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Women.com presents

Author Ellen Cooney
"The Old Ballerina"

January 26, 2000

Ellen Cooney, author and teacher of creative writing at MIT, is here today to discuss her most recent novel, "The Old Ballerina.". She is also the author of "Small Town Girl," and "All the Way Home." Ellen is currently being featured in Victoria Online's Book and Arts Roundtable.

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HomeArtsLive: Good afternoon and thanks for joining our one-hour chat with Ellen Cooney, author and teacher of creative writing at MIT. Her novels are "Small Town Girl," "All the Way Home," and, most recently, "The Old Ballerina." Ellen is currently being featured in Victoria Online's Book and Arts Roundtable. Welcome Ellen!

Ellen Cooney: Thank you very much it's a pleasure to be doing this.

Charisma: I've read "The Old Ballerina" and immediately want to read it all over again -- just to be sure I didn't miss anything. Have you heard this from other readers?

Ellen Cooney: Charisma, (laughing) I've heard from other readers the fact that reading it is sometimes like reading poetry. After you finish a chapter you want to go back, maybe to look at an image again or to read a paragraph over again, because there might have been meanings that you want to know a little bit better.

Sara: In your latest book, "The Old Ballerina" it is clear you love the art of ballet. Why do you think you have such a seemingly innate love of ballet?

Ellen Cooney: Sara, good question. I never myself took a ballet lesson - I was never even inside a ballet studio. I saw my first ballet when I was already about 35 years old, but I've thought about it all my life. I started reading about ballet when I was a little girl, and I loved it! I loved it because I was always a writer; I wrote my first poem when I was about seven years old and for me words were and are the most important thing in life. However, ballet is an art that has no words, so nothing could be more exotic to me. When I started reading about ballet, I began immediately as a kid to picture it, and I had to imagine what the story of a ballet was like on a stage far away in New York City. I grew up in a little factory town in central Massachusetts, so a stage with a ballet going on to me was like something on Mars. I became absorbed in the whole idea of it without ever wanting to do it myself. To me, now, it's something that's very beautiful, but more importantly, it's something that's very demanding. What I wanted to do with my characters is write about what it's like to completely and absolutely devote yourself to something. In a way, ballet is a metaphor for anything that anyone does that's outside the world of the ordinary. The things that I write about with my characters, and what they are doing when they learn and practice ballet, are really about anything. Somebody baking a cake in a very skillful way would know what this is like; somebody building a house would know; somebody teaching somebody who made a decision to do something that is really hard and do it really well would know what I am talking about.

Judy: Ellen, you had your first poem, "Rain" published in The Worcester Gazette. What was that like for you?

Ellen Cooney: Judy, it was beyond belief - marvelous! I remember what it was like to see my name in print for the first time-- that was the most important thing. It was a thrill and it was very scary too. I knew, even as a kid, that people were reading something that I wrote, which was a very daunting experience in a personal way, like walking into a room full of people and you have no clothes on! It seemed a miracle to me that words that had existed in my head became printed on a page. Once that happened to me for the first time, there was no going back. And I knew as a kid that I would have to be a writer who doesn't write in a journal for themselves and doesn't write to express their feelings; that I would have to write to be read. In other words, I would have to do it for real.

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