Novelistweaves quidditch, feminism andHouston into tale
Anna Meriano first made her way onto a quidditch pitch her senior year at Rice University.
“It was a small group of dorky people — and we were already at
Rice, so we were already dorky people,” she says. But whatever. Dorky people need to have fun.
And quidditch — the flying, wizard sport birthed from the Harry Potter universe — is fun for the 29-year-old Meriano, who is now a beater on the Houston Cosmos quidditch team. So when she left Houston and Rice to pursue a master of fine arts in writing at the New School six years ago, she did two things: She joined a Manhattan-based quidditch team, and she began writing her master’s thesis about a quidditch beater named Ellen.
That used-to-be-thesis will be released on Dec. 15 as her YA debut, “This Is How We Fly,” a Houston-set Cinderella story featuring a lost-andfound cleat and a cast of supporting characters in various stages of learning and loving their ever-evolving identities. Plus, yes, an evil stepmother.
“It’s a quidditch book … set in contemporary Houston,” says Meriano, who lives in Montrose.
Over the course of 449 pages, Meriano’s protagonist, Ellen LopezRourke, dives into a couple of couldbe romances; a lot of stewing over that evil stepmom, who will stop at nothing to force Ellen to clean the family garage; and deeply intersectional ruminations on everything from Ellen’s bicultural heritage to how she wants to — or doesn’t want to — identify her gender.
“I had someone ask me recently if I hoped that people would be learning about diversity and racial diversity and biculturalism and gender identities by reading my book,” says Meriano, who has previously published the “Love Sugar Magic” series
for middle-grade readers. “And I was like, ‘I mean, no.’ I think the ideal reader I have in my head is people who already feel this way, and know these things and are seeing themselves.”
Mostly, she wants to ensure none of her readers feel like they’re on the outside looking in.
“I’m hoping a lot of people are able to see reflections of themselves, or see they’re included in this work, and that this is not something they’re excluded from,” she says.
Quidditch, it turns out, is a shining example of inclusivity on many fronts. Meriano includes an urban legend she’s heard that a quidditch team — maybe in Europe, she thinks — was once penalized by a ref for fielding too many players of the same
gender. The rules state a team can have no more than four players of any gender on the pitch at once. But the team in question had more than four players who were nonbinary in action.
“Quidditch has been really transclusive since the beginning,” Meriano says. “The characters are questioning their gender, looking at gender, looking at how different players identify, and that has always been in the book because it’s always been in quidditch.”
Of course, this has become complicated in 2020, after Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweeted transphobic comments that she has since stuck by — leaving many Harry Potter fans feeling frustrated, or worse. Somehow, Meriano’s quick-typing fingers managed to squeeze the controversy into her plot during “a frantic final-pass page moment” right before publication.
The result, she hopes, is a book that feels open and safe. One that feels like Houston, which is a character in its own right.
“I’m writing what I actually see on my team,” says Meriano. “I think the people I’m writing for — the imagined audience in my head — is not going to be tripped up by any of the representation. My students would not be surprised. But there are people who might be. And if anything, I hope that people get to see a little more of the Houston that is my experience.”