From Dancer to Writer - Janine Kovac and 'The Nutcracker Chronicles'

Former professional ballet dancer and author, Janine Kovac, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her third book, “The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Fairytale Memoir.” Her second memoir centers around her life as a dancer and is inspired by her time dancing in The Nutcracker, which she performed in for many years. Her breakout role was dancing as Clara’s brother, Fritz, at the age of 12. “…I just had so many Nutcracker anecdotes, just fun things that happened backstage or onstage, or just the life of a dancer that centered around dancing Nutcracker after Nutcracker… I thought that would be kind of cute to have a story onstage that was going on – the battle, the party scene – and then tell you what was happening backstage… which if you know The Nutcracker, a little girl named Clara gets a nutcracker for Christmas… Fritz breaks it, and then magic happens… she comes to the aid of this nutcracker when the mice and the soldiers fight, and then she gets to go to a fairyland where she sits around and watches other people dance, and then at the end she goes home, which is kind of like the life of a dancer: you dance, you have your victory lap, and then it’s over and you’re still alive and very much wanting to dance, but you go to performances, or in my case I was a teacher and the wife of a dancer, so that’s kind of how the story evolved.”

While Kovac has been dancing since the age of 7, she actually started writing far earlier than that. “I have been writing longer than I have been dancing, so as soon as I could read, I started writing books… and when my twins were born… they were born several months premature and so they were in the hospital for three months, and it was in that moment that I realized I have to figure out how to be a writer. It’s not enough anymore to just write… so I found a community of writers, I volunteered for literary festivals… I found writers who were better than I was and read writers who were better than I was. That’s something else you do, you find people who are better than you are and try to hang around them… and I put my work out there. I revised it when it’s not what I wanted to say and I just keep doing that. That’s basically all you do.”