Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End

The pieces in Life and Limb are diverse in subject and voice. Some of the narratives in Life and Limb deal directly with the subject of skateboarding; others are about completely non-related subjects such as tree-eating, the historical and cultural significance of boulders, and setting fire to cemeteries.

Despite, or maybe because of this diversity, they all express certain aesthetics common to skateboarders everywhere: an iconoclastic sense of creativity fostered by a lifetime spent (mostly) outside the restrictive bounds of team sports, a collaborative artistic spirit and a disdain for overt competitiveness, humor, an appetite for risk that often borders on self-destructiveness, a youthful distrust of authority and a reluctance to resign one’s self to the "adult" world of commerce and responsibility. While all the contributing writers have been heavily influenced by skateboarding, the stories in Life and Limb don’t glorify or idealize the sport. In fact many of the pieces reveal the dark side of skateboarding—the curse that accompanies the blessing of a lifetime spent rolling very fast over very hard surfaces.

Justin Hocking served as Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) from 2006 to mid-2014, and remains active in creative community-building, small-press publishing, and the synthesis of book arts with literary pursuits. He is the author of the memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld.