The Dance Tree

From the author: I first heard of the 1518 dancing plague in 2016. A brief Atlas Obscura article about the largest ever event of choreomania: hundreds of people dancing uncontrollably and without rest in the Strasbourg streets, many dying of heat exhaustion, was such a strong visual image for me and led me down a rabbit hole of research. But I was already midway through several other projects, and could’t commit the time to write the story I knew was brewing. Three years later, with my debut novel The Mercies written, I knew the dancing plague was the perfect backdrop for my next story. In the intervening years it had been permeating my thinking. I was preparing to write this book long before I sat down to the blank page.

In this process of thinking and discovery, a woman stepped from the shadows of the Black Forest that surrounds Strasbourg. In that unexplainable alchemical way characters do, she told me her name was Lisbet, and she was pregnant. She lived with her husband Henne and mother-in-law Sophey on a beekeeping farm on the outskirts of the city. It was her story I was telling. I’ve never had a character change under my fingertips the way Lisbet did. I knew I wanted it to be about desire, friendship, longing and love. She was living at a turning point in history: the Holy Roman Empire was crumbling and the Ottoman Turks were advancing. The resultant war was flooding central Europe with refugees and racism was rife. Climate change was ruining crops and bringing drought. The parallels felt unavoidable. While writing The Dance Tree, I lost six pregnancies. It’s impossible to go through that sort of grief without being transformed, so the book transformed too. In many ways the story became a repository for all the things I couldn’t say aloud because they were too raw, too angry, too bitter. But they also helped me to process those, and I’ve become a better writer because of it.”