Dancer Turned Novelist
For as far back as I can remember, music made me want to move, and there was always music playing at my house. I was ten when I finally convinced my father to let me take ballet lessons. My passion for dance grew over the years, but my father was so opposed to my pursuing dance as a career that I was not allowed to take dance classes during my senior year in high school or apply to a college with a dance major.
"...I married and began intensively studying dance, as well as pursuing graduate work in sociology at the University of Arizona. I more or less lived a double life..."
Fast forward to my Smith College years when I took the smattering of dance classes offered, wrote a proposal for a dance major (which now exists), and fell in love with sociology, a major that afforded endless opportunities to explore my fascination with people and their behavior.
Following college graduation, I married and began intensively studying dance, as well as pursuing graduate work in sociology at the University of Arizona. I more or less lived a double life, a graduate student by day and a member of a modern dance company at night.
When my husband relocated us to Michigan, I decided I needed to make a decision as to whether I was going to focus on sociology or dance. Dance won out, and I earned my master’s in dance from the University of Michigan. I then joined Harbinger, a Detroit-based modern dance company, where I was a principal dancer for five seasons. By this time, I’d had a baby I adored and had become a single parent following the disintegration of my marriage.
"Along the way, we co-founded and directed two modern dance companies, Three Dancers Plus (in Colorado) and Art! Art! Barking Dog Dance Company (in Kentucky). I loved the years we danced together, and it was a joy to work with students and watch them grow and develop as young performing artists."
A few years after my divorce, I met the love of my life when he joined the dance company, and we married within a year. After he left the company and earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, we went wherever we could find work teaching, and we continued to perform and choreograph as well. Work took us from Michigan to Oklahoma to Colorado, back to Michigan and finally to Kentucky where I took a job chairing the dance department at a performing arts high school. Along the way, we co-founded and directed two modern dance companies, Three Dancers Plus (in Colorado) and Art! Art! Barking Dog Dance Company (in Kentucky).
I loved the years we danced together, and it was a joy to work with students and watch them grow and develop as young performing artists. Eventually, however, age and injury caught up with me and led to my retirement from dance.
Mourning the loss of dance in my life, I got an idea for a story about a young dancer with all kinds of family and friendship problems. While I’d moonlighted as a freelancer writing magazine articles while I was still dancing, I’d never thought I had the fiction gene. I plunged ahead, however, and that project became my first published novel, WHILE I DANCED. I returned to school in my sixties to earn my MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and have just kept going ever since.
Surprisingly, a career as a performing artist turned out to be great preparation for my late-in-life career as a novelist. Being a dancer helped me develop the kind of self-discipline, perseverance, and resilience that I’ve found so helpful in navigating the challenges of a writing life.
All-in-all, I feel very fortunate to have had two rewarding and meaningful careers. I am incredibly grateful.
