The truth: from the ages of eight to eighteen, I loved ballet more than anything in life, and I knew I was going to be a ballerina. The fact: there was never any way in hell that was going to happen. Not just because I took just three classes a week at our small town’s only ballet studio, in the basement of a former Sacramento Ballet soloist. She loved us and yelled a lot and was glad we came to class, but I think she knew she wasn’t grooming any prima ballerinas. The fact: I was not born with the ballerina essentials—the body, the turnout, the strength, the extension, the stamina. None of it.
Besides being a former ballerina, I am a playwright who writes novels. I think in scenes, not chapters, and when imagining a story I always begin with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski’s “magic if.” The “magic if” is the truth that occurs on stage, which is different from the truth of real life but is absolutely necessary for an audience to believe in a performance. It is a truth informed by facts, but not made up entirely of them. And it often begins with the question “What would I do if this were happening to me?” A question I come back to time and again when writing fiction.
Which is all to say, Up to This Pointe is a work of fiction informed by a ton of research about ballet and the lives of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, and the Winter Overers at McMurdo Station. Antarctica has always been a brutal ballet to me—a painful, terrible beauty. Both demand a nearly impossible, superhuman capability and instinct to survive. And both hold inexplicable sway over the people who fall in love with them.
Rose Wilder Lane said of writing novels, “Facts are infinite in number. Truth is the meaning underlying them.” In reality, a teenager would never be allowed to Winter Over in Antarctica. But in the reality of Up to This Pointe, in Wilder’s words, “It is not a fact, but it is perfectly true.”
Below I’ve shared some of my favorite research sources with you, because trust me—the “magic if” cannot compare to the real-world magic of ballet and Antarctica. The real world we are so very lucky to live in.
- The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- Encounters at the End of the World, documentary film by Werner Herzog
- Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange & Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson (companion book to the archived blog of the same name)
- An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science by Edward J. Larson
- Antarctica: A Year on Ice, documentary film by Anthony Powell
- South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton
- Dancing on Water: A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT by Elena Tchernichova, with Joel Lobenthal