Literary Mama Rewind: Dance

Welcome to Literary Mama Rewind! Every few weeks we’ll round up some of our favorite essays, stories, poems, columns and reviews from the Literary Mama archives relating to a particular theme. This month pick up your ballet shoes, grab your partner’s hand and dance. From tutus to rehearsals to Prom, these stories from the archives all bring out the dancer in us all.

• Same Old Song and Dance by Francie Arenson Dickman  in Creative Nonfiction
  I point to the laundry baskets of dance costumes piled on the mudroom floor. “I know,” I say. “I thought I’d be churning out thoughts by the thousands. They’re in there, but I can’t hear them because they’re buried under all of this crap.”

• Mother-Son Dance at the Elementary School by Laura Sobbott Ross in Poetry
  Soon the floor will clear and we will sway/ with our sons

• The Carol Lawrence School of Dance by Carol Graser in Poetry
  Our girls tutu in adjacent rooms/ Princess costumes/ varieties of ruffled pink

• Children Dancing by Cammy Iverson in Poetry
  It is said that to dance on a grave/ Is disrespectful of the dead.

• The Price of Cool by Ona Gritz from the Column Doing it Differently
  It’s the night of Ethan’s junior prom and, weeks earlier, he’d volunteered me to sign the paperwork for the after-hours joyride he and ten of his friends have arranged for.

• Black Swan and Burlesque by Caroline M. Grant from the Column Mama at the Movies
  …what stayed with me most in both films: images of two strong, young women asserting themselves in the face of aging mothers, insisting they can dance and taking our breath away when they do.

• The Ballet Recital by Leah Browning in Fiction
  His new girlfriend brings Paige to the rehearsal. When they arrive, Paige is already wearing her costume, a hot pink leotard with a matching pink skirt.

• Dégagé by Heather Galiri in Fiction
  She felt foolish going back to a childhood hobby now, ten years later. That’s all it had been, a hobby, even though the hair pins, the pink, seamed tights, the endless sewing of elastic on shoes had been her life at eighteen.