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It would be tempting, but incorrect, to call Dale Lisa Flint’s career a study in reinvention. It’s more apt to see it as an act of deepening: from bright young performer in San Francisco’s Young People’s Musical Theatre Company, to lauded drama teacher, to playwright, and now, at last, novelist. Each step is not so much a pivot as a natural evolution—a widening of the same expansive devotion to storytelling that has animated her life since she first tap-danced on stage at the age of five.
Speaking from her ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Flint visited with me about her newest endeavor—a young adult time-travel novel called Finding Juliet.
A classically trained actor who spent formative years with the American Conservatory Theater and California Shakespeare Festival, Flint always recognized a certain precariousness in pinning her livelihood to the stage. “I thought about becoming a professional actor,” she said, “but it seemed like having to make a living at it would kill my joy.” Instead, she found a second home in teaching, where the art of communication, empathy, and connection offered a familiar and sustaining kind of performance.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that someone who described herself as a “big book nerd”—who preferred devouring a series to binge-watching one—would eventually turn to writing. “As I entered my late thirties, early forties, I started to take stock,” she said. “I decided I’m going to write a novel before I’m done with this life.” It was an audacious leap: Flint had never taken a creative writing class, never penned a short story. But she had authored a master’s thesis, she reminded herself—an act of endurance as much as invention. How different could a novel be?
The answer came slowly. Finding Juliet took twelve years to finish, with the book’s modern-day first act pouring out easily, only to hit a wall when the story’s heroine, Alex, travels 400 years into the past. Flint, striving for authenticity, initially bogged her characters down in painstaking Elizabethan English—a valiant but reader-alienating choice. Her husband, a reliable early reader, loved the first third. His enthusiasm wavered when confronted with the dense historical section.
“I could tell he was still being nice, but I lost him,” Flint said. It was only when she revisited her favorite historical novels and films that she realized: the setting could be ancient, but the heart of the characters must stay modern. “Once I allowed myself to retain what made the first part of the book so special,” she said, “everything became much easier.”
The result is Alex: sharp-witted, flawed, funny. A foster child, she carries the echoes of the resilient young people Flint encountered during her two decades teaching in public schools. But Alex also channels the plucky heroines of Shakespeare—Rosalind, Viola—who disguise themselves, outwit their adversaries, and forge their own futures. Flint knew from the start: Alex had to stand on her own.
Flint’s own love affair with Shakespeare began, fittingly, with a dose of humiliation. As a teenage performer with Broadway dreams, she found herself outmatched by a group of non-theater friends who casually referenced the Bard’s works—references she, mortifyingly, couldn’t follow. Shamed into action, she devoured the plays on her own, including the exhaustive History Tetralogies at age seventeen. “Once you go Shakespeare, you never go back,” she said. “It’s like breathing air—finding someone who can express what’s in your heart in such poetic ways.”
Her theater training echoes in her fiction. As a playwright, Flint thinks structurally, instinctively adhering to a five-act rhythm. Dialogue is her forte; she writes it with the verve and economy of someone who understands that words must not only be read but heard. “I have to remind myself, okay, you need a paragraph in here somewhere to describe what’s going on,” she said with a laugh.
When asked to name a favorite Shakespeare line, Flint gravitated not to the ornate soliloquies but to Shakespeare’s rare, brutal simplicities: King Lear’s repeated “never,” the fatalistic repetition in Macbeth’s “if it were done when ’tis done.” These stripped-down moments, she suggested, hit hardest precisely because they stand in contrast to the usual lyrical grandeur. “He chooses to get to the heart of it, to really punch you in the gut,” she said.
Finding Juliet was finished in 2021, during a global moment when, as Flint put it, “everyone either drank a lot, finished a novel, or both.” Now, with cows grazing outside her window, she reflects not on endings but new beginnings. Teaching, performing, writing: all different ways of telling a story. All part of the same long conversation with the world—and with herself—that began, long ago, with a tap dance.