Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir by Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears

October 17, 2023
12:00pm - 1:00pm

Through stories about playing this full-contact, theatrical, and revolutionary sport, Collective Chaos shows the value of gaining a truly radical self-knowledge through teamwork, love, discipline, and critical consideration of our local and global societies and of our roles and responsibilities within them.

This program will be available to watch live on Facebook Live, on YouTube, and on the OCPL website's LWB Livestream page.  Log into your Facebook or YouTube account during the program to leave questions for our presenters in the comments box. They will answer them during the live broadcast. 

PRESENTER BIO: Samantha Tucker (she/her) is an antiracist teacher, writer, and editor in Columbus, Ohio. Sam writes personal essays, memoir, and cultural critique, having earned her MFA and MA in creative nonfiction. Her essay “Fountain Girls,” originally published in Ecotone, is a listed notable in Best American Essays 2017 and is anthologized in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology. Other essays have been published with Literary Hub, Columbus Alive, BUST, Brevity, and Guernica. In her spare time, Sam loves protest, mutual aid, roller derby, and karaoke.

FEATURED BOOK:  Collective Chaos Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir by Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears

A view into the continuing evolution of the niche-yet-global sport through the historical lens of Ohio Roller Derby, one of the founding leagues of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. Part sports autobiography, part cultural critique, this book offers the collective experience of a tenacious group of nontraditional athletes who play, officiate, plan, schedule, market, and manage the business of a (mostly) women’s amateur sports team.

This modern sport, with its alternative, punk rock culture, is often a place for those who’ve struggled within the mainstream. But even as the sport is often home for historically marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, roller derby organizations and participants often mirror and experience the same inequities as those in the world surrounding them. In a full-contact, theatrical sport that some consider revolutionary, the authors show that gaining truly radical self-knowledge is an ongoing, difficult process that requires love, teamwork, discipline, critical consideration of one’s local and global societies, and—above all else—one’s place and action within them.

REVIEWS: 

“Collective Chaos is an informative, witty, hilarious collision of all things roller derby. It has everything from a history of the sport to player profiles and even personal narrative. Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears have unique voices and an important message that anyone, regardless of skating experience, would benefit from reading.” -Gabe Montesanti, author of Brace for Impact: A Memoir

Lunch With Books Livestream starts at noon on Facebook and YouTube.

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"Lunch With Books" is the library’s flagship program for adult patrons. These lunchtime programs feature authors, poets, musicians, historians, and more every Tuesday at noon. Bring lunch (to your computer), feed your brain!