English professor Adrienne Sharp’s first love was ballet dancing; her second was writing, so it makes sense that her first full-length novel entitled ‘First Love’ would connect the activity she loved most as a child with the interest she cares most about now.
Growing up as an aspiring ballerina took hours upon hours of physical exhausting practice and was emotionally exhausting due to constant scrutiny and critiquing by instructors, Sharp said.
“Compliments weren’t given very often and when they were it was something like ‘better’,” Sharp said. “It was a strict environment in which we were incredibly disciplined, and focused, and desirous of perfection.”
Sharp, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, began dancing at a very young age.
“You find your training intensifies without even knowing it so by the time I was ten, I was on full scholarship taking class six days a week,” Sharp said.
At age 17, Sharp was accepted at Harkness Ballet in New York but had a few months before her training began which gave her the opportunity to reevaluate her life as a dancer.
“It didn’t take me long before I realized that this was not really what I wanted to do forever,” Sharp said. “Now that I was away from all of the teachers who had so much hope invested in me, I could see what I wanted to do and that was to stop doing these exercises over and over and have a little bit of a larger life.”
Sharp incorporated many of her own experiences and observations as a ballet dancer as well as her interest in the old fable of “Sleeping Beauty” to mold some of her characters in the novel, particularly the main female character, Sandra.
“There is lots of focus on the girls who make it; not too much focus on the girls who don’t; I wanted a girl who felt like she was not going to make it,” Sharp said.
“In my main character I have a girl without a mother, a girl whose father is ineffectual; there is no protection for her.”
At EC, Sharp teaches three English classes and a creative writing course and said she believes that being a teacher has made her a better writer.
“It’s fun to go into the classroom and talk about literature and writing with my students; it has made me a stronger writer as well to continually lecture and to encourage my students to consider structure, characterization, where a story opens, foreshadowing, etc,” she said. “Teaching provides a terrific balance to writing.”
