INTERVIEW: Ellen van Neerven, Author of Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity

Interview by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Ellen van Neerven has been a soccer player, poet, fiction writer, teacher, and much more. Their first poetry collection, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize, and their next poetry collection, Throat was the recipient of Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Multicultural Award at 2021 NSW Literary Awards and the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award.

Personal Score: Sport, Culture Identity (Two Dollar Radio; April 2024) is a meditation on learning how to play soccer on stolen land and within a culture where expectations related to race, gender, and sexuality are toxic at best and dangerous at worst. In its own quiet way, the essay collection resists the social and political mores that have violently disturbed the lives of people around the world, and invites readers to better understand and imagine queer and First Nations experiences in Australia, where Ellen lives.

Hillary Moses Mohaupt: Congratulations on this book. For me, the journey of reading Personal Score felt like receiving an invitation into conversation with a curious and compassionate guide who is able to render big complex ideas into remarkable, accessible moments. Can you tell me about the journey of writing this book?

Ellen van Neerven: Thank you so much, that’s really kind of you to say. I have long been obsessed about sport, and stories about sport began to creep into my writing. At some point, I decided it would be worthy to make this obsession a book-length project but I had to find the form. I dabbled in fiction for a while before deciding that a big, expansive, creative nonfiction project would be the best vessel. I wrote about personal experience and matched this with my curiosity about the bigger picture – histories, politics, care, environment and ethics.

HMM: You write, “I worried many people would forget climate change as a new major event went ‘live’ around the world. Because, of course, it was hard to worry about so many things at the same time.” (205) I think one of the beautiful and true things about your book is that you do manage to “worry” about several things at once, and by that I mean, you draw the connections between big global things like climate change and also very intimate experiences like coming to understand one’s gender identity. What do you hope readers understand about the world after reading your book?

EvN: I want readers to understand how connected colonization is to both the current state of the planet and also the gender-based discrimination, queerphobia and transphobia that continues to be fueled in places like Australia and the United States. In Australia, we have the largest and most rapid mammal loss in the world, and many of our rivers are being destroyed. Many of our Indigenous communities are being displaced by rising sea levels and other climate change related events.

Pre-colonization, gender diversity was acknowledged and honored in Indigenous communities around the world. We live in such disconnected times, though our Indigenous elders and young people are leading the way forward towards more sustainable and equitable futures.

HMM: There’s a beautiful and heartbreaking sentence in one essay: “When our places flood, we also flood: our bodies, our memories, our sentences. The flood is like a swallowing.” (96) Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with Country, the environment? How do you go about writing about this relationship? Do you approach writing about the Earth/Country differently than other topics, especially when writing, as you do in this book, about the violence that has been inflicted by settlers on the land?

EvN: ‘Country’ is an all-encompassing expression for our relationship with land that includes everything in, on, above, and beside the land. We are Country and we belong to Country, Country does not belong to us. So in my writing, I sought to eliminate the false separation between us and Country by heightening that relationship in the way I used my narrative voice. There is a strong link between the settler violence inflicted on the land and waterways, and the violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples, both historical and current. This was important to write about, though painful.

HMM: Across “Personal Score” you use a variety of forms, from longer essays in the first person to shorter vignettes in the third person, to lines of poetry. The effect of these shifts in form is that the reader (at least this particular reader) pauses, reflects, takes a deep breath, and, instead of being jarred out of the book, is brought deeper in. How did these forms evolve?

EvN: These shifts in form not only reflected the span of time writing the book took (I had a few transformations myself from beginning to end), but also the fluidity and plurality of queer and Indigenous experiences in sport. I go from narrating a very specific on-field memory in the short vignettes to describing this moment in a greater context, with other voices and perspectives weaved in. Also, poetry helped bring the movement of sport to the page. In the end, the blank page was a field and the text was what happened on the field.

HMM: You write, “Conversations about sport are not honest if they don’t reference dispossession and displacement. Land is an archive, saturated with information.” (25) In some ways, and maybe this is an oversimplification, this book explores how playing football/soccer helped you to connect with that information and in turn inform your own identity. How do you think sports can be one avenue for people to challenge the status quo or shift dominant narratives?

EvN: When I was in high school, my brother and I were close to being the only Indigenous students at our school. This led to me experiencing unrelenting bullying that came from a place of ignorance. I found that playing sport allowed me to express myself and feel a sense of belonging. I think this is reflected in the wider world of professional athletes, where sportspeople can use their platform to make gains that benefit greater society. In an Australian context, gold medal winner Cathy Freeman brought the Aboriginal flag on the track at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, sparking a moment that will resonate decades in the future, while the Matildas (Australia’s national women’s soccer team) fought for gender equality and progressed mainstream queer representation.

HMM: As a queer person myself I really appreciated reading this book, which made me think about the roles of Elders and intergenerational dialogue in supporting queer community and telling queer stories. How do you think that telling queer stories offers resistance to or healing from colonialist/settler perspectives?

EvN: Queer people can grow up feeling isolated or alone and not sure of what a future as an older queer person could look like. This can really been alleviated through having community and older queer people to offer leadership. Telling queer stories can resist erasure and singularity and can help us heal from all of what we were told we could never be.  

HMM: How or where do you find support for writing? Who are your first readers?

EvN: I am very grateful to my friends and relatives who read this book in its early form. I’d read chapters out loud and they’d listen and offer feedback. And I told my publisher I wanted my structural editor to be First Nations. So I worked with an Indigenous editor, and someone I knew for a really long time, Dr. Jeanine Leane. This is the first time I have worked with an Indigenous editor. Jeanine is a writer, editor, and academic and has a background in history and education. It was important to have Indigenous eyes on the manuscript before there were non-Indigenous eyes. A decade ago, this might have been seen as unusual, but there is a broader understanding now of how important it is to have Indigenous people employed and engaged in all roles in publishing.  

HMM: What advice do you have for younger or emerging writers?

EvN: Don’t be afraid of trying something new. I started off as a short story writer and thought I’d only write fiction. This was largely because of my education. I went on to write non-fiction and poetry. This gave me a wider understanding of what I was capable of as a writer.