On sparring nights, two fighters take to the ring at a time. Everyone else is supposed to be doing bag work or shadowboxing until their turn comes, but that never lasts. Inevitably something happens in the ring that exerts a magnetic pull. We stop doing our own work and drift over, moths to a flame.
Sparring nights have a different energy. They’re a little more intense and competitive. We take to our corners and stare across the ring at our opponent like this isn’t a person we see and train alongside nearly every day of the week.
[at an open sparring event at Level Up Boxing in Fort Lauderdale]
Sparring happens once or maybe twice a week, because it’s not a good idea to do heavy contact all the time. Sparring usually comes in two forms: in-house, when you work with your teammates, and outside sparring, when people come over from other gyms, or we go to them. This week will be a busy one on the boxing front—I’ll be traveling to two other gyms for sparring. Working in different environments, with people you don’t know, helps you get a little closer to the unpredictability an actual bout. Plus there’s the nerves of being in a new place, in a different ring, on someone else’s home turf.
On this particular night, we were in-house and doing 4 three-minute rounds, with 30 seconds off between, so more-or-less 12 minutes straight through. Novice fights are half that length, but everyone fatigues more quickly in competition due to adrenaline and nerves, so the conventional wisdom is to train for 2 or 3 times the volume you’ll actually need in the fight.
This summer, I’m the only woman in my gym’s competition program. For the in-house nights, I’ve been mainly fighting teenage boys–we’re matched up by weight–who let me get away with absolutely nothing. You get to know your sparring partners in a very particular way. Even if you never learn much about their lives outside the gym. You learn how much fear they have and how much will; if they have a temper; if their thinking is rigid or adaptable. If they have style. If they understand their gifts.
I have never been a superstitious writer. Or even a writer who had a lot of specific requirements in order to work. Early on I learned to write in whatever conditions were available. When I was working on my first novel, I was living in Baltimore and adjuncting at a bunch of different schools. One of my gigs was in DC and I ended up doing huge chunks of work on the MARC commuter train. Two hours roundtrip, two times a week. I suppose I could have developed an attachment to a certain car or seat, but by then I had gotten used to working whenever and however I could. I now live in a house with my own office, which still feels wildly luxurious. I have windows, my own bookshelves, photos, art, plants. I am intentional about the space, and what I put in there, but I don’t think that’s quite the same as being superstitious.
I have, somehow, become a superstitious fighter. Especially on sparring days. I always spar in the same pair of workout shorts. I use the same handwraps. I eat the same thing a few hours beforehand (PB & J, with a little sea salt mixed into the peanut butter). My gym is in the Berkshires and the drive takes me around an hour. Near the New York / Massachusetts border, I pass a road sign with the name of a lake. The first time I passed it, I said the name out loud, for no particular reason, just a fleeting desire to get a feel for how the name sounded. The next time I passed the sign I said the lake name out loud again. And again and again and again until eventually saying the lake name on my drive became yet another superstition.
But on the night I’m talking about I’d been engrossed in a news podcast and flew past the lake without saying the name aloud. The lake was ten or so minutes behind me when I realized my mistake. I felt a cold, flooding panic. I could turn around and go back to the lake, solely for the purpose of executing this superstition, but then I would be late for training and being late is bad news. I decided to drive on. I arrived at the gym feeling a little off. Should I have gone back to the lake? My first two rounds were tough. In the third and fourth rounds, I finally forgot about the lake and kicked it into gear. My opponent was tall and rangy and my usual style of out-boxing was not working. I had to adjust, to bite down and press forward.
That’s the purpose of sparring days–to test our skills under pressure. To see if we can adapt as needed in real time, to see where the holes are. Sparring is not as intense as an actual fight, but it’s a lot more intense than the drills we do throughout the week.
Also: risk. In drills, because we’re not throwing hard, the cost of risking and falling short is relatively low. In sparring, we’re putting something on the line. The more punches a fighter throws the more vulnerable they become. Open, potentially, to that punishing counter. And at the same time the fastest way to get someone to stop hitting you is to hit them more, hit them harder. It’s a beautiful feeling, to know you’re winning a round. It’s a terrible feeling to know you’re losing. Or, even worse, that you could win the round if you weren’t so damn tired. I have never before experienced the degree of sheer physical exhaustion that I have with fighting. When it’s going badly it can feel like drowning without water.
And if you feel like you’re drowning it’s natural to want air. For the mind to shield the body. These self-protective impulses have to be unlearned to have a chance in the sport, and I wonder if that’s where the superstitions come in. A lot of fighters have them and it makes sense to me, to cultivate these protection spells. Superstition, when it’s working for us, can feel like summoning a powerful, shielding force. No one wants to believe they’re alone in there and everyone deals with the fact that we are alone in there in different ways.
We meet these kinds of high-risk moments in our books too, when we’ve put a lot on the line and the time has come to make a big move. Slash hundreds of pages. Reimagine the entire architecture. Do the terrifying, crucial thing. Jump off the cliff. My own novels often begin with wanting to take a different kind of risk than I have with past books, but that first risk is in some ways the easiest. The project is still theoretical. A dream. All possibility and no reality. You haven’t had to actually confront its energies, its shape, its beauty, its limitations. Once I taught a revision workshop and a student pointed out that risk is nearly always harder when we know what we stand to lose. The more time we’ve put into a project the scarier risk can feel. We’re aware of that fine line between quantum leap and destruction.
Maybe risk is another way of saying trust. And writing requires so much trust. Trust in the power of incremental labor over time. Trust that the greater mysteries will reveal themselves in due course. Trust in our instincts. Trust in our effort. Trust that our misdirections are correct directions in disguise. Trust in our weirdness. Trust in our play.
On sparring nights, only the coaches are supposed to be coaching, but another inevitability is that your teammates, once gathered around the ring, will start calling out orders. When I first started sparring, I had a really hard time hearing anything. It was all just a wall of noise. Now I concentrate on a few voices. Voices that I trust. Voices that help me risk. You’re not tired! I could hear one of those voices shouting, at the end of my last round, even though everyone is tired by the end. Being “not tired” is a state of mind we’re all trying to will ourselves into. And he was right. The mind quits before the body does. My mind had been telling me you could die you’re so tired but actually I was fine. I moved in. I threw and I threw. Sometimes the moment your mind tells you that you’ve gone as deep as you can go is the moment you have to pull out a shovel and start digging.
*****
News & recs–
August was a good reading month. Loved The Singularity by Dino Buzzati, first published in 1960 and reissued by NYRB, and Opacities by Sofia Samatar. I’m currently rereading Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool—I’m writing an introduction for a new edition—and am freshly enthralled by that book’s eerie magic.
Later this month, I’ll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival, on a panel with Jennifer Croft and Jáchym Topol.
State of Paradise is New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and one of Elle’s best books of 2024! The Italian edition was published by Mercurio Books at the end of August. I love seeing the different covers. SOP has gone into multiple reprints since it came out in July—thank you to everyone who has helped to spread the word in any way.