Introducing Sari Wilson Brattleboro Literary Festival, October 15, 2016   I first met Sari Wilson in New York City a little more than fifteen years ago, when she was hired to join our doughty little team of editors hard at work on a new edition of Adventures, a literature program for grades 9 through 12 — by far the oldest and, we smugly believed, by far the best set of high school literature textbooks available in the United States. Sari was a rookie at this kind of thing, but she had the background and the smarts and the drive to catch on fast, and in no time she was one of us. Then, one morning just two weeks later, our team was summoned to a conference room where we found ourselves facing the president of our company, who had flown up from Texas to tell us that our adventure was over — they had decided to spend our production budget on a series of middle-school math textbooks. We were stunned, and while commiserating over beers at the emergency staff meeting we held at a nearby tavern, we figured that life couldn’t get any worse than this. The date: September 10, 2001.       The next day changed the world — life, it turned out, could suddenly and forever get much, much worse — and it hardly mattered that our team was now scattered into various other projects within the company, where we worked on mediocre programs designed (that is, dumbed down) for “the middle of the market.” Take my advice: Read Elsewhere. But Sari was the consummate pro — she got herself on a schedule of three long workdays each week that would leave her four days for her own writing. She was serious, and she was disciplined.       Now that she’s published her first novel, I see where she acquired that seriousness, that discipline, and that quick-study insight into the dynamics and subtle politics of small groups of passionately creative people. Girl Through Glass draws on Sari’s firsthand knowledge of the world of classical ballet — specifically, on the intensely focused training regime for young dancers, mainly teenage girls, enrolled in New York’s most competitive dance programs. The winnowing is severe, and merciless — the ballet world has room for only a tiny number of stars, and an even tinier number of former dancers to pass along the traditions, discipline, and passion to the next generation of would-be stars. Girl Through Glass is a window into that world, with its own rituals, its own rich history, its own dangers, its own smells — a “world,” as the novel puts it, “in which trust is the hardest thing.” Above all, it is a world obsessed with beauty — and Sari writes about it beautifully.       Please welcome Sari Wilson.   © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2016   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page