Every single character in my book is a real person. When I felt the need to create a composite character, I had to ask myself, what am I avoiding? 

Janine Kovac – 12 November 2024

The Back Flap

The Nutcracker Chronicles, a modern twist on the beloved holiday ballet, intertwines the story of Clara and her nutcracker prince with the true-life stories that unfold backstage.

The curtain rises on Ballet El Paso’s production of The Nutcracker, where young Janine Kovac is cast as Fritz, the boy who breaks the nutcracker. Her director is Ingeborg Heuser, a German woman who once performed for Hitler and who peppers her teaching with insults like, “Why can’t you just dance like a pretty girl?” At least it’s better than “You look like a cow on ice skates,” which is what the other girls hear daily.

Onstage, Janine wins the battle and embarks on a voyage through a snowy forest to the Land of the Sweets, where she serves as spectator to a beautiful dance. She also travels offstage, leaving El Paso to study at San Francisco Ballet before landing a job in Iceland and returning to California, where she rises through the ranks from soldier to snowflake to candy soloist. Eventually, however, she is relegated to watching other people dance—her husband, her children, her students—and her claim to the spotlight is replaced by the quest to find joy in her new roles.

About the book

What is the book about?

I was seven years old when I saw my first Nutcracker. The fluttery feeling in my chest was like the best kind of dizzy. Watching the Sugar Plum Fairy, I knew, I wanted to be up there on that stage. Before long, I was a soldier, a mouse, a snowflake, a flower and nearly every flavor of candy in the Land of the Sweets. But my signature role was as Fritz, Clara’s bratty brother who snatches the nutcracker from her and yanks off its head. The Nutcracker Chronicles tells the story of my pursuit of an elusive dream that compelled me to endure blistered toes, weekly weigh-ins, second-hand pointe shoes, and constant insults from my directors. Why can’t you just dance like a pretty girl?

When did you start writing the book?

I started writing this book in 2011 when my twins were just over a year old. They were micro-preemies and spent the first three months of their lives in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. That experience lit a fire under me. Life was precious, I realized. And if I didn’t tell my stories, they would be lost. It didn’t make financial sense, but my husband and I hired a babysitter to stay with the boys twice a week for three weeks. During that time, I went to a café I knew didn’t have WiFi and wrote as many Nutcracker stories as I could remember. I called it Nutcracker Crumbs: Backstage Stories.

 How long did it take you to write it?

Taking care of three kids under four years old is a lot of work and I forgot all about my Nutcracker book. Then, in 2016 I was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island. I opened my Nutcracker Crumbs file and was shocked to see I’d already written 30,000 words. I figured that if I could write that much in six three-hour chunks while juggling twins, then I could certainly finish a draft at the residency. Three weeks later, I had my first draft of The Nutcracker Chronicles.

It took another four years to get the story right. My husband is a retired ballet dancer. My daughter is an aspiring ballet dancer and my twins both had brief spells in the ballet studio and onstage. All five of us have danced in the Nutcracker. I knew I wanted to include some of their stories in my book but I didn’t know how they fit together.

In 2020, during a daily Zoom write-in during the pandemic (we called ourselves The Flying Flounders), I realized that in the ballet, Clara gets a gift, fights a battle, and then, in her victory lap in the second act, she sits around and watches other people dance. That was me! I got the gift of dance, fought very hard to break into the professional sphere, and now, as the wife and mother of ballet dancers, I sit around and watch other people dance. With that correlation, all the pieces fell into place.

 Where did you get the idea from?

In 1985, as a ballet student at San Francisco Ballet School, we were given an assignment to write about dancing in the Nutcracker. I chose to write about the time a regional ballet company in West Texas went on tour, and when sidelined by a flat tire, the director discovered she had left the music and some of the costumes back in El Paso, 200 miles away. The rest of the essay recounted all the mishaps that happened on that tour: broken scenery, small stages, dressing-room roaches and costume malfunctions.

My essay was chosen to be printed in the program that year for San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker. I felt sheepish about poking fun at my hometown and its modest production. I didn’t expect my story to be relatable, but it turned out that everyone had their own Nutcracker anecdotes about show catastrophes, which were retold as if they were war stories. I realized that there was a lot of tenderness to be explored and many, many stories to be told.

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

My director in El Paso was a complicated woman. She was creative and resourceful and talented. She also often used insults to motivate her students. Many of us went on to have successful ballet careers with famous ballet companies. Many more of us felt damaged by her verbal abuse.

I knew it was important to tell all sides of this multifaceted director but at first I felt like I was divulging family secrets. It took me a long time to strike the right balance that felt truthful.

What came easily?

It was so easy to write about the wonder—how it felt to shine onstage or how it felt the first time my husband and I danced together. If it had to do with dancing to Tchaikovsky’s music, the words tumbled out of me.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

Every single character in my book is a real person. When I felt the need to create a composite character, I had to ask myself, what am I avoiding? Most of the time, if I wanted to create a composite character, it was because I didn’t want anyone to be mad at me. This would prompt more questions. What’s the real story? Does this person need to be in the scene? Do they move the story forward? If not, they didn’t need to be in the book. In some cases, I could tell the story I needed to tell without naming names. For example “my boyfriend” or “a dancer in the back.”

Do you have a target reader for this book?

The woman who remembers going to the ballet and thinking, I want to be one of them.

The retired dancer who thinks If only I had more time.

The innocent bystander who says, “I’ve never seen the Nutcracker. What’s it about?”

How was writing this book different from what you’d experienced writing previous books?

My first memoir Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home told the story of the unexpected beginnings—the birth of micro-preemie twins—and the unexpected ending of my ballet career. Many of my coping skills had been honed through my experience as a dancer steeped in denial. In the same way I pretended it didn’t hurt to dance on a broken foot, I pretended I wasn’t terrified that my newborns need heart surgery. Writing Spinning meant I had to dig into those buried emotions and write about them. Structurally, it meant I needed to balance tension-filled hospital scenes with ballet scenes to give the reader a break. I created the outline for my book the way I’d choreograph a ballet. Sometimes a chapter needed to slow down the way the prima ballerina milks the silence. Sometimes it needed to speed up like the flurry of pirouettes at the end of a demanding solo.

For The Nutcracker Chronicles, the structure was already laid out for me because each chapter follows a scene in the ballet and the content is the onstage and backstage stories. I’ve listened to portions of the Nutcracker every day for the last six years, trying to match my prose with melodies and trying to pace the action of my story with Tchaikovsky’s music. It’s not something I imagine a reader would notice but it was fun for me to explore.

What new things did you learn about writing, publishing, and/or yourself while writing and preparing this book for publication?

When you are a ballet dancer, you don’t have complete creative control. The choreographer tells you what to dance. The costume designer tells you what to wear. Sometimes I would get a prickly feeling in my chest. This costume isn’t right. These steps aren’t organic. I got accustomed to the notion that even if the situation could be improved, there was nothing I could do about it.

Working on this book, I did have creative agency. But I had to advocate for my artistic vision. No one would read my mind and do it for me. It meant that when I got that prickly feeling, I had to speak up for myself. This felt like an artistic risk, even though my publisher, She Writes Press, is a hybrid publisher, and encourages author involvement.

Here’s one example: the silhouette the designer chose for the chapter headings was of a ballerina in a beautiful arabesque. The pose was picture-perfect, but when I saw it, my heart sank. My career was not picture-perfect. In fact, one of the life lessons in my book is how to feel beautiful when you know you aren’t picture-perfect.

I thought about letting it go. I didn’t want to mention it. My ballet training had conditioned me to keep quiet. But I wanted every aspect of my book to reflect the real stories backstage. I want every ballet dancer to pick up my book and say, “Yup, that’s what it was like.”

I found a photograph in the public domain of Edgar Degas’s sculpture “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer.” In it, a young girl in a tutu clasps her hands behind her. She stands in fourth position, chin lifted in a combination of grace, patience, and perhaps even a little defiance. I hired a graphic designer to create a silhouette of the picture and submitted it to my project manager. No feathers were ruffled. No questions were asked. The illustration was included and it’s one of the tiny details that make the book a more authentic depiction of the ballet world.

End of Interview:

For more from Janine Kovac visit her website and follow her on Facebook.

Get your copy of The Nutcracker Chronicles from Amazon US.