Melissa ‘Melicious’ Joulwan
The Texas roller-derby queen chronicles her double life with her book, Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track
By Mia Horberg
Published: April 16th, 2007 | 3:17pm
Melissa “Melicious” Joulwan fell in love with roller derby after seeing her first bout in Austin, Texas, in 2002. After some initial fear and hesitance, she joined the Austin roller-derby team the Hellcats shortly thereafter.
With little to no rules in place, bad attitudes, and the type of drama that can only happen in a stadium filled with estrogen, Joulwan helped lead a revolution. In 2003, she became one of the founding members of the Texas Rollergirls Rock-n-Roller Derby league.
Joulwan has added “writer” to her resume. In April 2007, she published Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track
When I arrived at the correct Chicago bar that we’d arranged to meet up at, I was greeted by a warm smile and a handshake. Joulwan is shorter, friendlier, and resembles Betty Paige more than I’d imagined. We settled into a booth with some much-needed coffee and hot pretzels before she made her way to a book signing at a Windy City Rollers bout.
Was it harder for you to try out for the derby or write this book?
Definitely writing this book. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I went into skating; it was a little intimidating but it was really fun. Writing the book was really challenging in ways I didn’t really anticipate. The biggest issue is that I had five weeks to write my first draft and it needed to be 100,000 words, so I was writing between 3,000 to 3,500 words a day and it got really, really lonely.
It was really difficult and I was also interviewing skaters while I was doing that. So going back and forth from trying to put the story together and also interviewing people and coming up with questions and trying to be engaging and in a lot of cases talking to girls who don’t know me. I had to build up their trust to tell me the stories of when they started and they were really great about sharing personal details with me, which I think, really made the story better. And it’s my first book so I kept alternating between being really excited and not thinking I could do it. If I could’ve just shut up my little voice, it might have been a lot easier.
You make an interesting point about how you felt as though there’d be more camaraderie among the team at first. You separate the Good Girls from the Mean Girls and found that even though you were on the same team, the girls you were with weren’t necessarily your friends. I thought that’s really a metaphor for life and women’s relationships in general.
It was really hard that first season because I don’t have any team sport background. My ideas of what it would be like were shaped by corny sports movies, which I love. It was really disappointing. I will say now, it’s really changed. We really pulled together when we went through that stressful splitting time. So I feel like now I have the team dynamic that I wish we would’ve had when I first started. I can’t believe how rewarding it is.
Some of the names that the girls came up with had me laughing out loud while reading. My favorite being “Sedonya Face.” What are some of your favorites?
I have some new ones because we went to the Dust Devil last weekend and last night I met some girls. The one I heard last night, “Sixteen Scandals.” Great! I was signing her book and I told her I felt like I needed to make some reference to Jake Ryan.
Oh yeah, he’s dreamy.
“Riley Coyote,” that was a really good one. There was one at the Dust Devil that we couldn’t stop talking about.
Who do you think the primary target audience for your book is? Because I can see this being really influential for teens especially.
My hope is that people outside the derby will get a lot out of it. It’s been very well-received by the derby community, and I was hoping that it would be. What I’d really like is for young women and women in their 30s and 40s to learn from what we did with roller derby and apply it to anything they want to do with life. Even though it’s a book about roller derby, it’s really about fighting for what you believe in, sticking to your guns, having faith in your integrity, and finding your community. I think roller derby is something that brought us together, but the bonds we’ve made playing is what is going to keep us together.
I’ve noticed over the last year or so [that] the game has evolved to become a really legitimate competitive sport. So much of the bullshit that we used to argue about off the track is gone, because all that weird girly, catty, competitiveness that can creep into female relationships is fought out on the track. And that lets us be really supportive of each other off the track. It’s great. I hope that girls who don’t think they like sports can read this book and think, “Wow, there might be a sport out there for me.” You know, having to dress like someone else and having someone else tell me what to do, I’m not into that. At all.
What’s the worst injury you’ve ever witnessed? Some of the ones described in the book made me gag.
Whiskey L’Amore breaking her leg was really bad. The one that made me really gasp was, at the end of our 2005 season, when Dynamite — who is one of our all-star players and looks like a superhero — got body-checked into the crowd, which hardly ever happens. We all got really excited, but then a split second later realized she wasn’t getting up. Dynamite tore something in her knee and had to have knee surgery.
She’s back now, but it was the championship game, so she didn’t get to finish the game, and it prevented her from trying out for our All-Star Team, and she wasn’t able to play in the Dust Devil. It’s that kind of domino effect, not so much the injury itself but the way it affects your life afterwards that makes it so sad.
The transformation of the game from when you started until now is huge. Does it make you feel like you can accomplish more things in life? And how has being one of the founding members changed the way you approach everyday situations?
I think it’s really affected me a lot. Having that persona to call on is really powerful. It’s actually getting to the point now where the line is a bit blurrier than when I first started, especially off the track. When I’m about to do something that I find personally intimidating, I just think, “Well, just be Melicious.” Because if there are repercussions, if something embarrassing happens, it hasn’t happened to me, it’s happened to my persona. It’s not a new idea, people have always said, “Fake it ‘til ya make it.” It’s kind of another twist on that.
Now that the sport has become really competitive and legitimate, it’s been a challenge to keep that layer of entertainment on top and keep the sport. At this transition we’ve lost some people who were a part of our organization when we first started because they don’t want to play a sport. But now we’re also attracting women who have athletic backgrounds and are being influenced by the kind of girly part. They’re exploring playing at being vampy for the first time in their lives, so it’s really fun kind of watching those two disparate groups coming together. I think everybody grows from it. I know a lot more about sports now than I did four years ago, and I enjoy them more.
How hard is it to separate Melissa and Melicious in everyday life?
There are times when I just want to just be Melissa and play some Chopin and not worry about having eyeliner on. It’s really interesting. I put a lot of work thinking about my persona and getting it out there. And it’s a really strange experience for me to meet someone from the derby world and have them call me Melissa. It’s pretty weird, but it’s also pretty fun. I recommend everyone come up with a persona for themselves. I mean, why not?
What made you write this book? Did you come up with the idea or did someone approach you to do the book?
I was really lucky and a literary agent contacted me to do the book and all my dreams came true. I got an agent and then we started working on a proposal and shopped the proposal around. Simon and Schuster really got it. They got the idea of roller derby right away. We worked with my editor to really define the idea of the book to be more memoir-ish than I had really thought about.
I was really shy about having the book be too much about me because the story of roller derby is really about the power of all of these women coming together. I’m very hesitant to focus on one star because we’re all stars. So they helped me get over that initial hesitancy. I’ve heard from other derby girls that when they read it they felt like they were reading about themselves. And that’s really how I wanted it. Someone said they liked it because it was about me, but it wasn’t about me. I feel like my editors really helped me with that.
What are some of the best uniforms you’ve seen on the track?
I’ve seen some really great ones. There’s this team, the Reservoir Dolls, and they wear white shirts and ties like assassins. And of course, I’m partial to my own uniforms.
The book really captures the DIY spirit. Has it motivated you to start any other DIY projects?
Well, I’ve got a list! It’s made me really want to learn to sew because people have done really fun things with their uniforms and the skill that I’ve seen girls apply to cutting up and restructuring T-shirts is really impressive. I think it would be really fun to learn how to do make-up properly. I’ve seen some girls do really fun things with that. Redding to Rumble from Rat City Rollergirls does half of her face with beautiful pin-up girl makeup and the other half is a skeleton. Breathtaking, she’s awesome. She’s got a really great look on the track and she’s a really, really great skater. What’s really cool is that people are backing up their bravado and their personas with actually being very skilled athletes.
Matching their aesthetics with their athleticism.
Yes, and that’s really different than when we first started. Part of it was that we were doing it for the spectacle, and part of it was that it was really just people’s perceptions. And it’s really great now to have the athleticism backing up the other fun part of it. It’s kind of like Dennis Rodman had all this crazy shit and he was a pretty good basketball player!
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