LITTLE MOVEMENTS

A NOVEL BY KIMBILIO FELLOW LAUREN MORROW

A page-turning, tenderhearted debut about a Black woman who is finally given a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a renowned choreographer, only to find that it comes at a tremendous personal cost

Layla Smart was raised by her pragmatic Midwestern mother to dream medium. But all Layla’s ever wanted is a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives a prestigious offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House, an arts program in rural Vermont, she leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it.

Navigating Briar House and the small, white town that surrounds it proves difficult—Layla wants to create art for art’s sake and resist tokenization, but the institution’s director keeps encouraging Layla to dig deep into her people’s history. Still, the mental and physical demands of dancing spark a sharp, unexpected sense of joy, bringing into focus the years she’d distanced herself from her true calling for the sake of her marriage and maintaining the status quo.

Just as she begins to see her life more clearly, she discovers a betrayal that proves the cracks in her marriage were deeper than she ever could have known. Then Briar House’s dangerously problematic past comes to light. And Layla discovers she’s pregnant. Suddenly, dreaming medium sounds a lot more appealing.

Poignant, propulsive, and darkly funny, Little Movements is a novel about self-discovery, about what we must endure—or let go of—in order to realize our dreams.

LAUREN MORROW

KIMBILIO FELLOW AND AUTHOR

Lauren Morrow studied dance and creative writing at Connecticut College and earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She was a Kimbilio Fellow, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, and the recipient of two Hopwood Awards, among other prizes. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares and the South Carolina Review. She worked in publicity at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now a publicity manager at Dutton, Plume, and Tiny Reparations Books. Originally from St. Louis, she lives in Brooklyn.

LAUREN’S WEBSITE

Five Questions for LAUREN MORROW

Humor! This has always been important to me as a reader and writer (and human). Some of my favorite authors employ humor beautifully, which often serves as a release valve in books with heavy themes. Zadie Smith, Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty. I find their work incredibly smart, urgent, and very funny—and I think I learned a lot from them. I was also often the quiet one in a big extended family of loud funny people, so I internalized humor from an early age. I was never the loudest voice in the room, but when I realized I could let some of that humor out on the page, it was a game-changer.

I was inspired deeply by the choreographers of the past and present—Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Ronald K. Brown, Kyle Abraham, the list goes on. In a way, this book is a love letter to modern dance. On a literary level, Erasure by Percival Everett was a big influence. My friend described Little Movements as American Fiction [the film adaptation of Erasure] set in the dance world, which is incredibly flattering. I’d read Erasure during my MFA program and was blown away by Everett’s razor-sharp take on the publishing world. I wasn’t necessarily trying to write something similar—and the scale of Erasure is next-level; quite different from my book—but a sharp, funny critique of the modern dance world felt like the right topic for me to tackle.

Character typically comes first for me—I love writing people, relationships, dialogue. I sort of let the characters tell me what the plot is, and that changed (in small ways) from draft to draft. Plot doesn’t necessarily come easily to me, so I really had to try a lot and see what worked best with this particular cast. Setting is never top of mind for me and often the element I get the most notes on, but when I was pushed to develop the setting of Vermont more, it allowed me to dig deeper into my protagonist, Layla.

There are some elements of the book that connect deeply to some painful moments from my not-so-distant past. In early drafts, I took put in placeholders, to get through the manuscript, then went back and filled them in when I felt emotionally ready. The best part of the process was actually pulling away from some of those moments and moving deeper into fiction. It gave me a sense of power and agency to create entirely new traumas and dramas for my characters.

Getting to the end of the first draft was the most important part, as I think I could have second guessed myself all day. By pushing myself each day to simply reach my word count (1k), it allowed me to push the story out, and then I was able to dive in and really make it work. The second part that was crucial was being able to see feedback for what it was and determine what suggestions made sense and which weren’t right for the story I was telling. In the end, some of the best moments from the book came from suggestions that pushed me to take my writing further than it could go.