Story Behind the Story

Since my short story this week is so... short. There are not really excerpts I can share. My inspiration came from the most recent surfacing of abuses by sports medicine staff of athletic programs. And the protections in place that dismiss complaints, making it impossible for the victims to be empowered. So, this is a rare opportunity where I want to share the story behind the story, and to do that, share the discussion with my really amazing critique group who showed up for me to workshop this short story and help it fit into the literary genre.

Inspiration was a call for submissions on the topic of "Summer." As an athlete, summer means training camp for me. I had the beautiful example from C.L. Clark about women being in their bodies, and then the sports medicine abuse in Michigan. I went to my alumni community - because we had a sports medicine doctor who was creepy. I tried to avoid seeing him, and saught out our team of physical therapists. However, when I had an injury which was more severe than just heating and icing, I was required to get a diagnosis from this clinic in University health devoted to athletes. They were usually wrong. I had leg biomechanic issues, like compartment syndrome of my shin muscle, and my knee cap woud track laterally. He would suggest surgery. Thankfully the physical therapists had a more realistic grasp of my physiology, and assured me that if I just went through the motions of getting the diagnosis and prescription for therapy they would ignore his recommendations. In my first year, I had already heard disparaging descriptions of the doctor as being creepy. Not really sure what that meant, I was more annoyed that he was so incompetent than anything else. When I asked the alumni community if anyone remembered him - the stark message came when a woman asked me if I was at University in the 80s because she remembered him. Then a woman I did know from my sport from the mid 00s responded with the nickname they had for him. Twenty years of athletes, in the programme at the same time, all experienced the same culture. That was the huge impact the conversation had on me.

For the short story, I talked very little about the specific sport and focused on the lifestyle. Cross-training, the social dynamics. I shifted the focus away from the US University system and to a UK elite institution, and focused on a high performance training group that was somehow adjacent to it - so more the European structure of sport, and I used real life conversations and situations I have personally experienced. The abuse by the sport medicine doctor I extrapolated from that memory with our creepy doctor. I was not sure how far to go with it. In the Michigan case, there was a male athlete that cited he would go with an arm injury, for which the doctor would do prostate and testicular exams to diagnose. Abuse does not have to mean something as extreme or explicit as rape. Without being that explicit or extreme will every ready fully understand that it was abuse? Sadly, even people who will unquestioningly condemn rape will still try to explain away other touching and question a victim about it being their imagination.

In my critique I was admonished that the way for readers to connect with the general message, ironically, was leaning into grounding the world of sport in specifics.

I think the conversation during critique is worth mentioning as part of understanding the conversation and back story of this story. There was really a great group. It was very short, which is good for critique groups. 2000 words takes less time than 5000 words. However, one of my readers this week reminded me I needed to issue a content warning with the sexual assault scene, so I was nervous that it might deter participants. However, it brought some new faces I do not always see when we are critiquing something falling in secondary worlds, who were passionate about how I was handling this topic and invested in what was conveyed. That was wonderful. A few of the regular attendees came as well, especially men. Their commentary was interesting. One even said he cares very little about sport, so when a character was presented as a writer, he wanted to know more about what she wrote! I did include a writer character to include the writing community in the story, but there were a lot of characters for a laser focused short piece.

The way the men responded to this story became a topic of conversation from the invested women present, and I think all of this certainly conveys the strength of the story. One reader this week said it would not be as much of a conversation starter as all of the non-fiction accounts in the news which are more widely read than fiction. However, one woman observed that memoirs have to be careful about how they write about real life people. The letters that gymnasts read to the coach in Michigan told what he made them feel and experience emotionally. However, these stories present the readers with the question of past events and the question "how did this happen?" My university recently appointed a woman as director of university athletics, so based on the impact that the (now deceased) sports doctor we encounter had on 20 years of women, I penned her a letter on the culture that protected the situation, and then mentioned that there was actually a male coach in my tenure who I definitely knew stories of more explicit abuses of the women's team. If the predator is removed, the structure that protected him is not, and will just attract perpetuation of the problem.

One of the men who offered commentary proceeded to explain to me the lifestyle of high performance athletes and what their world was like. At the end of the feedback round when I presented responses, I mentioned that of course I chose a setting I knew, which was very niche, which is why I had stuck to more general experiences like cross-training, to make it more broadly connecting, which they helped explain was not the right approach. Hearing a man with no experience in a high performance training environment explain to me the details I needed to consider was certainly an interesting experience.

Another man said I needed to say something different than the body of writing on this topic. However, back to it being a narrative piece of fiction rather than real life, it brings the reader into the actual events and feelings of someone experiencing it in real time, instead of listening to events that happened in the past wondering why? One of the men suggested that the theme of sexual assault was "so emotional" that it would dominate any other themes in the story? Really? My response to that is that is that how the women who experience it experience that reality? Are they allowed to be consumed or experience only the overwhelming emotion that they have been assaulted, and should they? Is that now the only emotional response you have to a woman who has experienced assault because it is now the one thing you see that defines her? If that is the case, you need to judge 30% of the female population - and I believe that statistic is from Western cultures. In other cultures in the world that statistic might be much higher. That means if you look around to the women you know, you need to assume that 30% of them have been sexual assaulted. Is the suggestion that 30% of the female population are now allowed to let the emotions of sexual assault dominate their entire conversations? I am sure if given that license, we would see a lot of really angry people and some faster moving changes as a result.

One man said he wanted to relate to this character and understand her shame and embarassment, so he put himself in a situation where he felt shame and embarassment. His correlating experience was when someone screwed him over in business, and would cause him to avoid talking about the embarassment he felt. He suggested I should put a male character in my story having an experience that men could relate to in order to understand the shame the character felt. One of my invested women responded very definitively that men need to learn to relate to the character not need things to be translated to their experience.

One of my regular critique partners has suggested that I should write a collection of short stories now about the experience of being woman in this world where these obstacles are experienced. She was actually afraid if I included too many points of focus, I might use up or run out of examples to use in other stories, as if one character with an isolated character flaw in this story would steal away the potential for real life based bad behavior from other male characters in other stories. That makes me laugh.

Some of the specific lines in the story discussed were when one character says "I don't think about my body that way." Was seen as speaking truth to the female experience of not needing to move through the world into spaces obstructed from just living life by focus on things we do not even think about. When one character questions "why should we understand what triggers bad behavior instead of trusting our medical staff?" one of the men referred to this as "feminist theory" which startled me. Is it though?

Because being able to trust medical staff not to abuse you - even if you are the man in Michigan - is somehow "feminist theory?" I think definitely if men are going to ask these kinds of questions in discussion groups with women, and let women respond to them instead of ignoring their ludicracy, that right there does something different by publishing the piece, doesn't it?