MELISSA FALIVENO: I’m not actually sure when I started writing that essay, but I know it had something to do with that moment of finding myself in New York and realizing that the fears of natural disaster that people have here are very different than that which we have in the Midwest. Like being in Brooklyn, and seeing the sky turn dark and thinking, “Oh shit.” And everybody else was like, “What? It’s just a thunderstorm.” Storms became perfectly representative of this larger understanding that hit me after I moved to New York: As a Midwesterner, and as a working-class Midwesterner, I had such a different set of experiences, and obsessions, and defining moments and stories that made up my life. It really wasn’t until I moved to New York that I started investigating how these experiences defined me, how where I come from defines me, and differentiates me from people who grew up here. And once I started digging into that essay, I realized it was also about faith and religion and growing up pretty religious — and then losing that religion, leaving the church, and not having any spiritual life anymore. And so it was investigating that loss of the belief in God with fear of natural disasters, and no longer having that umbrella understanding that God would protect us. Which was an awakening.

EB: What you just said about fear of natural disaster — as climate change becomes a bigger part of our national discourse, I always think about bigger hurricanes and more extreme weather. As someone who grew up with such extreme weather, is that something you think about as we go further into the twenty-first century?

MF: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, last night — are you still in New York?

EB: Yes. The storm last night?

MF: Yeah, oh my god, which was just the most violent thunderstorm that I’ve experienced in New York. These huge cracks of thunder, a ton of lightning and wind, and the sky actually turned green — which is nothing I have seen here before. It was thrilling because I was like, it’s like a Midwestern storm. But sitting by my window, watching it come in and watching it hit, I thought, this is not normal. This kind of storm is not normal for a coastal climate.

EB: For people who have never experienced extreme weather — in that sort of Midwestern sense — what advice do you have for how you process it? As someone from New York, our biggest weather was like crazy snow days or some really bad hurricanes, but that’s not comparable.

MF: Yes, very different. I write about it in that essay, the sort of palpable differences in the fear. Maybe when you grow up with a fear of hurricanes, for example, that kind of lives in you all the time, too, during hurricane season. My sense is that it’s not on the back of the mind of everybody here, it’s just like, if there’s a hurricane coming, or a tropical storm coming, people are aware of it. But it’s not the mentality that exists in Tornado Alley, where you know this could happen at any time. It’s built-in fear that a lot of people have. I don’t know if there’s any way to process it; it’s just this low-level anxiety that exists in a lot of people all the time. Like most things, maybe you have to push it to the back of your mind and not think about it, or it could be consuming and I could imagine one getting debilitatingly freaked out about it. But, if someone’s experiencing it for the first time, especially a tornado, get to the lower level of the house, or get to the interior room where there’s no windows and hope for the best.

EB: I hope I never have to take that advice… But let’s pivot to talk about something else that comes up in Tomboyland, which is gender and identity. You write about struggling to find the words to define yourself, in terms of your gender identity and your sexuality. I was really struck by this, especially since you’re a writer. Can you talk about this lack of language and what it means to avoid words, as someone who writes for living?

MF: It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ve always been interested in language. When I was younger, I studied linguistics a little bit and I was always really into morphology and etymology. Often when I’m starting an essay, I’ll start by looking at the etymology of a word, and something clicks and I can dig into whatever question I’m circling around. I’ve always been interested in the idea that language is fluid, and that it changes and that we adapt to it. Depending on colloquial usage, new words are added to the dictionary every year that some people will say are not words — but course they’re words, because we use them and we create them and we made the language. And we’re continuing to make it.

I spent a long time thinking about the words that we use to define our identities, and this idea that we just made them up. It’s what we do with language: We create a word to name something, and then it becomes part of the lexicon. But when it comes to identity, we cling to these words as a way to feel like we fit somewhere, feel like we belong, or feel like we’re part of something. I started digging into that idea of holding on to words to try to make sense of our bodies and ourselves and our identities and how languages’ fluidity is both liberating and nebulous. I was looking at the words that I’ve used to describe myself and I thought, what does that actually mean? What does it mean when words feel both right and not right? What kind of language might exist in the future to describe a body that we don’t even know about, or that we won’t even experience? Especially in that essay, “Tomboy,” I was digging around in language and fluidity.

EB: In that essay, you write about being called a tomboy growing up, and how you eventually decide to call yourself that after some resistance. Was it a reclamation of a word you disliked, or a warming up to it? What was that journey for you?

MF: I was pretty young, so I feel like it was more an acquiescence. That’s an interesting parallel because I feel like that’s kind of what “queer” has become for me too: an acquiescence, more than a claiming. I write about that too; being uneasy about, a specific word that has a ton of different connotations. And as I write about, “tomboy” has these old racist implications and it’s derisive and it has misogynistic implications. I remember resisting it when I was really young, because I knew that the word highlighted my difference from the other girls. But I felt so identified with the boys that I was like, well, this is the closest word that I have to express what I feel. I belonged with the boys, and this word that society had given me had the word “boy” in it. So “tomboy” was as close as I could get without actually calling myself a boy — which I didn’t even think was possible. And I think that has been my experience with a lot of words, especially when it comes to sexuality and gender identity.

EB: Not like a reclaiming but more like alright, I guess this is happening?

MF: I think it vacillates. Some days, I feel connected to the reclamation of tomboy. Language can be a protest; language itself can be resistance. By claiming these words, we have the ability to push back, and fight against the systems of oppression in which were raised. I was reading a lot of Audre Lorde at the time, and I was very inspired by her writing about language and identity and reclamation. Like the word “woman.” Some days, I feel really connected to it and then some days I feel separate — almost like a dissociative feeling. It’s this constant back and forth feeling of inhabiting a word and not inhabiting a word.

EB: On that note, what does the word “tomboyland” mean to you? How do you picture that word?

MF: What’s funny is the original manuscript for this book was not named Tomboyland, and it had a different title. When we were talking about naming the book, I had a lot of conversations with my editor and with my friends, and we kept circling around the word “tomboy.” At first, we were thinking of calling the book Tomboy, but there are already several books that are called Tomboy, including one by Lisa Selin Davis that is coming out like the same week as mine. What I wanted to communicate is this connection between the body and the land. I kept coming back to that: a body and place, the Midwest, and how a body lives in a place. I was having a conversation with my editor and it came to us in strike.

Tomboyland became an ethos we were working toward as I was finishing it, and as we were editing it. It became this ethos of the book: the state of mind where we’re in the vast in between that the Midwest is so often thought of. In between spaces of body and identity and class. It’s about existing in the in between spaces: in between the coasts, in between the poles, and the binaries in terms of body and place.

EB: Yeah, I had actually never been to the Midwest, except for last year, when I visited my friend in Madison, who’s in a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. So reading Tomboyland, I felt like I actually knew some places that are described in the book which was neat and the “Switch-Hitter” essay set in Wisconsin was my absolute favorite. Playing softball, you write, was like trying to be “both one of the guys and the kind of girl those guys wanted.” Can you elaborate on that dichotomy?

MF: When I was writing that essay, I was looking at this cultural experience of growing up in a place — a small town in the Midwest — where sports are the thing that matters. If you play a sport, and especially if you’re good at a sport, you’re a hometown hero. I was deeply in love with softball for my whole life, and it was something that I felt like I could do. I had this plan to go to college and play in a D1 school. I realized at a certain point that so much of my experience in this sport was about performing for men and boys and a town. Not to take away from the good and the joy that I had, but, it took me a while to reclaim that joy because I felt like my experience as an athlete in high school was about performing for men, finding the acceptance from men, and finding what I thought was love from men — rather than doing it because I really wanted to do it.

Circling around all that was this feeling that if I was good at a sport, I would be good. That it would make me a “good girl.” And so a lot of that, too, is related to posturing myself as a sexual object to those boys and men while playing this sport that’s historically associated with lesbians and queer people. We tried so hard to make ourselves look feminine and be pretty; we wore a ton of makeup, we did our hair just right, and we wore skirts and heels on game day as if to prove to the school and the town that even though we were these strong athletes that played this farm girl sport, we were also young women.We were available and we were sexually attractive. It’s this weird dichotomy, like you said, of being an athlete, which is being very active, being strong and competing, being aggressive, and all these things that are associated with traditionally masculine characteristics — and then being expected to also be a “lady.” I think that that’s a pretty ubiquitous experience, not just in the Midwest, not just in small towns. There’s a real culture of the young girl athlete who is supposed to be a lot of things, who obtains a feeling of acceptance and goodness and popularity by being good at a sport, but is also expected to still satisfy the role that girls and women learn that they should satisfy within our patriarchal system.

EB: Just as you’re talking, I was thinking about women’s soccer. I absolutely love women’s soccer, it’s my favorite thing to watch. But I was thinking how a lot of the athletes put on a whole face of makeup to play. I mean, I understand why they do it, and they want to be wearing makeup, but still.

MF: It’s this feminization that’s just drilled into us early. And like, if you put on a full face of makeup, you’re gonna sweat it off. It’s gonna be a dripping mask on your face and it’s going to get into your eyes that’s counterproductive.

But it’s complicated. I talk about this in the essay, too, that feeling of power through femininity as well, and reclaiming — or claiming — feminine characteristics, feeling powerful and feeling good about yourself while wearing those signifiers. It’s totally legit that some people feel more powerful in those expressions of femininity. My own experience was that I tricked myself — or felt I was tricked into feeling — that femininity was power, when in fact, it was me trying to put on this costume to get power in the way that I thought only women could. I wore the skirt and I wore the heels and I wore the makeup and I spent two hours getting ready in the morning, because I felt that that was the way to have control and have power. And I didn’t actually feel in control or powerful in my body until I started to live in it in a way that was honest and authentic, which is not super feminine.

EB: In “Switch Hitter,” I was really struck by the vulnerability in sharing what happened to you in Madison as an undergrad. For me, it was the bravest part of the whole book. What made you decide to share your assault here in this context? How did you come to that decision to put it in?

MF: That was the hardest piece of the book that I wrote. Much to my editor’s chagrin, I ended up writing that scene in third person. She told me, ‘you’re separating yourself from this experience.’ And I was like, ‘it’s literally the only way that I can write it.’ It just felt like a necessary part of that story. The story is not just about softball and my love affair with the sport, but with violence and this experience of — like that quote that you pulled out — living in such a way that it would make men want me. Being this cool athlete, the cool girl who likes sports and could drink beer and liked to party, but was also feminine enough that the men on a college campus, for instance at a football party, would want.

The whole story is this trajectory that was all leading up to that point, which was this reckoning where I thought I had power. I thought I was living in my body powerfully. I thought I had the ability to make men want me and desire me. And then, I had this moment in college where I just realized very quickly what little power I had. I had never faced that before. I was a pretty cocky kid when I was an athlete. When I started playing sports really competitively, I had this confidence and this swagger. I don’t think I ever confronted that kind of fear, or that kind of violence in any way. But these little moments all sort of led up to it. And it was just this moment that I was like, oh, right, I actually don’t have power over men. In fact, they have power over me such that they can harm me. It was a moment of reckoning.

And, because this is what we do, I blamed myself for a really long time. I ignored it, I kind of repressed it. It wasn’t until many, many years later in therapy that it came out. I realized that I had just been ignoring it, and that I had blamed myself for a long time — because I went to a party alone, I got drunk, so it was my fault. I don’t think I realized that I’d internalized that blame either, because intellectually, I was like, of course, it wasn’t my fault. But somewhere very deep inside of me, I thought, that it was my fault. It’s the thing I’m still reckoning with. Reconciling power and victimhood and blame and forgiveness has been the work of many years and a lot of therapy. I realized that I had to include that because I think it was, in a way, a turning point and a necessary part of the story. Even though it was highly uncomfortable to write and it feels super vulnerable to have in the world.

EB: Yeah, I’m sorry to bring it up, I really appreciate your answer.

MF: No, I’m definitely here for talking about it. It’s just one of those things that — it’s hard. It’s hard to look at, even though I wrote it down.

EB: When I was an undergrad, every female-identifying person I knew seemed having a similar experience, and it’s not talked about enough. About the shame and the not calling it rape even when it is. It’s something I think about a lot.

MF: I was really interested in writing about these kinds of experiences of oppression against female bodies and women that are not historically like, ‘well, that’s illegal’ or ‘that was wrong’ or ‘that was rape.’ These nebulous spaces that when you encounter it, you’re like, well, that’s fucked up. But there’s things that are excused and there are things that are not considered as bad as other things. And those sorts of everyday experiences happen to, I would wager, the vast majority of girls and women. Like you said, we just don’t talk about it and we don’t look at it. It’s gotten better in the last few years with the #MeToo Movement and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and people are talking more, which is great. I felt a little bit like it was my duty to tell the story because it was so inextricably bound to this part of my life and really fucked me up. It took a long time to grapple with it. So many people have that experience.

EB: Yeah. On another point of male violence, I also loved “Gun Violence.” You write about gun ownership and gun violence from a perspective I’ve honestly never encountered before, and I consider myself pretty well read! Why do you feel like this perspective was like important to include in this collection?

MF: I’ve been pretty solidly anti-gun my whole life. Particularly as mass shootings become de rigueur, I have always felt pretty strongly that we should take all the guns and burn them in a fire. I still feel that way most of the time. But, again, this shift happened when I moved to New York. Particularly around the 2016 election, I encountered the way that people were talking about working-class Midwesterners and Southerners and people in rural spaces that were ‘idiots voting against their interest.’ I don’t disagree that a lot of people voted against their interests. But it was this very like derisive way of talking about people as if they’re this swath of faceless morons. I found myself getting really defensive about the way that people talk about gun owners. I was like, why am I getting so defensive about this? It’s that thing where you can talk shit about your own family, but when someone else starts talking shit about them, you’re like, woah, no. Only I can do this. I can be critical of my family who loves guns, but when you start calling them idiots, I take issue, because it’s not coming from a place of knowing those people. It’s coming from this assumption about millions and millions of people that they’ve never met and whose experiences they’ve never known. I got really interested in looking at this question and the complication of loving people who love guns, and trying to continue to love them despite the fact that their politics are very different than mine; that they believe that owning guns is more important than other people’s safety and really trying to reckon with that.

I just wanted to see if I could find a nuanced narrative about guns, because we don’t really get that. I wanted to talk to people who were gun owners and who believed very strongly in their Second Amendment right. I wanted to ask them about their experiences, why this was so important to them, and try to ask some hard questions about violence and mass shootings. I was really looking at the correlation between white men and gun violence, and how primarily mass shooters are men or white men. I started thinking about gender and violence and rage and what might exist in like the gray space between pro-gun and anti-gun — if there is a gray space. I still don’t know if I have an answer. Like, I said, I feel pretty firmly anti-gun, but the people in my life that are gun owners are real people. They’re not idiots; they’re smart. I just wanted to tell their stories and try to make sense of it, and reconcile the questions that I had about guns and gun violence and rage.

EB: Did any writing about gun violence influence your own thinking on it?

MF: I read a ton of reportage journalism, about shooting statistics and looked at the profiles of the men who are committing these crimes. And I also tried to read a lot of sources that were pro-gun to try to look at the rhetoric that was being used, and the stories that people were telling about their ‘right’ to own guns and about the mythologizing. That’s a huge thread throughout the book: Stories that we tell to make sense of, and in some cases excuse, our behaviors.

EB: Broader about Tomboyland, is there any work that you consider to be your literary forebears, or whose work inspired you?

MF: So many, oh my god. Definitely Virginia Woolf. She makes a few appearances in this book. Her work has been really revelatory for me and, and still is. I return to her essays all the time. I have A Room of One’s Own and The Death of the Moth on my bookshelf by my desk. My essay “Of a Moth” was inspired by that essay of hers. But she’s a big one. Jo Ann Beard is my hero, my magnetic north. She was also my thesis advisor in graduate school, so getting to work with really opened me up in terms of like what an essay can do, what a personal narrative can do, and how you can combine personal narrative with reportage.

A lot of others recently, as I was writing this book, I read a lot of Hanif Abdurraqib, his essays from They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Ada Limón, her book The Carrying was super influential in writing this book, especially the “Motherland” essay — I have an epigraph of hers for that piece. Melissa Febos, who is a friend and always an inspiration. Audre Lorde, definitely, Sister Outsider was a big part of my reading for this book. Jeanette Winterson. I could go on, man. I feel like I’m forgetting really important ones! Rebecca Solnit — obviously. I quote her a few times in this book too, her earlier work like A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby were really important for me as I was developing my voice as a writer.

EB: Could you have imagined your debut collection coming out at this moment in time? I mean I’m sure the answer’s no, but what does it feel like to prepare for the release into this world?

MF: It’s is so weird. There are days when I feel so sad that I won’t be able to throw a big launch party for all my friends and family; essentially people who I have not been in great contact with because I’ve been working on this book. I conceived of my launch as a way to thank everybody for just being in my life and being a part of the journey of this book, which has been 10 years in the making. I had a tour planned and I was gonna take a big Great American Midwest road trip and end up in Madison with my community and my family. It’s been pretty shitty, to not have that to look forward to. You only have one first book, and to not get to celebrate with the people I love is really sad.

But on the other hand, I’m hopeful that it’ll still reach readers. I keep hearing that more people are reading during the pandemic, I can’t imagine that that’s true, but maybe it is! And as we have been in this really critical moment of uprising in our country, I feel like as a white person, my story is not the most important right now. So as much as I need to promote this book and be an advocate for it, I feel like I need to continue the work of uplifting work by Black writers and writers of color.

It feels like a really strange moment to be putting this in the world. But I’m also hopeful. It’ll come out just a couple months before the election. And maybe, who knows, maybe it’ll have an effect on someone and it’ll change the mind. Maybe that’s a pipe dream, but it also feels like an important time to be putting art in the world. So, I’m really grateful to be a part of that. And so many other debut books and non-debut books have come out during this time — I’m just grateful to be a part of that.

EB: My last question for you is related to what you just said. When readers put down Tomboyland, what do you hope they take away from it? What’s your pipe dream, as you just said?

MF: My parting request of my students is that when they’re writing they allow themselves the space to inhabit mystery and inhabit question and not try so hard to come up with answers. That’s what I was trying to do with this book: Ask questions, and maybe ask questions that historically haven’t been asked, or asking questions that I still don’t have an answer to. But maybe people will read these essays and be able to inhabit that space of questioning and mystery. And it might open up more room inside their minds and hearts for other experiences and other identities and bodies that don’t necessarily fit into the shape of theirs or what they’re used to. Or that they might hear both my own story, but all the other stories that I tell in this book; I talked to a lot of people when I wrote this book and those stories, I feel, are more important than mine. I want people to hear those stories. And maybe understand something about themselves that they didn’t before.

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Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection TOMBOYLAND (Topple Books, August 2020), which in a starred review Publishers Weekly calls “a winning debut.” The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, her essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Ms. Magazine, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, and Midwestern Gothic, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays 2016. She has taught nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Catapult in New York City, and will be the 2020-2021 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin, she lives in Brooklyn, NY. www.melissafaliveno.com

Emily Burack is a writer and editor at Alma, a Jewish culture site. She’s also written for Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, Bustle, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @emburack and read more of her work at emilyburack.com.