Q & A with Dia Calhoun on THE PHOENIX DANCE with Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FSG: In a starred review of one of your previous novels, FIREGOLD, Booklist commended your mixing of “fantasy, adventure, and coming-of-age.” In your new novel, THE PHOENIX DANCE, you have written a fantasy story for young adults that weaves together mental health issues, romance, magic, and dance in an innovative retelling of Grimm’s fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. How are you able to incorporate these various themes and genres so seamlessly?

Dia: As I was developing the novel, I found that I needed all these various themes and genres to tell the story I wanted to tell—the story of a girl who must deal with her mental illness in a fantasy world in the context of Grimm’s fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. The different themes and genres are threads really, threads in a great tapestry which is the story. The theme of Phoenix’s bipolar illness is the foremost pattern, the golden thread. Woven through that is the fairy tale, which mirrors Phoenix’s own illness, like a thread of silver. Next are emerald and ruby threads, themes of Phoenix’s romance with Whelk, and magic. All of this is woven on the background—let’s call it blue for the sea—of the fantasy world of the archipelago kingdom of Windward. As the story is told, I could see where each color of thread, each theme, must be pulled through to support another. At the end, when you have the whole tapestry, with luck all you see is the picture and not the pattern of the weaving. To weave seamlessly is to see what the story wants to be, to let it move your hands as you weave, rather than imposing the pattern upon the story. This is what I try to do.

I also wanted to mix fairy tale and fantasy with the so-called problem novel, the mental health issue, because I thought it an interesting way to hook my readers. I would lure them in with the fairy tale and fantasy, get them interested in Phoenix and the plight of the princesses, and then begin slipping in the bits about her illness. My hope is that I may get more readers this way than if I wrote a contemporary straightforward problem novel about a girl with bipolar illness.

FSG: What inspired you to write about a teen with a bipolar disorder making her journey through life?

Dia: My primary inspiration for the book is that I, too, have a mild case of bipolar illness, Bipolar II Disorder, to be exact. And I wanted to show young readers what it is like to have this illness, and also to speak to those who do have it. But I was waiting for the right idea to carry the story. Then one day I reread the Grimm’s fairy tale: The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I thought of many questions the story left out. What would the princesses be like in the daytime after all that manic dancing at night? Wouldn’t they be terribly tired and depressed? Wouldn’t they grow more exhausted each day until they were as worn out as the worn-out shoes? It seemed to me that the princesses had a rapidly cycling form of bipolar disorder. But a magic spell caused their illness. I thought it would be interesting to retell the fairy tale with this in mind. But the story needed a heart, a living breathing girl who had bipolar illness. That’s why I chose to center it on a girl whose bipolar illness was not caused by a magic spell. That’s where Phoenix comes in, as the apprentice shoemaker to the princesses. I wanted to show her struggles with the illness: the difficulty getting properly diagnosed; the difficulty getting the proper medicine; and the difficulty of staying on the medicine due to side effects—all things that teens with bipolar illness experience today.

And I wanted a girl who had only Bipolar II Disorder—because I thought it would be too difficult for a young reader to follow a mind seized with full-blown case of Bipolar I Disorder. And I have no experience with that state of mind. Also, there is a prevailing attitude in our society there is only one kind of bipolar illness, where a person is half out of her mind. I wanted to show that there is a wide spectrum of the illness. That some people who have it are not so very different from people without mental illness. I was also interested in taking away some of the stigma of bipolar illness, which unfortunately still exists.

Another reason I mixed the story of a girl with bipolar illness with the tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses was that once Phoenix was properly diagnosed, and on her medicines, something else needed to happen in the novel during the long lapses of time while Phoenix’s medicines were waiting to take effect. Otherwise the story would have come to a screeching halt.

FSG: Someone described THE PHOENIX DANCE as Ursula K. Le Guin meets FIRL INTERRUPTED. Is this an accurate comparison?

Dia: Wow! Ursula K Le Guin and Susanna Kaysen! I don’t think I can compare my work to such giants of literature. But what an interesting question. I would say that Ursula Le Guin deals with darkness as a force in the universe. Evil becomes almost a character in her work. Whereas in GIRL, INTERRUPTED the darkness is purely personal, it comes from Susanna’s mind, and perhaps from the institutions of society, too. In THE PHOENIX DANCE the darkness comes from the evil of men and from Phoenix’s own mind, rather from an exterior force of evil. Also, GIRL, INTERRUPTED is a memoir. I show Phoenix’s mental illness onstage, as it happens, and that gives a sense of immediacy to younger readers. That said, I have indeed created a fantasy world about a girl with a mental illness complete with dragons, wizards, and spells; so I think the comparison to a cross between Le Guin and Kaysen has some merit.

FSG: You have created a kingdom replete with mystery and uncertainty that feels otherworldly yet resonates as a real location, complete with class struggles, gender issues, and misunderstanding of mental illness. What was the inspiration for Windward?

Dia: The original idea for Windward came in ARIA OF THE SEA, which was my first book set in Windward. The setting came from an experience I had in the rugged Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of Canada. I walked through a trellis covered with white roses and found myself in a garden by the sea. The garden was a riot of flowers growing on tall stems: snapdragons, daisies, cosmos, purple coneflowers, and much more. But, only a few feet away, the roaring surf—it was high tide—pounded against the shore, throwing up white spray. The contrast of the two things ignited my mind. The garden was the force of nature cultivated by the hands of men and women. The ocean was the raw elemental force of nature untamed. And so, being a writer, I thought of a book, a book set in such a place with such opposite forces at work. And there I thought of the Sea Maid, and I saw her, the image of Botticelli’s Venus, sailing on her seashell drawn by six blue sea horses. And there, as I stood in the garden with my hair a mess from the wind, I saw the Black Ship of death that took the souls of the dead away home from the sea. And there I saw Cerinthe with all the power of the raw islands in her, trying to change herself and become part of the cultivated world of the garden. And that is how Windward was born.

The rest—class struggles, gender issues, a misunderstanding of mental issues, the culture, and the religion of the place—I made up as the story needed them, rather than as a world into which I fit the story. I know this is a rather backwards and feeble way to create a fantasy world—I believe most fantasy writers make up their whole world and then put their story into it. But for me the fantasy world comes out of the needs of the story. Now what is interesting and contradictory about this is that three books of mine were sparked by a place in the real world: the Methow River for FIREGOLD, an orchard for WHITE MIDNIGHT, and a garden by the sea for ARIA OF THE SEA. But these real places were only inspirations for the fantasy worlds.

FSG: Phoenix Dance is a fascinating name for a character—Phoenix rises symbolically and literally from poverty and her social standing as well as from internal struggles that have limited her from achieving her dreams. How much of this is Phoenix’s own doing? Does her name offer other insight into her personality?

DIA: All of it is Phoenix’s own doing. Phoenix’s rise comes from two things: her wish to help others (the princesses) and her struggle to learn to manage her illness. Though she has helpers, this is no easy task. Phoenix is essentially on a hero’s journey.

I used the name Phoenix very deliberately to symbolize the mythical phoenix that rises from the ashes into fire and back into ashes, over and over again. This seemed to me to show how a person with bipolar disorder swings from the fire of mania to the ashes of depression over and over again. Dance is Phoenix’s last name because I think there is a dance between mood states. Also because it makes a connection with the wild dancing she and the princesses do aboard the phantom ship.