During our phone call in the middle of April, Jenny Zhang set the scene: “There is something really bittersweet about talking to you right now, because we had originally wanted to meet up in New York City. I had imagined that we would be walking around the streets of Manhattan and talking about poetry, and it would be really cinematic and literary. That’s something I always wanted to do because of books I read when I was a kid, and I wanted to live that life. This is, I guess, romantic in a different way—in the way that I yearn to do that, and we cannot.”

Zhang’s childhood became a touchstone in our conversation, memories and anecdotes unspooling in response to my questions. Her award-winning collection of short fiction, Sour Heart, was told from the perspectives of children and “in the language of childhood, with its unruly spirit and raw emotions.” Her second full collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday, out today, delights in the same riotous way as her fiction and her first poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. She writes in a wild and phonetic vernacular, pairing the sonic incantation of visceral sounds with internet slang and bodily functions; she is playfully irreverent, deploying words like cunt with a wink, daring you to be offended. But there is a sense of control thrumming underneath everything, the same grounded feeling communicated by Zhang’s smart, down-to-earth sensibility.   

INTERVIEWER

Your book of stories, Sour Heart, received a glowing reception in 2017. Was there any temptation to continue writing fiction? Why did you turn back to poetry?

ZHANG

I did feel like retreating after getting all of that really great positive press for Sour Heart, and doing all those interviews, and constantly talking about my process, and after the fact, trying to make a story out of the stories I had written. I felt like every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t rid the audience from my mind. As soon as I’m calculating for an audience, I lose interest in writing. It’s just another exhausting performance. I wanted to practice writing fiction without any thought of sharing it. When I’m writing, I don’t write with the thought that I’m going to share it with the world. Or, I prefer not to think that way. As a fanciful seven-year-old, I wrote diaries and I was sure that someone would break into my home, and steal all of my journals, and be so dazzled by this seven-year-old writing in a journal that they would come back and like, introduce me to their uncle who would be a scion of the publishing industry. I had those fanciful thoughts and would write diaries with the intention of making that happen. But now I really treasure the feeling of writing without expectation and without the thought that it would reach anyone, but just to write. Just to, I don’t know, process something that maybe is a little bit more unconscious.

The other thing was that I missed poetry. There was a time when I used to read my poetry two or three nights a week. And sometimes, these would be poetry readings where there would be twelve people there. You know, there’d be five readers, and each person brought a friend. I missed the intimacy of poetry. I missed the immediacy of poetry. I was sick of telling narrative stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. I just wanted to go into a different place. And I also just wanted to be a little smaller. I know the ultimate goal is often to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger. But I guess I was interested in seeing if there was some other way to be.

INTERVIEWER

So, poetry was a kind of a sanctuary, in a way. It was a place without an audience and a place where you could just be for a while.

ZHANG

Exactly. I’m also a very slow writer. I let things sit for a while. It’s like I purposefully want my things to be less relevant, or something. Because if I wait, and put things in a drawer, and don’t share them for a while, then the moment where I wrote them has passed and we are in a different moment. And it’s almost like I want to know with stories, those poems, whatever the thing I wrote—is it still relevant now that the moment has passed?

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Left: Quan Barry, photo courtesy of the author

In 1692, a small group of adolescent girls dominated Salem politics, accusing local women and men of witchcraft. The condemned women were often misfits, unfairly deemed dangerous by their kin. The young accusers themselves—their active imaginations stifled by puritanical life—quickly became the main players in the Salem witch trials. In her second novel, We Ride Upon Sticks (Pantheon, 2020), author Quan Barry reexamines this notorious history with a new question in mind. Who would these women and girls be had they lived three hundred years later? Her answer: the 1989 Danvers High varsity field hockey team.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a feminist bildungsroman set in a township just outside of Salem in the eighties. The field hockey team is on a losing streak, so they employ a dark strategy, using witchcraft to turn the season around. Forming an unlikely coven, each player signs her name in a makeshift devil’s book—a diary with a picture of Emilio Estevez on the cover. The losing streak becomes a winning streak, but victory on the field leads to debauchery off. A Ouija board urges human sacrifice, cars are smashed by field hockey sticks, a tarot reader is consulted, and potions are brewed. The team gathers for bonfires as regular and ritualistic as the games, where Janet Jackson blares on full volume and Bartles & Jaymes flows freely. Partaking in this pagan revelry, the girls dance stark naked in the clear light of the New England moon.

Barry’s novel is a love letter to her hometown of Danvers. In artful prose that recalls Barry’s long career in poetry, she depicts her local landscape in detail, unveiling the communal memories imbued in each turn of Route 1 and each corridor of Danvers High. But her narrative is as universal as it is regional. The field hockey coach, Coach Butler, is recognizable to any woman who partook in high school sports. She was modeled on Barry’s real-life coach, Barb Damon, and so vividly recalls my own, Miss Monahan, who would stand on the sidelines waving her stick like a baton as I tore through crowds of players twice my size.

Barry and I spoke over the phone in mid-March, just after she had concluded a book tour in New York and along Boston’s North Shore. She had appeared at Danvers High not a week before. Though COVID-19 loomed, we lingered on unrelated topics, such as hair, feminism, and D.I.Y. witchcraft. Our conversation took place, quite aptly, on Friday the thirteenth.

INTERVIEWER

In We Ride Upon Sticks, you play with the aesthetics and tropes of movies from the eighties, especially horror movies. Why did you choose the eighties as the backdrop for the novel?

BARRY

I’m from the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. I graduated from high school in 1990, which means I played on the field hockey team in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. But unlike in the book, it was never a rags-to-riches story. We were good all along. I knew the eighties. I knew the town. I knew the history of the Salem witch trials. That’s why all of those elements are in the book. I didn’t realize it when I was going into the project, but I like the fact that we can look back on that decade with a wiser eye. Oftentimes when people think of the eighties, they just recall the funny clothes and the hair. But, as is discussed in the book, the eighties definitely had their issues. It’s post-Reagan, you have the Central Park Five, you have the AIDS crisis. There was a lot going on, and I was interested in rethinking that time through a more complicated lens. It’s a time that was dear to my heart, because that was when I came of age.

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