Hello, dear readers —
A few weeks ago, the Australian writer and podcast host Liz Duck-Chong tweeted out this question:
“School,” in Australian parlance, means K-12 (college is “uni”) and Liz’s question prompted a lot of responses from former baby feminists, teen vegans, and adolescent agitators. Here’s how I answered:
My mother is an anthropologist and epidemiologist by training, and she showed 8-year-old me how to grab a clipboard and a pen and go out into the world and just… ask people questions about their lives. Write down the answers. Look for patterns. Try to draw some conclusions from what you learn.
Thanks to some sociological methods classes in college and a decade as a journalist, I’ve gotten a lot more practice at doing that. And this book is one result of that practice: I’ve interviewed about 90 people, and it’ll top 100 by the time I’m done. Back on the playground, I had a hand-ruled table where I recorded all my respondents’ answers. Now, I have Google sheets for storing all that information, and more.
Here’s my spreadsheet for tracking media coverage of ballet, organized by topic:
And here’s the spreadsheet where I tracked the books I read:
There’s more data here, and in the rest of the master sheet that houses all these tabs, than I could ever hold in my head, and I’ve learned more from each cell of these sheets than I could ever put in Turning Pointe.
That’s one tough thing about writing a book: there’s so much that you know won’t make it in. You could write a whole second book consisting only of the things you couldn’t fit into the first. You could make a whole third book out of the little side streets you went down that didn’t serve the main road, but that you found absolutely fascinating (for example: did you know that two of Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters were ballerinas who burned to death when their tutus caught fire, thanks to the open-flame gas lighting of 19th century theatres? True story, but probably not one I can find a place for in a book about the future of ballet.)
After four months of reading, two months of interviews, and eight months of writing, my manuscript is due in 28 days. This book has been my life for the better part of two years - but I was reminded, thanks to Liz Duck-Chong, that I was practicing how to do this work many years before that.
And when this book is done, I am getting a damn dog.
Some ballet news from this week:
The School of American Ballet, founded in 1934, just hired its first full time Black woman teacher.
Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle, will have an entirely digital season this year and it looks pretty good!
Inside the Lagos ballet school whose young fouetté-ing student has gone viral.
That’s it from me this week. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Chloe.