Kerry Madden-Lunsford during my first MFA in Creative Writing Residency at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I was immediately drawn to her; she emanates a warm and welcoming vibe, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, down-home smile. She dresses like a hippie teenager from the ’60s who has met her future self, an older, wiser earth-mother. Currently she directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she covers the desks and tables of her classrooms with books — dozens of picture books and chapter books, and middle-grade and YA, and, sprinkled in between, weathered copies of classics, like cherished relics from a magical library. Reminiscent of your favorite elementary school teacher, she actually writes out the lessons — infused with words of wisdom and anecdotes — in a comforting cursive on the board. She connects with everyone. She connects with their work. She was my first workshop leader, and her editorial letter about the 20 pages I had submitted told me everything I needed to know about her — namely, that she was a very old soul with a very young heart. You can sense this about her. You can feel it flowing from the pages of her books.

I recently visited Kerry at her home in the hills of Echo Park. We sat together over bagels and coffee with her husband Kiffen and their dazzling little dachshund, Olive, to talk about her latest release, the aforementioned Ernestine’s Milky Way, as well as her prior work. 

She is the author of eight books, including the lauded Maggie Valley Trilogy set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. The first in that series, Gentle’s Holler (2005), was a PEN USA finalist in Children’s Literature, and it’s easy to see why. The book shares some strands of Ernestine’s world as it explores the life of a 12-year-old girl and her adventures, with her eight brothers and sisters, in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1960s. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Imagine a mash-up between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Coal Miner’s Daughter, and you’re nearly there. Mountain country folk ridden with worries about money and bellies swollen from hunger are the characters that anchor Madden-Lunsford’s work. But the families in her stories rely on mutual affection and a resourcefulness that flows like pure mountain spring water to get them through the rough times.

Her December 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Times, “The Christmas Suit,” is a blistering meditation on family addiction — a deeply caring mother’s despairing attempt to stave off the crippling inertia of frustrated emotion. It’s a different side of Kerry, a flip of the coin. It reveals something tender and truthful about a majority of authors who write picture books, middle-grade, and YA: that they are seasoned individuals whose brave flights of fancy trying to survive adult life are the pearls of wisdom hidden in the sealed-shut shells of books that celebrate innocence, or the end of it.

¤

TIM CUMMINGS: Where did you grow up?

KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD: That is a complicated question, though it shouldn’t be. The short answer is that I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, and we moved all the time. For years I said that I lived in 12 states, but my daughter, Norah, reminded me that it’s actually been 13 states. Alabama is lucky number 13. I used to remember all the states by mascots and teams rather than towns. My father’s first coaching job was for Father Lopez’s Green Wave (High School). He married my mother in between football and basketball season.

He was both the coach for both outfits, so he had the basketball season printed on the wedding napkins to build up team support. “Follow Janis and Joe on the Green Wave.” Always the coach, he informed the principal, Sister Annunciata, that the school dance should be held in the library, so the students wouldn’t mess up his gymnasium floor in fancy shoes. He only told me this story a few weeks ago or it would have been in Offsides, my first novel about growing up the daughter of a football coach. Sister Annunciata shut that suggestion down flat, and the dance was held in the gym. I asked him if he chaperoned, and he said, “Hell, no.”

Because some people are going to think that I am the daughter of John Madden, which I am most definitely not, I finally had to write an essay called “I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter.” My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia and he sometimes wakes up from naps, talking old football plays or what defense he ran at the Sugar Bowl in 1977 as the defensive coordinator. He did this while we were in Rome a year ago, and my mother said, “Snap out of it! You’re in Rome!”

How did you come to writing?

I’ve told this story once or twice, but I really do credit my fourth-grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. It was the first time a teacher ever said any such thing. They usually said, “Aren’t you a nice tall girl who listens well?” They said this because I was shy. So it was a relief when a teacher noticed more than height or shyness. That day, I walked around my neighborhood of Ames, Iowa (Iowa State Cyclones), noticing everything, and wrote a story called “The Five Cents,” thinking it was about the “the five senses.” I never was a good speller. I remained a shy kid, and later some of the nuns began to suggest I might have a vocation to join the convent. I wrote about everything, but mostly I read — I read all the time and that absolutely formed me as a writer.

Who are your greatest influences?

My parents were great influences for humor and resilience, but I rebelled quietly because I was not a girly-girl or an athlete (unless field hockey in ninth grade counts, along with golfing on the boys’ team in high school), so I set out to find ways where I could create my own identity away from the gridiron.

I was definitely influenced (terrified) by Helen Keller and facing her fate when I had to get glasses in third grade. The doctor told my mother, “she’s blind without them,” to make a point. When I sobbed in my father’s arms about my horror of going blind (I think I also threw up in the bathroom), he shouted, “By God, nobody is going blind in this house!” I cried, “But how do you know?” “Because I said so!” It made no sense whatsoever, but I believed him.

I adored my babysitter, Ann Kramer, who was a wild tomboy in Ames, Iowa. I loved the coaches’ wives because they were such good storytellers. I was incredibly influenced by my first best friend, Pattie Murphy, in high school because she was so funny and irreverent, presenting a good girl persona to the powers-that-be and then whispering to me filthy things that were horrible and hilarious. We got caught cracking up laughing in the worst places — in class, at midnight Mass, on stage in Ten Little Indians. She was the first friend to make me laugh. We were miraculously “the new girls” at almost the same time in a school, Knox Catholic, where the kids had been together forever; even their parents and some grandparents had attended Knox Catholic.

I was very influenced by my Aunt Jeanne, who gave me books, and my Uncle Michael, who taught me about art. I lost them both to suicide when I was very young, and I wrote about them in Offsides as a way of atoning for not paying more attention. I wrote an essay about that this past summer.

I do think I was most influenced by getting to study abroad at Manchester University my junior year in college. A group of British drama students adopted me and showed me a whole world of art and theater, and I worshipped them for their hilarity and brilliance. I also had wonderful professors in England, who paid attention to me in ways I had never experienced during my first two years at the University of Tennessee. Plus, nobody in England cared if I went to church or watched football. They wanted me to write plays and “drop the grotty trade school occupation of journalism,” and I was very happy to oblige. I’m now writing a novel inspired by that time called Hop the Pond, which also has themes of addiction and features the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.

When I returned to the University of Tennessee from Manchester, I often pretended to be a British exchange student (yes, I was insufferable because I couldn’t bear leaving England for Tennessee). I changed my major to theater, and I came to know my professors in Tennessee who taught us theater history, acting, directing. I was grateful for the encouragement and attention they gave me as a student (and a girl in the South) who wanted to write plays. The only contemporary playwright I knew of at that time was Beth Henley, and I hadn’t yet heard of Wendy Wasserstein.

Our theater department was still cranking out suggested scene study pairings of mostly Inge, Albee, and Williams, and maybe, once in a while, Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write plays, so I stayed in Knoxville after graduation and began an MFA in playwriting. I was the only student in the course at the time, but it gave me two years to learn to teach “Voice and Diction” and to write plays while working at a bookstore. Those two years in Knoxville influenced me because that is when I fell in love with Southern literature. I dropped the faux British accent, and my patient friends were grateful.

Finally, I think my greatest influence just happened this year. She is my cousin, Maureen Madden O’Sullivan — or, simply, Mo. We met for the very first time last May; her grandfather and my great-grandfather — Patrick and Joseph Madden — were brothers in Roscommon, Ireland. Mo and I have lived parallel lives in Los Angeles for 30 years, with many friends in common. She has been sober since 1982, and I have a family member who suffers from addiction, so she has taught me how to really let go — to breathe, to meditate, to eat better, to make gazpacho, to take walks by the sea. She also has stage-four cancer and is doing everything to live and take care of herself, from chemo to acupuncture to meditation to plant medicine to sound therapy to massage to simply taking joy in everything. She is the light of my life, and when I complain about us not meeting sooner, she says, “We met at the perfect time.” She is more evolved than I am.

I have gathered all the letters and texts we have written to each other since May in a compilation, and it’s currently 440 pages. It’s ridiculous, I know, and I don’t know what the project will be, but I am so grateful for Mo. I know I’m a mother, and I love being a mother, but around her I am not a mother. I’m just me again. A friend said I should call the book or whatever it’s going to be: 23 and Me and Mo.

Could you talk about your dual life as director of Creative Writing in Birmingham as well as a working author, teacher, and mother in Los Angeles? 

I’ve been living this unplanned dual two-state life since 2009. I wrote an essay about making the decision to accept a tenure track teaching job in Birmingham, Alabama, and living on an air mattress for a while. I came alone the first year; the second year, my sixth-grade daughter, Norah, joined me and she was like a little cultural anthropologist. She came home from school the first day and said, “We played the name game and we had to say what we liked. And all the kids said they liked only Auburn or Alabama. I know they like their state and ‘auburn’ is a very pretty color, but what I am supposed to choose? When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m Norah and I like books.’” I realized I had given the child no information about Alabama, so we had a crash course in football so she could catch up. Whenever I hinted at wanting to return to Los Angeles, she would say, “You can go be with Daddy. I like it here. I love it here. All my friends are here. Alabama is great!”

When I realized we were in it for the long haul, we got a rescue dog, Olive, who flies back and forth with me to Los Angeles. I had a terrible flight before we got Olive, awful soul-sucking turbulence, and Norah thought I was crying out “Hell Mary’s” instead of “Hail Mary’s.” After the trip, I vowed to drive or take the train, but it only took a four-day train ride from Los Angeles to Birmingham sitting up in coach class to get me back in the air. Then I got Olive. She has rescued me in countless ways every single day. And she truly is my emotional support animal on planes, along with the occasional emotional support Bloody Mary or glass of red wine.

I love my job as the director of Creative Writing at UAB. I love my students. I learn from them all the time. They come from all walks of life and many of them are first-generation college or they are returning to college later in life. I do miss living with my husband, who has four more years until he retires from LAUSD, but we get to spend summers and holidays together. We also cook and watch movies together. We do this by saying, “One-Two-Three — Go!” and then we hit play at the same time and mostly we’re in sync on Netflix. And because he is a wonderful man, he also goes to visit Mo, and we all have dinner and Skype together.

Our son is in Los Angeles, our middle daughter is in Chicago, and our youngest lives in the dorm at UAB. During the academic year, I live with Olive in what I call my “Alabama Retreat House.” Lots of sweet students and kind faculty drop by from time to time and other friends, too. Birmingham is such a cool city — a bright blue dot in a big red state. One of my L.A. friends visited, and she looked around the house and said, “You’ve created a little Echo Park in Birmingham.” I have filled the place with books and art from mostly “Studio by the Tracks,” where adults on the autism spectrum make art. Started by Ila Faye Miller in what used to be an old gas station, it’s a fantastic studio located in Fannie Flagg’s old neighborhood of Irondale.

I’m currently working on three novels — two are children’s books and one is for adults. I’ve adapted Offsides into a play, and I’m writing a little poetry and always picture books. I am thrilled that Ernestine’s Milky Way, written in this Alabama Retreat House and edited in a 1910 bungalow in Echo Park, has found a home at Schwartz & Wade.

What are your thoughts about the MFA Creative Writing programs these days?

I think they’re valuable because they allow students to find their people. I didn’t find my people in an MFA program, because I was the only student in my program at the time. However, I kind of made my own MFA with a writing group in Los Angeles — we met for 15 years, regularly. Those writers are still some of my dearest friends. I’ve also joined an online group of children’s picture book authors, who are brilliant, and a wonderful local group here of smart women writers. I find I need the feedback and connection with other writers — a kind of forest-for-the-trees thing with all the teaching I do. We also show up and support each other when our books come out.

That is the most valuable aspect to me of the MFA program — finding our people and getting to teach upon graduation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have taught in both a traditional BA and MA program here at UAB and a low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What’s the most important thing you relay to your students?

I hope I encourage my students to trust themselves — to know that they do have a story to tell. I use play in the classroom (storyboarding and making book dummies) and I get them to take risks or chances with writing sparks, exploring narratives. I also talk about the importance of showing up for each other when success comes along. In other words, go to the reading, buy the book, go to the play — it’s such a long and lonely road to go alone, so I encourage them to cheer each other along the way and offer a hand. It’s so much better than being competitive and harboring jealousy.

Of course, it’s natural to feel envy, but I have been so fortunate to have friends who show up and are genuinely pleased, and I hope I do the same for them. I encourage my students to be good literary citizens and also to spend less time online. I offer the advice I need to listen to myself, especially when I fall into the online rabbit hole.

Can you tell us about your love of picture books and children’s literature?

I read to our three kids all the time. My son’s favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. I even read that book last year to a group of incarcerated men at Donaldson Maximum Security Prison who had never been read aloud to before. I wrote an essay about that experience.

Anyway, I loved reading to our children when they were small, and my husband was a fantastic reader, too. I used to seek out books with great writing and stories. I hid the Berenstain Bears from the kids because I hated books where we had to learn a lesson. I never really thought of writing for kids because I was writing plays and novels for grown-ups. But I began falling in love with stories like Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs, and anything by William Steig. The kids loved Chris Van Allsburg, as did I, and of course we loved Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Roald Dahl, Ann Whitford Paul, Cynthia Voigt, Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. There are too many to begin to even name. One of their favorites was “What Luck A Duck” by Amy Goldman Koss, who later became a friend.

We read stacks of books, and as they grew older, they began to tell me what books to read. My son, Flannery, begged me to read The Giver and The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter, Lucy, fell in love Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. She wasn’t a huge reader at the time, but she liked that book a lot and said after school one day, “Mom, I felt like reading it at the lunch-table with all my friends around. What it is up with that?”

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn out loud to them and we watched the movie together. Norah used to have a little shelf of books in the minivan, because she was terrified of finishing one and not having another at hand. She used to ask me, “Can I bring three books?” and I would say, “You may bring them, but I am not carrying them.” When we moved to a different house a few years ago, we donated 20 boxes of books and it still has not made a dent in all the books we have.

¤

Tim Cummings holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. His recent work has appeared in F(r)iction, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, Critical Read, and LARB.

The post Echo Park in Birmingham: An Interview with Kerry Madden-Lunsford appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

CRABAPPLE, PRICKLY GOOSEBERRY, bittersweet, and devil’s walking stick — are these the names of thorny old monsters in some dark children’s fairy tale? Nope. They are simply the flora that vine the paths of the forests and hollers of the Smoky Mountains. A brave five-year-old girl named Ernestine must journey through these persnickety snatchers in the early morning shadows in order to deliver mason jars full of fresh milk to the neighbors who live far away. It is 1942, and the husbands are away at war. The wives and mothers run the farms, raise the children, milk the cows. These country neighbors take care of one another in their time of need.

This is the framework for Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s Ernestine’s Milky Way, an achingly poignant tale of independence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned neighboring as seen through the eyes of a strong-willed little girl in the wartime South. The illustrations, by Emily Sutton, brush the pages like the powdered wings of butterflies. There are sturdy rock houses and old wooden fences, hand-sewn blankets and dusty banjos, everything surrounded by watercolor bursts of soft country colors — trees, leaves, grass, and plants. Flowers and vines are like their own characters. The facial expressions of the people make you ache for home. Any city-dwelling child is bound to look up at the parent, or teacher, or sibling, or babysitter reading them this story and ask, “Can we please go the woods tomorrow?”

I met Kerry Madden-Lunsford during my first MFA in Creative Writing Residency at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I was immediately drawn to her; she emanates a warm and welcoming vibe, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, down-home smile. She dresses like a hippie teenager from the ’60s who has met her future self, an older, wiser earth-mother. Currently she directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she covers the desks and tables of her classrooms with books — dozens of picture books and chapter books, and middle-grade and YA, and, sprinkled in between, weathered copies of classics, like cherished relics from a magical library. Reminiscent of your favorite elementary school teacher, she actually writes out the lessons — infused with words of wisdom and anecdotes — in a comforting cursive on the board. She connects with everyone. She connects with their work. She was my first workshop leader, and her editorial letter about the 20 pages I had submitted told me everything I needed to know about her — namely, that she was a very old soul with a very young heart. You can sense this about her. You can feel it flowing from the pages of her books.

I recently visited Kerry at her home in the hills of Echo Park. We sat together over bagels and coffee with her husband Kiffen and their dazzling little dachshund, Olive, to talk about her latest release, the aforementioned Ernestine’s Milky Way, as well as her prior work. 

She is the author of eight books, including the lauded Maggie Valley Trilogy set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. The first in that series, Gentle’s Holler (2005), was a PEN USA finalist in Children’s Literature, and it’s easy to see why. The book shares some strands of Ernestine’s world as it explores the life of a 12-year-old girl and her adventures, with her eight brothers and sisters, in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1960s. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Imagine a mash-up between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Coal Miner’s Daughter, and you’re nearly there. Mountain country folk ridden with worries about money and bellies swollen from hunger are the characters that anchor Madden-Lunsford’s work. But the families in her stories rely on mutual affection and a resourcefulness that flows like pure mountain spring water to get them through the rough times.

Her December 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Times, “The Christmas Suit,” is a blistering meditation on family addiction — a deeply caring mother’s despairing attempt to stave off the crippling inertia of frustrated emotion. It’s a different side of Kerry, a flip of the coin. It reveals something tender and truthful about a majority of authors who write picture books, middle-grade, and YA: that they are seasoned individuals whose brave flights of fancy trying to survive adult life are the pearls of wisdom hidden in the sealed-shut shells of books that celebrate innocence, or the end of it.

¤

TIM CUMMINGS: Where did you grow up?

KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD: That is a complicated question, though it shouldn’t be. The short answer is that I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, and we moved all the time. For years I said that I lived in 12 states, but my daughter, Norah, reminded me that it’s actually been 13 states. Alabama is lucky number 13. I used to remember all the states by mascots and teams rather than towns. My father’s first coaching job was for Father Lopez’s Green Wave (High School). He married my mother in between football and basketball season.

He was both the coach for both outfits, so he had the basketball season printed on the wedding napkins to build up team support. “Follow Janis and Joe on the Green Wave.” Always the coach, he informed the principal, Sister Annunciata, that the school dance should be held in the library, so the students wouldn’t mess up his gymnasium floor in fancy shoes. He only told me this story a few weeks ago or it would have been in Offsides, my first novel about growing up the daughter of a football coach. Sister Annunciata shut that suggestion down flat, and the dance was held in the gym. I asked him if he chaperoned, and he said, “Hell, no.”

Because some people are going to think that I am the daughter of John Madden, which I am most definitely not, I finally had to write an essay called “I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter.” My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia and he sometimes wakes up from naps, talking old football plays or what defense he ran at the Sugar Bowl in 1977 as the defensive coordinator. He did this while we were in Rome a year ago, and my mother said, “Snap out of it! You’re in Rome!”

How did you come to writing?

I’ve told this story once or twice, but I really do credit my fourth-grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. It was the first time a teacher ever said any such thing. They usually said, “Aren’t you a nice tall girl who listens well?” They said this because I was shy. So it was a relief when a teacher noticed more than height or shyness. That day, I walked around my neighborhood of Ames, Iowa (Iowa State Cyclones), noticing everything, and wrote a story called “The Five Cents,” thinking it was about the “the five senses.” I never was a good speller. I remained a shy kid, and later some of the nuns began to suggest I might have a vocation to join the convent. I wrote about everything, but mostly I read — I read all the time and that absolutely formed me as a writer.

Who are your greatest influences?

My parents were great influences for humor and resilience, but I rebelled quietly because I was not a girly-girl or an athlete (unless field hockey in ninth grade counts, along with golfing on the boys’ team in high school), so I set out to find ways where I could create my own identity away from the gridiron.

I was definitely influenced (terrified) by Helen Keller and facing her fate when I had to get glasses in third grade. The doctor told my mother, “she’s blind without them,” to make a point. When I sobbed in my father’s arms about my horror of going blind (I think I also threw up in the bathroom), he shouted, “By God, nobody is going blind in this house!” I cried, “But how do you know?” “Because I said so!” It made no sense whatsoever, but I believed him.

I adored my babysitter, Ann Kramer, who was a wild tomboy in Ames, Iowa. I loved the coaches’ wives because they were such good storytellers. I was incredibly influenced by my first best friend, Pattie Murphy, in high school because she was so funny and irreverent, presenting a good girl persona to the powers-that-be and then whispering to me filthy things that were horrible and hilarious. We got caught cracking up laughing in the worst places — in class, at midnight Mass, on stage in Ten Little Indians. She was the first friend to make me laugh. We were miraculously “the new girls” at almost the same time in a school, Knox Catholic, where the kids had been together forever; even their parents and some grandparents had attended Knox Catholic.

I was very influenced by my Aunt Jeanne, who gave me books, and my Uncle Michael, who taught me about art. I lost them both to suicide when I was very young, and I wrote about them in Offsides as a way of atoning for not paying more attention. I wrote an essay about that this past summer.

I do think I was most influenced by getting to study abroad at Manchester University my junior year in college. A group of British drama students adopted me and showed me a whole world of art and theater, and I worshipped them for their hilarity and brilliance. I also had wonderful professors in England, who paid attention to me in ways I had never experienced during my first two years at the University of Tennessee. Plus, nobody in England cared if I went to church or watched football. They wanted me to write plays and “drop the grotty trade school occupation of journalism,” and I was very happy to oblige. I’m now writing a novel inspired by that time called Hop the Pond, which also has themes of addiction and features the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.

When I returned to the University of Tennessee from Manchester, I often pretended to be a British exchange student (yes, I was insufferable because I couldn’t bear leaving England for Tennessee). I changed my major to theater, and I came to know my professors in Tennessee who taught us theater history, acting, directing. I was grateful for the encouragement and attention they gave me as a student (and a girl in the South) who wanted to write plays. The only contemporary playwright I knew of at that time was Beth Henley, and I hadn’t yet heard of Wendy Wasserstein.

Our theater department was still cranking out suggested scene study pairings of mostly Inge, Albee, and Williams, and maybe, once in a while, Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write plays, so I stayed in Knoxville after graduation and began an MFA in playwriting. I was the only student in the course at the time, but it gave me two years to learn to teach “Voice and Diction” and to write plays while working at a bookstore. Those two years in Knoxville influenced me because that is when I fell in love with Southern literature. I dropped the faux British accent, and my patient friends were grateful.

Finally, I think my greatest influence just happened this year. She is my cousin, Maureen Madden O’Sullivan — or, simply, Mo. We met for the very first time last May; her grandfather and my great-grandfather — Patrick and Joseph Madden — were brothers in Roscommon, Ireland. Mo and I have lived parallel lives in Los Angeles for 30 years, with many friends in common. She has been sober since 1982, and I have a family member who suffers from addiction, so she has taught me how to really let go — to breathe, to meditate, to eat better, to make gazpacho, to take walks by the sea. She also has stage-four cancer and is doing everything to live and take care of herself, from chemo to acupuncture to meditation to plant medicine to sound therapy to massage to simply taking joy in everything. She is the light of my life, and when I complain about us not meeting sooner, she says, “We met at the perfect time.” She is more evolved than I am.

I have gathered all the letters and texts we have written to each other since May in a compilation, and it’s currently 440 pages. It’s ridiculous, I know, and I don’t know what the project will be, but I am so grateful for Mo. I know I’m a mother, and I love being a mother, but around her I am not a mother. I’m just me again. A friend said I should call the book or whatever it’s going to be: 23 and Me and Mo.

Could you talk about your dual life as director of Creative Writing in Birmingham as well as a working author, teacher, and mother in Los Angeles? 

I’ve been living this unplanned dual two-state life since 2009. I wrote an essay about making the decision to accept a tenure track teaching job in Birmingham, Alabama, and living on an air mattress for a while. I came alone the first year; the second year, my sixth-grade daughter, Norah, joined me and she was like a little cultural anthropologist. She came home from school the first day and said, “We played the name game and we had to say what we liked. And all the kids said they liked only Auburn or Alabama. I know they like their state and ‘auburn’ is a very pretty color, but what I am supposed to choose? When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m Norah and I like books.’” I realized I had given the child no information about Alabama, so we had a crash course in football so she could catch up. Whenever I hinted at wanting to return to Los Angeles, she would say, “You can go be with Daddy. I like it here. I love it here. All my friends are here. Alabama is great!”

When I realized we were in it for the long haul, we got a rescue dog, Olive, who flies back and forth with me to Los Angeles. I had a terrible flight before we got Olive, awful soul-sucking turbulence, and Norah thought I was crying out “Hell Mary’s” instead of “Hail Mary’s.” After the trip, I vowed to drive or take the train, but it only took a four-day train ride from Los Angeles to Birmingham sitting up in coach class to get me back in the air. Then I got Olive. She has rescued me in countless ways every single day. And she truly is my emotional support animal on planes, along with the occasional emotional support Bloody Mary or glass of red wine.

I love my job as the director of Creative Writing at UAB. I love my students. I learn from them all the time. They come from all walks of life and many of them are first-generation college or they are returning to college later in life. I do miss living with my husband, who has four more years until he retires from LAUSD, but we get to spend summers and holidays together. We also cook and watch movies together. We do this by saying, “One-Two-Three — Go!” and then we hit play at the same time and mostly we’re in sync on Netflix. And because he is a wonderful man, he also goes to visit Mo, and we all have dinner and Skype together.

Our son is in Los Angeles, our middle daughter is in Chicago, and our youngest lives in the dorm at UAB. During the academic year, I live with Olive in what I call my “Alabama Retreat House.” Lots of sweet students and kind faculty drop by from time to time and other friends, too. Birmingham is such a cool city — a bright blue dot in a big red state. One of my L.A. friends visited, and she looked around the house and said, “You’ve created a little Echo Park in Birmingham.” I have filled the place with books and art from mostly “Studio by the Tracks,” where adults on the autism spectrum make art. Started by Ila Faye Miller in what used to be an old gas station, it’s a fantastic studio located in Fannie Flagg’s old neighborhood of Irondale.

I’m currently working on three novels — two are children’s books and one is for adults. I’ve adapted Offsides into a play, and I’m writing a little poetry and always picture books. I am thrilled that Ernestine’s Milky Way, written in this Alabama Retreat House and edited in a 1910 bungalow in Echo Park, has found a home at Schwartz & Wade.

What are your thoughts about the MFA Creative Writing programs these days?

I think they’re valuable because they allow students to find their people. I didn’t find my people in an MFA program, because I was the only student in my program at the time. However, I kind of made my own MFA with a writing group in Los Angeles — we met for 15 years, regularly. Those writers are still some of my dearest friends. I’ve also joined an online group of children’s picture book authors, who are brilliant, and a wonderful local group here of smart women writers. I find I need the feedback and connection with other writers — a kind of forest-for-the-trees thing with all the teaching I do. We also show up and support each other when our books come out.

That is the most valuable aspect to me of the MFA program — finding our people and getting to teach upon graduation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have taught in both a traditional BA and MA program here at UAB and a low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What’s the most important thing you relay to your students?

I hope I encourage my students to trust themselves — to know that they do have a story to tell. I use play in the classroom (storyboarding and making book dummies) and I get them to take risks or chances with writing sparks, exploring narratives. I also talk about the importance of showing up for each other when success comes along. In other words, go to the reading, buy the book, go to the play — it’s such a long and lonely road to go alone, so I encourage them to cheer each other along the way and offer a hand. It’s so much better than being competitive and harboring jealousy.

Of course, it’s natural to feel envy, but I have been so fortunate to have friends who show up and are genuinely pleased, and I hope I do the same for them. I encourage my students to be good literary citizens and also to spend less time online. I offer the advice I need to listen to myself, especially when I fall into the online rabbit hole.

Can you tell us about your love of picture books and children’s literature?

I read to our three kids all the time. My son’s favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. I even read that book last year to a group of incarcerated men at Donaldson Maximum Security Prison who had never been read aloud to before. I wrote an essay about that experience.

Anyway, I loved reading to our children when they were small, and my husband was a fantastic reader, too. I used to seek out books with great writing and stories. I hid the Berenstain Bears from the kids because I hated books where we had to learn a lesson. I never really thought of writing for kids because I was writing plays and novels for grown-ups. But I began falling in love with stories like Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs, and anything by William Steig. The kids loved Chris Van Allsburg, as did I, and of course we loved Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Roald Dahl, Ann Whitford Paul, Cynthia Voigt, Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. There are too many to begin to even name. One of their favorites was “What Luck A Duck” by Amy Goldman Koss, who later became a friend.

We read stacks of books, and as they grew older, they began to tell me what books to read. My son, Flannery, begged me to read The Giver and The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter, Lucy, fell in love Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. She wasn’t a huge reader at the time, but she liked that book a lot and said after school one day, “Mom, I felt like reading it at the lunch-table with all my friends around. What it is up with that?”

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn out loud to them and we watched the movie together. Norah used to have a little shelf of books in the minivan, because she was terrified of finishing one and not having another at hand. She used to ask me, “Can I bring three books?” and I would say, “You may bring them, but I am not carrying them.” When we moved to a different house a few years ago, we donated 20 boxes of books and it still has not made a dent in all the books we have.

¤

Tim Cummings holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. His recent work has appeared in F(r)iction, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, Critical Read, and LARB.

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