Hello and thanks for visiting my website. It’s been here for a while but without a lot going on but now I am really excited and proud to share with you my book, Arms Out Like Wings.  It’s an anecdotal memoir of my time at a ballet boarding school from the age of 9 to 17.  This means that there is a little artistic license but it is mostly true to life. I am putting it out first as a podcast as that seems to be the most straight forward way of introducing it and hopefully once we have completed all the podcasts and produced an audiobook it will eventually be in print too.  There’s nothing like a real book.  My husband is the techie one – there’s no way I could have got my voice up there in the ether without him.  Arms Out Like Wings would have just lingered in our dropbox until I got brave enough to submit it somewhere.  In fact I’ve been playing around with it for years and then one of my greatest and closest friends became ill and I started sending him my book just one tiny piece at a time and I have loved sharing it with him. 

Why Arms Out Like Wings?  Well, dancers love describing movements in animal terms.  My yoga teacher says “arms out like wings” almost every class when we lift from a forward bend and it always reminds me of my ballet training as we often thought of our arms as wings and not just in the context of Swan Lake.  So, that title just stuck and I kind of like it though it may become The Ballet School or just The School at some point.  All input welcome on this 🙂

I got really excited about the concept of a podcast.  I have always loved stories read aloud. Then I suddenly thought that it would be lovely to add music from ballet classes.  The pianists who play for ballet classes are so talented.  Their playing can carry you through a class even on days when your body just wants to give up.  I love ballet pianists!  My husband found a brilliant pianist Ray Lindsay.  When we asked him if we could use his music for this project he said yes straight away – how wonderful!  We are so thankful to him.  His music is perfect.  My book is in four parts and we have chosen music for barre work for the first part, allegro for the second, adage for the third and grand allegro for the fourth, so the book builds as a ballet class does and as a young dancer does in strength and stamina.

I’m sure that most people listening to begin with, apart from family and close friends, will be people who actually went to ‘the school’ with me or even before and after I went there as we are a tight knit bunch.  Sorry I never told most of you that I was writing this – I was never sure it would ever be completed!  Names have been changed apart from my own.  You’ll have fun guessing who is who!  Eventually there will be a gallery of photos which you can add to if you want to send us photos.  Have fun matching those photos with the characters in Arms Out Like Wings.

So, I have gone on far too long I know, but I had to get all that said.  If you’re still with me, pop along to the podcast pages and have a listen.  We’ll be putting up one or two pieces each week.

Much love to you all and thanks again for listening.

Glenda x