Memoir about ballet and illness from a creative writing teacher whose career as a ballerina was stopped by rheumatoid arthritis. RenEe Nicholson's professional training in ballet had both moments of magnificence and moments of torment, from fittings of elaborate platter tutus to strange language barriers and unrealistic expectations of the body. In Fierce and Delicate, she looks back on the often confused and driven self she had been shaped into-always away from home, with friends who were also rivals, influenced by teachers in ways sometimes productive and at other times bordering on sadistic-and finds beauty in the small roles she performed. When, inevitably, Nicholson moved on from dancing, severed from her first love by illness, she discovered that she retained the lyricism and narrative of ballet itself as she negotiated life with rheumatoid arthritis. An intentionally fractured memoir-in-essays, Fierce and Delicate navigates the traditional geographies of South Florida, northern Michigan, New York City, Milwaukee, West Virginia, and also geographies of the body-long, supple limbs; knee replacements; remembered bodies and actual. It is a book about the world of professional dance and also about living with chronic disease, about being shattered yet realizing the power to assemble oneself again, in a new way.
RenEe K. Nicholson is the author of two poetry collections, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center and Post Script, and coeditor of the anthology Bodies of Truth: Stories of Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She serves as director of the humanities center at West Virginia University.
Part I A Girl Who Wanted to Fly When I Was a Mouse Five Positions Never Famous Raked Stages: A Twelve-Step Program Coda: Partnering Out of the Blue Part II A Woman Tethered to the Earth Hair: A Short History In Sickness A Royal in Appalachia Certified: Dancer Becomes a Teacher Claque Fierce and Delicate Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast Acknowledgments
"Many dancers wrestle with one of the central questions of RenEe Nicholson's fabulous book: How does one live as an ex-dancer? The answers Nicholson explores will strongly resonate with those who long to lift the veil that shrouds creative pursuits in unnecessary mystique. I love Nicholson's powerful prose: how the essays circle in and out of dance, the way movement comes alive on the page, and the articulate grace with which Nicholson writes about sudden disability. In Fierce and Delicate, Nicholson teaches us how to envelop our impossible dreams with gratitude for the life we have now." RenEe E. D'Aoust, author of Body of a Dancer "Lyrical and fascinating." Buzzfeed News
