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Back to the Barre: Amber Benson on Her New Urban Fantasy, The Witches of Echo Park
More than a decade after the show went off the air, Amber Benson is still best known as Tara, the shy-but-strong witch who wooed Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the intervening decade, however, she’s built quite a career for herself as an author, penning five books about Calliope Reaper-Jones, the reluctant daughter of the Grim Reaper. Her newest novel, The Witches of Echo Park, starts off a whole new series. Below, she discusses what inspired the book, and pushing through the hard part to produce something you are really passionate about.
I like dance movies. Not so much of the Step Up variety. I’m a traditionalist. I like the ballet ones…the ones about dance companies full of hopeful young boys and girls who just want to be the best and, man, oh, man, is it hard to be a ballet dancer.
In these movies there’s always a girl who has bad feet, or is from the mid-west, or has too much funk in her soul just to be a ballerina and, at some point in the course of the story, she has a meltdown because everyone is telling her she can’t do it, she can’t be a prima ballerina. And when this girl is at her lowest, when she’s about to chuck it all in and go home, that’s always when an older, wiser, formerly antagonistic ex-dancer/teacher comes in and offers the girl a very important piece of advice that turns everything around…and that piece of advice is simple:
“Go back to the barre.”
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Focus on your technique. Find the joy in your art all over again. That’s what the ex-dancer/teacher is saying. Take it all down to brass tacks. Lose the adulation, the validation, the celebrity, the money…and return to the reason you started dancing in the first place.
I co-opt this statement, this truth, for all art.
What do I do when everything that made me think I was a writer feels like it’s been ripped out of me, ground up into little pieces, and blown away to the four corners of the universe?
I go back to the barre…or, in this case, I go back to the story.
I write what moves me, what I feel passionate about, and I ignore everything else. I do the work that pleases me. This is the journey I am on, and I welcome anyone who wants to tag along.
I wrote The Witches of Echo Park for myself. This is a book I want to read. It’s an evocative story ripe with magic and atmosphere, chock full of three-dimensional women, all of whom I adore. It’s a mash note to the east side of Los Angeles, and to the neighborhood of Echo Park—a place I call home. I walk the same streets you’ll read about in the book, and the women in the story are all based (in pieces, here and there) on my own friends.
I went back to the barre and found this book waiting for me there.
Enjoy.