Hybrid Interview

Sonja Srinivasan: This book was so enjoyable, I couldn’t put it down! I have been a ballet lover since I was a child and even took classes in college and after. It’s never easy to write about a different art form, especially a nonverbal one. Could you tell us this translation of the nonverbal into verbal? The physicality of what the dancers experience is so vital to the novel.

Elyse Durham: Thank you so much for your kind words—I’m really glad to hear you enjoyed reading this novel. I’m also glad you’ve asked about capturing the physicality of ballet, because that was one of the most important things to me about this book. I fell in love with dance as an adult, taking ballet classes in my late twenties, and was so enraptured with the experience that I had to write about it. Dance demanded the attention of my mind and my body. I’d never experienced that kind of concentration before. I also knew the book wouldn’t work unless its depiction of dance and dancers’ lives felt totally authentic, especially on a physical level.

You’re absolutely right that this is tricky, though. Part of the problem is that it’s just not interesting to read descriptions of how somebody’s moving their body: “she lifted her foot,” “extended her arm,” etc. But I had a huge breakthrough when talking with a friend who was trying to figure out how to write about music. My friend realized the key was capturing how music made you feel. That’s what I decided to focus on, too: how it felt to dance. It meant I was writing about dance from the inside out.