An Interview with Breakout Writers Prize Winner, Georgia Cloepfil
Winner of the 2020 Breakout Writers Prize, Georgia Cloepfil’s “Lucky To Be Here” was published in our Winter 2020 issue. Her nonfiction debut, The Striker and the Clock, was published from Riverhead (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.) in July of this year.
Her other writing can be found in The Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine, n+1, Colorado Review, Joyland and Epiphany among other places. Select essays have been featured on Longreads, The Rumpus, and WBUR Boston’s Only a Game. She holds an MFA from the University of Idaho.
Epiphany: Initially, what inspired you to write this memoir?
Georgia Cloepfil: I think, you know, I am just a sort of writerly person, so I was always taking notes on life's happenings, and many of life's happenings for a while were being in foreign countries by myself playing soccer, so I sort of accumulated a lot of journals full of just pages of notes. I sort of compiled them into one essay finally when I was in Korea, and I remember one professor of mine was like, “let me know when you want to make this a book,” and I was like, “what?” And then years later, I went to grad school and had the chance to look back on what had accumulated and noticed all these big themes rising to the surface that really interest me like endurance and gender and pain and mortality and things that are bigger than sports. I feel like I was sort of struggling to find my own experience of being both a female athlete sort of outside the spotlight, and also an artist and an athlete. That experience and a more nuanced sort of narrative about athletes was just harder to find in contemporary literature, so I sort of wanted to write into that space and write that book that I thought would have been sort of helpful for me, navigating those two parts of myself and the experience of playing soccer. And so then it came forth.
Do you find it easy to recall how a certain game or goal felt and how do you go about provoking the same feelings for your readers?
Yeah, it's really hard actually. I think I write about that feeling [being] really hard to, to access and to remember what it's like to actually play when you're sort of in a mindless state, if you're doing it really well. But I think the fact that I was writing in close proximity to these things happening really helped as I went back, so that there's a past tense of me playing and a present tense of me writing. And that also was really helpful. The present tense happens soon after my playing career. So this sort of temporal proximity I think was huge. If I were to even write it today, it would be a very different book. It might be better in some ways, but it would be probably less emotionally true to how I was feeling. So I think just getting those notes and glimpses and having written down all that I wrote while I was in it was really helpful, even if it was sort of raw in terms of craft.
In what ways do you think that your desire to write has been the most impacted by your soccer career?
Yeah, I think in some ways that these two passions are very unhelpful to each other because one is so in the body and one is so in the mind and, actually, you’re just trying not to be so in your mind when you're playing soccer. I always had a hard time with that because I have this, you know, tendency to narrativize, which all writers have to have, but I think in terms of the persistence and practice, writing books and playing professional soccer are things that really few people get to do. And it's just hard, like timing and luck and just continuing doing it when you're not getting good feedback, like the resilience in the face of rejection and just believing in yourself no matter what and sort of having this vision and committing to it no matter what comes. Even if there's bad agents or rejections or you can't score for a week or you're not getting anything published – that sort of obsessive like dedication and belief definitely has its roots in athletics and is very helpful for writing.
Can you describe the first moment you realized you loved to write?
I had these two amazing high school English teachers. They make an appearance in the book, and I think they really helped me learn to write. But I think loving reading is like such a big part of my writing practice, and that has been in me since I was very little. I think, even now, if I'm not reading productively, then I'm probably not writing productively. They're intertwined. I have, in the book, my high school English teacher saying someone who can write like this doesn't need to worry about goal kicks, and starting to sort of get feedback that I was good at it as well as being a really passionate reader was definitely helpful, but it sort of just slowly accumulated. I feel like the habit of it and the desire of it and learning to do it as a discipline really took a lot of practice, just like soccer. And I hadn't done that until I went to grad school – learning to finish things, learning to experiment, learning to let your voice grow.
All these things take like just a ton of practice. And I feel like when I was younger, I was not dedicated enough to put enough time into that, or I just had other interests that I was more passionate about. So I would say it's just like a really slow burn, but in me the whole time, especially in reading.
Do you feel as though fighting for greater quality in the sport is like something that you owe back to the game? How do you envision that?
Yeah, that's a good question. It is really important work and I feel like living through it is not really fighting for it, although you sort of are a part of the movement of progression. Things are getting so much better and have gotten so much better since I quit and will continue to get so much better in terms of the working conditions for female athletes in particular. I think like writing stories like this that are more truthful to an experience that you don't read about in the newspaper as much, I hope is sort of a way of giving back.
I will always advocate, if given the platform, for equal pay and more opportunities, just for television and media coverage for women, I think is huge. If you just provide it, people come to support – it's proven over and over again. Everything for gender equality is so slow moving, but does make progress. I will always be an advocate, but I hope I've given back in these small ways.
How do you feel that the experience that you had with the fast paced international lifestyle that you led has changed you or your, or your perception of the world?
Yeah, that's fun. It's funny, I live a very different life now. I'm in a small college town in the middle of nowhere and it's a very not international area. So, quieted way down and I feel like I was very ready to do that because I was so sort of exhausted. Even though they were amazing experiences, it was tiring to live out of a suitcase and always be on the go. I feel like that compulsion toward movement and “what's next?” and “what's next?” and like the floor is always going to be pulled out from under me and I’ve got to have a next plan is still a habit that's very much ingrained in me that sometimes does not feel productive in a life where you're trying to have a career and a family. So it's interesting to sort of watch how that still manifests but On the surface my life looks a lot different now.
Do you ever find yourself using the pregame rituals you write about to get yourself in the right mindset to write?
No, but I think it would probably be really helpful. I think I've struggled to figure out the balance of routine and also forgiveness for how to fit writing into a life where you have other things going on, and I think some sort of rituals would be really wonderful.
I do like to write in the morning – I like to read as I'm writing and thinking so I have a little shed out back where I can go sit when it's not 105 degrees here like it is right now. I'm not as structured around those sort of rituals, but I think it'd be really interesting and cool. Maybe you've inspired me to experiment with that actually.
You wrote a lot about the idea of time and how it applies in extreme ways for professional athletes. Can you talk a little bit more about how being on such a time crunch during your athletic career has shaped your life beyond soccer?
I mean, it's sort of just the way life is, right? That's why it's also kind of a study of mortality. There's the athlete – just the other phases of our life have like short amounts of time, right? Being in your athletic prime for any sport goes by quite quickly. Now I'm adjusting to sort of “what does like running look like when I can't get all my best times?” or sort of shifting our perception.
I mean, now I just became a parent and it's sort of like you're watching phases of your life move by really quickly as development happens so quickly with young kids. And then, it’s like, watching my parents retire and move into a different phase of their life.
You just watch these sort of like – ______ says it's like a second death and there's so many of those deaths and rebirths in our life. So trying to understand how to move through those gracefully and also grieve appropriately and live with your other self appropriately as we move through them is really all connected in that way.
How has the practice of pushing past obstacles during your athletic career in order to follow your passion impacted the way that you write and continue to live?
I think, yeah, the book is quite melancholy. I found it harder to access and to write about the, like, very joyful moments, which is so interesting, because it's also the only reason I kept playing was because I loved it, because I was making very little money, and I was not going to be a famous soccer player, right?
I mean, I played to get better, that sort of seeking feeling, but also because I found such amazing moments of joy in it. So I think there's like a really deep level of trust there that there is a love that requires this sort of sacrifice and it will sort of come and go. And that feeling definitely with writing is like not fun most of the time for me. It's really tedious and doesn't go well, and then it does. Those are less ecstatic moments. It's not like scoring a goal when you're like, “nice, paragraph!” but a real feeling of accomplishment can still manifest. And so I think it's just sort of trusting this is part of the process, like running sprints on this field by myself is part of the process and enjoying it because it's part of the process, even if it is a bit of suffering. I have a lot of faith in that cycle and that's another reason that I've been able to continue writing.
What's one piece of advice that you've received as a writer that's stayed with you?
One piece of advice as a writer. Man, that's hard. I feel like I'm still in a phase of getting so much advice and feedback and guidance. Maybe just the most recent thing someone said to me was “it doesn't matter because you're going to keep writing anyways”, in terms of, you know, publication or sales or all these things you can start obsessing over. Thinking about how this is like a practice, a relationship for the rest of your life, and it's going to be there no matter what if you're actually like a writer. You don't really have a choice in the matter in some ways, so learning to think about the breadth of the life rather than the ups and downs or what's like asked of you in terms of the market.
