Finn grew up in Kansas City’s Brookside neighborhood and graduated from St. Teresa’s Academy and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She went to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and became a writer and college teacher. She now lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., where she continues to write and to pursue a garden design business.
Finn will visit Kansas City Wednesday to discuss “Hold Me Tight & Tango Me Home.” Her book about growing food in small spaces, “A Little Piece of Earth,” also comes out this month.
Q. Your memoir, this part of your life, starts with the breakup of your marriage. How sudden was this?
A. There’s that phrase, “shocked but not surprised.” I don’t know if that’s possible. At the time I was quite shocked. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock, but I think betrayal always is.
Was there a discussion about trying to work things out?
We’d only been married a year and a half. It’s not like there were any problems. I thought that if he’s doing this now, what happens in five years when we have children and things do get tough? I think I probably married him too quickly. I think the decision to get married was bound up in wanting to have a child.
You and your ex-husband used to salsa dance, right? Where does all this dancing come from?
After I graduated from UMKC, I moved to Homer, Alaska, and I started working on one of the only mostly female commercial fishing boats up there. Then I worked for the Alaska Fish and Game Department. It was a small town, and I knew everybody. I moved to New York City to go to graduate school, and I suddenly felt very alienated and isolated.
I had gotten into a rut socially, and I was really looking for community. So I started taking dance lessons. People talk to you. And it’s this way of really sort of being in your body and flirting without owing anybody anything. It was a safe place to be sexy and life-changing in a lot of ways.
And it was fun. You feel joy coming off of people. I’ve never really felt it anywhere else. You don’t feel it at the shopping mall.
Did you meet your ex-husband at salsa lessons?
It’s a long story how we met, but it more or less had to do with salsa. We would go dancing once a week. He was a really good leader. A good leader can make you feel very safe, very protected, very sexy.
But put this in bold: Women, just because he’s a good leader on the dance floor does not mean he’ll be a good life partner.
And after the breakup, for some reason you immediately turned back to dancing.
You have this moment when everything you envisioned for the future is gone. You’re emotionally wiped out. We were saving to buy a home and get pregnant, and now that’s all gone.
At the time, some mutual friends of ours were getting married in Montevideo, Uruguay, and we were planning to go to the wedding and to go to Buenos Aires first. We planned to take tango lessons (before the trip) and to go dancing there.
I decided, OK, I’m still going to the wedding, and I’m going to Buenos Aires and I’m going to take tango lessons without him.
I had always wanted to learn tango. I went to my first tango event at South Street Seaport (in New York City). About 300 people show up there to dance tango on Sunday nights. I saw a man there I knew from salsa, and he took me into the tango embrace, and I felt his heart beating against mine, and there was the comfort of the music, and I just knew I wanted to do this.
It became the only time I didn’t feel bad. I couldn’t eat from the grieving, I was clumsier, more forgetful. It made a lot of sense to me to do something physical to get out of that state of mind.
For New York, it’s a very inexpensive activity as well. You pay for lessons, but milongas (social dances) are usually $5 to $15. You can hardly go to a movie for that. And I didn’t have to talk about my divorce. I felt very ashamed about it when it happened. It was painful to talk about. So I could go somewhere where nobody knew me. You can start making a new social circle.
But this Argentine tango music, the lyrics — so sad. You quote some of the words, such as “then leave me to cry for our love” and “my dreams and my youth fell dead with your goodbye.” Is that really what you needed at that moment?
It’s important to have a space to feel bad. Our culture doesn’t always give people a place for that. I was like: I feel really bad right now, and I’m staying here and feeling bad. It’s like listening to the blues when you feel bad.
And when you’re dancing you can feel melancholy and you can feel joy. I just think it’s really important to have that wide spectrum of emotions. All of them are valid.
As you learned and practiced, what do you think tango did for you?
For me, it helped take a bad experience and transform it into a positive experience. Not that infidelity and divorce will ever be a positive experience, but it did help me see that you can feel all the bad feelings as deeply as you can and then move on. You cannot stay angry and obsessed with your ex.
I’m learning to surf right now. I live close to the Pacific, close to a great white shark nursery, actually, and I’m dating a man who is a surfer, although he’s not a great teacher.
Learning to surf is really learning to read the waves, spending time in the ocean, getting beat up by it, and being worried a great white might eat you. That is, you’re fully focused. That’s what tango does. It’s a full-body meditation.
A lot of people see these dance movies and think it’s about competing for a trophy or that you’re going to find a love interest. I had a gay tango partner, and I danced with men who were over 75 years old, so that’s not what is going on really.
But it is a metaphor for relationships because you’re finding balance and harmony with another person, without an agenda. You appreciate the other person, move in sync with him, reveal what’s best about yourself. You come to feel an openness and fondness for humanity in general.
Who: Maria Finn, “Hold Me Tight & Tango Me Home”
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th St.
Admission: $13.95, includes a copy of the book and two tickets, go to www.rainyday books.com or call 913-384-3126
Tango speaks of heartbreak. On her Web site, www.tangomehome.com, Maria Finn invites those who have experienced lost love to submit their stories of 100 to 200 words or to tell the tale in a one- to two-minute video. The deadline is Feb. 28.
Finn will pick the best 10 stories, and those finalists will receive a copy of her book. A panel of judges will choose a winner. Composer Marlan Barry will arrange the winning story into a tango song.
“The book is about transformation,” Finn said. “Sharing these stories can make us feel better, and eventually we’ll have a piece of art we can dance to.”
