Sari Wilson's Blog

Ballet was my great young love. I loved the feeling of being part of something larger and more important. I loved the striving for perfection, the thrill of recognition. I trained as a ballet dancer from about ages 8 to 14. After I stopped training that whole part of my life became locked in a very private place. I felt cut off from this world where I had found so much joy. I tried to put it behind me and devote myself to other things, but the experience left me with some conflicted feelings about dance. Then, something happened this year. First, I published GIRL THROUGH GLASS, my novel based on memories of a ballet childhood. 
Spring Dance Concert The Nutcracker
 Second, my daughter began performing in the dance concerts at her school. Watching her brings tears to my eyes—complex moments of pain, love, and healing. 

Now, to bring things full circle, on the school’s stage, in an event hosted by the school PTO and open the the whole community, I will have a chance to talk with her school’s dance teacher, an energetic and visionary woman with big ideas about dance education. We’ll be talking about childhoods in dance (she was a child performer too) and more broadly about how dance can inform an entire life. 

I wanted to share the cover of Girl Through Glass  and why I am so thrilled with it: to me it evokes the magic and beauty of dance during the era when I fell in love with it---and also something of the gritty feel of New York City during my childhood (the 1970s and early 1980s).

At one point, after the book was finally done, I looked in my files and found a photo I clipped from the New York Times that accompanied a great Sloane Crosley piece. The piece was about watching a dance class and then taking the class to, in essence, spy on yourself.

The photo: a girl, back-lit, through a lighted window. Night out. We know from Crosley’s piece that she is a dancer and this is a dance class, but this is incidental. What we feel is the focus, the effort of a craft, a girl in a room, by a window, a private act of becoming, but also, in a sense a public act. She is aware of being by a window. Someone could---might---be watching.

And as a girl growing up in New York City, I remember being fascinated by all of the windows that surrounded me. The mysterious lives they contained. The publicness of life amidst millions, but also the mystery of private spaces. The lighted window---windows in general---contained all of this discrepancy and tension and mystery.

I sent this photo along to my editor during the cover design stage---I imagine it inspired the designers because, here, in this cover unpacked, are echoes, the layers, of my fascination with windows, and dance, and the spaces they contain.

I recently finished reading over Girl Through Glass in first pass edits. It's the first time in a long time;I have read the whole novel through. It's been a deeply strange, often thrilling experience... something like meeting an old friend who keeps surprising you. Books have been, tiredly, compared to children, but I see now the analogy: we care for them, nurture them; they leave us, we must let them go... I hope Girl Through Glass comes into the world with a fanfare and makes the deep connection with readers that I imagined all the years I was writing it!

A beautiful, surprising part of this stage is the I’ve fallen in love with the publisher's chosen font for the novel's pages. I never gave much thought to the mechanics of the book-making, but going through this process has bred a new love for the elegance of publishing process, and a new level of gratitude for my amazing editor and the terrific team at Harper.

We���re finishing up the FLASHED: SUDDEN STORIES IN PROSEAND COMICS manuscipt and it's in the process of being designed. It���s quitesomething to see a manuscript that you���ve been working on for two plus yearscome together. It feels like a book now, a unique project with a voice of itsown, a sense of humor, and something to add to the ongoing investigation intonarrative forms (not to be too academic). It makes me so happy to see such fine prose writers and such fine cartoonists rubbing shoulders and bouncing ideas off of each other onthe page. I just read this in The New York Times Magazine, in an article on the brain, "...an idea dating back as far as Plato and Aristotle, that meaning emerges from the links between things..." and I thought, yes, right. Meaning emerges from links between things. That is what we were trying for. 

I can���t show any of the design yet, as its still inprototype stage, but at least I can show the title page of Josh���s earlymock-up...

We’re finishing up the FLASHED: SUDDEN STORIES IN PROSEAND COMICS manuscipt and it's in the process of being designed. It’s quitesomething to see a manuscript that you’ve been working on for two plus yearscome together. It feels like a book now, a unique project with a voice of itsown, a sense of humor, and something to add to the ongoing investigation intonarrative forms (not to be too academic). It makes me so happy to see such fine prose writers and such fine cartoonists rubbing shoulders and bouncing ideas off of each other onthe page. I just read this in The New York Times Magazine, in an article on the brain, "...an idea dating back as far as Plato and Aristotle, that meaning emerges from the links between things..." and I thought, yes, right. Meaning emerges from links between things. That is what we were trying for. 

I can’t show any of the design yet, as its still inprototype stage, but at least I can show the title page of Josh’s earlymock-up...

We’re finishing up the FLASHED: SUDDEN STORIES IN PROSE AND COMICS manuscipt and it's in the process of being designed. It’s quite something to see a manuscript that you’ve been working on for two plus years come together. It feels like a book now, a unique project with a voice of its own, a sense of humor, and something to add to the ongoing investigation into narrative forms (not to be too academic). It makes me so happy to see such fine prose writers and such fine cartoonists rubbing shoulders and bouncing ideas off of each other on the page. I just read this in The New York Times Magazine, in an article on the brain, "...an idea dating back as far as Plato and Aristotle, that meaning emerges from the links between things..." and I thought, yes, right. Meaning emerges from links between things. That is what we were trying for. 

I can’t show any of the design yet, as its still in prototype stage, but at least I can show the title page of Josh’s early mock-up...

A week-long writing retreat upstate. I had the days to myself up in the attic! I could write a whole ode to the attic. This one is airy and there are pine trees that rustle in front of the windows. I spend a lot of time watching the trees. Wind rush. Shiver of birds. Frantic hop, majestic hop, preening hop of red robins.

So much of writing, of making the writing, is time and space. I had both to pursue this next round of revisions. Got my footing, I think. Watching trees was very good for it.
Last night I read Mavis Gallant’s “The Hunger Diaries” in an old New Yorker. I identified. Are there other ways to do a writing apprenticeship? Besides hunger and fear. Fear of dropping into the book, the totality of it. But then there you are! And it’s delicious.
This novel is becoming lighter but somehow more serious. Feels like I am removing some old rigging, so it can stand—float?—on its own. Removing the scaffolding.

It���s been a long time since I wrote. Why? I���ve been absorbedin the most amazing editing process. I am basically rewriting one of thenovel's story lines. My editor is an incredibly perceptive and gifted reader whose comments have an illuminating effect--I can suddenly see with more clarity the characters and their journeys as well as my own role as writer in crafting the book. It's quite mysterious. This also somehow means that I have to acknowledge--ugh, painful!--the moments when I fail to be honestwith myself or when I get lazy or lose faith. Her questions and her comments, once I sit with them, open up the characters and the story in ways that continually surprise me���andsometimes scare me (but this, too, I am learning, is a good sign).

It’s been a long time since I wrote. Why? I’ve been absorbed in the most amazing editing process. I am basically rewriting one of the novel's story lines. My editor is an incredibly perceptive and gifted reader whose comments have an illuminating effect--I can suddenly see with more clarity the characters and their journeys as well as my own role as writer in crafting the book. It's quite mysterious. This also somehow means that I have to acknowledge--ugh, painful!--the moments when I fail to be honest with myself or when I get lazy or lose faith. Her questions and her comments, once I sit with them, open up the characters and the story in ways that continually surprise me—and sometimes scare me (but this, too, I am learning, is a good sign).

I sold my novel to Harper Books! It happened pretty recently and I'm still absorbing it. I’m working with a wonderful editor there on revisions, going deep into the world of the book—again. I'm working on two characters in particular and I'm thinking about: What makes a character rich and complex? What is the intersection of plot and character where a plot can have momentum but a character in that plot can remain mysterious and surprising? I think what I am searching for are the elements, the alchemy that can produce grace. Which which brings me back to the very beginning of this project--the thing that compelled me. What are the ways we seek grace in our lives? And, how can we deliver ourselves from the possibility of not receiving it? (Still figuring out what I mean by that last question!)