Jonathan Russell Clark in Literary Hub:
Years ago, when I was still a budding fiction writer, I published an essay about how hard skateboarding is to write about. I focused on a few novelists who had skater characters in their books but who clearly didn’t skate themselves, as they got it completely wrong. But even for someone like me, who has skated for nearly 30 years, the intricacies of tricks, the goofy and convoluted terminology, and the nuanced hierarchy of difficulty all conspire to make skateboarding one of the most challenging subjects I’ve ever tackled.
So, naturally, for my second book, I chose to write about skateboarding. Skateboard, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, will come out in July. I began the book in earnest in the summer of 2020 and just finished it in December 2021. It was much harder to write than I imagined, and the primary issue at hand was the question of audience: who was I writing this for?
More here.