Playing football for the Flash, my team in suburban Paris, was stranger still. La Courneuve, the suburb where the team was based, was more the bland concrete and metal poverty of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes than the chic café culture of the Left Bank. The working- and lower-class blacks, North Africans and whites who made up the team were the people who got followed by security guards in stores, who got hassled by the police during “random” stops to check ID papers. The French call this demographic of their society, “les marginaux” — marginals. But my teammates refused the label. They defined themselves as having been forced to the margins.

For them, American models displayed the
how-to of anti-establishment behavior. Many wore replica letterman’s jackets and baseball caps, a rebuff of France’s culture of fashion. Two players restored and drove big 1950s American cars. They all greeted each other with soul handshakes, and one player once explained to me that seeing the blaxploitation classic Shaft as young men had profoundly marked them. They associated American football, an in-your-face, violent game, with African-American culture, and they embraced it as another way to distinguish themselves from the larger French society.

Eventually, the two things — the attempt to become a writer and my experiences playing football in La Courneuve — began to merge.

When I came back to the US and enrolled in the MFA program at UMass, I knew I wanted to write about my five years abroad. Away Running began there. It was a long road after that, but it started there.

As an unagented author, how did you identify your editor and connect the manuscript with the publishing house?

Away Running’s journey to print was long, serpentine, and frankly, at times kind of odious. Every author has at least one story about the difficulty and pain of becoming a published writer. Ours — my coauthor’s and mine — had tinges of racism to it.

Luc Bouchard

The book began as a dual-voiced memoir chronicling Luc Bouchard’s and my experiences playing American football in the working-class and poor, immigrant communities surrounding Paris, a new slant on the long tradition of North American expatriate narratives. The manuscript circulated among New York publishing houses. One editor commented that she thought the story would make a great movie. But none accepted the book.

It was my agent at the time, a friend and former student, Paul Rodeen, who suggested that Luc and I transform it into a young adult novel. He told us about the lack of books aimed at what the mainstream publishing industry dismissively calls “reluctant readers” — that is, boys. I did a little research and realized that not just boys tend to be overlooked by mainstream publishing, but children of color, broadly, and particularly boys of color. I wrote an essay, “Invisible Boys,” that appeared in American Book Review in July 2013, to call attention to this ongoing and shameful legacy, and Luc and I decided to re-imagine Away Running as YA.

Penguin initially bought the idea based on a written proposal but later orphaned the project when Luc and I refused to cut the black point-of-view character and tell the story uniquely from the white boy’s perspective. The black character, Freeman, is a working-class kid from San Antonio, a high school football player who excels in school as well as on the field. But in trying to deal with his father’s death in Iraq, he resents his Muslim teammates in his new community outside Paris (a place like La Courneuve). Though he doesn’t realize it yet, he views those brown boys in ways that mirror how he was treated as a black boy growing up in the Texas.

Our editor at Penguin, who was white, disparaged our characterization of the black boy. He called the complex aspects of his personality “ugly” and “unattractive,” and referred to his voice as “slang.” He found it unbelievable that a boy who spoke this way with his friends (though the character code-switches to standard English with his mother and teachers) could master French sufficiently to function in France. (That the main white character can speak both English and French raised no red flags for him.)

After Penguin orphaned us, the other mainstream houses, maybe predictably, also passed on the manuscript.

From its founding in 1984, Orca Book Publishers, out of Vancouver, has been committed to diversity and inclusiveness and has pioneered publishing books for so-called “reluctant readers.” Last year, it released a book on LGBT history for young readers, Pride:Celebrating Diversity & Community. Paul and I had parted ways professionally (though we are still friends!), so I queried Orca myself, and they took an immediate interest in Away Running. They proved to be a great fit. Our editor, Sarah Harvey, was great, asking the right questions, pointing us in good directions to find solutions to the manuscript’s problems.


What model books were most useful to you and how?

I’d never read YA before writing Away Running, not even when I was a YA myself. As strange as it may sound, the book that may have most influenced me in writing Away Running is North Dallas Forty by Peter Gent (William Morrow, 1973), this 1970s roman à clef about the Dallas Cowboys of the 1960s. I read it when I was fifteen, traveling overnight on a Greyhound from West Texas to Kansas City, where my father lived, and it surprised me in a way that no book had surprised me before. The movie had just come out and all my teammates and I had found a way to see it, even though it was rated R. I had stumbled upon a copy of the paperback at a garage sale with my mom not long after seeing it and thought it might make the fifteen-hour bus ride go by faster.

David on a YA panel at the Texas Book Festival

Where the movie depicts this rowdy and raunchy bacchanalia about pro football, the book is just as much a telling study of post-sixties America. Like every other high school player, I dreamed of going pro, and like every single Texan, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Dallas Cowboys. They may have been America’s Team but Texans venerated them as downright saintly. But the book takes an unflinching look at the racism and misogyny at the heart of the team and the society that reveres it. Football creates and rewards conformity, but the book tells the story of this free-thinking individualist caught up in football culture because he loves to play the game.

North Dallas Forty was one of the few books I took with me when I went abroad at twenty-two, and in certain moods, I’d always return to it. I saw something of myself in the main character, and I came to recognize my teammates on the Flash as nonconforming fellow travellers.

My Flash teammates were misfits but proud, loyal, and community-oriented. La Courneuve, La Courneuve had a mairie rouge, a “red” city council, with its mayor and other elected officials members of France’s Communist Party. Most poor municipalities in suburban Paris did (and do). At its origins, the Flash was a collaboration between the township and the team intended to provide an outlet for local young men other than street-life. Two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, none of my teammates saw any irony in the fact that their township was sponsoring their American football club.

So when I started thinking about writing about the Flash, aspects of North Dallas Forty echoed in my imagination. Luc and I wanted Away Running to be more about the society the characters live in than about the sport they play. But we also recognized that we were writing about boys and girls, primarily for boys and girls. Since our book had not started out as YA, we spent one spring day sitting under the Egg in Millenium Park in Chicago and read the entire manuscript aloud. Luc read Matt, I read Free, and we made sure that every dirty word, every incidence of violence, every seemingly risqué scene (there is only one) was warranted and belonged.