The Fight & the Void

A year in fighting & writing

3 fights, 2 wins, 1 loss. Those are the stats for 2025 but I feel like the real story exists between the numbers.

I did not keep a log of how many rounds I sparred, but my guess is at least 100. Each round taught me something. Often the lessons were simple: do better, try harder, take more risks, trust your skills, trust your will. I learned that sparring will only help me if I am willing to risk making mistakes. I learned that I do not need to fear getting tired. I learned that each time I take a little breather in a round I’m giving away momentum. That I might as well be handing my opponent points. I learned that I can fight tired, angry, sad, hungry, stressed, distracted. I can fight when the conditions are deeply imperfect because the ring is its own universe, with its own conditions, and I can choose to live in that world.

Here’s a little round-up from my year in the ring & on the page:

Favorite moment in the ring. I was at an open sparring event at another gym in the fall and did a round with a girl who had a strong forward style and everything I’ve been working on just, like, came together. Movement, punching off movement, punching off angles, being evasive while still landing my shots. For 2 minutes I felt invincible, unhurtable, untouchable.

Least favorite moment. gotta be when I dropped a weight on my hand in August and smashed one of my fingers to bits (all good now).

Most important question I learned to ask myself. What if it all worked out? What if I won?

Favorite recovery. Cold plunge + sauna reboots my brain, though I also maintain that there is no better recovery than 10 hours of solid sleep. Cupping dramatically helped tendinitis in my shoulders. I also recently discovered Voltaren cream which is the best otc pain reliever I have ever found.

What I wrote this year. I wrote my first-ever sportswriting piece on the final Amanda Serrano vs. Katie Taylor fight, which is in the new issue of The Believer. I’m proud of how this piece turned out and would love to do more sportswriting. My big project, though, was a sweeping architectural revision of a new novel, Ring of Night. This draft has been in a drawer since the summer. Soon I’ll read it over and see if the work I did earlier in the year holds up. If it does then I’ll send the draft off to my editor. Might do a future post on how I approached doing a big revision of a project I’ve been working on for a minute / how I determine when something is ready to send to my editor.

A paragraph that I like. This is from a story called “Just Another Family” by Lori Ostlund, which I read in January and have been thinking about all year. It’s in Ostlund’s new collection Are You Happy?

Shirley Koerber lived on the lot behind my parents, her sole companions a band of dogs at which she yelled for various infractions. She was a stout woman with legs that bowed severely, as though she were straddling an invisible barrel as she walked, and she possessed a deep hatred of small animals—squirrels, chipmunks, birds—all of which the dogs chased with limited success and at which she shot with far greater. As a child, I’d awakened often to the sound of her gun, rising to watch from my window as the dogs circled the felled animal, howling, while Shirley rode her imaginary barrel toward them. Once when I was hanging laundry on the backyard line, a bullet whizzed past my head and I ran inside, leaving the basket of wet clothes behind. When my mother came home and asked about the abandoned clothes, I explained that Shirley had been shooting again, and my mother nodded as if I’d said it had started to rain, my options akin to opening an umbrella or going inside, for there was no option that involved making the rain stop.

A book I read this year that has haunted me like a ghost. A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. I exited this book dazzled and wrecked. One of the best accounts of why a writer writes (and impossible question and Toews somehow turns that impossibility into a subject)—and the value of choosing expression over silence.

But writing is life, listen to me, you clown, you don’t quit, you don’t grimace and wave away your audience, tell them the show is over. Writing is life and silence is the final step before the metal rail, the sharp smell of creosote, the wind.

What I am taking into the new year: I have been thinking a lot about what happens between the bouts. After a fight, people tell me that I must be so excited to rest, but when I do take a break I tend to feel more tired and not less. Partly because I am really on my “living well” game when I’m training like a beast, really on my meditation and my sleep and my vitamins and my mobility. I start slacking on all those practices post-fight, and I need to get better at tending to my well-being even when I’m not on the brink of stepping into the ring.

There is a definitely a void, after a fight.

I guess I am at home in the trenches. At work on something I find challenging but also meaningful. Under at least a little pressure.

For years my chosen trench has been writing books. I am rarely without a big creative project. But recently it dawned on me that after I finish-finish Ring of Night I have no idea what my next project will be. Like zero. I would not expect to start working on a new book until I finish edits on Ring, but at this point I usually have some idea of what the next thing is going to be—a hunch, a sliver of knowing, a shape I can just barely start to see.

The fight void will be filled soon enough, and in the year ahead I’d like to embrace my trench-person-nature and see how far that can carry me. No big breaks. Just keep going from one battle to the next. Just keep daring to ask myself: What if you can do so much more than you sometimes think you can? What if you won? But I don’t want to force myself to start a new book because I find the not-knowing unsettling. I want the project that will smash the limits I didn’t even know I’d been working within, that will make me think differently about the world in some way, that will surprise and delight and terrify me, that will be radically and unmistakably itself. That is my standard, and all I can really do is cultivate the conditions for the next thing to emerge.

The waiting is hard. I have to keep reminding the panic-prone quadrant of my brain that likes to whisper what if there are no more ideas to zip it. In some ways the path of lesser-resistance would be to just start something new for the sake of it. Because that’s what I’m used to doing.

At my old gym in Florida my coach would say “easy work” before moving us through a training session that felt like being slowly—and then swiftly—murdered. At first I was very confused: “all easy work today” seemed to portend hell on earth. But eventually I got it: in time the work becomes habit. You learn to talk to yourself differently. “Easy” is not a physical reality, but a mindset. For me the work, even the worst work, becomes easier when I feel certain that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing. The work becomes easier when I feel called to it. That’s the kind of work I’m looking to do.