State of Wonder

Victoria Jamieson Clobbers Young Adult Tropes In 'Roller Girl'

By April Baer (OPB) and Joshua Justice (OPB)
May 14, 2016 3 p.m.
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Courtesy of Dial Books for Young Readers

Victoria Jamieson has written books for kids and teaches children's literature at Pacific Northwest College of Art, but in her spare time she skates with the Rose City Rollers Wreckers team under the name of Winnie the Pow. So perhaps it was just a matter of time before she wrote a graphic novel for middle-grade readers about girls who get in touch with their deeper selves by skating around and hitting each other called "Roller Girl." The book is also about the very messy social geometry that happens when kids move beyond their elementary school friendships.

The book became a "New York Times" best-seller and recently won a Newbery Honor.

State of Wonder host April Baer sat down with Jamieson to discuss the subtle but salient messages running through the story and how much of "Roller Girl" is a reflection of her own experience.

Highlights from their conversation are below.

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On how much of "Roller Girl" is autobiographical:
A good deal is autobiographical. I didn't skate as a junior. I started skating as an adult. Junior derby is sort of a new phenomena, and I sort of missed that wave. But I think the same things hold true whether you're a kid or an adult: you still fall a lot and it's still pretty terrifying, so that part's all based on true life. Then the other part of the story, besides roller derby, is based on drifting apart from your friends, and that's also based on my own experiences as a tween growing up.

On the inspiration for Astrid and Nicole's friendship:
My best friend growing up was named Nicole also. I'm not very creative with the names, so I kept the name. She was very interested in ballet, and I just wasn't. She'd talk about her ballet friends, and I'd get a little jealous because it wasn't a world I was in.

Really the parallels come from when I was 12. We moved from Philadelphia to Florida, so that was when I had this big break in our friendship. We'd been best friends our entire lives, and suddenly I was in a new school and new state. And we tried to keep that friendship going, but we were both in different schools. I remember being really sad at that age — feeling this friendship that was so important to me, it was just slipping away, and I couldn't do anything to stop it.

So when I wrote the book, I tried to really stay honest to the feelings of myself when I was a teenager and what it really feels like to lose a best friend and how hard it is.

On the absence of a father character:
I thought about having the dad in the book, but in the end I decided roller derby is a sport dominated by strong women. I wanted to show her mom, a single mom, as another example of what a strong, powerful woman can look like. She's doing the best for her daughter as she knows how. She's really attentive in terms of exposing her daughter to different cultural events around the city, which is something my parents did to us (they forced us to a lot of times) and something I want to do for my kids someday.

On why she chose to both write and illustrate "Roller Girl":
The comics world was kind of new to me, where I learned some people write the story and others draw it and others ink it and others color it. I was just used to doing it myself. I really like the process of just having control over everything.

When I went to art school I was thinking of doing animation. Because I lived in Florida, I wanted to be a Disney animator. I didn't like that you had to be a part of this huge team. You didn't have much control over the story. So now as a writer, even though I work with an editor and an art director who are very valuable with their feedback, it's still largely my story and I get to tell it just the way I want to.

On YA (Young Adult Fiction) Tropes in "Roller Girl":
I was trying to avoid cliches about mean girls. There's definitely a mean girl character in the story, but I wanted to show that girls aren't always fighting with each other. I wanted to show more the strong friendships that girls can have. That has been my experience. My friends from high school are still my friends today. Those strong female friendships are very important to me.

On reading "Roller Girl" as a queer narrative:
When you're writing books like this, you have two or three years to think about it, so I thought about the character a lot. I tried to imagine her in the future and tried to imagine what kinds of relationships she'd be in. I never really came to a conclusion, but definitely the queer subtext was on my mind as a possibility. ... Roller derby has historically had such an inclusive community that I wanted to open that up. Maybe [Astrid] will discover that about herself and maybe this is going to be a safe place for her.

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