When author Rita Bullwinkel joined host John Freeman to discuss the California Book Club’s March selection, Headshot, he noted that her debut story collection, Belly Up, had a surrealist edge. Headshot, he went on, “is far less fantastical, yet it feels like hang gliding. It feels really daring. I wonder if you felt that as you were writing. I wonder…if you had an answer to yourself as to why it might feel like this.”
Bullwinkel responded that her editor had called it “not quite realism.” She explained that when she was thinking about the world of the boxing tournament in Headshot, she was thinking of it “almost as a fantasy world, even though, you know, the confines of the book are ostensibly realist.” While no magic happens in the book, her memories of competing in youth athletic tournaments were surreal and left her feeling as though she’d visited a foreign planet that she no longer had access to. While driving to far-out parts of the country to compete in tournaments, “the rest of the world kind of fell away.” She explained that when you enter athletic facilities, or certain other large architectural spaces, “you can almost immediately see them as abandoned and decayed.... They have this spaceship-element quality to them.” As she built the world of Headshot, she was thinking, “In what ways could a boxing tournament be like arriving on another planet?”
Freeman asked Bullwinkel to talk about the way that she used sentence length and syntax to create different spaces within the book. Bullwinkel said, “With the sentences in this book, and even the overall structure of the paragraphs, I think of there being this dichotomy between the language that is embodied—that the young fighters are experiencing when they’re in their bodies—and then the language that is going on in their mind as they’re kind of going back in time, forwards in time.” She thought of the parts of the sentence or paragraph that were embodied by a character as “being above water. They require such intense clarity, because being in a body has a clarity.” Meanwhile, things “get a little fuzzy around the edges” when someone is recessed into their mind, and so things become disembodied in the sentence.
Freeman likened the reading experience to being in a cathedral with stained glass. “There were, like, four portraits on each side, and the narrative intelligence was light pouring through these glasses, because I just felt possessed by the intensity and high-definition articulation of each character.”
An audience member asked how Bullwinkel came up with the characters’ personalities. Bullwinkel said, “It was both great fun and also a great challenge to have such a large, maximalist cast.” Initially, she had written hundreds of pages that amounted to a first-person, past-tense narration of just one female boxer. When she reread those pages while at a residency at MacDowell, she felt that the only parts of the manuscript that had energy were when the main character was in the ring and fighting against another girl. “The confines of the ring and the lack of language allowed me to move in ways that narratively were far more interesting to me than anything else I had written or made,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, she realized that the bout was the whole book. She drew the tournament brackets, named the eight boxers, and sketched their characters. While she didn’t know everything about them yet, she wrote the book linearly from there. “I think that the eight main characters are, in some aspects, foils against one another, but I also think they’re almost like fractured-out parts of my own consciousness.”
Special guest Lucy Corin joined the conversation and commented on a mention of girls’ handclapping games in the middle of Headshot. She asked, “I wonder if you’ll talk a little bit about the decision to bring in the handclapping and how you think about that form of physicality and its relationship to boxing and this girl’s consciousness.” Bullwinkel noted that one of her favorite Easter eggs in the book is the section on the possible meanings of girls’ handclapping games. When she’s done readings for the book, she said, it’s been a joy to see that women would try to remember some of the lyrics of the handclapping games that girls play. Bullwinkel went on to comment on the physicality of handclapping and how charged touching someone else is in most other situations; there are only a few social situations in which touch is acceptable.
Bullwinkel noted that sometimes libidinal desires are ascribed to a sporting encounter but that this isn’t what’s going on in a sport, in her experience. “I think it’s something so much weirder and, like, so much stranger. I think the impulse to want to play a handclapping game is to ask someone, Will you have this collective lived experience with me? Like, spend these earth hours doing this thing? It’s a desire for a shared memory.”•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Ishmael Reed will sit down with special guest Justin Desmangles and CBC host John Freeman to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
