Barrelhousing with “Heading North” Author Holly M. Wendt
Holly M. Wendt’s Heading North is a beautiful and expansive novel that defies easy categorization. A queer love story, a hockey novel, a coming of age story about a young man finding his way after the tragic death of his boyfriend and teammates. It’s a beautiful, generous, surprising book with a large cast of characters you won’t soon forget. We talked with Holly about the novel’s path to publication, their approach to revision, how it feels to cut an entire point of view character, hockey Twitter, and of course, Patrick Swayze Movies.
BH: Since a lot of our readers are writers as well, I like to start these off with a question about the publishing process. What was Heading North’s path to publication?
HMW: It’s been a winding journey, shall we say. I started writing the novel in 2012, just a handful of months after the real-life Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash that inspired it. The first draft just leapt out over the next year–the best-feeling writing stretch I’ve ever had–but as my first drafts always are, it was far too many pages in search of a plot. I spent the next eight years, essentially, rewriting on and off after really helpful feedback from various friends, and I wrote a draft of a new novel and revised that twice while Heading North rested between things. I did query agents for this novel, and I got a few almosts–including one that offered the most important piece of revision advice, which I so appreciated. After reading Siân Griffith’s Scrapple and Curtis Smith’s Lovepain–both published by Braddock Avenue Books, and both really beautiful–I decided to try my luck with Braddock. It’s been a process of persistence, and I’m glad I saw it through.
BH: Eight years of rewriting! Can you tell us a little bit about that project? If you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to know the revision advice you got from the agent, and also how you approached revision, because I think that’s a situation a lot of us are familiar with: I have a kind of sprawling mess of a first draft, and there’s a good book in there, but I’m not quite sure how to get from point A to point Z. This has nothing to do with the sprawling mess of a first draft I just finished, I can assure you ;-)!
HMW: The first and best thing about that much revision–including another bonus revision when Braddock accepted the manuscript and I looked at the sentences for the first time in nearly two years and decided I needed to do a lot of line-level work–is that I never fell out of love with the story itself. I was really afraid the book and I wouldn’t recognize each other, so to speak, after so long and after I’d worked on such wildly different projects in the interim. But the spark persisted, even though the necessary advice I got was both sage and pointed: half of the book had no business being there. The issue was evident, from an outsider’s perspective, on all fronts; half of the book had no plot, was involved in a whole other muted, interior emotional and existential question, and added bulk without intensity. After a wee mourn over some sentences I really liked, I found myself in full agreement. I just hadn’t been able to put my finger on what the problem was because I hadn’t considered what the book could look like in such a way, hadn’t been able to see my way toward such a drastic (humbling) change. So. I threw away an entire point of view character, and then after paring down what remained, I rebuilt the novel with Liliya’s point of view included and a much sharper image of what the novel was.
As far as the actual process went, the only way I know how to do meaningful revision is to print out the manuscript and start pulling it apart, physically. After removing the pages to be jettisoned, I read the remains on their own to discover what load-bearing beams I had to replace, what emotional beats were missing, and what possibilities might open up with the new material. I always mark up pages by hand, often doing the re-writing in the spaces between the lines of a double-spaced manuscript. I also read the whole novel aloud to myself at the finishing stage, and I regret to report that such an incredibly time-consuming process is and remains massively useful.
BH: Wow, that is kind of heartbreaking! I actually did something like the opposite with my last book, when an agent told me my office novel had too many scenes set in offices, so I added a character who only sits at his desk and obsesses about what he’s going to have for lunch, or where the milk frother in the kitchen went. This is one way to not get an agent, by the way, not exactly recommended. Anyway, do you mind telling us about the excised character/half-of-the-book? I’m super curious about that. And a quick follow up, do you see yourself ever doing anything with that part? Do you have any ideas for where that part could take you?
HMW: Okay, but I loved Gibbons’s obsession with the milk frother. It does make a cup of crappy office coffee feel nicer, more special.
If I’ve managed to do one thing passably well as a writer in the world, it’s becoming inured to the heartbreak, which is, no matter what’s happening in your writing career, pretty much a constant. That isn’t to say I don’t feel heartbroken, early and often, but I’m at a place where I can feel it but also know I’ve gotten over it before and will again.
That character I removed, though, was actually my initial way into the novel. She was an academic and a translator who had a complex relationship with her father (also an academic and a translator), over scholarly matters. [I think you can see why that half of the book had to go.] She is still referenced once, without a name, as Viktor’s former English tutor–so not entirely gone–but I don’t expect I’ll go back to those pages or re-use them in any other way. They’ve served their purpose, which was to get me deeper into the novel. She was the bridge that carried me into Liliya’s point of view, and for that I’m grateful. In general, I’m someone who writes a lot of pages that don’t make it into the final draft; that’s simply part of my process, for better or worse. One of the problems with that character was a lack of urgency in the first place, and I don’t feel any urgency in that direction now, either.
BH: I’m glad we have Liliya. I thought that was a really interesting point of view. For folks who haven’t read the book yet, and I hope I get this right: Liliya’s father owns the San Francisco Pilots, the team our protagonist, Viktor, plays for, and she is married to the father of Viktor’s boyfriend Nikolai. She’s the general manager of the Pilots, so we get a lot of inside the business of hockey viewpoint through her, and she’s another person who is bumping up against some of the limitations of the traditional hockey/business world. I’m curious about the “inside hockey” part of the book. I’m not a hockey person, but that part of the book read really well to me. I think you have a real authority writing about both the business of hockey, the behind the scenes, and the game stuff. At the risk of being super basic: did you play hockey? What kind of research did you do on the behind the scenes part of this book?
HMW: Thank you! I’m glad that came across effectively because it was something I took very seriously in the process. I wanted it to be a book that could hold up to the scrutiny of hockey fans but that could also make the sport accessible to readers who come to the book from different avenues.
I didn’t play hockey in any organized fashion, but when I was a kid, I played a lot of pond hockey–you know, back when winters in Pennsylvania reliably meant frozen water. I would have liked to play properly, but I grew up in a small, rural place where there weren’t school or club hockey teams. That said, when I was in high school, my uncle and his friends rented the one ice rink within 30 minutes’ drive for an hour on Tuesday nights, from 10:30-11:30 p.m., and that’s when I got my one real taste of something that seemed like actual hockey. I was the youngest person on the ice, and the only one who wasn’t a dude, but no one ever said (at least to my face) that I didn’t belong there. It was chaos, but it was pure fun and physicality and full of all of those delicious sensory elements of the sport.
Also, I was and am a pretty ravenous hockey fan, and when I started Heading North in 2012, it was the absolute heyday of “hockey Twitter” and before the terrible “pivot to video” of the later 2010s razed the sports journalism landscape. Pro teams were throwing everything they had at the internet and still making interesting things, rather than simply “producing content,” so the Pittsburgh Penguins, for example, were live-streaming their summer development camp scrimmages and their equipment manager shared his videos of sharpening skates and the coffee brewing and the jerseys waiting for tags and so on. All of the major sports outlets had their own beat reporters for individual teams, plus there was this rich sports blogosphere and independent sports coverage and things much more wonderfully weird than anything you’d call “coverage” that were simply ambient at exactly the right moment. I read everything, watched everything I could get my hands on. When there was a labor stoppage due to contract negotiations in the NHL in 2012-2013, I threw myself into the international game, which meant watching loads of games on dodgy livestreams where I couldn’t understand the language of the commentary, but I could see certain differences in the rhythms of the game. I dug into memoirs and biographies of players and coaches who’d worked both in North American hockey and in Russian hockey to better understand the particular differences of the hockey world.
There’s a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that also ended up on the cutting room floor in the name of making a functional novel, but the research was this obsessive, consuming process (that I really, really love).
I love the idea of Hockey Twitter. I wonder does Hockey Twitter have a daily discourse as well, or does the lack of poets make Hockey Twitter a relatively calm place? I don’t want to give away the ending of this book, obviously, but I’ll say that I think you really nailed the ending, in that it totally surprised me and also seemed like it totally made sense. Did you know where you were going whole time, or did it surprise you as well?
RIP, Hockey Twitter. There was such discourse, and unfortunately a fair bit of creep behavior (which essentially killed all of the good, thoughtful parts of it in tandem with the gutting of most competent online sports media in the second half of the decade).
We can never have nice things.
But. I wish I could say that I knew where everything was going, with surety and grace, but the truth of the matter is that when I know where a book is going, I seldom feel much urgency to see it through. In a very Joan Didion fashion, I’m writing in order to discover.
The particular moment I’m sure you’re thinking of startled me as much as I hope it’s startling readers now. Once it happened, I knew it was exactly the decision that character would make, and it’s something that, had I tried to plot it, wouldn’t have worked, couldn’t have landed in the same way. So I’m glad that my general practice is simply to follow where the story takes me. A lot of the time, that following means endless hallways and dead ends, but sometimes I end up somewhere better than I could have intended.
Okay it’s probably time to wrap this up, so I’ll ask you the Standard Barrelhouse Interview Question: what’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
Dirty Dancing, now & forever.
Holly M. Wendt is the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). They are a recipient of the Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists from the American Antiquarian Society and fellowships from the Jentel Foundation and Hambidge Center. A 2023 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Holly has also been a member of workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Tin House. Their work has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, Memorious, and elsewhere. Holly is a former Baseball Prospectus contributor and contributing editor for The Classical. Their nonfiction has appeared in Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, The Rumpus, and Sport Literate. Holly is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College.