A. McLemore: Hi, my name is Anna-Marie McLemore. My pronouns are they, them, and I'm the author of Dark and Deepest Red. Dark and Deepest Red re-imagines the fairy tale of The Red Shoes through the lens of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague.

The dancing plague, as strange as it sounds, dozens and then hundreds of people started dancing uncontrollably and no one could figure out why. And there seemed to be these secret threads of history between the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Red Shoes, which is one of his bloodiest, most terrifying fairytales, and the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague. So this book is part history, part fairy tale re-imagining, part secret history of a fairy tale.

For a while, actually, I'd wanted to write about the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague. There have actually been recorded history of a number of dancing plagues, particularly in medieval Europe. But this was the one that I was really interested in for a long time, because it was one that was very well-documented and it was one of the largest so we have a lot of information about it. And it was something that I knew I wanted to write about, but I didn't exactly know how I was going to go about it.

So I was thinking about the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague when I was in Irish dance class, when I should have been thinking about the steps that I was going to be doing. So I'm turning this over in my head and I'm thinking, how would I tell this story? What would I do with it? And the daughter of one of the other women in my Irish dancing class points at me and said, "Mommy, I want to dance like her. I want to dance like the girl in the red shoes." And that was just the moment where I thought, oh my gosh, that's it. This is a story about this fairy tale that shows this girl whose red shoes make her dance uncontrollably and about connecting that to this dancing plague.

And when I decided that I wanted to do that, when I took that sort of spark and decided to run with it, I didn't even know that there were these specific historical connections between this specific outbreak of dancing plague and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The dancing plague, or what they called it in French, la fièvre de la danse, which means literally fever of the dance or dance fever. They would dance until they either fell down from exhaustion, or unfortunately in a lot of cases, they would fall down dead. You had marginalized communities blamed for things that were awful and unexplainable. Our worst impulses have been with us throughout history. That kind of blaming of marginalized communities tragically still happens today. We know that all too well.

I think the one thing I would add about why this book is very special to me is because I got to take this corner of history and this fairy tale and center characters of color and queer and trans characters. This story really at the story's center is two girls of color who are five centuries apart. You have Lavinia Blau in 1518 Strasbourg, who is a Romani girl who is navigating a city where her identity is outlawed, where she has to hide who she is and she lives in fear of what she and her family and her community are going to be blamed for. And then 500 years later, you have Rosella Oliva, who is a Latina girl living in a small town who gets taken on this journey by this pair of red shoes that make her dance.

It was special to me to get to write about medieval queers in 1518 Strasbourg and write about this community that I come from and that often gets left out, even though we've been there throughout history.

Now I'm going to share a little of Dark and Deepest Red.

My mother told me once that being an Oliva meant measuring our lives in red thread. And probably, that was true. But growing up in Briar Meadow meant I measured mine by the glimmer that appeared over the reservoir every year. That was what they called the strangeness that settled onto our town for a week each October, a glimmer. Both for the wavering light that hovered above the water, and because it seemed like the right word for the flicker of magic that came with it.

One year, the glimmer stirred the air between neighbors who hated each other. Families who'd become enemies over fence lines and tree roots suddenly burst into each other's kitchens, trading long-secret recipes for tomato sauce or spiced cookies. Another year, it was icicles that tasted like rose candies. My mother and I ate them all week, licking them like paletas and tried to save some in our freezer.

When the glimmer left at the end of the week, we found them vanished from between the frozen peas and waffles, and managed to be surprised. (My abuela called us fools for thinking we could hold onto Briar Meadow's magic any longer than the glimmer let us.)