BOOKS & WRITING  | Being a skater isn’t just about admiring Jackass.

Skaters are punks aren’t they? They’re skinny kids in flat-bottomed shoes and baggy pants. They do stupid, dangerous tricks around the stairs outside the Vancouver Art Gallery and get weird haircuts. They watch (and admire) Jackass. The girls among them listen to Avril Lavigne and complain about what a poser she is. I mean, Sk8er Boi? What is that?

It’s a bad rap, actually. That’s what it is. The word skater may have made its way into the mainstream consciousness, but not much else about the sport or its participants has. As a result, what little most of us know about skate culture is based on tiny bits of information broadcast through music videos and Mountain Dew commercials. If we believe what television tells us, we know that skaters are too busy squeegeeing car windshields and stealing fries from mall security guards to do anything as respectable or intellectual as sitting down to write a book. Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Jacket, Life and Limb: Skateboarders write from the deep end, 2004.

Life & Limb: Skateboarders Write From the Deep End isn’t at all what you’d expect.

[Editor’s note 2018: Good lord, is anything I wrote about in 2004 what you’d expect?] It isn’t a Who’s Who of the sport, and it isn’t a how-to book. It’s not even really about skateboarding. Life and Limb is a literary anthology – a blend of fiction and personal essays – at times about skate culture and at times simply from the minds of those who are entrenched in it.

Editors Justin Hocking, J. Jacang Maher, and Jeff Knutson (friends and writers as well as skateboarders) began work on the anthology in the hope of combining their passions while dispelling some of the negative myths about skaters and skate culture. In previous interviews, Hocking said he feels there is a “misperception that skateboards are slackers, that they’re not interested in intellectual pursuits.”

This literary skateboarding book, as well as its editors, prove otherwise.

With a master’s degree in creative writing from Colorado State University, Hocking has written for a number of magazines and is currently at work on his first novel. Knutson is in the midst of pursuing his master’s degree in education and plans to be a high school English teacher, and J. Jacang Maher – who is only 23 years old – is already a contributing editor for Adbusters magazine. Skaters? Yes. Slackers? Hardly. Try scholars.

In an e-mail interview, Ammi Emergency of Soft Skull Press, the book’s Brooklyn-based publisher, says the anthology is “intended to change popular perception of skaters.” While skaters may appear hard-edged and sullen – consider the name of the publishing company – the truth is that skateboarding is only a small part of the lives of many multi-faceted, multi-talented people. “They’re artists,” Ammi says, and their “worldview is informed by being part of an outsider sport.”

The result of this attempt to rehabilitate the image of skateboarding is a pretty engaging book.

It’s about everything from personal history to the act of eating an entire tree in very small pieces. Hocking himself contributes an exploration of the nature of accomplishment, considering the existential predicament of being in your late 20s and “the only thing you feel you can do with any competence or enthusiasm is roll around on a piece of wood with wheels.” The book thus becomes a fairly universal and highly accessible commentary on twentysomething angst. And it’s funny, too.

If you live in deathly fear of your teen arriving home from school one day with a mohawk and road rash, this book might be for you – or for your kid.

Even librarians like it, says Ammi. “It’s a way to get kids and teens into reading for pleasure.” And if you’re like most people who know little more about skateboarding than the name Tony Hawk or the lyrics to a cheesy pop song, Life and Limb might give you insights into a largely untapped culture that is far more interesting – and far less scary – than you probably think.

A version of this skateboarding book review was originally published in the Vancouver Sun, August, 2004 under the headline “Skateboarding book leans to the literary”. Jump down below the scanned image to read a little about how I feel about it in 2018.

Published August, 2004 in The Vancouver Sun, part 1.

Published August, 2004 in The Vancouver Sun, part 2.

2018: It’s amazing to me to look back at these old pieces and see myself write the same thing over and over again.

Everything is “less blahblahblah than you probably think”. I put some version of “X isn’t what you’d expect” or “considering X, you’d expect Y to be Z … but it’s not!” in every. single. piece. as if that shit was original or even interesting.

I knew my writing during this period was generic and formulaic, but it’s disturbing to experience it all at once. The tone and style of these pieces is also pretty funny. I suppose I was carving out a niche for myself as a sort of toddler-granny. Ny persona was about trying to assimilate in youth culture, then translate it into digestible tidbits for the aged. It’s so funny and cringe-worthy to read myself performing this.

I remember that though I was only just barely 24, I was embarrassed when I was tasked with reviewing a Jessica Simpson concert (even though she was also 24 and I watched Newlyweds religiously). At the same time, I knew nothing about skate culture when I was asked to write about this skateboarding book. I had to wing it entirely. I felt like I was pretending constantly. Baby writer Jen was trying to be a cool 20-something and a relatable 65-year-old curmudgeon at the same time.