The Prairie Dancers was my first novel and remains close to my heart. I began it in 1976, writing in pen on a large tablet. I had finished grad school, English lit and Creative writing, at the University of Kansas. I was living in Lawrence with my cat Belle Star, who graciously kept me company wrapped purring around my neck.
I’ve no clear recollection of what specifically drove me to take courage and begin. I simply was bursting with a young man’s energy and a craving to write. I was 27. I began with a rough outline and a few character sketches, done in a couple of hours. After that I simply started.
This first novel was written like those that followed. I worked then after work although the time would change later. I work by automatic writing, always have. I need to sit somewhere and smoke or drink coffee for an hour or so while my mind piano-rolls and then I can go sit in my ‘writing place’ and put that bit, perhaps a few pages, into prose, without stopping.
Day after day I did this. It took me a few months to get more than halfway. Then I stopped due to the ill health of my parents and subsequent move to New York. Relocating to NY from a small university town was far more difficult for more than writing The Prairie Dancers. I couldn’t get back to the novel until summer of 1977. The long break was devastating. I found myself lost in the story with characters I no longer knew.
I started again and managed to proceed from start to finish. This time writing it in totally different surrounding. I’d replaced my cozy life of lots of ladies and bucolic small town Americana for 70s East Village, a one room tenement apartment in a wrecked building on East 9thstreet just off Tomkins Square Park. Lots of dope and adrenaline in the air there and then, and in me too. Maybe that’s why the novel seems to have been so effortless.
The Prairie Dancers derived from my Garcia Marquez period. It was to be American Magical Realism in the form of a Baroque frolic. The story followed a wealthy and most buxom young redhead, spoiled and capricious, who decides she’ll become a ballerina. No matter what.
This is Possie Victoria Vandermark who proceeds through the novel undeterred by all and everything despite her formidable size and not being particularly well coordinated.
Her foils are jealous and spiteful Aunt Bertha Flatbottom Dowel and the greedy Signor Lothar, a middle aged Italian dancing master who Possie advertises for and finds. The planets align when the dancing master arrives in the lost and dying high plains town of Possom Trot, where almost all of Prairie Dog County is owned by Possie.
One could call it rumps in a romp. To my wonder it was acquired by Buchan & Enright, a London publishing house, and was published in 1985. The years between finishing it and publishing it were filled with getting married, moving to Queens and writing my second novel, L.O.V.E. For a first novel The Prairie Dancers did not do so badly, to my knowledge it sold out, mainly in Ireland, Canada and Australia. Only the UK, Irish and Commonwealth rights were sold.
Sadly Buchan & Enright disappeared not long after, for what reason remains a mystery. The novel is now a rare book, with only a very few copies about in odd corners of the globe.
For this first novel I wanted to write a sassy, anti-culture, anti establishment satire.
And that’s exactly what it is. With it words came dancing from my head. And all the world was a lark.