Why this. Why now.

[image description: Mandy Shunnarah, a white woman with green eyes and brown hair, wearing a skate helmet and a blue and red shirt. She is at Skate Naked, an indoor skatepark in Columbus, Ohio, taking a selfie on a break from skating.]

When people ask me about Midwest Shreds, I’m always tempted to respond, “How much time do you have?” I could talk about skating in the Midwest all day.

When I was writing the book proposal and pitching Midwest Shreds, I had to quickly and succinctly articulate why the book is so needed. So here’s a sliver of info from my book proposal. Since this site is going to be more photo- and video-heavy, this will likely end up being the longest written post.

The largest skatepark in the United States is 88,000 square feet of poured concrete, rails, ramps, banks, and jumpable staircases. It isn’t in Southern California. It isn’t in New York City.

It’s in Des Moines.

Midwest Shreds: Skaters and Skateparks in Middle America is an effort to write a comprehensive cultural history of ramp skating in the Midwest. Though Midwestern skaters and skateparks occasionally get mentions in skate media, to date, no such book has been written. The chapters in Midwest Shreds is an attempt to write the Midwest skate communities’ experience into the larger cultural narrative of park skating in the U.S., which is mostly centered on the west coast, and amplify the aspects of Midwestern identity and culture that make skating in the region markedly different from elsewhere in the country.

Skateboarding, rollerblading, aggressive quad skating and wheelchair skating are more than fun hobbies and video clips on social media––they’re all-encompassing lifestyle sports that extend into fashion, music, film, art, and a gritty, DIY, devil-may-care ethos. Though rife with stereotypes of the slacker stoner white guy, the truth about skating is that it’s expansive, diverse, and welcoming––particularly in the Midwest where skaters tend to be ignored by skate media and form strong, dedicated communities as a result.

Through interviews with skaters both active and retired, skate shop owners, skatepark creators, skate product manufacturers and skate camp organizers, as well as travel writing and my own personal experiences as an aggressive quad skater in Columbus, Ohio, Midwest Shreds is a broad look at skate life in the Midwest. That includes exploring the challenges of underrepresented skaters in this underrepresented region, such as losing beloved old skateparks and the activism required to petition local governments for new parks, preserving skate history, maintaining DIY parks, and skate shops’ triple role of retail store, community arts center, and economic recovery engine. And as a bisexual, Middle Eastern, plus-size female skater, I’m dedicated to interviewing as many women, nonbinary, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, and other marginalized skaters as possible for the book.

At heart, Midwest Shreds is a howl of demand to be seen. Within the oft-ignored “flyover country” are skaters, stereotyped as delinquent, back alley, jobless riffraff with nothing better to do. But those who live here, skate here and love it here know that nothing is further from the truth. Midwest Shreds is the story of a place and a population of people within it who deserve more credit and respect than they’ve been given.

By nature of being in Middle America, away from where most skate media (books, films, and magazines) are produced, these skaters don’t often see themselves reflected in the sports they love outside of their localized skate community. For this reason, Midwest Shreds is necessary. While the recent surge in popularity with roller skates makes the book timely, the fact that these skaters and skateparks have existed long before now shows that Midwest Shreds is long overdue.

Stay tuned for more info closer to fall 2022 when Midwest Shreds is set to be published.