Dos manos in Matamoros

 

SLOW, QUICK, QUICK: The Many Paths of Ballroom Dancers

I haven’t blogged in a long time.  In the past few months every time I went to the computer it was to work on a major project that I began back in 2015 and then set aside a couple of years later when I discovered Angela Macke’s amazing tea farm in Northern Michigan and a light went on in my head saying, “There’s a story here.” And then, realizing I already knew other wonderful women involved in different aspects of the food world in Norther Michigan, I said, “I think there’s a book here.” And there was.  Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming was published in 2020, not the best time for promoting it since all the bookstore readings had to be cancelled, but nonetheless a book that found many positive reviews and I hope many happy readers.

But before I got sidetracked into the wonderful oral histories of those twenty Michigan women I had begun the project of interviewing ballroom dancers, professionals and also amateurs, men and women I had met when I first started taking lessons and discovering another amazing world.

I interviewed more than 30 different dancers, and although the project of creating a book was set aside for a very long time I was able to make a gift of all the audio and transcripts of all those interviews to the New York Public Library Performing Arts Division at Lincoln Center.  My earlier interviews with men and women in the Bronx in 1980 that developed into Bronx Faces and Voices: Sixteen Stories of Courage and Community, published in 2014, also had a long hiatus between the time of the interviews and the creation of a book with my co-editor Janet Munch at Lehman College.  All that time the interviews had been safely archived in the Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College where Janet, unbeknownst to me, had worked to get them digitized for great accessibility.

With this in mind I had approached the Leonard Lief chief librarian, Kenneth Schlesinger, to see whether my dance interviews could be archived like the other ones in the Bronx.  Instead, he directed me to colleagues at the NYPL saying this was the perfect home for oral histories from the world of dance and performance.  And, mirabile dictu, no one before me had done an oral history of ballroom dancers so that the NYPL was delighted to add my interviews to their collections.  This meant that I could tell the folk I interviewed that while I hoped someday to see their stories in print in a book they could share with friends and the larger world of ballroom dance, in the interim their stories were preserved for posterity at the NYPL where anyone could come and read the transcript or listen to the audio. 

So those stories sat safely but also quietly at the NYPL while I worked on Northern Harvest. And then we had the pandemic which is still with us and which stopped all of us in our tracks. It was hard to plan anything or pursue anything when you had to stay isolated—at least for those first horrific months before there was a vaccine—and we watched as it spread and loved ones were sick and some died.  But during that time another writing project landed on my desk, or, as it is these days, on my computer. One of my interviewees when we talked on Easter morning back in 2015 had told me he was also working on a book.  A former champion and coach to champions it promised to be a good book.  At the time I don’t think I took him seriously but I did say that I’m a reasonably good editor and proof reader, have done a lot of editing including of 18^th century French  manuscripts, and I offered to help him should he ever need it.

Well, there we were in the midst of the pandemic and his text arrived on my screen.  I spent the next six months working with it, a major editing job, some rewriting and reshaping, and it promised indeed to be a valuable addition to the history of ballroom dance in this country.  I was really happy to have this project challenging me, something to engage my mind and editing skills every day during that terrible period of waiting for the pandemic to subside, for the percentage of people vaccinated to rise to the point where deaths were far less numerous, the danger of going out again--always wearing a mask--less perilous.  That book, by Bill Davies, Wanna Dance?, came out in the spring of 2021 and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of ballroom and the personal story of a fascinating dance champion.

But late this winter, after scolding myself for procrastinating, thinking it was just too major a task to revisit all those interviews from 2015 to 2018, shape them into something manageable, publishable—and I did truly dread attempting it—I woke up one day and said to myself, “Okay. enough procrastinating.  I’m going to dig them out and reread every one and see what I can create with them.”

So for the past several months I have done exactly that, and there is a joy for me in having a project that calls to me so that the daily hours on the computer are not just absorbing emails and the Facebook posts but something more creative, most productive, more hopeful, too.  Writing a book and launching it into the world is hugely satisfying if a bit perilous, like launching a ship in earlier centuries was perilous.  You couldn’t predict its fate.  Would that ship encounter storms? pirates? And with the book, will it find a publisher? will it once in print find readers? But the challenge is invigorating and the future—well, the future has to remain unknown, but I’m hoping by spreading the word early that friends and ballroom enthusiasts will share my anticipation and be eager to see and read this book when it exists.

A few days ago I stopped my daily writing, editing, shaping, thinking and rethinking, and sent off a portion of it to two friends who are superb critics and editors.  I brought several stunning photos to a photographer to scan and get ready for sharing with a publisher. I decided that instead of spending months sending the prospectus to different publishers and waiting for their rejections I would self-publish this book, even though with both the earlier two books I was successful and two different university presses did super jobs in publishing those two books. I don’t want to wait any longer than necessary and right now am consulting with two different self-publishing options before taking that leap.

So is it really finished, ready to go?  No, not quite.  I’m still hoping for two additional interviews with specific individuals whose input would enrich specific sections/themes in the book, and I want to craft an Epilogue to bring the stories of these dancers up to date as life has brought many changes in the past half dozen years since we first met.  But once that is done, and I have the comments and critique from my two friends, yes, I will entrust my manuscript to one or the other of these self-publishing companies and hope to see the book in print no later than September and maybe earlier. Wish me luck!  I’ll keep you posted in future blogs and for those of you on Facebook in posts as the stories go through the next stages between here and publication.