Dear Reader,
I first started drafting Leave it on the Track because I missed playing roller derby. It was the height of the COVID pandemic, I hadn’t skated in months, and I thought that if I captured just an ounce of that feeling roller derby gives you—that power and fear and taking up space while you get knocked around on roller skates—then maybe I wouldn’t feel quite so isolated. The more I wrote, the more it bloomed into something else. My LitUp mentor, Laurie Frankel, told me that things you need to recognize within yourself have a way of coming out in your writing. And through writing this novel, I realized that roller derby isn’t just getting knocked around on skates for me. The community—messy and queer and loud and complicated, as communities often are—is what makes derby more than a sport.
Through working on Leave it on the Track with Laurie during the LitUp fellowship, I found those seeds within myself that needed to come out. Through the community I found with my LitUp sisters from my cycle, I realized the significance of having people in your corner. Through the journey of publishing this book, I found strength that I didn’t know I had.
So Leave it on the Track is about roller derby, but it’s also about many, many other things. I hope you see some piece of yourself in it, and I thank you so much for reading.
– Margot Fisher
