Contents

Introduction

Part I. Niche Sports and Subcultures: Non-commercial Experiences

1. “All Lithe Power and Confidence”: Skateboarding in Michael Christie’s If I Fall, If I Die

Heidi Tiedemann Darroch

Burn the Scoreboards: Michael Christie on Skateboarding and Olympic Sport

2. Olympic Athletes Versus Parkour Artists: Sport, Art, and the Critique of Celebrity Culture in Timothy Taylor’s The Blue Light Project

Angie Abdou

On The Blue Light Project: An Interview with Timothy Taylor

3. Covering Distance, Coming of Age, and Communicating Subculture: David Carroll’s Young Adult Sports Novel Ultra

Fred Mason

4. Out of the Ordinary: Curling in The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon and Men with Brooms

Jamie Dopp

Part II. Colonialism and Nature

5. Sporting Mountain Voice: Alpinism and (Neo)colonial Discourse in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields and Angie Abdou’s The Canterbury Trail

Eva-Maria Müller

“Climbing It with Your Mind”: An Interview with Thomas Wharton

6. A “Most Enthusiastic Sportsman Explorer”: Warburton Pike in The Barren Ground

Misao Dean

7. Getting Away from It All, or Breathing It All In: Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Stories

Gyllian Phillips

Part III. Gender, Race, and Class

8. “Maggie’s Own Sphere”: Fly Fishing and Ecofeminism in Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel

Cory Willard

9. “Don’t Expect Rodeo to Be a Sweet Sport”: Ambiguity, Spectacle, and Cowgirls in Aritha van Herk’s Stampede and the Westness of West

Veronika Schuchter

Contention, On Rodeo: Aritha van Herk on Rodeo and Writing

10. Immigration, Masculinity, and Olympic-Style Weightlifting in David Bezmozgis’s “The Second Strongest Man”

Jason Blake

Weightlifting, Humour, and the Writer’s Sensibility: An Interview with David Bezmozgis

11. “It All Gets Beaten Out of You”: Poverty, Boxing, and Writing in Steven Heighton’s The Shadow Boxer

Adrian Markle

On Boxing: An Interview with Steven Heighton

12. Turn It Upside Down: Race and Representation in Sport, Sport Literature, and Sport Lit Scholarship

Jael Richardson in conversation with Angie Abdou

Contributors