Kelcey Ervick Brings an Athlete’s Discipline to Writing

In one of my favorite pages of The Keeper, Kelcey Ervick‘s graphic memoir about her time as a goalie in the early days of Title IX, Ervick is, at this point, no longer a teenage soccer player. Time has passed, and she’s now a wife and a mother trying to take herself seriously as a writer and artist. On this page, Ervick has drawn herself as a loopy contour of lines, writing at her computer—you can see right through her body to the furious scribble of her hands working her keyboard. Her figure is transparent, but effervescent; we’re witnessing her in a moment of transcendence. “I was getting angry,” she writes at the top of her page. “I was finding my voice.”

I love this illustration for how it captures that moment of being so deeply inside yourself that you begin to disappear; what a relief for the identity that dictates so many of one’s experiences to recede just a little. Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education programs receiving federal assistance, and which just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, led to a sharp rise of women in sports. Ervick, who played on a top soccer team in the 1980s, was one of those athletes whose participation in high school and collegiate soccer was made newly possible. “My teammates and I didn’t know of any of this,” Ervick writes. “But