The good people of HarperTeen asked some questions a while back about the genesis of HOUSE OF DANCE. With the book a month or so from launch, it seems the time to share some of that exchange here.
According to your author bio, you’re a ballroom dancer yourself. Do you find connections between the art of writing and the art of dance?
Absolutely. I find the two inseparable. I have always thought of writing as an act of choreography—always tuned my ear to the rise and fall of words, scenes, even characters. Like dance, writing requires an enormous amount of discipline and endless attention to details; it requires the patience to listen and to watch. Dance demands authenticity, power, a willingness to succumb to forces that are greater than yourself. I begin every day with music, stretch, dance, and this is what has always carried the writing forward. Poetry, memoir, short stories, fiction: It doesn’t matter. The dance is there.
The themes of mortality and death echo throughout this novel. Were there experiences in your own life that caused you to write so passionately about this subject?
Sadly, yes. I had a friend, a woman, with whom I sat at church each Sunday; she was the epitome of kindness and supreme selflessness, a very special lady. She went missing one Sunday, which seemed odd, but I let it go. The next Sunday, again, she wasn’t there. I told myself that I should give her a call, but it was August, vacation time, and it seemed a little overwrought to worry. Next week, I thought, if she isn’t here, I’ll ring her and find out if she’s okay.
Three days later, I learned that she had passed away. That she had been living, unknowingly, with a devastating, advanced case of cancer, that she had been graceful to the end. In the weeks to come, her daughter would describe my friend’s final days, and I was so grief stricken, so mad at myself for not having called to let my friend know that she’d been on my mind, that I turned to writing a book in which a character, a young girl, has the wisdom, the acuity to be there in person for the one she loves. In which the heroine doesn’t wait to do the right thing.
And so I began to write HOUSE OF DANCE, and I was halfway through when my mother grew gravely ill and heroically fought a terrible collision of rare health challenges. I spent three months at my mother’s side; I spent those months observing my father, who did everything a person could do to try to save the person he loved. Ultimately, my mother passed away just after Christmas, and then there sat HOUSE OF DANCE, a first draft due two months on. I returned to the book with the sort of fury one has when steeped in sorrow, but also when one has been given the chance to say goodbye. My mother appeared to me in several forms after she’d passed away. I felt her presence throughout the writing of this book. I felt my friend’s presence, too. And because of the goodness that does live on and transcend, HOUSE is a hopeful book.
Why do you think dance is so important to Rosie and helps her to express her feelings and heal the rift in her family?
Rosie sees dance not as a chance to heal the rift in her family so much as the only gift she can give a grandfather who has little living left. Rosie is fifteen. She has been given the monumental responsibility of easing her grandfather’s final days. When she discovers that dance has been part of his history, that memories of dance connect him to his long-deceased wife, she begins to understand that she can evoke his sweetest memories by bringing music and dance into his house. Dance transports us. Dance enables us to transcend. Rosie’s gift to her grandfather is color, beauty, light—all yielded through the vessel of dance.
Ballroom dancing has becoming very popular recently, with the television show Dancing with the Stars and the documentary film Mad Hot Ballroom. As someone with expertise in the art form, why do you think this is?
I don’t know that I will ever consider myself an expert in ballroom dance; I simply love to do it. Certainly my own ballroom lessons came as a result of Dancing with the Stars. My husband loves the show and bought us both lessons for my birthday, and I know—because I’ve now talked to so many people about this—that Dancing, which makes it more than all right for men to put on those shiny shoes and dance, has transformed the industry. Indeed, every time a new season of Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance begins, my own dance studio experiences a surge of new students.
The fantastic documentary Mad Hot Ballroom reminded us all of what dance is for—of how it is about connection, posture, mutual respect. Mad Hot Ballroom describes a year in the life of the Dancing Classrooms program created by the remarkable dance team, Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau. That program has since grown well beyond its roots in New York City to cities across North America and last year came to my own Philadelphia. I had the privilege of attending, photographing, and writing about the semi-finals and finals, of seeing what the program really does for those children and their sense of self. There’s nothing forced or odd or presumptuous about any of the claims made for dancing. It truly is so deeply liberating, artful, and, when done right, good.
Let me finally say this: I have enormous respect for those who can dance well, who have it, natively, in their blood, and who stand on their feet, hours each day, teaching those of us who yearn to be so much better at it. This intelligence—this dance intelligence—I hold in highest esteem.
