On Writing Vaulting Through Time

Springboard on an adventure when a young teen uses a time machine to answer the biggest questions of her life in Vaulting Through Time (July 25, 2023, CamCat Books). Hopeful, humorous, and filled with a heartfelt mother/daughter relationship, Nancy McCabe’s YA debut captures the struggles of being a teen gymnast and fitting in. Desperate for answers about her identity, her struggles with gymnastics, and her relationship with her mom, 16-year-old Elizabeth turns to her best friend who offers a magical watch that can jump her through time. In time, she meets a gymnast, her true parents, and finds that family means more than just blood.

Acclaimed author, Nancy McCabe, is best known for her work in non-fiction writing on the subjects of Chinese adoption with nine years of accolades from The Best American Essays, she debuts her young adult novel featuring her expertise in adoption, her relationship with her daughter, as well as engaging storytelling that Margaret McMullan, author of Sources of Light, calls “evocatively written, McCabe weaves a heartwarming and absorbing journey. Great mother-daughter read!”

In this piece, Nancy shares the process of writing her book. 

One of the things that drew me to time travel when I was writing my young adult novel Vaulting through Time was the opportunity to make comments about a variety of issues that affect women. In my book, as gymnast Elizabeth travels through time and circumnavigates the globe in an attempt to unravel a mystery related to her birth, she encounters three generations of women who preceded her as well as well-known gymnasts from the past. As a result, a number of issues arose naturally—gymnastics and body type, the roles and expectations for women in different time periods, obstacles facing women in science, stereotypes about aging women, misconceptions about adoption and birth parents. And I was repeatedly reminded of the importance of being conscious of the ways that language and awareness change over time and the many minefields when it comes to presenting realistic historical attitudes without endorsing oppressive attitudes.

 

This may be a bit less challenging in time travel stories than in straight historical writing. After all, contemporary characters who travel to the past have the freedom to comment in ways that might seem anachronistic in a historical novel. I also wanted Elizabeth to be a realistic contemporary teenager with the typical body-related concerns of a gymnast whose center of gravity is changing as she matures. It seemed to me that Elizabeth wouldn’t be believable if she never notices or worries about the kinds of bodies that are favored in her sport, if she never feels self-conscious, if she never notices that gymnasts in the 1940s were allowed to have womanly curves or that gymnasts in the 1970s were expected to be waif-thin or that current gymnasts have much more muscular, athletic bodies. Still, I agreed with my editor that it was important to avoid any wording that might appear to be body-shaming. 

Nevertheless, Elizabeth has knowledge gaps and blind spots that enable her to learn and grow. She’s sometimes envious of the range of body types that gymnasts could once get away with and gradually has to come to a place of self-acceptance. She initially has no concept of the hardships faced by many women in the past. She holds stereotypes of older women that cause her to miss important clues in her journey to solve the mystery of her past and find her way home again. She has ideas about adoption that she has to reconsider. Prevailing social attitudes have often vilified birth mothers, who historically often encountered cruelty and coercion. It was important to me that the two birth mothers who feature in my book are fully complex humans who experience complicated emotions about their situations.

Probably the biggest conundrum I faced centered on reproductive politics. Time travel is about choice, always to some degree engaging questions regarding issues such as free will vs. determinism. When Elizabeth’s birth mother becomes pregnant as a teenager in 1988, I felt that I should acknowledge that abortion was a legal option in the U.S., something that in an early draft Elizabeth struggled with because she does identify as pro-choice—but being pro-choice could mean that she won’t exist, so she doesn’t really want her birth mother to have a choice. My publisher accepted the book in the midst of the overturning of Roe V. Wade, and we agreed that in this particular historical moment we especially did not want to appear to be making what might seem to be a confusing or oppressive political statement. I finally leaned into the birth mother’s strong denial and did not present the option of terminating her pregnancy.

In the end, I felt conflicted about some of my narrative choices. Some decisions were carefully considered; others had to be made quickly, during the final stages of book production. I’m not sure that every choice I made was ideal, and I might make different ones for a different audience. But the process increased my awareness of the gaps between social attitudes in different time periods and the importance of finding ways to navigate them.  

—

An adoptive parent and former longtime gymnastics mom, Nancy McCabe is the author of six books for adults and has published articles in Newsweek, Salon, Writer’s Digest, The Brevity Blog, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others. She’s a Pushcart winner and her work has been recognized nine times on Best American Notable Lists. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University.

Twitter  @nancygmccabe

VAULTING THROUGH TIME

Can she perform the vault of her life to save her loved ones―and herself?

Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn’t care that her mother is older than the other girls’ moms or that she doesn’t look anything like her parents. She has too much other stuff to worry about: an embarrassing crush on her ex-best-friend Zach, and changes in her body that affect her center of gravity and make vaulting and tumbling more terrifying than they used to be. But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won’t give her: a time machine they found in an abandoned house.

As Elizabeth catapults through time, she encounters a mysterious abandoned child, an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials, and an enigmatic woman who seems to know more than she’s revealing. Then when a thief makes off with an identical time machine, Elizabeth finds herself on a race to stop the thief before the world as she knows it―and her own future―are destroyed.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing