Amy Bass
Emmy award-winning writer Amy Bass was born and raised in New England, the daughter of two noted local journalists, in a house filled with books and a yard filled with an enormous vegetable garden, berry patches, a small orchard, and about thirty acres of woods going straight up a mountain. Now a New Yorker, she makes sure that the Red Sox, the Berkshire Hills, and Cape Cod’s beaches and bike paths remain big pieces in her heart. Bass is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where her fourth book, One Goal, is set. She received a doctorate degree with distinction from Stony Brook University and has had a fruitful career as a professor and scholar of sport, culture, and politics, established by her first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle. She worked across eight Olympic Games for NBC Sports, winning an Emmy for Live Event Turnaround in 2012. One Goal was named a best book of 2018 by the Boston Globe and Library Journal, and was featured on the Today Show, NPR’s The Takeaway, Midday, and Only A Game. It is being adapted to film by Netflix. In its starred review of the book, Kirkus Reviews called One Goal “an edifying and adrenaline-charged tale,” while the Wall Street Journal declared it “the perfect parable for our time,” and the Globe and Mail dubbed it “magnificent and significant.” Bass is a frequent contributor for CNN, both in print and on-screen, and is professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College.
Twitter: @bassab1
Instagram: @bassab1
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
I used to be a writer who needed complete and utter silence to write. I wouldn’t leave my apartment, wouldn’t shower, wouldn’t do anything that would allow me to be presentable in the outside world until I had exhausted my writing day. Now, I can’t write at home or at the office, and I have to write with music in my ears. I have somehow become a coffee house writer, one who needs music to make the words work. My mom, who is an editor, actually noticed a shift in my writing without knowing that I started listening to music – “there’s a beat to your writing,” she said, “which makes the work of an editor a little bit tricky, as it is something harder to preserve.” Music is something that lives inside me – I don’t know how else to explain it. I grew up playing piano and, for a while in school, clarinet and oboe. I can sing, and did the school musical thing and then the cover band thing (oh college, how I miss you.) But mostly, music is what helps me through whatever I’m doing. The music can vary – a lot of Vivaldi, Bach, and Beethoven, some Broadway soundtracks, like Come from Away – but also a range of more popular stuff that I don’t generally listen to as a “fan”: Mylie Cyrus, Afrojack, AC/DC, Ed Sheeran. For whatever reason, this is the music that helps my brain get from writing chapter 1 to writing the afterword. Sometimes it is because of a steady, loud, anthem-like beat – I find that the covers created by Two Cellos works really well for this – and sometimes it is because of some kind of outpouring that I hear in a singer-songwriter’s work. Mylie’s wrecking-ball anguish works for me. And I’m as surprised as anyone that is true.
Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
For me, the creation of comfort food is the key, not its flavor. I adore baking, I adore processes like pressure cooking and pasta making, and I adore the joy that people get from these kinds of creations. Cookies, I think, are the absolute perfect food. Better than cake or ice cream, better than anything. They can be sweet or savory, intricately designed and decorated or just giant lumps of awesome. I run a page on Facebook, Comfort Food in the New America, that I launched after the presidential election in 2016. I had noticed that my social media feeds increasingly involved photos of people’s mac-n-cheese and meatball creations, lots of “sheet-caking” (thanks to SNL for making that a verb) and dessert making. We have several hundred members now, and it is a cherished community. When I did a book signing at RJ Julia, members from the group showed up in support. When the great yeast shortage of Covid-19 began to take hold, members took their stocks, split them up, and mailed out packages to one another. It is no great mystery that food brings people together, then, and writing about food – whether on a Facebook page or in a book is great fun, and can be used to great effect. In my book One Goal, I write a lot about the Snack Shack, the concession stand at the high school soccer field. That sambusa, created by the mothers of some of the Somali players, is a top seller there is enormously significant in the story, just as I knew I had hit a turning point in my research the first time one of the families I was writing about invited me to break fast with them during Ramadan.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
The only pilgrimage I’ve ever made to see a work of art, meaning a trip that held the single purpose of seeing a painting, is Seurat’s “Sunday on la Grand Jatte.” My dad and I went to Chicago for a long weekend when I was fairly young because I had been fascinated by the idea of pointillism at an early age, and I wanted to see the painting up close and then take a step back, and another, and another. Imagine my surprise when such a scene emerged a few years later in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Seurat was my gateway to the art that serves as my almost daily inspiration: Matisse. Matisse speaks to me in a singular way, and I have visited his work all over the world. My favorite Matisse is “Interior with a Violin” because it makes the person looking do some work – a seaside window, so you know how it smells, how the air feels; an open violin case, but no violin, so somewhere it is being played, making music. I love the sensory exercise that Matisse puts you through – not just seeing, but using all of your senses while looking. That is something that I carried with me as I began to transition my writing from that of an academic to one who writes narrative nonfiction: how can a place be made to come alive? How can a reader do some of the work of understanding what is going on? How can we tap our senses while writing words?
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
I’ll take vacation anywhere I can find it, but I always need to clarify: for me, there is a vast difference between travel and vacation. What you do when you get to a destination matters. Going to Greece and enjoying island life and food and sleeping late: that is vacation. Visiting Greece and touring ruins and museums and attending concerts: that is travel. I adore both, but for me, vacation means very little agenda, and the place where I do that best is Cape Cod. I grew up all the way on the western end of Massachusetts, the Berkshires, but for my entire life, every August, I am on the Cape. It is a place where lots of folks go to explore the history of the Kennedys and Pilgrims and art and music and so on. For me, it is a place where I don’t bring shoes, and quite often spent 12 or more hours on a beach, reading, walking, and finally – come “the golden hour” – sipping wine and eating cheese and thinking about maybe putting on clothes and heading somewhere to dinner. I love cities – I adore them – but the ease of my life on the Cape, where there isn’t one second of planning anything, is vacation. And no matter how many years I go, or how long I stay, re-entry into “real life” is brutal each and every time. There is no way to prepare for leaving vacation behind.
What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?
My Ramones concert shirt remains a beloved part of my chest of drawers, even though I don’t wear it anymore. I got it when I was 13 years old at JB’s, a club in Albany, New York, where the band was playing. I was too young to go to JB’s – you had to be 14 (why on earth would anyone think 14 was an okay age to enter a club?) but my mom got me and a friend tickets anyway, and got herself one, and off we went. The guy at the door asked us for ID. “How could they have ID,” my mother protested. “I’m their mother, and I’m telling you they are the right age.” The bouncer looked at her, looked at us, and said softly, “You’re a really good mom.” And in we went to one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, to hear a band that remains one of my favorites, and because my mom made it happen. Once the show began, the bouncer actually took up a post quite near us, and told my mom she could go into the back, where it was quieter, and that he would make sure we were okay, especially once the stage diving started. And he did, even procuring one of Dee Dee’s guitar picks for me, which Joey Ramone himself handed over at the bouncer’s request. The shirt, black and white, with ROAD TO RUIN scrawled across the back, probably wouldn’t survive one more washing, so it stays safely in my drawer, protected, a testament not just to my love of a band, but my mother’s love for me.
