Elyse Durham: Writing Is Just One Piece of Who You Are

Elyse Durham is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her fiction has or will soon appear in the Cimarron Review, the Cincinnati Review, Image, and elsewhere. She is an Elizabeth George grantee and has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Glen Arbor Arts Center, and the Mount, the home of Edith Wharton. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband, who is a Greek Orthodox priest.

In this interview, Elyse discusses how her love for ballet helped inspire her debut novel, Maya & Natasha, how drastic changes in the writing process helped the story come together, and more.

Name: Elyse Durham
Literary agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary
Book title: Maya & Natasha
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release date: February 18, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch:Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born during the Siege of Leningrad and raised to be dancers with the Kirov Ballet, like their late mother. But at the start of their senior year, they learn the devastating truth: the Kirov can only take one of them.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I fell in love with ballet after one of my favorite musicians did a collaboration with the New York City Ballet. I’d grown up around dancers, but this ballet looked nothing like anything I’d ever seen; it was contemporary and fresh and so, so human. I became ravenous for all things ballet, and soon I felt like the titular character in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie: I loved watching ballet so much that I had to start taking classes, and I loved taking classes so much that I had to learn everything I could about dance. The book was born out of that obsession. Reading about Soviet dancers in particular intrigued me—I wanted to immerse myself in that world. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be born into those difficult and unusual circumstances and then build a life around making art.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Between research, drafting, editing, and publication itself, it took me six years to finish this novel. And the concept changed a lot! It took me a very long time to figure out when in history I wanted to set the novel. At one point, it was set during the Russian Revolution, though I eventually became fascinated by the Cold War and shifted the story accordingly.

But the biggest change of all came about halfway through the process: For about two years, one of my characters was an actual ghost (the working title was Maya and the Ghost), and this was causing all kinds of logistical problems and muddling the story. I started wondering what would happen if I cut the ghost character altogether, so I tried it out. To my astonishment, this not only solved a number of problems, but made the rest of the story immediately gel. The process was never easy, but after that it became a heck of a lot smoother. It was a good lesson for me—sometimes cutting work feels like going backwards, but in reality it can be a huge leap forward.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest surprise for me was how quickly everything happened. My plan had been to spend all of 2023 working on edits and then start querying late that year. But an agent reached out in early 2023, we spent the summer polishing the novel, and then sold it in the fall. I was incredibly lucky—and spent the entire year feeling like I had whiplash. But it was a good experience in learning to trust myself and my instincts. The book was ready—I just had to catch up with it!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Probably the biggest surprise was discovering how much I love working with omniscience. It was a steep learning curve at first—when I started, I knew the effect I wanted (I’d loved opinionated narrators since childhood), but I didn’t even know what omniscience was called! And this novel had so many moving parts that I often wondered why I’d picked something so complicated as my first project. Omniscience turned out to be the glue that held everything together; it was what let me weave together multiple timelines and locations, not to mention the consciousnesses of several dozen characters. It was exhausting and utterly exhilarating, like spinning plates or juggling (two skills, alas, that are not in my wheelhouse).

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

My sincere hope is that they’ll feel fully immersed in this world. For me, one of the deepest pleasures of reading is getting to feel like you’re somewhere else—and someone else—if only for an afternoon. I also hope that they come away with a deeper appreciation of ballet and what dancers sacrifice to perform so beautifully. And in a pie-in-the-sky kind of way, I hope they walk away with just a little more compassion. That’s the true joy of an omniscient narrator—it’s easier to be patient with someone when you know what they hope for, what they’re anxious about, what they don’t like about themselves. That’s the dream, anyway.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

That old axiom that the work itself is the reward—well, like it or not, it’s true. Publishing and other milestones are very joyful, but they’re not going to heal you. Do whatever you can to keep working, don’t compare yourself to others, and don’t forget that writing is just one piece of who you are. Your art should support your life, not the other way around. (Was that more than one piece of advice?)