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I loved reading about your origin story with skating in Midwest Shreds. You started as a kid alone with their skateboard in a place with just a sloped street and no skate parks. What changed for you when, at 28, you found access to both skating space and skating community?
It’s easier to try new things when you have at least one other person to show you the ropes and cheer you on. For the particular type of skating I do—on roller skates at skateparks—having a community is essential because it’s a pretty niche activity, so we’re seldom the majority at the skatepark. Plus, most people who do this type of skating are women, nonbinary, or trans folks, so guys caught up in toxic masculinity would mess with us until we started showing up as a group. The strength in numbers gave me a semblance of protection. Sexist male skaters were far less likely to snake our runs or jump the line when there was a group of us, so it would have been harder to even be at the skatepark without this community. Additionally, when one of us learned a new trick, we’d teach the others, so we were learning not only how to do the tricks we wanted, but also how to take up space. Eventually, by just consistently showing up and dedicating ourselves to the practice, other skaters started getting curious and asking questions. They figured out that we’re actually really cool—we just don’t take shit. :)
Why was fulfilling your lifelong skating dream possible when you moved to Columbus, specifically?
I grew up in the 90s in a small town in Alabama where there were no skateparks. Even after I got my driver's license as a teenager, my mother wasn’t going to let me drive for hours to get to one. I attended college in Birmingham, and the city government repeatedly tore down all the DIY skateparks. It wouldn’t build a city-funded, well-made skatepark until nearly a decade after I graduated and left the state. Like any sport, skating takes practice, and I really only had access to the street and the rink, so that was the extent of my practice.
I’d fallen into the false belief that skateparks were exclusively a West Coast and Northeast thing, so even after life brought me to Columbus, Ohio, I didn’t immediately think, “Great, I can find a skatepark now!” I’d more or less given up on the dream until I started driving around, getting to know my new home, and realized there were small skateparks dotting the city. I later learned that the city hired Tony Hawk’s father, a skatepark designer, to build Dodge Skatepark in the 1990s, which was incredibly forward-thinking for the time. Skateparks are expensive to build and maintain, so building one is not something most cities are willing to do unless there is sufficient demand. So, I started digging into the city’s skate history to learn who made all this happen and who’s skating these parks now. Once I started learning more about Columbus’s skate history, I got curious about other places in the Midwest, which is how Midwest Shreds came to be.
In one chapter, you write, "What is 'authentic' skate culture if not scrappy, improvisational DIY in all respects?" Tell me about what's special about skating in the Midwest. How does the DIY ethos and grittiness of the region influence its skate culture?
Most people are unaware that skate culture likely wouldn’t exist as we know it without the Midwest, and that the Midwest played a significant role in popularizing skateboarding. The Midwest has long been a region where manufacturing has been a dominant force, and roller skate manufacturing is no exception. In the 1960s, a surf shop in California got the idea of putting a board on wheels so surfers would have a similar activity to do in the street on days when the waves weren’t tubular, dude. So, they began purchasing parts from the Chicago Roller Skate Company to create the first skateboards. Before that, they were buying used roller skates to deconstruct, which wasn’t sustainable on a mass scale. They had to work with Midwest manufacturers to build the volume of skateboards needed to grow the sport and satisfy demand.
Later, an ice hockey player in Minnesota took a leaf from the surf shop’s book. He wanted to practice his hockey skills on the street when it was too warm for outdoor ice rinks and frozen lakes, so he got skate parts and started building an early version of what we now know as Roller Blades. So, from manufacturing, which is inherently DIY, to the more inventive and improvisational development of more ways to enjoy being on wheels, the Midwest has played a significant part in this sport that’s beloved by people the world over.
On top of that, there are DIY skateparks, which are plentiful if you know where to look and “know a guy who knows a guy.” When municipalities refuse to fund skatepark creation, skaters take matters into their own hands. And when their impromptu plywood and Quikrete ramps and stolen stop sign rails under bridges get torn down, they build more. These efforts have been so persistent and successful in some places that the local government has agreed to finally build a skatepark. For every successful attempt at getting a professional skatepark built, there are probably ten or twenty more DIY spots built and maintained by determined skaters. And a number of these skaters are so invested in their homemade spots that they wouldn’t abandon them even if their city or town built the best skatepark in the world next door to them. That’s part of the gritty DIY ethos as well. We don’t give up. We don’t quit.
The road trip you took to conduct research for this book took you all over the Rust Belt and put you in conversation with a wide swath of fascinating people. So that our readers might have a sense of the stories your book holds, will you tell me about one or two of those people here?
I was on the road for five weeks, interviewing skateboarders, rollerbladers, roller skaters, wheelchair skaters, and extreme unicyclists in big cities and small towns throughout the Midwest. Some were professional, some amateur, and they were primarily women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC folks. Others were nonbinary, disabled, or had other marginalized identities. I also interviewed skate shop owners, skatepark owners, and skate manufacturers to gain a comprehensive understanding of this vibrant and thriving community.
One of my favorite people I interviewed is Tia Pearl, a queer disabled skater. She grew up skateboarding, which is her passion, but after a botched hernia surgery left her with severe nerve damage in one of her legs, she couldn’t walk for a long time and worried she’d never skateboard again. So, she started taking a hospital wheelchair—with no shock absorbers!—to the skatepark and became one of the world champions of WCMX, or wheelchair motocross. Years later, she started to regain enough nerve function in her leg that she was able to walk short distances, so now she’s an adaptive skateboarder. Because it was her pushing foot that was damaged during the surgery, she uses crutches to push and gain speed, which allows her to build up enough momentum to perform tricks. Her passion for the sport radiates in everything she does, and she travels around the world for adaptive skateboarding competitions (including winning Dew Tour multiple times) and teaching disabled kids how to skate. Her nickname is “The Technician” because she performs tricks with such precision that she nails them perfectly, making it look effortless.
I interviewed two more incredible humans in St. Louis who are putting their own spin on roller skating at skateparks and helping advocate for more skateparks in Black neighborhoods. Dee Drenning is a queer mom, veteran, printmaker, mural painter, and instructor of pole class and burlesque. Elexus Adams is a nonbinary musician, makeup artist, and kawaii idol enthusiast. Both grew up going to the roller rink and jam skating—an art which Black skaters have practiced and kept thriving for generations—before getting curious about skateparks. Instead of getting different skate setups for the skatepark, which many roller skaters do if they skate multiple terrains, Dee and Elexus brought their jam skates, which don’t have toe stops, and incorporated their dance-forward moves into their skatepark skills. As such, they’re incredibly graceful and artistic in a way that defies the action sport’s alternative name of “aggressive” skating. They’re based in St. Louis, not far from where Michael Brown was murdered by police, and nearly all of the city-funded and city-maintained skate facilities are in St. Louis’s wealthy white suburbs, and many have signs up that say “no roller skates” precisely to deter Black skaters who might want to use them. They’ve had the police called on them and their friends simply for skating at suburban skateparks and have become staunch advocates for more city-built skateparks in Black and lower-income neighborhoods, so everyone who wants to can practice the sport they love.
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