307. Witnessing History and the Vital Reassurance of Romance: An Interview with Jessica Luther

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 307 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is Jessica Luther. Jessica Luther is the author of the book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape. She’s also one of the hosts of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down. Yes, I will have links to both of those things. Jessica’s writing covers the intersection of sports and sexual and gendered violence. I’ve been following Jessica on Twitter for several years, for a really long time, and we connected originally over loving the romance genre. Since then her career has been really incredible, and I was so happy that she was willing to talk about it with me. Among the topics that we discuss today are the reason she initially concealed her identity on Twitter and her decisions to write under her own name; her experience as a writer who has become a visible, public face leading the reframing of sexual assault, sports, and women’s rights; being witness to history during Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster in the Texas State Capitol in the summer of 2013. We talk about the power of Twitter and live social media in connecting people instantly and personally during events around the world and how it turns us all into witnesses. We talk about knowing when to step away and not to invest too much emotionally, and we talk about how romance fiction keeps her going when writing, researching, and covering such painful and difficult but vitally important topics. And of course she recommends books, because, well, romance fans are the greatest of people.

Now you might have guessed from that introduction that I might have some specific content warnings? Why, yes I do! From timestamp 40 minutes and 5 seconds to about 51 minutes, we have a discussion of sexual violence and suicide in football and the results of her research into the behind-the-scenes accounts of assault and sexual, gendered violence in college and professional sports. Because of the specifics in that particular section, if that’s a topic that’s sensitive to you, I would recommend you skip that eleven-minute section, starting at about minute 40, but I also understand if this episode is not something that you feel prepared to listen to, and I really appreciate that you let me know what is and isn’t okay with you in your listening. I try to be, be as candid and transparent as I can with the content of each episode, and if I miss something, please, by all means, let me know.

Now, speaking of not missing things – that was a terrible transition, but I’m going with it anyway – we are going to do a live show at RWA. If you would like to come and play Cards Against Romance Tropes with me, please come on down. If you’re at Romance Writers of America in Denver, Tower Court B, Friday, July 20th, 4:40 p.m. – not 4:20, because that would be awesome – it’s 4:40, Tower Court B. We’re going to be playing silly games and having late afternoon mayhem, and we’re going to record a live show! Bring your own wine, and please come and hang out, and if you want, volunteer to play Cards Against Romance Tropes, ‘cause it’s super inappropriate and I have really cool prizes! I will have a link to RSVP in the show notes, or you can go to bit.ly/RWALiveShow. That’s capital R, capital W, capital A, capital L, live, capital S, show. I hope you will come, because it will be awesome.

This episode is brought to you by Rogue Souls by Chelsea Mueller. If you like Ilona Andrews, Patricia Briggs, or Darynda Jones, you will love this sexy urban fantasy packed with magic, murder, and a smoking-hot man on a motorcycle. Callie Delgado volunteered to apprentice to Gem City’s Soul Charmer. He’d forced the soul magic ability into her, but now it was hers. She’d learn to control her body’s reaction to rented souls or go up in flames. Literally. She exchanged her chance to escape the darker side of Gem City to save her brother. Now she needs to keep him sober and safe, try to mend family ties, and avoid the mobsters who have too much interest in the magic of borrowing souls. But when bodies begin dropping at the Soul Charmer’s door, it’s up to Callie and her partner Derek – the aforementioned hot dude – to track down the person killing soul renters. The Charmer wants retribution, but Callie is determined to get justice even if it means putting herself directly in the sights of the murderer. If she wants to stay on the Soul Charmer’s good side, Callie must confront her enemies head-on and learn to command rogue souls…and hope someone she loves doesn’t become the next victim. Rogue Souls by Chelsea Mueller is out now, and the Kindle edition is on sale for just $2.99 for the next week. Find out more at chelseamueller.net. And of course I will have links to this book and to Chelsea’s website so you can check it out!

This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by our Patreon community. Everyone who has supported the Patreon helps me make sure that each episode receives a transcript handcrafted by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter!

I also have compliments:

To Charity E.: Your strength and optimism and taste in footwear are only three of the 467,000 things your friends admire about you.

And to Rosalinda: Leaves that are blowing in the wind are actually clapping very quietly for you each time you walk by, so keep going!

If you would like to have a look at the podcast Patreon, I invite you to check it out at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

And now, let’s do this thing! On with our interview with Jessica Luther.

[music]

Jessica Luther: I am Jessica Luther. I’m a freelance journalist and writer living in Austin, Texas, and I most often cover the intersection of sports and gendered violence, though I write on a variety of topics. I have a book out called Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape, and I’m also a huge romance novel fan, and I read them like they’re air or something. Like, I’m just constantly, constantly reading them as, it’s like a, it’s like an antidote to the work that I do. [Laughs]

Sarah: I was going to say, it is the perfect antidote in a lot of ways –

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – to the things that you, that you cover. Now, you’re a journalist by training, right?

Jessica: No! No, I’m not, actually. I –

Sarah: Right, so you’re an, an autodidactic journalist? That’s my favorite kind!

Jessica: Yes, yes. So I was actually in grad school for a very long time, too long, and I almost got my Ph.D. in History and I –

Sarah: [Laughs] I know that story.

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, I wrote, like, you know, more than half of a dissertation before I left grad school, but I – and it was, it was at that moment of transition in my life when a friend of mine suggested that I write for money, which is not a thing they teach you in the academy, and so –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: Yeah. I, like, didn’t believe it at first –

Sarah: They really don’t!

Jessica: – and – so she really taught me how to pitch, and I did a lot of sort of op-ed writing? You know, editorial, and sort of easily – not easily, but I, I wrote for a site here in Austin called the Austinist that doesn’t, I don’t think it exists anymore, and I worked for free, but it taught me how to interview people, you know, about, like, whether, what the bike rentals for South by Southwest Festival would be like or, like, smaller, low-risk, you know, kind of work where I got used to interviewing people, and I just sort of transitioned over time into doing, you know, reporting itself rather than just my opinion writing, and it turns out that all of that time I spent in the academy actually pre-, prepared me very well for this kind of work, so I am, I’m an impeccable researcher and will chase down anything, and I like interviewing people. I’m good, I think, at asking the right questions and trying to get at the, you know, the heart of the story, and I think a lot of that comes from all that training that I did as a historian.

Sarah: Because you, you, you can’t be an academic historian without knowing, without knowing how to cite your source.

Jessica: Right, exactly. And, you know, one thing I always joke about, I, I was a teaching assistant for years, and I even taught a couple classes, and, you know, talk about – like, I, I used to worry about going into interviews, and I still get a little bit nervous about it, ‘cause you want it to go well, but, you know –

Sarah: Of course!

Jessica: – after you spent years trying to get, like, a group of a hundred undergraduate students to talk about a book that only four of them read for half an hour –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – to talk about it for half an hour, like, your, your ability to ask questions to provoke a certain kind of conversation, those are very useful skills when it comes to being a journalist, it turns out, so there are lots of things that I didn’t understand at the time that were really prepping me for this work.

Sarah: Isn’t it funny how the things that you learn in one context become suddenly so useful in a context you never expected them to be useful within?

Jessica: Yeah, I know. It was a good feeling. I remember the first big, big interview I did was with a running back, Ricky Williams, from, he was at University of Texas, then he went to the NFL. He won the Heisman, which is the biggest award you can win as a college student, and I was interviewing him with my friend Dan Solomon, who I’ve reported with a fair amount over the last five years, and – but it was the first big interview. I was so nervous, and Dan was like, you’re going to be fine; it’s fine, you know, and I knew Dan was there, and he was good at this, and, but yeah, it just turned out that, I just remember sitting in there and being like, oh no, I know how to do this. [Laughs] I have –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – I have absolutely done this kind of back and forth and having to think on your feet and respond to, like, I was like, this very much reminds me of all those book discussions that I have had over the years with people, so. And, I mean, I was also lucky Ricky Williams was an incredibly, he’s a very fun person to interview, so it worked out well.

Sarah: [Laughs] It’s interesting how so many of us who write online, we learn how to do that by doing it.

Jessica: Right, yes.

Sarah: And by, by partly listening and synthesizing quickly and then coming up with the next question on our feet.

Jessica: Right. Absolutely, and that’s definitely something that I have to do, and the other thing that I think translates well from my academic training is that I can read a lot of stuff and, and – borrowing your word – synthesizing, what’s actually important here?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: What do, what do I need to pull from these different places in order to create a coherent narrative that everyone’s going to, or a lot of people would be interested in? That kind of, that kind of skill. I didn’t, again, I didn’t recognize that I had it until I saw other people struggle with it, and it’s something like, oh, well, I’ve been trained to do that, and so, yeah, it’s all, it’s, that’s a, that’s a fun moment when you recognize what it is you actually know how to do – [laughs] – that you didn’t know before.

Sarah: Now, you and I connected online –

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – through our mutual love of romance, and I remember speaking to you on Twitter. You, your Twitter handle was, I thought it was @scATX?

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: It was actually Speaker’s Corner, ATX –

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and you were very, very protective of your identity, and, and you were very, very much going by that handle.

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: You didn’t use your real name, and you didn’t want to tell anybody your real name, and I was not so wise. I was just like, I’ll just show up under my name! And, and little did I know that the increasing number of consequences of being a woman with opinions on the internet –

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: That’s always fun.

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: But you were very, very, very protective of your identity, and you’ve gone from writing under a one-word pseudonym to being on television reframing sexual assault, sports, and women’s rights.

Jessica: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: That’s not, that’s a big step. How did you move from writing from a position of, I’d really like to not have my identity be public, to being, oh, I have no fucks left to give, and it’s, it’s time to start talking about this publicly, and being the face of it?

Jessica: Yeah. It, you know, one of those kind of gradual things that you’re – I mean, I will say, the moment when I chose to, I don’t want to say come out, ‘cause that, that has so many connotations, but the, when to reveal my actual identity associated with that –

Sarah: To be publicly yourself.

Jessica: Mm-hmm. I, that was a big moment, and I talked to a lot of people before I made that decision –

Sarah: I remember.

Jessica: – but, you know, I did that originally because I was in graduate school, and the academy itself has changed a lot in the last five years, where –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – being a public intellectual and associated with your university is not nearly – at least from the outside, it appears to not be as big a deal, but when I first got on Twitter back in, like, 2010, 2011 – 2010, I guess – and – that was a long time ago, Sarah. [Laughs]

Sarah: I know!

Jessica: Wow!

Sarah: It really is!

Jessica: When I first got on Twitter, there, I absolutely feared that I would get in trouble with my graduate department, that it would, that it would hurt my career as an academic to have opinions on the internet, and so I really did – yeah, I had a blog, I had tumblrs, I had a Twitter, and it was all anonymous under that handle, and, but then it was in 2013, I want to say, I got a job working for a website called RH Reality Check, and it’s now Rewire, and they do a lot of reproductive rights, reproductive justice kind of stuff, and I was helping them do social media, and we had worked very hard to use social media to try to kill a bill in, I want to say, Idaho that, you know, we were trying to garner public support to reach out to politicians in the state to kill the bill, and it worked, not that we were the only people doing it, but we were part of it, and it hit that, and Irin Carmon who re-, was very recently in the news – she’s a really great journalist, and she has been on top of the Charlie Rose story; she’s one of the two reporters at Washington Post who’s been covering Charlie Rose – she was at Salon at the time and wanted to write about that work, and I didn’t put any stipulations on Irin about my identity, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – [laughs] – and I just remember when that came out. I think she might have emailed me, and I thought, oh, I wonder if I’m – you, you never know what part will end up in a piece when you talk to a reporter, and I thought, I wonder if I’m in this, and I click on it, and the first two words of the article were Jessica Luther, and –

Sarah: Ahh, well! [Laughs]

Jessica: – I was like, I was like, here I am, and then multiple people that knew this, that I, you know, that scATX was Jessica Luther, had tweeted out the article –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – and there was a connection, and I thought, okay, this is the moment. I had already been having conversations at the time, ‘cause I was doing this other work outside the academy about whether or not – and so that was sort of the moment. That was the day where I was like, okay, I’m just going to own that this is me, and I’ll use Irin’s beautiful piece that she wrote about this work that I care very much about that I have done, that was successful, and so that’s, that was the moment, and I, so I remember all that really well because of how it all played out. But yeah, then to go from that to reporting on a very contentious topic like sexual violence, gendered violence in general is, you know, hard enough, and then I’ve chosen to do a very specific, narrow version of it, which is within sports, which –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Jessica: – has its own, you know – what’s the right word here?

Sarah: Just a few.

Jessica: Yeah. Like, people are not happy with the messenger – [laughs] –

Sarah: No.

Jessica: – talking about that, especially in sports, and they get very defensive, like you’re going to destroy their, the favorite thing that they love in the whole world by your reporting, and so, you know, it’s, it’s been, that part of it has been a very interesting journey, and I don’t necessarily love – [laughs] – going on television or doing radio hits and that sort of stuff around the topic, but it often comes down to, do I want them to be talking to someone else? And how do I think, you know, like, I’m so careful with doing this work, and I try very, very hard to not be harmful when I do it, and I just get nervous about who else would be, who would, who would be on television if it wasn’t me in that, in that seat, so I, you know, I’ll take that on for, for those reasons. But yeah, it’s been, it’s been a wild few years from – that’s funny; I hadn’t thought about the period of being anonymous for a really long – you know, I haven’t thought about what that was like, and it was pretty great –

[Laughter]

Jessica: – now that I think about it, but yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s strange. There are times where I’m out in public now, and it’s pretty rare, ‘cause I’m not, you know, whatever, but – and someone’ll recognize me, and, like, that is –

Sarah: Isn’t that the strangest?

Jessica: It is the weirdest thing. I will never get –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: I, I don’t think I would ever get used to it.

Sarah: I have had people recognize be my, recognize me by my voice?

Jessica: Oh wow.

Sarah: Like, this week at Romantic Times –

Jessica: Oh, for sure.

Sarah: – I was, I was talking to somebody in line, and I hear someone in the back go, oh my God, I know that voice; that’s Sarah Wendell, and I was like, what do I do with my body right now?

Jessica: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Like, what do I do?

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: What do I do? Yes, hi, the, the voice comes out of a person.

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: [Laughs] Did you want me to go back to being a voice? That’s totally cool, and I understand it. But it’s very strange to be recognized.

Jessica: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s very nice that mo-, I’ve, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a negative experience with that. It’s often very kind people who are –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – happy to meet me, but it’s also, it is very strange.

Sarah: There’s an element of fear. Like, are you mad about what I did?

Jessica: Yeah, I never sort of know where it’s coming from, but I recently – well, not even recently now; it’s been over a year that I joined a coworking spot near my house so I could have somewhere to go that had guaranteed internet and desk space and all that sort of stuff, and I get there, and there’s three other guys sharing the common space that I’m in, and one guy is, you know, they’re all saying hi to me, they’re all very nice, I like them so much, and, you know, and I introduce myself, and I said, you know, I’m Jessica; I’m a sports writer, and one guy in the room, he was like, you’re Jessica Luther. I was like, yes? Like, who are you?

[Laughter]

Sarah: And like, what does that mean?

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: Do, how do I interpret that statement?

Jessica: And it turns out that it’s this guy named Arch, and he writes, he’s a soccer writer, and so he, this –

Sarah: Oh cool!

Jessica: – he knew me from the work, and he’s, I love Arch, he’s great, and it’s really fun to share that space with him too, ‘cause we talk about sports a lot, but it was this moment of, like, how in the hell – [laughs] – do you know who I am? And yeah, that’s, I’ll never get it. I, this is just such a bizarre thing to go, like, as you said. Like, I used to literally try to make sure no one knew who I was, and now –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – I have moments like that.

Sarah: Oh yeah. And when you are known and recognized by your full name –

Jessica: Yes, yes. [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s the full, it’s, it’s the first name last name recognition that is really like, whoa!

Jessica: Right, right.

Sarah: That was, whoa. But it’s, one of the things that I, I find interesting about what you’re saying is that, so earlier you were talking about leading discussions in classrooms and knowing what questions to ask to bring out the, the discussion and conversation and narrative that you want to have in that class, and I realized over the years that part of speaking to the, to the press, especially about nuanced, difficult, and somewhat emotionally charged topics, you’re also trying to shape or at least further a specific narrative, but instead of asking questions, you have to answer questions.

Jessica: Mm, yeah.

Sarah: So it’s almost the reverse of what you do when you lead a discussion, is try to answer questions in a way that shape the discussion in a way that isn’t detrimental to all of the work that you’re doing.

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: And it’s very hard to do that!

Jessica: Yeah. I, it’s a learning experience.

Sarah: It really is.

Jessica: I think part of this work, like – [clears throat] – excuse me. Like, one thing I have to do is not think too hard on stuff that I’ve done in the past. I mean, I’m proud of almost everything that I’ve done. At the same time, after I, or in the middle of working on a, the next piece or, you know, I’ll think, gosh, I wish I had done this – [laughs] – before.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: You know, I wish I had thought about it. I wish I had thought about this issue in this way four years ago when I was writing that piece, but I just didn’t know to think about it like this or –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – to understand the questions that I should be answering? Right? Like, I mean, I think that’s a really good way to put it. I didn’t, I didn’t –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Jessica: – understand it that way before, and – I’ve been working in therapy a lot on this – that’s fine! I need to be gentle with myself, and I’m doing the best I can as I, as I do it, but, yeah, it’s absolutely this long process.

Sarah: Yes. It’s hard.

Jessica: Yeah. It’s very hard. I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy – [laughs] – talking about it, and I have to remind myself, be gentle with yourself and recognize that you are doing the best you can as you do it. But it is, absolutely, I feel like every single time I do this I, you know, it’s a growing experience, and I am learning constantly.

Sarah: Oh yes, and you learn how much you don’t know –

Jessica: All the time!

Sarah: – that you thought knew.

Jessica: I know!

Sarah: And how much you don’t know! Like, wow, I don’t know jack.

Jessica: You know, there’s a point where I had to say, okay, fine, I’m an expert on this, which still almost feels like a fraud to say that, but I have, I’ve accepted it. I’m an expert on this topic, and sometimes I’ll be –

Sarah: Yes, you are!

Jessica: – I’ll be, I’ll be interviewing experts about it, and they will say something, and it will blow my mind, and I’ll be like, I had never thought of that! Like, it’s amazing, and you think, oh, I, how did I get here? And I didn’t know this yet.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jessica: And, oh, I don’t know. Those moments are, they’re fun but also kind of terrifying? The, like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – you can be –

Sarah: It’s so true!

Jessica: – you can be an expert and still have holes, and you still need other people to help you fill those in as you go.

Sarah: Yes. And, and that’s where I think, at least for me, citing my sources –

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: – is so important. If I quote someone, I always want to make sure that I acknowledge who said it, because one of the things I think that, that happens when you are positioned as an expert is that sometimes you are the easiest reachable, most recognized person who has synthesized a lot of information in a way that can be communicated in sound bites.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: And then, and then that doesn’t allow you to fully demonstrate the nuance of all the things that you know and all things that you’ve learned, but I’m meticulous about citing sources that I quote, which is really hard for my brain, ‘cause I don’t remember what I was wearing yesterday, I don’t know what year it is; I, I reserve all my memory skills for that part. [Laughs]

Jessica: Yeah, no, that’s such a good point, ‘cause – so when I wrote this book on college football and sexual violence, I was nervous to do it, ‘cause I get, I get people who get very mad at me for writing on this topic, and I thought writing a book –

Sarah: Oh, just a little.

Jessica: Yeah, and I thought a book would really open me up to more, and it actually was the opposite? It’s really, I didn’t think about this until the, we published, but it’s really hard to engage with a book. Like, it’s much easier to read the headline –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: It’s much easier to read the headline of an article that mentions a school that you care about and to go after the person who wrote it than it is to really deal with a book, ‘cause it is a long-form, nuanced take, and I think I seem really reasonable when you actually read it that way, and you know, it was, I was adamant with the publisher, who was great – it’s a small print out of Brooklyn called Akashic – and I was adamant that, like, we would have extensive footnotes in the book, that I needed people to understand that this was sourced, and it wasn’t just me; that, like, I was taking this –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – from a lot of different places. So I really do – I, I often get editors who remove links from my pieces, ‘causes I, there’s too many links that, like, ‘cause I’m always, like –

Sarah: No!

Jessica: – citing everything that I possibly can, ‘cause I, you know, sometimes these ideas are new and I have my own ideas and I want to put them out there, but it’s always built on so much work that has already been done and that is happening at the same time and that I’m pulling from, and I feel you. Like, I always do want to give back credit to the people who are really, you know, my intellectual peers in, in this work.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. ‘Cause no one is doing this work alone.

Jessica: No! There’d be no way.

Sarah: So what have the reactions to your book been?

Jessica: They’ve actually been really positive overall, and, you know, there’s, I mean, there are people who dislike me because of other work that I’ve done, and they’ve said some stuff about the book, but there’s no part of me that thinks they’ve actually read it. And I, it’s funny; there’s, I think there’s maybe one one-star review on Amazon, and my husband was like, don’t read it, but I’d already read it, and I said –

[Laughter]

Jessica: – but I said, no, it’s actually fine, ‘cause while this person who wrote this, he and I vehemently disagree on really fundamental things about this issue, he clearly had read the book and was engaging with the book itself, and I thought, oh, that’s fine! Like, at least he read it, and I can tell that by the way that he’s engaged with it. But most of it has just been very positive. You know, I’ve heard that there, a lot of academics actually teach the book, and it, a lot of them teach sports classes, and so they end up with a lot of athletes in these classes reading this book, and you know, I’ve heard that the athletes can be defensive, especially if they’re football players –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – but that they still take stuff out of it, and you know, I, the book is really about the, the system of college football and how the way the system is set up encourages people to make bad decisions, harmful decisions, ones that often ignore or even, you know, lead to direct cover-up of reports of gendered violence, and so it’s really, you know, I understand why those athletes would be defensive, but it’s not really even about the athletes; it’s about all the people at the top of the system who benefit a lot from the way that the system works now.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Jessica: And so, you know, it’s, you know, I, I’ve also sat on panels with, like I sat on a panel with a coach, a football coach of a Division III school, which is a smaller school that works differently than the big moneyed programs that you often hear about, and you know, he was, he had read the book beforehand and said this great thing about, you know, you don’t want to be the guy that ends up in Jessica’s book. And –

Sarah: Oh, nice!

Jessica: Yeah! And so most of it has been good, and I, I’m proud that it’s out there and that it’s part of the conversation, and I did try very hard to write a book that would be useful moving forward, that it wasn’t about a single case or anything like that, so. You know, it’s, it’s just been so much better than I imagined in my head before we published.

Sarah: [Laughs] I’m sure, oh, beforehand, I’m sure you were like, ohhh –

Jessica: I was, yeah, I was very nervous about it.

Sarah: Bracing for it.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: And then it, it appeared in the television show Pitch; the lead character, who’s a Black, female, major league pitcher, she had that on her desk in a scene, didn’t she?

Jessica: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if it actually ended up on the television screen, but they definitely, I sent them a book, and they, and it was supposed to be used, and they, they cared very much about the topic. It was part of, it was one of the storylines in, in –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – in the show, and they were very nice.

Sarah: That’s so cool.

Jessica: They all signed it and sent it back to me afterwards with a –

Sarah: No way!

Jessica: – with, like, swag from the show. Yeah, it was really, really nice, so that was so cool.

Sarah: [Laughs] That is seriously cool. Now, I, I also know that you, you had a lot of press coverage when you were part of supporting the filibuster in the, was it the Texas House? Forgive my pad, my bad memory brain.

Jessica: It was the Senate. It was the Senate.

Sarah: Senate, thank you!

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I remember seeing you, like, in the very front line of demonstrations, and some of the coverage that you did of being inside the – is it, is it called the State House in Texas?

Jessica: Yeah, the Capitol is how I think of it.

Sarah: Wow.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: You were there for, like, four straight days? Five?

Jessica: Oh no, I was there for seven weeks.

Sarah: Great day in the morning! I had no idea!

Jessica: Yeah. That was quite a summer.

Sarah: How did that come about? What did you –

Jessica: I don’t know?

Sarah: – do? Seriously!

Jessica: I don’t know how that happened.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: It’s such a weird –

Sarah: I just showed up and –

Jessica: I did!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: And then actually I just, the –

Sarah: True enough!

Jessica: – the first night of it – so Wendy’s, Wendy Davis’s filibuster was in the middle of all of that actually, and it started with, there was, like, a committee hearing, and what it was, was we were in a special session. Texas legislature only meets every two years because of small government or something, and so we had finished the leg; the legislature had, had been dismissed, and then Governor Rick Perry – [laughs] – who is now our Secretary of Energy –

Sarah: Ah.

Jessica: – he had called a special session, which meant that they were going to meet for so many days, and they could only cover certain topics, and I want to say abortion was one of them? And – it must have been – and, but that meant that if, if they didn’t vote on the bill by the time the special session ended, it would die. And so –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – a lot of people who had been doing a lot of really good work on this issue figured out that we should slow the process down as much as possible and hopefully time out the bill, and so that began with committee hearings, and I do want to say it was a House bill first that then went to the Senate and then was filibustered in the Senate, and so I think it started with the House committee, and they had just called for everyone who could possibly show up to show up and, and speak, and the idea was just to make it go on for so long that it would delay when the bill made it to the floor to be voted on, and it would just be that much more time eaten up, right? And so I went –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – to that first night, and I was tweeting about it, and that, that became a shit show, because they tried to shut it down, like, into the night –

Sarah: Yep, I remember that.

Jessica: – and so people were following because of social media and Twitter, and I was one of the main people tweeting. At that point in time, I think I had, like, four thousand Twitter followers, which was a lot; that’s a lot of people. It’s nothing compared to what I have now, and over that summer I went from four to ten thousand, something like that, because the amount of people paying attention, and so it turned out that I just, because of the prominence of my Twitter feed, there, it just became sort of a focal point on social media, and it, and it was a useful organizing tool, and so I used that platform that I had to help the actual organizers just get the information out. And then it sort of shifted –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – over time as we were spending more time at the Capitol. I became the person who was organizing food? Every –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – people from around the world, actually, not just the States, but around the world wanted to understand how they could donate food to the people protesting, and so I became sort of the center point for that. I’ve never carried so many pizzas in my whole life. I had the drivers for the local pizza. We were, you know, I had them in my cell phone so that they could easily text me to coordinate delivery. It was quite a, I mean, I, I ate so many cookies. We had this local cookie place called Tiff’s Treats that people ordered boxes of cookies from. It was a wild ride.

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: And, but, so I was absolutely there the night of the filibuster in 2013 and screamed my face off along with everybody else in the center of the Capitol, and we killed the bill, ‘cause they couldn’t vote on it in time –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – that we made so much noise that it timed the bill out, ‘cause they couldn’t hear each other, so they couldn’t vote at the very end, and I was there through, I was there until, like, four, I don’t know, three in the morning when they finally announced it. I have a video on YouTube –

Sarah: Wow!

Jessica: – of Cecile Richards actually getting the text from Wendy Davis saying that they had killed the bill, and, and then I went home and did a BBC interview at, like, four in the morning? It, it –

Sarah: Isn’t that fun? [Laughs]

Jessica: Maybe, and I definitely did, I definitely did, like, radio in Australia that day. Like, that was, I mean, I – but then it, and then the session ended, and they called a second one, so we went back, and so there were weeks, there were a few weeks later of, of more protesting, and that’s when they actually passed the bill, but it has since been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because Whole Woman’s Health took it all the way up the chain, and, and it was ruled unconstitutional, but, you know, that was, it was about seven total weeks of my life, and –

Sarah: Wow.

Jessica: – it was wild and, you know, it was an honor to be there and to be a part of it and to be a, a, you know, a way in for people who couldn’t be there themselves.

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: You know, I think I made it into Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist ‘cause she actually wrote a piece about it, I want to say maybe for Salon, and in –

Sarah: Cool!

Jessica: – cited me as the person who got her invested in, in what was happening in Texas because she was, saw it on my Twitter, and so, and that essay made it into Bad Feminist, so still to this day, every once in a while there’ll be a tweet where someone will be like, oh my God! [Laughs] I was reading Bad Feminist, and there’s Jessica.

Sarah: And there you were!

Jessica: Yeah. So that’s –

Sarah: Amazing!

Jessica: – you know, it was just, what a thing, and it’s been a, it’s a real treat. I still, every once in a while I’m lucky enough to run into Wendy Davis or to chat with her about something, and I still get, I’m such a fangirl. Like, she really –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: As much as I can love a politician, I just, I love her, and I just, she’s so inspirational to me.

Sarah: One, one of my favorite things about Twitter is that it allows people to see into a specific moment from someone who’s there, and in effect, it turns everyone into a, a, a witness and a journalist of sorts.

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: And lately I struggle a lot with Twitter. There was a, an image, and I’m still trying to find the source of it, like, who drew this? But it was the seven deadly sins of social media. Like –

Jessica: Huh.

Sarah: Netflix, Netflix is Sloth; Facebook is Envy –

Jessica: Hmm.

Sarah: – Instagram is Pride; and Twitter is Wrath.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: And I’m like, yes, that is exactly how I feel. Sometimes I feel like I’m taking a bath in Wrath when I go on Twitter –

Jessica: Yes.

Sarah: – but at the same time, without Twitter, we would not have some of the national and regional or even global moments that we have without people saying, no, this is what’s happening. I’m right here, and I will show you what it looks like and what it sounds like. And then it’s real, because you can see it and feel it and hear it. I remember so clearly, during the Arab Spring –

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: – every news channel had something about a Kardashian. I don’t even remember what it was, but it was something Kardashian, and I watched governments fall on Twitter, because that was the only place I could get information, and I was like, this is amazingly weird and sad and, and really inspiring! Like, I’m hearing from someone who’s there. So for you, you were sort of the portal to this, this state movement that became this huge global thing, because you were showing people, this is what it’s like right now.

Jessica: Yeah, and I, I was going to actually mention the Arab Spring, because that was when I learned what you could do with Twitter. Like, I remember –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – tweeting at people in the square who were tweeting back? And just thinking, how is this that I am talking to this person –

Sarah: What?! [Laughs]

Jessica: – who is there, and they’re just thanking you. Thank you for see-, thank you for watching that this is happening to us, and –

Sarah: Thank you for being aware.

Jessica: – and I also was watching Andy Carvin, who I think at the time was working for NPR, and he was really one of the first people, as a journalist, to figure out how to marshal all these voices on Twitter into –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – some sort of coherent narrative, and also to suss out what’s true and what’s not, and to show us –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – how to question and – but really, just brought so many voices from Tahrir Square, Egypt, Tunisia, you know, all these countries, to this one central place where you could follow it, and I will say, like, when it, when we ended up in that House hearing and everything started to go to pot, like, I remember I, I was in the holding room – there were so many of us that they had an extra room, and I raced to get into the committee room as stuff was getting shut down, ‘cause I knew that I might not be able to make it in if I didn’t, like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: So I physically ran in, and I, and I, I just knew from having watched as, I was so, I was so affected by the power of, of social media for the Arab Spring narratives that I understood how this could work and knew that I needed to be in the right place at the right time in order to tweet these things out and, and how to do it?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: And, and it worked. I mean, it, we really did make it a national story when it would have absolutely just stayed a Texas story, and that was –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – because so many of us had learned from exact-, from the Arab Spring.

Sarah: Watching.

Jessica: That was such a moment –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – on Twitter, and it is a very different place now, but it is still very much a place that can drive news, and that, there are things that I see on Twitter –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – still to this day that, like, I don’t see anywhere else, and it is so much about that first-person witness account and, and how, how important that, that still is, how, you know, the media, the news media really is a machine, and they get stuck on stuff, and they’re always, you know, trying to guess what people care about, and yet you have this space where it’s totally outside of their hands, and, and people themselves –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – get to decide those things.

Sarah: I think – completely different topic – I think one of the reasons why we are now so viscerally able to talk about gun violence in schools is because the Parkland students documented it happening, and you could not ignore it because you knew it sounded like and what it, what it looked like.

Jessica: I mean, Dave Hogg was in the closet, like, filming –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – other students and putting it up – I mean – but even then, seeing the Parkland students from social media connect with the young people of Chicago –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – who have been working on this issue in a very localized way, trying to get publicity, and for all the reasons that they, that they can’t and, right, and so, like, how those Parkland kids knew what to do in order to broadcast out their story, and then also the way that social media still works as connective tissue to bring –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – those kids in, into discussion with the Chicago kids so that they could have a bigger platform. Like, that’s, I mean, I can hate the president’s Twitter feed and – forever – and the fact that he has it, and there’re things about the site that I think are horrible and, and need to be fixed, but at the same time, you can’t deny how much it can affect where media goes and, you know, and one thing about Twitter that’s so funny is that it’s only a very particular, you know, it’s a small group of people that hang out there compared to the overall population, and especially compared to Facebook –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Jessica: – but media hangs out there.

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: Like, it is our water cooler.

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: And so it’s, it is an important platform to spread, you know, to show, like, what it is that you want in the larger media. So while the audience might not be that big compared to other social media platforms, it absolutely has the ability to affect what stories are being told and how they’re being told.

Sarah: Yes. I have to remind myself frequently that Twitter is real people, but it is not the real world.

Jessica: Yeah, me too. Me too. It’s, that helps me step away –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – when I get really angry about stuff –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – where I have to be like, you know what, this is a Twitter. Like, it’s okay not to invest a lot of emotional energy in this moment.

Sarah: Now, you study in depth cases of sexual assault and cover-up on college level in sports programs. Speaking of stepping back, how do you –

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: – keep going? I mean, that is some really toxic, painful stuff to, to, to continually chase and go after. How, what do you do to, to take care of yourself and maintain equilibrium when you are investigating really painful, awful things?

Jessica: Yeah, that’s a good question, and it’s been, oh man, talk about a learning experience.

Sarah: Yeah, right?

Jessica: The first time that I worked – yeah – the first time that I worked with a survivor one on one to tell her story was in the end of 2014, and that was also the first time that a friend said to me, Jessica, do you know what secondary trauma is? I do now recognize it, but there, yeah, it’s a real – when you take on other people’s trauma, it’s obviously not the same thing as experiencing trauma, and I want to make that really clear, but, you know, I would get in these big funks, and I have my own history. I mean, I’ve been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, so I, I already deal with these things, but it was different. Like, I would get in these funks, and I couldn’t quite place it, and I’ve learned now, when I read a really upsetting court document or a hearing transcript, or I interview a survivor and they’re telling me their story, and, you know, I’m now able to say, the next two days might not go so well. I might, my brain might not focus the way it’s supposed to; I might find myself wandering; I might feel sad and not be able to place it. I can see that ahead of time, so then when it happens over the next couple days, I can be gentle with myself, and I can say that this is part of the work, and part of it is the recognition of what’s actually happening and, and letting myself go do something else, and so sometimes that me-, sometimes I cry a lot, and I’ll just cry to, like, get it out.

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Jessica: I recently had a moment like that where I did a speaking engagement, and I would just, it’s normal for – after a speaking engagement – for people to disclose to me about stuff that’s happened to them, often not in detail, but just that they are survivors too, but this happened to be at a high school conference, so the people disclosing were high school students –

Sarah: Oh gosh.

Jessica: – and so when I got back in my car I had to cry a little bit to, like, let that go, to, to process it, to help process it. But I, you know, a lot of it is just, I watch TV. I went through a phase where I watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, because I, it let me cry about things –

Sarah: Yeah!

Jessica: – that didn’t matter at all to me. So that felt good. I, like this last week, I was, put together a puzzle, so when my mind would start to sort of wander, I would just go work on the puzzle a little bit. I listen to a bunch of podcasts; I really love podcasts. I really, I’m one of those True Crime people, so there are certain invest- –

Sarah: This does not surprise me! [Laughs]

Jessica: Yeah, I know. So I really love good True Crime investigative journalism, but I also listen to a bunch of sports podcasts, a lot of WNBA stuff, and, you know, part of that’s ‘cause I have my own podcast, and I’m prepping for it; I enjoy that part. And then – I mean, I say this all the time – I think in the Acknowledgements of my book, I wrote a thank-you to romance authors –

Sarah: Aw!

Jessica: – because a big part of what I do is I will go lie down and read a romance novel, and I just, that has been such a huge part of my self-care for the last, you know, it goes beyond this work. It was even back in the, when I was writing my dissertation as something that really helped me, and it’s, you know, I wrote about this, I think at a site called the Culturess – I don’t even know if that still exists – but I wrote about reading, I read, like, every sports romance that comes out, basically –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – because, like, why not? It’s, like, two things that I love put together, but part of it too is it’s, you know, I read, I write so much about the shitty stuff in sports –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – and, you know, reading a guaranteed Happily Ever After involving an athlete –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – who’s, that’s great for me. And I, and I, and I love that, so. I mean, that is part of why – I remember finding Smart Bitches, Trashy Books when I first – ‘cause I’m, I’m a weirdo when it comes to romance novels. Like, I, I didn’t start reading them until I was, like, thirty. You know, like, late in my life. I’m not the teenager who found one and read it and was like, oh my God! I was, like, thirty when I read it and thought, oh my God!

[Laughter]

Jessica: It, like –

Sarah: You’re never too late, though. You’re never too late.

Jessica: I know. And I just, I was like, wow! This is, like, a real thing that exists; how did I not know that? And I remember finding your site and just being like, wow, there’s, like, a lot of people!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yes, we are here!

Jessica: And now – yeah, and now I really have a sense of, like, Romance Land and all the people and, and I remember when I first, when I was in the academy and I started to say – probably on Facebook? – like, I read romance novels, and having all these, like, especially female, of course, professors, like, message me privately to be like, I read them too, but I don’t tell anybody! And I was like, what is happening here?!

Sarah: [Laughs] That’s very common!

Jessica: So, but yeah, part of, absolutely a part of my self-care is reading romance novels. And then the other thing I’ll say is, I have also, I really like to bake. I like –

Sarah: I follow you on Instagram, and I’m gaining weight, yo.

Jessica: Yeah. I know, and so that, recently I found a really good – well, recently I started watching The Great British Baking Show, and then I bought BraveTart, which is the most amazing baking book.

Sarah: Oh, it’s so good!

Jessica: It is the most amazing. It’s perfection. Stella Parks –

Sarah: Amazing.

Jessica: – that’s her name, and she also blogs at Serious Eats, and so there’s a lot of good stuff there too. And, but part of it is just, there’s something, you know, I do investigative journalism. Sometimes it takes me years to publish stories –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – certainly weeks if not months, and so, like, on some level it’s very nice to start a project, have, like, follow the rules, follow the directions, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – at the end, you get this beautiful thing that you can eat, and you can do it all in a few hours and feel very accomplished, and there’s something about that that I like a whole lot, so that’s, that’s another thing that I like to do.

Sarah: And there’s also a connection, because one of the ways in which you were, you were playing a role at the state capitol was, you were making sure everybody got fed!

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. I love food.

Sarah: It’s all part of, all part of the nourishing, right?

Jessica: [Laughs] Exactly.

Sarah: Now, I want to get to books and book recommendations, ‘cause I –

Jessica: Yes.

Sarah: – have written down a bunch of titles for you that you might not know about –

Jessica: Ooh!

Sarah: – and I want to ask one other question.

Jessica: Okay.

Sarah: You continue to love sports.

Jessica: Yeah, mostly.

Sarah: And I find this fascinating. I find this absolutely fascinating, because I broke up with football –

Jessica: Mm, yeah.

Sarah: – after, after Junior Seau killed himself, because –

Jessica: Sure.

Sarah: – I know enough about the physiology of what happens when you shoot yourself in the chest and how long you stay alive to know what agony he put himself through?

Jessica: Right.

Sarah: And I was like, okay, the, the price of that action is that I can no longer give you my eyeballs. And I am from Pittsburgh.

Jessica: Oh.

Sarah: Like, the whole damn city comes to a complete stop on, on football days.

Jessica: Sure.

Sarah: And I have friends who are journalists in Pittsburgh who, going back to the Pirate, or going, going back to the stadium after Roethlisberger was back after his suspension, and the people who were protesting that he was there had to wear masks and, like, some body armor. Like, they had to be completely covered so no one would know who they were, and there were only a handful of them.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: And people were screaming hideous, hideous things at them, and I was like, yeah. I, I can’t give you my eyeballs anymore. But I also know – not at that level, not at that scale, it’s not an equal competition – I do know what it’s like to love something deeply and to work, make your work, make your job in that while also recognizing ways in which it’s harmful sometimes and hurtful sometimes, and, like I said, romance is a very different scale. I do get that.

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And while I’m not there with sports, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about continuing to love something that you investigate the ugly side of.

Jessica: Yeah! Well, I will say, the reason that the book is on college football and sexual assault is because one of the most high-profile cases up until Baylor, which is a story that I helped break, was Jameis Winston, the quarterback from Florida State University, and I went to Florida State University, and it was the only school that I applied to go to, because I, the number one thing I wanted out of my college experience was to watch Florida State football games because I grew up with it. Both my parents went there. My dad is a diehard fan to this day. It was just –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – part of my identity, and I, and so that’s really where I started to write about this, was around my own school, my own alma mater, the team that I loved –

Sarah: Ouch!

Jessica: – so much, and –

Sarah: Ouch.

Jessica: – and I actually stuck with it. I felt, I started to feel a certain way in 20-, so that was 2013 season – we won the championship that year – and I, I was even conflicted, my first piece about being conflicted as a fan came out, and, and before that national championship game, but I still watched in 2014, and it was really Baylor that kind of put it over for me. I stopped really watching college football and, and going in, around the 2015 season, I’ll still watch sometimes. I’m also a Debbie Downer; like, you don’t really want to watch it with me? Because I –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – I will tell you all the people – and it’s, sometimes it’s the, sometimes it’s the athletes, but a lot of time it’s the coaches. A lot of them have been involved in very problematic programs –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Jessica: – and have never faced accountability for that, and so it’s not, I’m not fun to watch it with necessarily, and I always tell this, this quick story. My husband’s so used to it now – bless his heart; he’s not really a sports guy, but he watches a lot of sports with me because he loves me a lot, and we were watching an NBA game, which I’ve only, I only very recently, for the first time ever, wrote about the NBA, and that was about the business side of the Dallas Mavericks. I wrote a piece with Jon Wertheim at Sports Illustrated about sexual harassment on the business side of the Mavericks, but I don’t really write about the NBA. And we were watching a playoff game a few years ago, and I wanted to show him a cute picture on Instagram from one of the teams about one of the players, and so when that player stood up to the foul line to take a shot, it was like, oh yeah, Aaron, I want to show you this, and I turn the phone around, and it’s this cute picture of a kid dressed up as the guy, and my husband goes – [gasps] – oh God, I thought you were going to tell me he was a rapist. [Laughs] It’s like –

Sarah: Oh no! [Laughs]

Jessica: I was like, yeah, okay, fair. So, like, that’s what –

Sarah: Fair enough, fair enough.

Jessica: – that’s what he expects from me, like, living with me and watching sports with me, and so part of it is that I don’t really watch football anymore. I actually, I, you know, there’s the part of it, the stuff I write on, but also, like you said, I have a really hard time with, I, I – part of the book explores, it’s mainly gendered violence, but it’s just sort of the exploitation in the system in general, so I –

Sarah: Yes.

Jessica: – I’m a pay-the-players kind of person. I think they should definitely get more money; they should absolutely have their healthcare covered. I have trouble thinking about what’s happening to their brains, and their bodies often, for a school that cares very little about them outside of what they’re able to do on the field. A lot of them, especially, it breaks down on racial lines – a lot of them don’t get the education that we say is the thing they’re supposed to get in the end, because they’re not, that’s not –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – what it’s set up for. So I, I find it very hard to watch college football in particular, because that’s really, you know, the beef that I’ve been on. But –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – you know, I watch March Madness, even though a lot of that stuff is still in play there as far as exploitation of the guys.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: I don’t know. I just love sports, and I think, you know, one thing I, I mention a lot, like, if you live in this culture and you’re not a cis-gendered, straight, white man, rich white man, you are going to be watching stuff, you’re going to be taking in pop culture that’s problematic, that in some way –

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: – is going to demean or further marginalize whatever part of you is already demeaned and marginalized, and you just get used to making those choices and understanding that you’re taking in things that are problematic and trying to find the good in it, and I think a lot of that happens with sports. There’s so much about sport that is so amazing, and you talk to athletes, like, a good friend of mine played football until college, and he still loves it and still worries that his brain is going to go bad. You know, like, he’s able to hold those things and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Jessica: – but football meant so much to him as a child and as –

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: – as who he is today, and I, so I listened to him talk about that. You know, at the same time, I try really hard not to write about tennis, ‘cause I love tennis so much that I don’t – [laughs] – I, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – I understand. I, I, I’ve written about Serena Williams a lot, and the sort of cultural stuff that she comes up against being a Black woman in this country and in that particular sport. Like, I understand all those things. I just try really hard not to, like, ignore them as much as I can so that I can be that ignorant fan who just enjoys the sport for what it is, and at the same time, though, I can tell you that I’m doing that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – right. Like, I, I understand that that’s what I’m doing. The other part of it too is that I just try to watch a lot more women’s sport, because you just don’t get a lot of that stuff. I mean, it’s not that you – there are –

Sarah: Nope.

Jessica: – problematic people. You know, sports writers who write on this will joke about, or on gendered violence, will joke about the, what about Hope Solo question you get every time you write about anyone, ‘cause she is a problematic figure on, as far as the choices in the, that she’s made off the field and the violence that she’s inflicted. But at the same time, just the system itself, because there isn’t a lot of money, ‘cause it doesn’t have all the other stuff around it, you just don’t get the same kind of –

Sarah: Right.

Jessica: – crap that you get with men’s sports, so part of it is that I –

Sarah: Very much not an equal –

Jessica: Yes.

Sarah: – very much not an equal. [Laughs]

Jessica: So I put a lot of my energy into those spaces as well, so I don’t know. I just, I just really do love watching people compete, and I do find it amazing what people are able to do and how teams can come together, and, I don’t know, there, I don’t know if I could ever not love it, but there are parts of it that I have given up, parts that used to mean a lot to me, because it is too hard now.

Sarah: And that is, that is just the worst thing to let go of. It makes me think of something you said earlier about how, oh, I wish, I wish I’d known then, when I was doing this work, what I know now doing this other work.

Jessica: Yeah. Absolutely.

Sarah: You can’t go back, you can’t go back to your former self and be like, wow, you are, you are so the opposite of awake.

Jessica: Right, yes.

Sarah: [Laughs] You are not, you have no idea what you missed. And then all, I think what I have to do myself, ‘cause I have what I call jackrabbit asshole brain?

Jessica: [Laughs]

Sarah: And that’ll be the part of my brain that’s like, hey, remember that shitty thing you did, like, thirty years ago?

Jessica: Uh-huh, yes.

Sarah: Let’s remember it –

Jessica: Yup.

Sarah: – in glorious Technicolor detail at this very moment when you’re trying to sleep –

Jessica: Absolutely.

Sarah: – and I have to be like, you know what, Past Self? I forgive you, because if you hadn’t known that piece of information at that time, now you do, and you have to acknowledge that you at least learned it.

Jessica: Right. Absolutely.

Sarah: Forgive yourself pa-, forgive your-, forgive your past self, but also acknowledge how much painful knowledge that you carry now.

Jessica: Right. Absolutely.

Sarah: So let’s, so let’s talk about romance fiction.

Jessica: Yay!

Sarah: I got some book recs for you.

Jessica: Okay. Yay. Let’s do it.

Sarah: Okay, so you like sports romance.

Jessica: I do.

Sarah: I want to hear about some of your favorite books –

Jessica: Sure.

Sarah: – but first, a lesbian contemporary romance that I really, really enjoyed –

Jessica: Okay.

Sarah: – is Edge of Glory by Rachel Spangler. I had a guest review from a writer named Tara Scott –

Jessica: Is that the two –

Sarah: – and I love –

Jessica: – Olympic athletes?

Sarah: One’s a skier – yes.

Jessica: Yes.

Sarah: One’s a skier; one’s a snowboarder.

Jessica: I think I, I think it’s on my –

Sarah: I snowboard, and I love it.

Jessica: Oh good, okay. Okay.

Sarah: The other one is, I, from Escape Publishing in Australia. I did an interview with the three authors of this series. It, there is a female Aussie rules football league?

Jessica: What!

Sarah: I, I believe it’s, AFLW –

Jessica: Okay.

Sarah: – is the official name, but it’s incredibly popular in Australia. There are people who are so into it, and so there’s a fictional trilogy set in a fictional league called the Women of W.A.R., and it’s the Women’s Australian Rules in their world –

Jessica: Whoa!

Sarah: – but they basically made up a league to, to mimic –

Jessica: Yeah.

Sarah: – the AFLW. So I did this whole interview with them about Aussie rules football, which I don’t understand a single thing about, but the first one is called Game On, the second one is Long Game, and the third one is Fair Game. All of the heroines are the athletes –

Jessica: Ohhh!

Sarah: – in the Women’s Australian Rules football league.

Jessica: Yes!

Sarah: Did I just make your day?

Jessica: Yes, I was actually – that’s so funny because –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – when I was prepping for this, and I had to go back to, like, look at books that I love, I’m horrible at book titles, and, and I actually wrote down Rebecca Crowley’s Love in Straight Sets as one that I wanted to mention because it’s a tennis book, and I love tennis, but because it’s about a female athlete, and that, you know, it’s not, that’s uncommon. That’s an uncommon in –

Sarah: Yeah!

Jessica: – in the sports romance.

Sarah: It’s one of my favorite tropes, too!

Jessica: Me too!

Sarah: I love female athletes!

Jessica: Me too, so thank you. I’m going to immediately go buy this.

Sarah: So what would you like to talk about in terms of books that you love that you just would love to tell everyone about?

Jessica: Oh my gosh. So the first one I want to start with is, I just read this, so I, I have a, a very good friend here in Texas. I’m going to mention her name, ‘cause it will make her so excited, but my friend Cheasty, she and I love romance novels, and we love to talk about them, and she texted me about a week ago, and she said, you need to read – or maybe she didn’t even say that. She was just like, I am reading Talia Hibbert’s Wanna Bet? and it is the best book ever. And –

Sarah: I love it!

Jessica: – and so I was like, I’ll see. So Cheasty and I tend to, like, we tend to like the same authors. We always disagree on, like, their best books? Like, we always have different favorite books by them. Wanna Bet? by Talia Hibbert is perfect. It is a perfect book! Like, I, it was like, the way she writes, there’s never a word wasted. Everything makes sense. It’s, it reminds me of Alisha Rai. Alisha’s also very good at this, where there’s, like, no word that doesn’t do work in helping you fall in love with one of the characters or the relationship or to build out the background that makes that possible, and –

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: – and so I, so I read Wanna Bet? and I, I almost reread it immediately. Like, I, I told myself, no, I’ve got to go read more of her? I was like, go read other books of hers, and –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – spend my time doing it, but that’s how much I loved it. It just, it’s, it’s so good. It’s just, it’s one of these, these people’ve been friends for years – seven years; that’s important; it comes up a lot – and he’s always loved her, and she has her own background, so she has trouble committing, and so she wants to be friends with him, but then they end up forced to live together in the same apartment, and sort of how she finally comes around, and he admits his love for her, and it’s just so great! I love it! So Wanna Bet? But then I’m reading right now, I’m in the middle of Talia Hibbert’s A Girl Like Her, which is her most recent book, and it’s also just lovely. Like, I just love her writing.

And I wanted to mention Kate Clayborn. She has two books now – I think only two – and the first one she wrote was called Beginner’s Luck, and it is so wonderful. It is a woman who is a scientist, and she and her friends win the lottery, so it’s a trio. The books, you know, it’ll be a trilogy with each of the friends and – but she wins the lottery and with her money buys a house, ‘cause that’s very important to her backstory, and this guy come, happens to live there, or his father happens to live in that town, happens to run a famous salvage yard, so when you buy an old house, where do you go but to the salvage yard? But he also, his job is to recruit scientists to these big corporations –

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: – and so he’s supposed to go recruit her, and I just love her, ‘cause she’s like, no. This is my life, this is the life that I want to lead, and – but again, it just, that book, the character development is so smooth, and it, all of it makes sense. Like, all of them make choices that make sense and, and it just, I just, ah, I felt so good when it was over. I will say, I mean, I mentioned Alisha, Alisha Rai, her Forbidden Hearts series is wonderful. But, yeah, I was looking back and, like, I, I’ve read Tessa Dare’s A Week to Be Wicked, like, twelve times. Like, that’s one of my, that’s one of my go-tos when I –

Sarah: Oh.

Jessica: – especially when I’m real down in the work that I’m doing, and I, and I need –

Sarah: Yeah. What you need –

Jessica: – I, I need to read a book that I know a hundred percent will make me feel good. A Week to Be Wicked – The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan is another one like that. I re-, I have reread Christina Lauren’s Beautiful Player, which I’m, I’m sure we all have different – if, if you like their writing, you, we probably all have different books of theirs, but that’s the one where it’s Will and Mia, maybe? [Laughs] I remember Will. The funny – I feel like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – when you talk about romances that you love, you say so much about yourself that you otherwise wouldn’t give away. [Laughs] So I remember Will from Beautiful Player really well. I don’t know, I, the other one I would like to mention is Alexis Daria’s Dance with Me, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners have heard about, but it’s a, Dancing with the Stars is the premise, and I started to read it, and I, I had heard such good things about it, and I was like, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know if I really care about this show, and it’s just so much more than that. Like, that is absolutely the framing that she uses, but it is such a bigger story than that, and it actually is adorable, and I, I just really, really enjoyed that book when I thought that I was the wrong person to be reading it, and it just turned out to be –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – very lovely, so. I have so many more that I could talk about, but I’ll just, I’ll stop there. [Laughs]

Sarah: You don’t have to? [Laughs] You can give –

Jessica: Okay, let me see, let me see!

Sarah: All right, go, go, go! Go-go-go!

Jessica: I always, so I’m, like everybody else in the world these days, a huge fan of Alyssa Cole. An Extraordinary Union, I actually just read that with Cheasty, and it’s just a remarkable book. Like, as a historian – [laughs] – it’s a remarkable book. It’s, you know, historical fiction that’s set during the Civil War. A Black woman who is a spy –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – from the North who goes to the South and is, you know, working as an enslaved woman in a house of a very important Southern guy – can’t remember, was he in the army? He’s just a politician of some sort – and pairs up with another spy, who happens to end up being, you know, the love of her life. But she, that character, that main character, she is just so wonderful and strong and smart, and everything about her is interesting, and that, you know, that Alyssa is putting these characters in that time period, and it’s so fleshed out. Like, the history itself is so fascinating –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: – but also just thinking about how these people would make sense of themselves in this world, she does that so, she does that so well. And then I was, one of my favorite series is the Boomerang series by Noelle August. August? And I can’t remember how I got the first book. I feel like I got is an ARC somehow – [laughs] – and then I went and bought it ‘cause I liked it so much. And so that’s another one that I will reread all the time. I’ve actually read that, like, that whole series three, three or four times. And then the last thing that I will mention, and then I’ll stop, I also love Sarah –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: I know, I could do this all day; we could have an hour of me just doing this. Sarah Mayberry’s Her Best Worst Mistake, which is –

Sarah: Oh, I love that book.

Jessica: Right? Yeah, it makes you make that noise.

Sarah: So good.

Jessica: Oh God, just so, you know, enemies to lovers in the best way. And I, that’s one, again, that I have returned to multiple times just ‘cause I know how good I will feel reading that book.

Sarah: Well, is there anything else that – what are you working on?

Jessica: What am I working on? I have another book that I’m co-writing with Kavitha Davidson at espnW – she’s at espnW – and the book is called How to Love Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, and –

Sarah: Oh my gosh!

Jessica: Yeah, right. [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s amazing! How did I not know about this?

Jessica: And so every chapter is a different theme, so – or it covers a different issue in sport that the conscientious sports fan might care about, and so –

Sarah: Right.

Jessica: – for example, I’m currently working on the chapter about homophobia and transphobia in sport. She just turned in a chapter about, like, how to, what to do if there’s a rapist on your favorite team. I wrote the one on CTE and head injury in sports. You know, mega-events and the damage they do to the local environments and stuff like that. So hopefully we’ll get that done this summer, and it’ll probably be out in 2020 at this point.

Sarah: Oh my gosh, I cannot wait.

Jessica: Yeah, it’s been really fun. It’s a, it’s really pushed me hard, ‘cause it’s not – I wrote a chapter on doping, and I, I learned very fast that, how much I didn’t know – [laughs] – about doping –

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: – but I also got to interview a bunch of experts, and so that was a lot of fun. But yeah, I mean, there’s always sort of stuff down, you know, stuff in the pipe for journalism. Nothing I can mention quite yet, but I also, I have a column –

Sarah: Yep.

Jessica: – at Huffington Post that comes out every other week. It’s an op-ed column where I write about stuff in sports and culture, and so, like, last week’s was about how to watch women’s sports if you want to be an engaged fan and why we should all want to be engaged fans of women’s sport, but, you know, I, I wrote about Serena; for my very first one, I wrote about Serena and whether or not we’ll ever let her retire, because she’s such a big force in, in sport in general. So it’s kind of all over the place. I, I, I’ll be writing one about the World Cup before the World Cup starts, so that’s been a lot of fun. And then I co-host a weekly feminist sports podcast called Burn It All Down.

Sarah: Yes!

Jessica: Yes.

Sarah: Greatest name ever!

Jessica: Burn It All Down, so you can find it wherever you find podcasts, and yeah, we do it every single week. It’s topical. We try to cover important things going on in sports and talk about them, but we also do a lot of interviews, and we’ve been at it now for, this week’ll be fifty-five episodes, fifty-five weeks in a row.

Sarah: Way to go!

Jessica: Yeah, and we have yet to have, I mean, all the guests that we’ve had on the show are either women or non-binary people, so –

Sarah: That’s fantastic.

Jessica: – you know, it’s not an exclusionary thing; it’s more that we wanted, we started the podcast, and one of our rules was if we could find a woman or non-binary person to talk about a topic, then we would interview them first, and it turns out that you can do that! And so we’ve made it now fifty-five weeks in sport, and, and so that’s just been really fun, and we also, every week we, one of our favorite parts is we do what we call the Burn Pile, where each co-host picks a different thing in sport –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Jessica: – that they, they hate, and they throw it on the metaphorical Burn Pile, but then we also have the Bad Ass Woman of the Week, where we list off and celebrate women in sport who are doing really amazing things a lot of people might not know about. So it’s been, that, talk about one thing that I do that helps me with my self-care is, you know, work with my friends on a podcast that I’m incredibly proud of that’s about sport and allows me to both work through my feelings about a lot of things in sports that I don’t like but also celebrate the stuff in sports that I do, so that’s, that’s been very good. So it’s Burn It All Down. So those are the, those are the main things that I’m up to right now.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of our interview. I want to thank Jessica Luther for hanging out with me and telling me all the things and for all of the recommendations. Above all, if you have not tried BraveTart, the Stella Parks cookbook, it’s, it’s good reading before you even get to all the deliciousness. I will have links to all of the books that she mentioned, as well as links to all of her writing online, should you wish to check it out, and I think that you should, ‘cause she’s amazing!

This podcast is brought to you by Rogue Souls by Chelsea Mueller. If you like Ilona Andrews, Patricia Briggs, or Darynda Jones, you will love this sexy urban fantasy packed with magic, murder, and a smoking-hot man on a motorcycle. Callie Delgado volunteered to apprentice to Gem City’s Soul Charmer. He’d forced the soul magic ability into her, but now it was hers. She’d learn to control her body’s reaction to rented souls or she’d go up in flames. Literally. She exchanged her chance to escape the darker side of Gem City to save her brother. Now she needs to keep him sober and safe, try to mend family ties, and avoid the mobsters who have too much interest in the magic of borrowing souls. But when bodies begin dropping at the Soul Charmer’s door, it’s up to Callie and her partner Derek – the aforementioned hot dude – to track down the person killing soul renters. The Charmer wants retribution, but Callie is determined to get justice even if it means putting herself directly in the sights of the murderer. If she wants to stay on the Soul Charmer’s good side, Callie must confront her enemies head-on and learn to command rogue souls…and hope someone she loves doesn’t become the next victim. Rogue Souls by Chelsea Mueller is out now, and the Kindle edition is on sale for just $2.99 for the next week. Find out more at chelseamueller.net. And I will of course have links to Chelsea’s website and to the book in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

Speaking of podcasts and thinking, and of things that I can link to – that was an even worse transition than in the intro – I am doing a live show at RWA, and if you are attending RWA in Denver, I hope you will join us! We are going to play Cards Against Romance Tropes, which sounds just as amazing as the title – trust me it’s a lot of fun. Tower Court B, Friday, July 20th, at 4:40 p.m. We will be playing games, indulging in mayhem; please bring yourself a glass of wine. We will need people to volunteer to play Cards Against Romance Tropes; trust me, you’re not going to want to miss it. You can RSVP at the link in the show notes or at bit.ly/RWALiveShow. I will have a link in the show notes, though, so you can sign up and let me know you’re coming. There’s no fee to enter; I just need to know how many people will be there. And I hope you’ll join us!

The podcast transcript this week is brought to you by everyone who has supported our podcast Patreon. Every episode receives a transcript handcrafted by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter. [My pleasure! – gk] Transcripts make the podcast accessible to everyone, and I am deeply grateful to the Patreon community for helping make sure each episode is transcribed, and also helping me make sure I can do nifty, chaotic live shows at places like RWA!

I want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Sara, Meka, Sam, Sherrylynn, and Joanne, thank you so much for being part of the Patreon podcast community.

Are there other ways to support the show? Yes! Leave a review wherever you listen. Tell a friend. Subscribe. Yell out the window. Whatever works. But if you are hanging out with me each week, thank you for that. I am really glad to be part of your Friday – or whenever you listen, or however you listen. It’s all good.

The music you’re listening to is from Sassy Outwater. You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater. This is the Peatbog Faeries’ Live @ 25, and this is one of my favorite of their tracks; it’s called “Jakes on a Plane.” You can find it on Amazon, on iTunes, or wherever you find your funky music, and you can find the Peatbog Faeries at peatbogfaeries.com.

Now, I have a joke, because that’s how we roll. This is from Tam B., and Tam has sent us her son’s favorite joke. Her son is nine, and he has outstanding taste in jokes! Okay, are you ready? [Clears throat]

What is a maths teacher’s favorite tree?

Give up? A math teacher’s favorite tree?

The geome-tree!

[Laughs] As much as I love trees, that joke tickles me in all of the most excellent places. [Laughs more] Geome-tree! Trigonome-tree! Imagine a whole forest of that tree. I, no. I’m bad at maths; it would not be good. Thank you, Tam, and thank you to your son for this most excellent silly joke. I’m very pleased.

As I mentioned, I will have links in the podcast show notes to all of the books and all of Jessica’s writing, and I will, of course, have links to sign up for the live show. I hope you will join us.

In the meantime, on behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you here next week! Bye-bye!

[excellent music]