Defending Goals & Breaking Barriers with Kelcey Ervick

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Show Notes

Kelcey Ervick, author of the graphic memoir The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law that Changed Women’s Lives, is here to discuss soccer, women’s sports, Title IX, connections between goalkeeping and writing, rereading your teenage diaries, research for memoirists, her own evolution from athlete to writer to graphic memoirist, Viking names, and a lot more.

Kelcey Ervick is the author of four award-winning books, including The Keeper(Avery Books/Penguin), a 2025 Choose to Read Ohio selection and winner of a 2023 Ohioana Book Award. Her three previous award-winning books of fiction and nonfiction are The Bitter Life of Božena NěmcováLiliane’s Balcony, and For Sale By Owner. She is co-editor, with Tom Hart, of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Ervick has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and is a professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University South Bend. She writes and draws stories of the creative life at her illustrated newsletter, The Habit of Art.

In this episode:

Correction: A group of vultures roosting is known as a committee. A flock of vultures gathering to feed together is a wake. Finally, a group of vultures in flight is a kettle.

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Excerpts

Transcript

Kelcey Ervick (00:00):
Goalkeepers and writers have like actually so much in common because everything's very psychological, very intense. You're alone a lot, you're observing a lot. You're an outsider and I'm just like, oh my gosh. Of course.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:15):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel BODY OF STARS. Today we're joined by Kelcey Ervick, the author of the graphic memoir, THE KEEPER: SOCCER, ME AND THE LAW THAT CHANGED WOMEN'S LIVES. THE KEEPER is a 2025 Choose to Read Ohio Selection. Aside from soccer, some of what we might discuss today includes trailblazing, athletes, research and record keeping for writers, drawing, cardinals, sexism, failure, loneliness, the horror of reading your teenage diaries, and who knows, maybe bowling. We'll see how it goes. But Kelcey, we're so excited to have you here today. So thank you for joining us.

Kelcey Ervick (01:13):
Thank you, Laura. I'm excited to be here.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:15):
Well, I usually start by asking my guests about their Ohio connection and your graphic memoir, THE KEEPER actually opens with your younger years in Ohio playing soccer. So I thought maybe we could start there. Tell us a little bit about where you came from and also how soccer figured into your early years.

Kelcey Ervick (01:33):
Yeah, I'm a long time Ohio girl. I actually, my parents are from New Jersey and my dad worked for Proctor and Gamble, so we moved around quite a bit. And when we ended up in Cincinnati, when I was in sixth grade, we'd actually already lived there once before, but that's like the headquarters of Proctor and Gamble. So we were sort of destined to end up back there. But when we got there in sixth grade, I'd already lived in so many other places that I didn't feel like Cincinnati was home for a long time. And it wasn't until I, you know, attended junior high, high school, then college, then grad school, basically everything in Cincinnati that it's like, oh yeah, Cincinnati is definitely my hometown. When we moved there, I had played soccer before, you know, in elementary school in different locations. But Cincinnati is actually was pretty advanced in terms of girls' soccer.

Kelcey Ervick (02:25):
And they had this club team that I tried out for and it was called The Cardinals and I got on it, but, well actually at the time I was like, you know, a striker...I'd run around and score a bunch of goals, but they told me that they would take me on the team if I would be a goalkeeper because I was like a five foot eight sixth grader with a big wingspan. And <laugh>, they saw some potential there and I was like, okay! So that kind of changed the trajectory of my life in so many ways because it was this really competitive team. We were playing all year long, fall season, spring season, summer tournament, travel, winter, indoor, and it took me all around the country, you know, developed friendships, experienced all those like kind of weird growing up girl things with the team of girls in the context of sports and soccer, which was really exciting.

Laura Maylene Walter (03:22):
Well, since we're talking about beginnings, I am curious how and when you decided to write this book and I, I really loved your book, so listeners, if you enjoy graphic novels and memoirs, I really think you should pick this up. It is a coming of age story, it's a personal story about your life and growing up, but it's also broader than that. It's about the history of women playing soccer, the history of Title IX and developments in not only women's sports, but for women in general, I'd say. So can you tell us about how you conceived of this book and when and how you decided to work on it?

Kelcey Ervick (03:56):
Yeah, you know, when I went to graduate school at the University of Cincinnati, I was working on my PhD and they have two tracks, fiction and poetry. I was a quote fiction writer and I've mostly written fiction, but in the last, you know, 10 or so years I've started writing and teaching more nonfiction memoir essays. I've loved reading them, I've loved writing them. And this actually started in some ways as an essay that I wrote when I was coaching my own daughter in soccer when she was in sixth grade. I had coached her through like preschool, kindergarten, all through grade school. And then when she was in sixth grade, you know, it was just like parents would volunteer to coach and like there was another parent who volunteered to coach, usually it was like a dad, but in this case it was another mom. And I saw her on the field when we met and like she's like dribbling around.

Kelcey Ervick (04:49):
I'm like, oh, you know what you're doing and you know, have you played soccer before? And it turned out she had, she went to University of Dayton. We found out we played against each other and I'm like, my goodness, these 12-year-old girls have two coaches who are moms who are former Division 1 soccer players. That to me was this like new generation of like a new soccer mom...that was the title of this essay that never got published anywhere. But I wrote it. I was really interested in the way the generations had shifted and thinking about my own mom as kind of an original soccer mom. So I'd written this essay thinking about these things and then connecting like, oh, the big reason for these generational shifts is Title IX, which got passed in 1972. I was born in 1971. I basically came up with Title IX and by the time it was being put into practice is exactly when I was coming up.

Kelcey Ervick (05:41):
And so I got to benefit from this new law in ways that like my mom hadn't, and now I'm seeing this next generation with my daughter and her teammates and how far things had come. So that was early, but that was written, you know, that was just like a written essay. And then I've kind of got this parallel track where I have started like drawing and doing visual storytelling and that kind of stuff. And so I started thinking, well, can I draw aspects of this essay and of this history? And I guess the third thread of that to address is after college I'd kind of let my soccer playing past and sports past go so I could pursue the life of like a writer and artist. And I was starting to think more and more about those old sports days in ways that I hadn't before.

Kelcey Ervick (06:29):
And I was kind of curious, like those always seemed like very different pursuits to me being an athlete, being an artist or writer. And I was wanting to kind of see how they were connected. And so that was a big part of like me looking back and going like, okay, they've got to be connected. They're all here and me, they're all part of my experience. So those were sort of the three things. And so I wanted to ask those questions. I was drawing, you know, my stories now and I had these experiences with this next generation with my daughter. So those are kind of the three threads that came together for me to begin this.

Laura Maylene Walter (07:02):
Yeah, and we'll talk in a few minutes about kind of the literary connections between being a goalkeeper maybe and being a writer. I found that really fascinating in your book. But since you're talking about different generations of soccer players and soccer moms, et cetera, can you give us just a little bit of the history of women playing soccer in the book? You talked about the Dick, Kerr Ladies or the Preston ladies and some other historical or trailblazing figures in women's soccer. But give us a taste of what was it like for women way back in the day, way before Title IX, who wanted to get out there and play this game?

Kelcey Ervick (07:37):
Yeah, that was honestly one of the big discoveries for me in writing the book, was doing that research and learning about these women from the past. So you know, I'm playing 40 or so years ago. I definitely am assuming that I am the first generation of like women and girls to play competitive soccer, to have people come and like cheer us on. And just at the level we were playing, like my mom hadn't done it, my grandmother hadn't done it. Like I was like, this must be the first. But I was like, well when did it start? You know, what is the history of women's soccer? And that was when I learned that there were women playing in World War I, in England and there, you know, kind of a parallel story to A League of Their Own, you know, where we have women playing baseball in America during World War II when the men went off to war and in World War I in England where soccer known as football was, uh, very popular, the women started playing. The women who had begun working in factories.

Kelcey Ervick (08:36):
And then they would at their breaks start playing football, soccer. And it's not just like they were like playing casually in the, you know, in the area by the factory, but they actually started forming these charity leagues and having games where they would raise money. So the very first big women's soccer match that happened in England on Boxing Day in, I believe it was 1917, with the Dick, Kerr Ladies who worked at the Dick, Kerr munitions plant was played in front of 10,000 people. And I was like, what? I mean I just couldn't believe this. And they went on to play all through World War I and by 1921 and the war's over by then, they played in front of like over a half million people over the course of the year. And I'm just like, why don't I know this history? Why didn't I, why had I never heard of this?

Kelcey Ervick (09:26):
And honestly, it's because it's only now becoming told it's women's history. And of course, well the, the other main piece of it that I write about in the book, is that 1921 after they play in front of all those people by December, the football association in England who runs, you know, all of the men's soccer and and women's soccer at the time, but they basically banned women. They said this sport is unsuitable for females and female, you know, and they should not be playing. And so that was part of why I'd never heard this story because they'd been banned. It was not part of the main narrative of the Football Association. They did keep playing for actually many years, but not in the official capacity supported by the, the Football Association. What was exciting to me in like learning about that was not just learning that history and thinking like, wow, that's so cool, but actually making contact with one of the grandsons of one of these players.

Kelcey Ervick (10:21):
So he lives in England and he was like tweeting about his experiences, basically discovering his grandmother's like old suitcase full of her memorabilia from when she had been on the Dick, Kerr ladies, his name is Steve Bolton, his grandmother's Lizzy Ashcroft. She was one of the captains of the Dick, Kerr ladies. And he's just done extraordinary research on the whole women's football scene at that time, which is much more extensive than I ever knew or understood even when I was writing the book. It was just a cool part of the process of writing the book and doing research that I got to trade, you know, emails with him. And eventually after the book came out last summer, I got to meet him in person in London and play walking football with him, which is like soccer for old people where you're not allowed to run.

Laura Maylene Walter (11:11):
That sounds amazing.

Kelcey Ervick (11:12):
You can only walk <laugh>. Yeah, it's, and he showed me the original suitcase and all of the items and kind of, yeah, it was really special.

Laura Maylene Walter (11:20):
What kind of things were in there?

Laura Maylene Walter (11:22):
Well, like her old cleats, which they call boots, you know, which are like heavy brown leather and then the old soccer balls that are also kind of heavy brown leather and look more like volleyballs in terms of how they're stitched together. Photos, lots of photos of like her and her teammates traveling around having...I mean I, I was able to incorporate some of them in the book. As I say in the book, it just reminded me of me and my teammates, you know, as we would travel around and then like become like tourists in the towns where we were. So, so many of my memories of growing up playing soccer were playing soccer, but also being on a team and traveling and having these experiences with my teammates.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:03):
What a treasure of a find. It sounds that he did not know about his grandmother's football past before he found the suitcase. So just to find all this documentation of a whole other part of her life that he had probably never imagined, especially people don't tend to think of their grandmothers often as having this whole other part to them. And so that is really fascinating and it makes me think about just how culturally we see women in general and what has changed in that time and what hasn't changed.

Kelcey Ervick (12:34):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:35):
So maybe we could get into a little bit of Title IX, which is starting to usher in a new era for women in soccer or football elsewhere. I'm sure a lot of people listening know all about Title IX, but some of our younger listeners, it's just something that they've always grown up with and maybe never gave much thought to. So can you tell us a bit about what it's about and also how it got started and how it was passed?

Kelcey Ervick (12:58):
Yeah, I mean it was interesting for me because while I hope what you say is true that a lot of people currently know more about it and it's been more on their radar, it was never on my radar. I mean we never talked about it at any point, even though my high school team was basically started very likely because of Title IX. My college team was probably started because of Title IX and both teams only started like five or six years before I got there. But it was never like, oh this is why you have this opportunity. It was just like kind of taken for granted. So I had to kind of piece it together that like Title IX in the way that it opened up opportunities for women in sports, but also the way it opened up opportunities for women in academia, which that is where I work.

Kelcey Ervick (13:41):
I'm an English professor. That it basically like paved the way for my whole life of experiences in sports and academia. And so I didn't realize that when Title IX was written and passed, that it was not only about sports. I didn't really know the origin story. And so that was something I wanted to look at. You know, by the time I was writing the book, I'd realized like, oh, this law has shaped my whole life and like the lives of all of us. But I didn't really know how it started and, and what its kind of original intention was. So it was fun to learn. I love telling stories of women's history and so I love learning about like Bernice Sandler who's known as the godmother of Title IX and how basically it just started off as this kind of like personal and professional injustice where she has just graduated with her doctoral degree from the University of Maryland.

Kelcey Ervick (14:31):
There's like seven positions open that she's qualified for and she's not being considered for any of them. So she asks her male colleague why she's not being considered and he says, let's face it Bunny, you come on too strong for a woman. And she has this great quote. She wrote about it later how she didn't know that those words were going to lead to like the transformation of the lives of women and girls across the country. She says she just went home and cried. And as I say in the book, because I'm a crier, I really appreciate that Title IX started with a woman's tears. And then she says she started doing bibliotherapy. She says, I started reading about a problem when I have it. So she started researching and then she started reaching out to women. And again, this is you know, pre-internet, this is the late 1960s...Asking women around the country, particularly at universities to like document their injustices, you know, where they had been passed over for a job, where they weren't paid as much as their now colleagues, where they had worse classes or worse office locations or you know, all sorts of things. Or we're expected to bring coffee to the meetings.

Kelcey Ervick (15:39):
And so she gathered like a thousand pages of documentation and she brings it then to people in Congress and specifically the handful of women in Congress who were involved and they ultimately get it passed. Title IX is 37 words. It's basically just saying that you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex in educational institutions that are federally funded. And so they then had to start like figuring out what does that mean and how are we going to enforce it and all that kind of stuff. So that's where like the sports came in because that is where it was, you know, women were extremely discriminated against. There were just zero opportunities in sports, but none of them were really planning on that. They just thought it would be like, you know, women were constantly being turned away from schools and universities just like from grad school, from jobs, whatever. Like Senator Birch Bayh, I'm in Indiana now and he was an Indiana senator who really like kind of authored and helped get the law passed. He was a great ally, but he had seen his own wife who he always said was kind of like smarter than he was get turned down from the University of Virginia because literally they wrote women need not apply like <laugh>. I don't know. So it was fascinating to just learn more about the way that the personal stories of Bernice Sandler in particular, but then like Patsy Mink, Shirley Chisholm and others got them right on board to help advocate for this long.

Laura Maylene Walter (17:03):
Yeah, it did change so much, but also by reading your book it really drives home how women were still being treated in rather sexist ways, both in sports and beyond. I really enjoyed, you had illustrations of when you were a child in school every year being asked to check a list of future careers and they had different lists for boys and girls <laugh>. they had what model for girls and what was boys. I mean some of the boys categories were a little silly too, like cowboy.

Kelcey Ervick (17:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (17:34):
And I love that you were checking in the boys categories at first until, I guess, a year or so later. Yeah. I can't imagine what that was like to find that.

Kelcey Ervick (17:43):
Yeah, no, it was so interesting going through, you know, my old scrapbooks and diaries and documents actually, I mean I happen to have that one right here. This is my school day's book. And so I know no one's like actually viewing this, but you can see the like when I grow up what I want to be. But for me to like track that, I was like, oh yeah, in first grade, which is when it starts, it was just like, yeah, I was just choosing stuff on the boys' side stuff on the girls' side it was like, I want to be a football player, I want to be a baseball player, I want to be a mom. You know, like so mom would be the person on the girls' side. And yeah then by third grade I was only choosing things on the girls' side and by sixth grade the only thing I wanted to be, as you know, a five foot eight, 12-year-old girl was a model <laugh>.

Kelcey Ervick (18:23):
And so I actually, when I talked to students at schools now, like I'll put those up on the screen and ask them what do they notice before I put any of my check marks. I just put like the blank one and right away of course they're like noticing these different expectations and possibilities for boys and girls. They notice that, for example, mother is one of the possibilities for women, but father is not.

Laura Maylene Walter (18:45):
Yeah.

Kelcey Ervick (18:46):
One of the options for boys. And then, yeah, and they watch me limit my trajectory over time and I kind of try to use it as a cautionary tale for them. Like, don't let other people tell you because you know, obviously it was already limited by the options, the like 10 options for boys, 10 options for girls and how different they were. But then there's the way that you start limiting yourself based on like messages you're hearing out even beyond that. So I just watch myself do that and try to like caution the students today like, don't do it <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (19:17):
Yeah, it's good for them just to be aware of that. And there's definitely a connection with the questions your National's bound team was asked. In 1987, your team, the Cardinals went to Nationals, which is an amazing accomplishment. And you included some sample questions that you were asked at the press and you're young women, teenage girls there for your athletic accomplishment. And what were they asking you in the, in the press events?

Kelcey Ervick (19:45):
They wanted to know who on our team that we thought would be the first to get married, who would be the first to have children, who would've the most children. And I just remember both being like unsure how to answer, but not in the way I should have been. Like I remember kind of actually thinking like, oh gosh, who will be, you know? And like you get kind of giggly and nervous. It was the first time I had even thought of who was going to get pregnant first or you know, or get married first. I don't get into all of this in the book, but I did get me thinking of my teammates in a weird way. And so then like the next year when someone did get pregnant, it was like, oh, so you are the one who was going to get pregnant for, you know,

Laura Maylene Walter (20:26):
Yeah.

Kelcey Ervick (20:26):
I thought it might be this person but it was you, you know? Yeah. And so I lament and also try to talk to kids today about like, that would've been an opportunity for us to be like, no, you are asking the wrong questions. Like we refuse to answer.

Laura Maylene Walter (20:40):
Well in the eighties that was, that was what it was like, you know, I mean culturally, but it's so fascinating that you pointed out how maybe the questions we are asked just that can shape how we think about ourselves or how we think about the future. It also made me think a little bit about sometimes when female authors are being interviewed and they might be asked if they have kids, like how do you do it? How do you find the time? But male authors aren't asked that.

Kelcey Ervick (21:06):
Yep.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:06):
Or if a woman is in like a heterosexual relationship, does your spouse support your work?

Kelcey Ervick (21:11):
Mm-hmm.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:12):
You know? But you never get that question on the other side.

Kelcey Ervick (21:14):
Mm-hmm.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:14):
So it's really, it's still happening. It's still...

Kelcey Ervick (21:17):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:18):
I think all women authors probably have some stories along those lines.

Kelcey Ervick (21:22):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:22):
That might be for a different podcast. <laugh>

Kelcey Ervick (21:25):
Yeah, but you know, when I mentioned that I was like working on this book looking for connections between, you know, my life as an athlete and my life as an artist and writer, I realized like at the center of that the connection was that I was a female athlete and like a female artist and that there are so many similarities and so I, you know, I have like a two-page spread of just laying out quotes.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:47):
Yeah. Tell us about some of the authors you drew a connection between other famous authors who were goalkeepers in soccer or football as well. Tell us a bit about that.

Kelcey Ervick (21:57):
Yeah, so one of my beloved authors that I just kind of always love reading as Vladimir Nabokov and in his book SPEAK, MEMORY, he writes about how he was a goalkeeper even in college and he just loved it, you know, in his Nabokovian way would like wax philosophical and have these beautiful sentences about the goalkeeper as like the lone eagle, the man of mystery, all this kind of stuff. And Camus was also a goalkeeper when he was a teenager. So yeah, kind of early on I talk about how like them, I was a goalkeeper who wanted to be a writer, but unlike them I was a girl, you know, even though they were 50, 75 years before me, you know, it was still a different thing to want to be either an athlete or a writer when you were a girl. But when I was researching more about like goalkeeper history or whatever, I don't know, I forget the guy I was quoting, but this great article that was talking about how goalkeepers and writers have like actually so much in common because everything's, you know, very psychological, very intense, you're alone a lot, you're observing a lot, you're an outsider, you know, and I'm just like, oh my gosh.

Kelcey Ervick (23:13):
Like of course, you know, I mean I would stand in the back of the goal with my team at the other end of the field because we were a really good team. So <laugh>, you know, I spent a lot of time just kind of by myself watching my teammates on the other side. And I would either be like picking four leaf clovers or just making up stories in my head. And so yeah, that position of being like the outsider, the observer, but then also being an area where like high plot action happens, there's those comparisons too. So.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:44):
Yeah, I think there's connections are so fascinating. I was never a team sports person in any team sport. I tried rugby in college for I think a semester and it didn't stick.

Kelcey Ervick (23:53):
Oh wow.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:53):
I liked, I liked the parties afterward but actually playing the game, I don't think I was a good fit for it <laugh>. But yeah, the connections between being a goalkeeper and being alone and a little bit apart from everyone else and being a writer were really fascinating. So you had, you know, these early formative years playing soccer, you played in college as well, but then you started studying English and writing and you went and got advanced degrees in those areas. Can you talk a bit about during that time when you were in school, in grad school, how you were seeing yourself as a former athlete, as a writer? How did you kind of reconcile those two parts?

Kelcey Ervick (24:32):
I mean definitely like in college I was the only English major who was also an athlete. So I understood that was, that divide was kind of there. By the time I got to grad school I was in a different place. I'd gotten married, I had a daughter and hadn't played sports officially. Other than like touch football, rec league. For years I'd kind of separated myself from like my former athlete self and yet I'm also like six feet tall. So I always felt kind of like more aligned in certain ways with guys and with sports. And I didn't feel as comfortable in like circles of moms as I would just like hanging with guys kind of. And I had male professors in grad school and I really wanted to be like them and write like them. And I loved all of the male authors that I'd grown up reading as a kid in college and grad school. And it was kind of though in that context that I, I realized I was actually somewhat resistant to reading women's writing. I don't know, I just realized how much my own thinking had been shaped by these messages about men and women's writing

Laura Maylene Walter (25:45):
Ingrained patriarchal ideas.

Kelcey Ervick (25:47):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:47):
Like women's writing is lesser, it's not as serious, it's not as important. I really liked when you mentioned in the book when you discovered some Black writers and Black women writers and how that changed some things for you as well.

Kelcey Ervick (25:58):
Yeah. So slowly that was kind of shifting my way of thinking. So it was this combination of like actually reading books by women and women of color and the experience of being a mother and having been like a young wife and just the continued messages and questions, you know, like I feel like as soon as I got married people were like, when are you having a baby? And I'm like, I don't know, maybe not for a while. You know? And then like as soon as I did have a baby, they're like, when are you having another baby? I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to. You know, and are you going to quit your job to take care of your baby? Like you said, they wouldn't ask my husband that, but they're asking me and I'm like, no, in fact I would like to get a different job...I'm going to go to grad school and make zero money, but also, you know, be a mom in grad school and then become a professor and hopefully a writer.

Kelcey Ervick (26:47):
And so I just had like ambitions that I just felt like were being ignored, not acknowledged that people had other ambitions for me as a woman...ambitions quote unquote.

Kelcey Ervick (26:56):
Just to like settle down and have a certain kind of life that I was just resisting. So as I was experiencing all of that, it was then that like women's writing really came to mean a lot to me. That's part of where I got really passionate about telling women's stories. So, you know, and not just mine, like the Dick, Kerr Ladies, I want to talk about these women who have been playing who are playing sports and band a hundred years ago. I want to talk about the women who made Title IX happen, you know.

Laura Maylene Walter (27:22):
Well, let's talk a little bit about your process for working on this book. It sounds to me like you had a real treasure trove of information and records to go through. You had a video maybe you could tell us about, you had a lot of saved materials that your mother had saved actually as the press secretary for your team. You had your old journals. So tell us a bit about what you did for the research into your own life, aside from, you know, these other topics. How did you approach that?

Kelcey Ervick (27:53):
Yeah, I definitely always like saved a lot of things and I get this from my mother who has saved a lot of things. But honestly, that video that you mentioned was really big because it came externally and is maybe another thing that I could say was part of what generated this book. So we had a Cardinals reunion in 2014, so the first time we've gotten together in 25, 30 years, I lose track of decades. But Mr. Ryan, as I call him in the book, which is very close to his real name and who gave me permission to use the video and talk about it. He was one of the dads and he followed us around with his giant 1980s, you know, video cam for all of our teenage years, you know, and he filmed it all and he apparently had, I don't know how many hours of footage, but he brought it down to like two hours that he put onto a DVD and like a Vimeo link.

Kelcey Ervick (28:43):
And he shared with all of us at the reunion. And that seeing us it like, I'd had the photos, I'd had whatever, but seeing us in motion and hearing our voices and just being taken back to these trips that we had gone on and seeing things from like a different perspective, you know, like I saw things from my perspective, but now I'm looking through his lens and I'm seeing things in a different way. I don't know, it was fascinating to me and it really got me thinking about those days again and was part of like what generated this book happening. There's another book that I love, a graphic memoir called BELONGING. It's, oh gosh, I'm blanking on her name right now, but it's a German writer looking basically back into her past to see if her family members were part of the Nazi party. She uses a lot of scrapbook kinds of documentation, like old documents that she draws and represents in different ways.

Kelcey Ervick (29:39):
And I loved how she did that. So I would go back through and like read my old diaries in my old handwriting or read back through old newspaper accounts and it jogged my memory. I didn't remember all of that stuff, but I loved incorporating those visually...kind of re-drawing them or whatever. And I don't know, I love primary documents, I love archives and as someone who's come into graphic writing late, I'm often like self-conscious about the fact that like, this is not like a traditional panel-y kind of comics story. I mean like FUN HOME by Alison Bechdel is one of my favorite books, was really influential in writing this. But she's got these like gorgeous panel by panel storytelling and you know, I'm a little more free range, which is just more me. And so I don't know. And Bechdel of course has tons of primary sources too. She'll put her own little diary things or books, you know, I don't know like in her images, but I kind of just use it as part of the layout.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:45):
Yeah, I loved seeing your recreations of the newspaper articles from when you were playing or even your journal snippets. And I love you wrote that your experience of reading through your old journals was like watching a horror movie. And that really made me laugh because I've always as well been a journal keeper since I was a child and if I ever open one of those up and look at it, I am mortified on many levels. So I completely understood that.

Kelcey Ervick (31:12):
Yeah, yeah. I'm like yelling at myself like, don't do that. Don't open that door. You know?

Laura Maylene Walter (31:17):
I know, what are you thinking? What are you thinking? <laugh> But yeah, there's also that great thread in your book about writers being keepers of history and memories and stories and I thought that was really beautiful. What advice would you have for other writers who are working on a memoir, whether it's graphic or not, in terms of mining these old primary sources? Do you have any advice for them or what if they don't have as much as you do? You have a lot of really good stuff you could look back on. So what about for the person who doesn't have all of that?

Kelcey Ervick (31:47):
Well, you still have your memory and once you start tapping into your memory, things start blowing. You know, if you just start writing, I remember all sorts of things are going to come back to you so you don't have to have those documents. And I mean, I think what was interesting for me was the ways in which some of those documents contradicted a little bit of what I thought, how I fancied myself. Like I have this image of me as this like lonely, you know, apart from everyone goalkeeper as a kind of moody and quiet or whatever, introverted <laugh>. And I watched the video and I'm like, oh my gosh, I was like a 14-year-old spazz, you know, like I so different images. So anyway, this doesn't really help because this is like, if you're asking, if they don't have something to contradict their memory, then lucky them <laugh>.

Kelcey Ervick (32:35):
You know, I was reading Mary Karr's THE ART OF THE MEMOIR as I was writing this and I think she is really smart about thinking about how you write about other people or even your, of your own life and experiences to just like, what are your motives for writing it? You don't want to like write to bash somebody else you don't want to write to just make yourself look great. You know, you have to like take a real look at why you're writing what you're writing and at what you're writing. And I think she's really smart about that. I'm actually teaching a creative nonfiction workshop right now and so I've been thinking a lot about what advice I have for writers. One article or one essay that I go back to over and over again is Sue William Silverman's essay on the Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience.

Kelcey Ervick (33:20):
I think you can find it online, but it's included in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO FLASH NONFICTION. It's kind of like obvious, but those terms are really helpful way of thinking about the innocence, what you felt and experienced at the time in the moment. And then like the voice of experience is how you're processing it now and you want to both be able to communicate that voice of innocence, how you felt in the moment, whether it was like ecstasy and wonder or whether it was like trauma and whatever. But then also like, you know, the point of a memoir or of a personal essay is going to be to process that from the lens of experience. And so just kind of holding not just those two time periods together, but the journey that kind of connects them. I don't know, that's what I think is like so important and what I was trying to focus on in my book.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:10):
Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about your development as an artist. You've mentioned a few times that you came to that later and on your website you say, I am a writer who started drawing every day, which I really like. So tell us about what it was like, how you got into the drawing side and how you developed that.

Kelcey Ervick (34:30):
I've always been interested in visual art and secretly kind of wanted to pursue it, but never thought I could. As I say in the book, in my twenties I did a lot of sort of like community Ed classes and painting and drawing and calligraphy and photography and all these different things. But I focused in writing and you know, I had my English background and felt more comfortable there. But once I got my PhD and moved to South Bend Indiana for my job as a professor and was kind of continuing my work, I don't know, I felt like free to just start trying some things on my own. That's when FUN HOME was published in like 2006 or seven. Myra Coleman's book, PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY with its like free flowing gouache drawings and her beautiful hand lettering really influenced me. And I was like, wait, you can make books with pictures, you know, and they're like smart and literary and reflective, philosophical like, oh man, this is what I want to do.

Kelcey Ervick (35:28):
So I just started doing a ton of art journaling and mixed media kinds of stuff. I was taking classes online and just trying a bunch of visual things, but I didn't really know that I could combine it with my storytelling. I was just doing kind of journal pages or whatever. And then, yeah, in 2018 I was like, you know what? I've been doing versions of this. I've started doing some kind of merging my storytelling and visual art a little bit, but I really wanted to get better and learn more and I don't know, just get on that track of visual storytelling. So yeah, so I started drawing every day and I did it for two years and so it wasn't just drawing everyday, it was like I would make a painting or drawing. So within a month of doing that, I've already like tried all these different, you know, I'm working in like watercolor, I'm working in ink, I'm working with acrylics, I'm working with gouache.

Kelcey Ervick (36:22):
I started working digitally. I, I'd always been resistant to like working digitally, but I use like an iPad and procreate now. So it's just one of those things when you're just trying stuff out, there's like this freedom to make whatever, try whatever, and you get good Amy Tan's book, THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES that came out this year where she just starts drawing birds and like making notations about them. She becomes a big birder but also an illustrator of birds and she uses the phrase, I forget what the phrase is, but it's like this physical sense of like getting miles. You have to do your drawing miles? I think that's what it was. This idea that the more you draw, the more miles you draw with your pencil or pen or whatever it was like training yourself to draw. So just that constant everyday habit, you figure out what you like, what you don't like, what colors you like, what media you like. Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (37:14):
Experimentation is so important. And I enjoyed you also have in your website you wrote, "As a professor, I know that the best way to learn something is to try it. As a reader of Beckett, I know the best way to improve at something is to try again, fail again, fail better." Which I think every writer knows that quote. But it is a good lesson for anyone who either a writer or anyone who is creative to just give it a try. You know? So what if it's not perfect...experiment. I have to remind myself that as well because I'm not a visual artist in any way. And I was actually at an artist residency. I was there for writing and I befriended a visual artist and I probably said that line that she hears from people all the time. Like, oh, I can't draw. And she's like, well actually you can. People just convince themselves at a certain age that they're no good at it and they can't draw. But she's like, you could draw. So I try to think about that.

Kelcey Ervick (38:04):
Yeah, you could draw, you can draw. It's more that you have not drawn in many years because we basically stop at like age 12 or something. Linda Barry has been hugely influential to me in my own journey to give myself permission to just draw and make things. But also as a teacher, she documents her own teaching on Instagram and it was on like, I don't know, some other site. And just in her books, syllabus and making comics and all, she is so fascinated by how from the beginning we write and we draw and we talk and they're all kind of part of the same thing. And then we start separating them out and then we stop drawing basically. And we start thinking in terms of is this good? You know, is this bad? And she's like, when did it become limited to those two questions? Is this good?

Kelcey Ervick (38:51):
Is this bad? You know? And she has these great moments where she'll do imitations of her students' drawings or she'll do some kind of wonky drawing and then she has little speech bubbles like, are you a bad drawing? You know, <laugh>, how old do you have to be to be a bad drawing? I marvel over like super technical drawing, but it's not even what I always want to look at. I would rather see like someone's human hand and mess ups. So I've been able, I've learned a lot from my students, you know, I'm like, hey, we're going to try this today. And they're like, okay. And then they do it and like I just, I find what they do so delightful. You know, and it's untrained. They haven't drawn for years and they're also like, this is an English class, why are you making us draw <laugh>? But there's probably a lot of things we could all do that we just haven't done...

Laura Maylene Walter (39:34):
Or talk ourselves out of, kind of limit ourselves. I really love Linda Berry's book. I think it's called WHAT IT IS, I think.

Laura Maylene Walter (39:43):
And it's all about creativity and imagination. So listeners, I'll link to all the books that we're mentioning in the show notes so that you can find them. We are almost running out of time. So I have three kind of rapid fire questions unrelated to most of our conversation. But I just really want you to tell us just a little bit about your bowling league. <laugh>.

Kelcey Ervick (40:03):
<laugh>. Oh my gosh, my bowling league. It is like, I'm so glad you asked about it. It's like the highlight of every week. I grew up, you know, holiday bowling. We would just as a family, like go now and again. I'm a total straight baller, so I was never in a league, never got a nice little hook shot or anything like that. Our league is known as the fun league, so it's like people who just want to be there to like whatever. And we, it's a handicap league, so that means you're just kind of bowling against your own average or whatever. But yeah, we've got a team of basically English professor types, and we are the Big Lebowskis and <laugh> they...

Laura Maylene Walter (40:43):
I love that so much.

Kelcey Ervick (40:44):
Mistakenly put an apostrophe 's' at the end of it.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:48):
No! <Laugh>

Kelcey Ervick (40:48):
We embrace it. We're just like, yeah, <laugh>. Yeah, we bowl three games and my average just kind of hovers around a 150. Once I got a 256 and it was like the highlight of my life. I got a little key chain <laugh> for it and I carry it with me and It's just fun. It's on Sunday nights, it's like just when you're getting depressed that the week's starting up, you're like, yay, I get to go bowling

Laura Maylene Walter (41:14):
Well I just love that you're the Big Lebowskis. Now that I'm thinking of film or TV, I know you had told me off air that you don't watch Yellowjackets or haven't watched Yellowjackets. So I just want to say for any listeners out there who are thinking, how are you not talking about a high school girls team in a few decades ago traveling to Seattle for Nationals? How are you not talking about the Yellowjackets connection?

Kelcey Ervick (41:38):
Yeah, it's my fault. <Laugh>. I know people have mentioned it to me and I just like, I don't know.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:44):
If you're not a horror person, you...maybe not.

Kelcey Ervick (41:47):
Oh, I'm not a horror person.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:48):
I'm not, either. But it's so fascinating because all the acting is so good and it splits between the 90s of the girls who are caught out in the wilderness after a plane crash and their adult selves. And all of the acting is so good and seeing who they turned out to be and what happened to them. So that's really what I watch it for, more so than the horror. But there is some cannibalism, so if you're not into that, I totally get it. But just know that probably a lot of readers are thinking about Yellowjackets when they look at your book.

Kelcey Ervick (42:17):
Yeah, it's been recommended to me before and so maybe this will be what timely gets me to do it.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:22):
If it's not your thing, it's, it's also not your thing. But moving on, can you tell us why Ervick, why you call it your Viking name? I love this.

Kelcey Ervick (42:32):
<laugh>. Oh thanks. Yeah. Well, yeah. I told you about how I got married when I was, when I was younger, I was like 24 and I did the obligatory name change even though I was like ambivalent about it. But I was like, hey, I'll do it. You know, it's also kind of romantic in its way, right? But then I got divorced and, and I decided to change my name back to my, well this is where it comes in...to my what? To my name, to my original name, to my birth name. You know, there are some terms, but of course the one that we would mostly say is to my maiden name. And I don't know, I, the more I had to say that, the more frustrated I got with that term, the maiden, you know, like, okay.

Laura Maylene Walter (43:14):
Yeah.

Kelcey Ervick (43:14):
What, what's a maiden and why is, why is this my maiden name?

Kelcey Ervick (43:18):
Yeah. And so Ervick is the name of a town in a little village in Norway where my grandfather is from. And his name was Ron Vold Ervick. So he was named after a Viking from the 900s, Ron Vold of Ervick. My name is called E-R-V-I-C-K, but in Norway it's E-R-V-I-K and V-I-K is the root of the word Viking, referring to people coming, it's like a little inlet and that's where they would all come from. So I figure I've got all these Viking connections and going to Ervik Norway for the first time in 2008 was one of the highlights of my life and I've now been back a couple times. So anyway, I just decided instead of calling it my maiden name, I'm going to call it my Viking name, <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (44:04):
Amazing. No notes on that. <laugh>. And then finally to make the soccer literary connection, can you just tell our listeners who might not know offhand, you know, you played for the Cardinals, what is a group of Cardinals called?

Kelcey Ervick (44:18):
A flock of cardinals is called a radiance. And as I say in the book, we were radiant. Every tournament we touched turned to gold. We had trophies every, you know, we traveled all around and yeah, that was something I didn't know 'til I was working on the book, but I, I found myself thinking in sort of fairy tale-ish or kind of mythical terms about, I mean this is not new. Other people have too about women and birds. Girls and birds. And so yeah, I have little moments where I'm interested in these other ways to, to think about girlhood, I guess.

Laura Maylene Walter (44:55):
Yeah. And I feel like it's such a writerly thing to love the names for groups of animals <laugh>. I recently did research on vultures and I love that. I think it's when vultures are roosting, a flock of vultures, it's called "a wake" and I love that so much. [Correction: "Wake" describes a flock of vultures feeding. Roosting vultures are known as a "committee."]

Kelcey Ervick (45:09):
Awesome.

Laura Maylene Walter (45:09):
So I don't know if you have any other favorites but. Yeah, this is the joy of being a writer, everybody.

Kelcey Ervick (45:15):
Yes, yes. <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (45:16):
And then I guess before we leave, I will just ask, you know, we talked a lot about the history of women in soccer and the developments and the improvements and some of the ongoing challenges, but is there anything you would like to say about what you might hope for the future? Are you seeing any new developments in sports for girls or maybe non-binary people that you want to talk about? Or just your hope for the future? What do you want to see?

Kelcey Ervick (45:41):
Yeah, I think just continuing to pay attention to and invest in women's sports and in all sorts of ways, whether that's watching the sports, going to and attending the sports, buying the merch, you know? Following the teams and that sort of thing. I used to be sort of more of a Olympics and World Cup watching women's soccer fan and I really enjoyed watching the NWSL, the National Women's Soccer League, which has been growing. And we just had this kind of cool moment this year. The Kansas City team created a stadium that is dedicated only to women's soccer. So they're not sharing a stadium with the men's team or some other sport or whatever. We're seeing progress, but we have to keep investing and kind of keep re-imagining. I mean, I think sometimes there's ways in which women's sports is kind of trying to imitate men's sports, but then like they also do some kind of cool and different things.

Kelcey Ervick (46:38):
But I've been excited watching the WNBA, but I think the important thing, you know, is keep focusing on the pay inequities between like the WNBA and the, as many of us like to call it the MNBA, the men's NBA <laugh>. You know, but even thinking about that kind of terminology, right? It was just a couple years ago that the NCAA was basically shamed during the major march tournament that they call March Madness for the men. But you know, they were not giving that term to the women's tournament and they were not giving equal facilities to the men's and women's teams. Just basketball would be basketball and then there would be women's basketball. So just, you know, continuing to think through the nuances of names and terms, but also just generally supporting. And, and it's hard, I mean, I could watch football four days a week, you know, know because, or three days whatever.

Kelcey Ervick (47:30):
They've got Thursday night football, they got Monday night football, they got Sunday football, and it's easy, it's on like the main channels and it can be hard to find where you watch women's basketball and where you're watching women's soccer. There's also a new women's hockey league, which is very exciting. Anyway, I'm kind of going off but there's a one minute video that's really just kind of an ad, but I love to share it. It was made by a former women's soccer player from like Australia, New Zealand. It's for this company called Correct the Net. So just thinking about how the internet works and how the internet repeats our biases. So Christine Sinclair is like the top goal scorer in international football ever, but Christiano Ronaldo is the top scorer in men's international football. So there's just this little girl asking, basically Google who has the most goals in international football? And the internet answers Christiano Ronaldo. And then the girl's like, yeah, but how many goals does he have and how many goals does she have? And it's just how, like when we type in anything, the default mode is men's. You know, the other day I, I put in like seated person for like a drawing reference and everything that came up was men.

Laura Maylene Walter (48:40):
Because they're the default. I don't know if you've read, what is the book? It was a book about data and women's lives. I will link to it. I can't think of the actual title offhand.

Kelcey Ervick (48:52):
About the biases and data.

Laura Maylene Walter (48:53):
Yeah, yeah. And how everything from how we test cars with crash test dummies [which] are more of male-size bodies. And if women's bodies are smaller, how does that affect it?

Kelcey Ervick (49:03):
Yes. Yup, yup

Laura Maylene Walter (49:03):
So anyway, fascinating. I'll link to that as well. And it makes me think, do you remember the dust up? It was years ago on Wikipedia, where in the American author section, there were too many names. So someone split it into American Authors and then like Women American Authors or something <laugh>. Yeah. I'll have to find a link to that. But that was, that was wild and kind of the same thing. So.

Kelcey Ervick (49:25):
Interesting.

Laura Maylene Walter (49:26):
These things matter. And you pointed that out in THE KEEPER as well, that words matter and we fight over these things or argue over them because it makes a difference in how we see the world and how we're treated. Well, thank you so much for this beautiful book, and thank you for joining us. It was a radiant conversation and I encourage all listeners to go out and read THE KEEPER. Thank you, Kelcey, for being here.

Kelcey Ervick (49:49):
Thank you, Laura. Your questions were amazing. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Laura Maylene Walter (49:58):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcast. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put 'podcast' in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.

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