Interview with Jenni Ogden, Author of Dancing with Dragons

What’s the story behind the story? What inspired you to write Dancing with Dragons?

My inspiration for ‘Dancing with Dragons’ was a combination of seeing a photo of my granddaughter, then aged 14, caught by the lens of her mother’s camera in an arabesque as she danced in her blue bathing suit on a remote New Zealand beach. The second inspiration is my love of wild places and the sea, and concern for coral reefs especially, symbolized by the rare dancing weedy seadragons only found in the southern waters of Australia. (Watch this short David Attenborough video to see a pair dancing.) My granddaughter is now a professional contemporary ballet dancer (loving the freedom that gives her over classical ballet).

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of Dancing with Dragons, what would they be?

Theme songs: The Swan Theme from Swan Lake, as Gaia, my 18-year-old protagonist was dancing to this when 11-year-old Jarrah, a lonely orphaned Aboriginal boy, first saw her… ‘He watched, enchanted, as she twirled and leapt and spun and glided back and forth across the sand where the low tide had left it hard and damp. She hovered and stopped, her bare right leg long and straight, its foot arched above her tippy toes, her back and left leg a curved new moon, balanced like a bowl in the blue, her left foot pointed and as high as her head. One arm was a swan’s neck reaching for the sky, the other a swan’s wing. But most beautiful of all was her face, eyes closed, worshipping the sun.’ (This description describes the photo of my granddaughter, exactly!)

The second theme music would be the Irish Jig, the joyful music that Seamus, the Irish rover who burst into their lives, danced to.

What’s your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

Accessible literary fiction and ‘Book Club’ fiction, especially about family (in the widest sense) and bringing up deep moral issues for the characters and readers to contemplate. These are also the stories I try to write. My big-selling, well-awarded novel “A Drop in the Ocean” set on a coral island, had very similar themes (finding a family and marine conservation) but the main characters were in their 40s and 50s.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

I am an avid reader of a wide cross-section of genres. On my TBR list now are ‘Playground’ by Richard Powers, ‘Sisters Under the Rising Sun’ by Heather Morris, and ‘Sweet Sorrow’ by David Nicholls.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

This is hard to answer; every scene must be important to the story and thus in some ways the favorite at the time. But I think my favorite scene would be Chapter 7, where Jarrah discovers Gaia dancing on the beach. Here I wanted to convey this lonely boy, with his club foot and his amazing sensory abilities, limping through the wild Australian bush and coming upon a fairy, dancing on the beach. It begins like this:

“The boy stood still, the tendons stretched tight along one side of his skinny neck. He listened. Music, coming and going like waves licking a shore, whispering, soaring, dancing. He’d never heard music like this before. Not like the loud beat of the insistent songs the other kids at the children’s home danced to; not like the hypnotic dirge of the didgeridoo Hannah sometimes let him and the other kids listen to on the special new CD player in the common room. Jarrah swayed side to side, his ears picking out the warm wind sighing high above him in the tops of the tall gum trees, the rustles of the tiny feet of lizards and insects in the dry leaves around his bare feet, the whistles and screeches and melodious calls of the birds darting like jewels through the bushes, the lull and swish of waves on a beach somewhere in front of him. The music wove in and out of all the familiar sounds, making his small body throb with a desire to dance.”

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

Don’t have any. But I do a lot of my creative thinking while walking along (or lying on!) our deserted and stunningly beautiful beach.

Do you have a motto, quote, or philosophy you live by?

I think it is simply “be kind” (to other living things and our planet).

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

Here I will simply give you two of the ‘quotes’ I had in the novel:

“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.” ― Rumi

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” —Robert Swan

Jenni Ogden is the author of the new book Dancing with Dragons

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