What was the reaction like from people at PNB when they learned you wished to spend a year there?

Everybody was so generous to me, I was just the fly on the wall. I think the deal was that people were surprised that somebody would actually be interested in what they do all day. Bruce Wells, who had famously been around forever, said when he first met me, “I'm going to tell you what I told that guy from Dance is a Contact Sport [author Joseph H. Mazo], which is you have to show up when we show up and leave when we leave,” which I did a lot of the time.

I'd love to hear more about what this process looked like on a day-to-day basis. In the book it seems like you were there to capture nearly everything.

I had a little notebook computer, and just sat there and watched and took notes. And the tricky part was I realized pretty early on that you had to pick a place. You have class, everybody's in the same place, now you move out to rehearsals, and there are three rehearsals going on, plus other stuff. And you had to kind of pick where you're going to be. And the question was, did I guess right? There were some narratives developing, like the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. And even that was sometimes being rehearsed in separate studios. And so you would have to pick, where's the story? And that was always just by your gut figuring out which place was going to have the real interesting thing that day. But I think I guessed right most of the time.

Your interviews shed a light on a world and history far larger than PNB. Did you expect to go so deep into personal stories and for those personal stories to reflect so much of ballet history on a national level?

I didn't know what to expect. I mean I tried not to let my prejudices rule, and as things developed, I learned. I didn't know anything about Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, and so people started talking to me about it. And the School of American Ballet was, of course, with Peter Boal's history and everybody who came through SAB either in the summer or some other way, I had to go see what that was about.

Do you think that as a writer you were able to capture the goings-on with more intimacy than film or recordings of rehearsal?

One of the reasons we have few good documentaries is the issue of music rights. And, of course, part of the problem is that you bring a camera. I think at some point I was sitting there, and I was like a fly by that time. But I didn't have lights. I didn't have a camera. I didn't have anything that got in their way. Somebody did a documentary on them while I was there, and I don't know what happened to it. I saw it, and it was shown once at the Seattle Film Festival, and there was supposed to be a second showing, and that never happened. I never heard why, but I would bet you it's music rights or choreography rights, and that's another whole issue. So strangely, this art of words, which shouldn't be particularly good at conveying ballet, it may be the best you get.