Kirk Van Brunt is the author of the new young adult novel Fight Song. His other books include My Life as a Clone. He is also a lawyer, and he lives in Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write Fight Song, and how did you create your character Nokes?
A: I wanted to tell a contemporary, realistic story about a girl who is a fighter. Hockey was at the top of the list of real-life situations with tough girls who “fight.”
But I wanted it to be about an indigenous girl who not only had to fight her way through challenges on the ice, but through hurdles in life/society as well. Chris Simon, tragic former NHL player and Ojibwe, was an inspiration, although Nokes is not modelled on him.
Nokes was created by taking what you need in order to be a successful hockey player and transferring those things to her life.
I call it the Tau of Hockey.
Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I had no clue how the story would end when I started writing (I don’t use outlines, just a page of bullet point, stream-of-consciousness ideas); it changed many times during the initial drafts.
And it kept changing: there was the ending I queried my agent with, the ending my agent went out on submission with, the ending after acquisition first edits, and the final ending (epilogue).
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The original title was “Big Bird and the Cyborg” (which is now the title of a chapter). My agent suggested coming up with something else.
I offered Fight Song because of—okay, I admit it—the Rachel Platten song. The lyrics nicely meshed with the story and Nokes’s character, I thought. Fight Song was intended as merely a placeholder until something better came along, but it stuck.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Girls are so much tougher than guys.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Working title: “A Hard Day’s Night.” An indigenous girl and her mother are forced off their reservation during the Indian relocation campaigns in the US in the ‘50s.
They flee to LA, hiding a big secret, where a young Maureen develops her music talents and joins a band in 1964. She and her bandmates are soon swept up in Beatlemania, and with it comes a painful reckoning with her mother’s secret and their indigenous heritage.
I'm almost done with a first draft. Of course, if the opportunity arose for a sequel to Fight Song, I would drop everything to write that.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: “Beat me once, shame on me. Beat me twice . . . that’s just not going to happen.”
—Nópika Lasley-Cheval, press conference after scoring game winner in OT
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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