Writing with a broken tusk

Challenge, Counter, Controvert: Subverting Expectations

2012-02-01T03:29:00.001-07:00

In Michael Ondaatje's novel, Divisadero, the narrator says, "I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere."

Elsewhere he writes of a steeple:

"Built in the thirteenth century, the belfry had been constructed like a coil or a screw. It had one of those unexpected, heliocoidal shapes--the surface like a helix--so that as it curved up it reflected every compass point of the landscape."

It's the surprise in this text that keeps me reading. How can you look into the distance and see those lost people everywhere? How does so expansive a word as "everywhere" manage to loop me back so close to the narrator's consciousness? How can "everywhere" conjure up personal, proximal space? The belfry, too, curves up in a single sharp, clear image. Yet its multiple reflections seem created purposefully, to reflect "every compass point" and thus to distract the reader's mind into attentiveness.

So how does all this internal contradiction work in narrative, given how much we're taught to prize logic and order? Shouldn't the work of crafting a story be all about trying to figure out what makes sense?

I will admit that I love complication and contradiction. I love the places in books where meanings rub up against one another and create new and mind-boggling patterns. Always did, even as a kid.

I'm writing this from India where continuum and contradiction are present in tandem: Republic Day flag-buntings and traditional rice-flour kolam on thresholds and sidewalks, the whir of ceiling fans and the shrieking of tropical birds at daybreak. Here, controverting meaning is part of daily life.

Take the other day, for example, when I went to the bank. A young woman was seated at a table as people came and went. She was creating mehndi designs with henna paste on customers' and bank employees' hands. A caricaturist was working away in a back room. A bank employee directed anyone who caught her eye: Mehndi? Quick sketch? Naturally, I volunteered.

The bank, it turns out, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. This birthday bash could last a week, a couple of weeks, or a month. No one is quite sure, but a party is promised at some point soon.

This mega-promo deliberately sets out to disrupt your sense of what is normal, so you're compelled to ask, Why is this happening? What could it mean? That asking keeps you guessing, and more to the point, it keeps you from walking out. Maybe you'll open a new account, or refer a friend. See the parallel with a reading experience?

The henna went on cool and dark green. Within an hour the leaf paste had flaked off, leaving a pale orange tattoo. A few hours of later, it turned a deep, glorious brick-red, the pattern having been fixed by the heat of my palm.

So it is with challenge, countering and controverting. It heats text up. It shifts expectations. It disturbs the rhythms of normalcy. When it's done right, it can keep us turning the page.

Taraneh Matloob on Susan Fletcher's Shadow Spinner

2012-01-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

I was at the ChLA conference in June 2011 when I met Naomi Wood, Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University. During the course of a conversation about writers and writing, she mentioned that one of her graduate students had written a paper on Susan Fletcher's Shadow Spinner. Thanks to Naomi's e-introduction, I was able to read that paper and correspond with its writer, Taraneh Matloob.

[Uma] What drew you to consider Shadow Spinner as the subject for your paper?

[Taraneh] The first time I heard about Shadow Spinner I was in my home country, Iran and I came across an article in a children’s literature scholarly journal. The name of the article was “How I met Shahrazad, the storyteller.” It was an interview with Susan Fletcher by Hossein Ebrahimi Elvand, the translator of the book in Iran. I was fascinated by Fletcher’s respect and passion for a culture different from her own and was inspired to know more about outsiders who set their story outside the mainstream culture. Initially, I started my research in the field from my own reading and writing and continued my study when I was awarded three months fellowship at International Youth Library of Munich. There, I had access to invaluable resources and also had the chance to meet scholars in the field. After being admitted to Children’s Literature graduate program in Kansas State I chose multicultural literature as the main subject that I want to study further, purposefully and passionately. Continuing my research in the field I realized that Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner is the best case to examine cultural authenticity. In my first and second reading of the book I was not consciously aware of the cultural elements interwoven to the story but I was certain that the book is an authentic representation of the Persian culture so I started working on that with a critical perspective.

[Uma] You take the position that rather than place the telling of culturally grounded stories out of bounds for those outside the culture, we should instead recognize writers like Susan, in your words an "outsider, practicing to develop an insider's eye." I'm fascinated by this, because really, this is what all fiction is about, the creation of illusion. In your view, what are the dangers for the unwary writer of navigating that coral reef of culturally grounded story when the culture is not the writer's own?

[Taraneh]I believe there is a serious concern when a book provides an incorrect picture of the other culture. As Edward Said discusses, inaccurate information about the East can change established theories and concepts through the history. Of greatest concern is that those authors from the dominant culture, mastered in authorship, apply their imagination to create an appealing but an inaccurate and a distorted view of the dominated culture. However, avoiding of everything to do with the West and in other words encouraging anti-Orientalism may have a more negative consequence than Orientalism because it brings a deadly dominant silence. So, although as Alcoff correctly indicates speaking for others is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate the solution is not simply restricting the practice of speaking for others to speaking for groups of which one is a member. Indeed, the fault of the Western authors who fail to respect the rights of people of minority groups cannot be responded by prejudice against any effort to speak because as Fletcher indicates, if “we don’t share our stories—trading them across our borders as freely as spices and ebony and silk—we will all be strangers forever” (132).

[Uma] Conversely do you have thoughts on the dangers for the insider writer of failing to take the broadest possible audience into account?

[Taraneh] In Iran we are introduced to the Western culture mainly through translation; Iranian authors rarely write about the West from their point of view. However, it is important to have Iranian multicultural authors who write about the West from the outside position because Western audience needs to know how their culture is viewed from the East. Conversely, this is true for the Westerners who write about the East. Marjan’s story is a tale never told in the history of storytelling in Iran and every culture needs the stories that have not been told. It does matter to hear those stories, both from the inside and outside. It is important to hear Fletcher’s voice who is outsider, practicing to develop an insider’s eye. Iranian young adults are eager and have the right to know how Western societies have understood and interpreted their life, culture, and country. Meanwhile, it is the responsibility and commitment of outsiders to not write unless they are confident that they know the culture enough and this confidence is achieved mainly through experiencing and having a conversation with member(s) from the other culture. Every culture has very specific characteristics that may not be captured by the outsider’s first attempts and therefore the work needs to be critiqued by insiders’ eye before publication.

[Uma] Anything else you want to add?

[Taraneh] I believe multicultural children’s literature is a new and very fragile field and portrayal of the other culture is the responsibility of every author, who is sensible of the great diversity rooted in different cultures and seeks to develop heightened sensitivity and understanding of others. In so doing, what matters is not to project the sense of nationality but to promote the sense of humanity, what is in danger of being lost in a battle between cultures.

[Uma] Thank you, Taraneh, for shedding this new and interesting perspective on an old and often contentious debate.

Ensorcelment By Story: Susan Fletcher on Shadow Spinner

2012-01-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Hardcover edition, Shadow Spinner

I first heard Susan Fletcher speak about her writing journey with Shadow Spinner when she was an alumna guest speaker at VCFA and I was still relatively new on the faculty. At first I was skeptical. Sure. Another white writer romanticizes the Middle East--what's new about that? But as I heard Susan speak, I became more and more convinced that she was about to make me shift how I thought about the telling of story across cultures. Here was a writer, I could see, who had done the work and done it with humility, serving the story and not herself. I was moved, and that was something I hadn't expected. I'm happy to say that Susan is now a friend and colleague on the faculty at VCFA.

It's my great delight to open 2012 with this interview. Welcome, Susan Fletcher.

[Uma] What were the delights and dangers for you of daring to place this coral reef of a story on the page?

[Susan] When I remember what it was like to write Shadow Spinner, I can’t help but think of the character Richard Dreyfuss played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’m not saying that aliens took over my mind – exactly – but I definitely felt in the grip of an obsession. It started when I was still drafting Sign of the Dove, and entire paragraphs of Shadow Spinner sprang full-blown into my head. I would minimize the page I was working on, take down the words I was hearing, then go back to Sign of the Dove. The obsession kept hold of me throughout the year and a half it took me to write Shadow Spinner and didn’t release me even after I finished. So I wrote a speech about Shahrazad and the importance of stories. I sketched out a sequel. I took a class in storytelling. It became annoying after a while. I couldn’t wait for the obsession to let go, so I could move wholeheartedly into my next project. Confession: Now I’m longing to be ensorcelled like that again.

I did worry about the fact that I was writing outside my culture. I read a lot of books, took a class, and asked for feedback from an Iranian friend and an Arabic woman who had worked for a princess in a royal harem. Also, I had the stunning good fortune of meeting the sister-in-law of renowned Persian scholar Abbas Milani, who is now Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford. Abbas was generous way beyond anything I expected or deserved. He vetted the manuscript for accuracy – twice – and recommended more books for me to study. He read Shadow Spinner as if it were an emergent poem, directing my ear to the faint ringing chimes of local metaphors and suggesting that they might resound throughout the whole.

[Uma--aside] And they do, they do! Watch this blog for an interview with Taraneh Matloob, whose research led her to Susan's work and who, like me, was taken with the loving care that Susan exercised in her research and her literary choices.

[Susan] Another thing that gave me the courage to write this book is that the 1001 Nights, on which Shadow Spinner is based, is such a cultural mélange. Some scholars claim that the tales originated in India; many others believe that they originated in a lost, pre-Islamic Persian book of fairy tales called Hazar Afsaneh, or “Thousand Stories.” From Persia, the collection moved to the Arabic world, morphing into new cultural articulations and accumulating new tales. The various translations we have today include stories from ancient Mesopotamia and India, early medieval Persia and Iraq, and Egypt of the late Middle Ages. A couple of the most famous tales have no known precedents before Antoine Galland translated the Nights into French around 1704. So the 1001 Nights is imbued with the perspectives and contributions of many different cultures over more than a thousand years. Moreover, it is a story about a woman who tells stories from many different cultures. In a way, those of us who have retold or re-interpreted parts of the Nights (including Robert Louis Stevenson, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Barth, among many others) are simply adding another layer to these many-layered tales…and carrying on the tradition of Shahrazad.

[Uma] In juxtaposing the tale of young Marjan with the story of Shahrazad, you open it up to the world--there is a world of young girls in the kingdom, anxiously waiting to see if the Sultan will like each night's story, and spare its teller's life, and thus possibly their own. By implication, and by giving agency to a young girl who has herself been deeply wounded in body and spirit, you offer hope to all young girls everywhere. It was a transcendent moment in the book for me when I arrived at that understanding and yet it came very simply and naturally; it came from within the story. What was the line you had to walk between story and message, and how did you manage to stay true to story?

[Susan] I usually have no idea what the themes of my books are going to be until I’ve worked my way through to a story that seems to hold together. Then I ask myself, “What is this book trying to say?” With Shadow Spinner, I knew that “Stories can save your life,” would be one of the themes. But the idea of giving agency to a girl who’s been deeply wounded came through working out the story.

I thought about the world of Shahrazad, in which the king takes a new girl as his wife every night and kills her the next day. I thought about the mothers of girls inside the city and wondered what desperate measures they might take in order to protect their daughters. I thought about Shahrazad’s having to come up with a new story each night for nearly three years. What if she got storyteller’s block? What if she forgot which stories she’d already told?

As a writer, I’m always more interested in story situations in which a child is the primary actor. So I imagined a girl who begins collecting stories out of admiration for Shahrazad, whom she idolizes for having saved the lives of so many girls in the city. And I imagined that the girl’s mother does what she feels she has to in order to protect her daughter.

[Uma] Would you like to say something about the process of having this book translated into Farsi and published in Iran?

[Susan] The first I knew about the Farsi translation was when Abbas Milani called to tell me about it. The Persian translator knew how to contact Abbas – but not me. The translator, Hossein Ebrahimi (penname: Elvand), invited me to a conference in Iran, but for various complicated reasons, I was unable to attend. I was thrilled to learn later that Shadow Spinner was popular with children in Iran. And eventually I went to Iran to research my other Persian novel, Alphabet of Dreams.

Over the years, Elvand and I became friends. He was an extraordinary man. Both Elvand and Abbas vetted Alphabet of Dreams. Elvand and I corresponded by email as he translated Alphabet of Dreams into Farsi. I’ve written about Elvand in The Horn Book Magazine, March/April, 2009.

More on Shadow Spinner before the end of the week. Look for an interview with Taraneh Matloob, writer of a children's book in Farsi, and currently a doctoral student in children's literature at Oakland University in Michigan.

Mount Kailas

2011-12-26T12:00:00.002-07:00

This will probably be the last post of the year, as I'm revising a novel while also trying to get ready for the Vermont winter residency and my trip to India following that. But I wanted to end 2011 with an image.

This image.

This is Mount Kailas (or Kailash; Gang Tise in Tibetan), a rare sunlit view of the giant peak that rises to an astonishing 22,028 feet.

The picture of Kailas gilded by sunlight was sent to me by an Internet acquaintance who has my undiluted admiration for having recently been on the Kailas-Manasarovar yatra (Sanskrit for "journey" or "pilgrimage"). Her group did the full parikrama (Sanskrit for "circumambulation") of the mountain on foot.

This part of Asia is a land of contested borders and competing claims of jurisdiction, with force and occupation ruling the day. It's also a place of great mystical significance for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and followers of the indigenous Tibetan religion of Bön. It was probably an object of awe and worship for unknown ancient belief systems that predate any religion we know today. Hindus believe it to be the abode of Lord Shiva himself, guardian of the forces of destruction and dissolution in the universe.

And finally, it's a place in danger. Himalayan glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates in our time.

So I want to end 2011 by taking some time to look at this mountain against light and cloud and sky. Just look. And see if it doesn't somehow provide perspective.

Naomi Rose on Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Author-illustrator Naomi Rose, welcome and congratulations on your new picture book from Lee & Low, Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure. (Review excerpt from Booklist: "gracefully introducing Tibetan words and customs...this upbeat story provides a rare look at Tibetan American culture.")

[Uma] Your own inquiry into Tibetan wisdom and culture is important to your life. How did that inquiry lead you to the mysteries of the flower cure?

[Naomi] About 10 years ago, my father was recovering from cancer. My mother, who knew of my interest in Tibetan culture, emailed me a true story about a Tibetan man who miraculously recovered from cancer. The story was written by a hospice worker. She had tried to use the Tibetan Flower Cure to bring comfort to the Tibetan man in his final days. Instead of simply bringing him comfort, the Tibetan Flower Cure actually cured him! But it wasn't just the flowers that evoked the cure. It was the coming together of communities in support of this man's well being. The doctor was baffled about the unexpected healing. But the Tibetan man explained that the disease couldn't live in a body filled with so much love. It was such a beautiful story of the power of kindness and community, I knew I had to write it for children.

[Uma] In the end this is a story of geographies blending and merging through the connections between the generations. Talk about both those elements and how you show this blending of places and cultures in your art.

[Naomi] When I have visited the homes of Tibetan-Americans, I've seen an intriguing mixture of American and Tibetan elements. The homes generally have a special room dedicated for the most sacred items. This room is specifically for meditation, chanting, and prayer. The rest of the house is a combination of Tibetan and American culture, such as prayer flags flying in the yard next to a lawn mower, thangkas hanging above televisions, and so on. In a way, this approach blends the sacred and mundane, which I really appreciate. So I was careful to place Tibetan items in the ordinary rooms and scenes in my art.

Another aspect of blending is the dress. Some Tibetan-Amercians, especially the elders, continue to wear chupas, the traditional Tibetan clothing. Others, especially the younger generations, wear American clothes. I portrayed this in the illustrations with Popola wearing chupas, and Amala and Tashi wearing American clothes.

[Uma] Reversals drive the structure of this book: Sickness to healing, inaction to action, I could go on. I know you worked on this book over time and in many different versions, but can you tell me how you arrived at the final structure?

[Naomi] After several years of working on the story on my own and with my critique group, it finally earned some interest at Lee & Low Books. Louise May was the editor-in-chief at the time and she and I worked on the story for almost 18 months. But when she finally showed it to the editorial committee, they passed on the book. I was devastated. I filed the story far away. Then about six months later, I read a newly-released picture book from Lee and Low, written in free verse. I loved the voice. Inspired, I rewrote Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure in free verse, first person, present tense. I wrote the story without thinking of a publisher. I wrote it from my heart. I knew I had a good story, much better than before. I showed it to Louise May and it required only a few minor revisions before the acquisitions committee accepted it.

[Uma] Finally, can you share a recipe for solja?

[Naomi] Solja, or Tibetan Butter Tea, is definitely an acquired taste. It is especially enjoyed when living in high altitudes and freezing temperatures. Tibetans in Tibet have very elaborate ways of preparing the tea. These ways may include using butter churns and horsehair (to strain the tea). But here is a way to make it more simply.

Solja

Makes 5 to 6 cups of tea:
Ingredients:
plain black tea (2 tea bags or 1 tbsp. of loose leaf)
¼ tsp. of salt
2 tbsp. of butter
½ cup of milk

Boil 5 to 6 cups of water. Pour two tea bags or one tbsp. of loose leaf into the boiling water and wait 2-3 minutes. Gently remove the tea bags or strain the tea leaves. Pour the tea into a large container with a lid or a blender. Then add salt, butter and milk. Shake it for 2 or 3 minutes. Serve it immediately. Enjoy!

This delicious tea will keep you warm in the winter and help you feel healthy and strong.

[Uma] Thank you Naomi. And here's another review from one of my favorite book bloggers, the BookDragon.

Cynthia Leitich Smith on Diabolical: From Literary Homage to Growing the Craft

2011-12-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

Cynthia Leitich Smith's intelligent, quirky, robust vampire series has swirled into an industry all its own. Her Dracula-inspired quartet of prose novels in theTantalize series includes Tantalize, Eternal, Blessed, and Diabolical, whichwill be released by Candlewick on Jan. 24, 2012. Tantalize: Kieren’s Story,illustrated by Ming Doyle, is now available, and the Eternal graphic novel,also to be illustrated by Doyle, is currently in production.

In addition, two short stories, “Haunted Love,” originallypublished in Immortal, edited by P.C. Cast and “Cat Calls,” originallypublished in Sideshow, edited by Deborah Noyes, are available for free downloadfrom various e-retailers.

The books and shorts are published by Candlewick Press inNorth America, Walker Books in the U.K., and various other publishers aroundthe globe.

I asked Cyn:

The world of your fiction has grown from akind of whimsical alternative Austin with lurking dangers to encompassingnothing short of heaven and hell. How has writing the Quincie P. Morris booksgrown you as a writer?

Here is her reply.

I credit the dark master, Abraham Stoker, for much of the past decade of my writing life.

The first quartet of novels in the Tantalize series are a conversation with his 1897 horror classic, Dracula, which likewise features varied settings (the Carpathian Mountains, the streets of London) and an international cast (the Dutch doctor, Texas gunslinger, English lawyer, etc.).

My first of the books is firmly set in Austin, but from there, we travel to Dallas, Chicago, a fictional small town in Michigan, the outskirts of San Antonio, north to Montpelier, Vermont; and its surrounding countryside, climaxing in a battle that literally rages from heaven to hell.

These multi-creature-verse stories are told from four points of view. A tie-in graphic novel, Tantalize: Kieren’s Story released this fall, and an Eternal graphic novel is in the works.

When I first began jotting notes in late 2000/early 2001, I had hopes of multiple books. Though many suggested there wasn’t a market for Gothic YA tales, I began writing with a super-arc in mind. Each of the books would have a beginning, middle, and end, but they would also combine to tell a larger story. My dream concept was an ambitious one—to extend Stoker’s world, starting with a pseudo-descendant (a many-times great niece) of the Texan character Quincey P. Morris and then working my way back to the root material, a demonic academy that lingers in Romanian-Hungarian folklore.

At the time, I was a long-time fantasy reader but had published only realistic, contemporary fiction.

Suddenly, I needed to learn world- and creature-building and to craft a story in which both were necessary for the protagonist’s internal and external journeys. Soon it became the protagonists’—plural—internal and external journeys, even as my world and its varied population continued to grow.

I had to consider the power of metaphor in conveying such weighty themes as alcoholism, homelessness, gender and power, sexual assault, bigotry, culture/identity, biological warfare, plague, child abuse, slavery, indentured servitude, sexual orientation, free will, the role of faith, good and evil, holy sacrifice, the nature of God, redemption, forgiveness, destiny, and grace.

You know, in a fun, occasionally funny, way that also inspired tears, while keeping the action moving, integrating compelling suspense/mystery elements, and making the occasional teenager (or YA librarian) swoon over a certain fictional guardian angel. Or two.

Meanwhile, I navigated quasi-epistolary elements, unreliable point of view, alternating point of view, juxtaposing urban/rural with high fantasy, translating from prose to graphic format, embracing the short and long form, and writing across race, region, culture, gender, orientation, nationality and species.

Worst of all, I had to learn to write love scenes—fresh, poignant, passionate love scenes that rang true and spoke to the adolescent experience. That nearly killed me.

Put mildly, the psychological and intellectual challenges have been numerous and formidable. The experience has equipped me with a toolbox of skills that I hope to carry into future projects. But my more valuable takeaway is what I learned about YA readers and my relationship to them.

I’ve learned to more seriously consider the young audience.

That’s not fashionable. You often hear writers say, “I write for myself” or “I write for people” (not merely—gasp—kids), or, though usually not so straightforwardly, “I write for acclaim.”

Don’t get me wrong. I do cater to my own inner brat (and a brat she is) and my darling readers over 18 (who generate about half my mail) and those remarkable champions/gatekeepers. I’m honored that the books have been critically well received and appreciate the importance of that in widely sharing them.

But my previous works had been for younger kids. And while I heard from a handful of grieving tweens and thoughtful Native readers in the wake of Rain Is Not My Indian Name, the vast majority of my feedback came from grown-ups.

With the Tantalize series, for the first time, I found myself presented with countless more personal interactions, such as:
a fourteen-year-old, big-city boy clinging to a tattered copy of Tantalize—the first novel he’d ever finished;

a pair of suburban African-American teen cousins wanting to talk to me about my choice of “black” as a color of heaven; when so often in Gothics, its only association is with evil;

a reader ranting (with many exclamation marks) that a girl is NOTHING!!! without a boy to love her;

a handful of girls writing about their physically/emotionally abusive “romantic” relationships and how Quincie’s arc inspired them to view themselves and their situations in a new light;

a date-rape survivor who wrote to say she’d copied an exchange at the end of Blessed and taped it to her bedroom mirror;

a young lesbian who wanted to know why the only gay main characters were male and adults (which is no longer the case with the upcoming release of Diabolical);

a reader who wrote of Miranda, “Nice to see an Asian girl pick up a battle-axe!”

foodies who requesting recipes from the Sanguini’s menus;

Ausitinites and Chicagoans thrilling to see their neighborhoods reflected in a YA book;

high schoolers delighted that they actually “got” the Hawthorne references (“English class was good for something!!!);

teens who read the novel Dracula along with Quincie, looking for clues;

readers literally bouncing, tearing up, or kneeling with enthusiasm;

and a seemingly endless array of folks (of both genders and, for that matter, all ages) swooning over the glory that is Zachary. It’s surreal to be gushed at about the sexiness of a figment of your imagination.

So now I have my audience in mind: Geeky but unpretentious young people (and those young at heart) with depth and a sense of humor. Those who’re willing to be challenged by the occasional unfamiliar literary device and/or reconsider their world view, who’re open to a hero who’s Asian or Latino or Italian-American or gay or part wereotter; and who can get behind imperfect characters who love deeply but aren’t wholly defined by their respective relationship status.

They’re avid and reluctant readers, those who love and hate genre romance, and those who adore and abhor horror novels. They reach for mystery fiction and revel in the mysterious nature of our so-called real world. A few leave unsettled, even unsatisfied, only to return months, perhaps years, later with more life experience, typically after their first real heartbreak.

At a time when there is so much economic pressure to pander, to dumb down, to revisit without reinventing, it’s important not to underestimate the young, not to cower in the face of the perceived market or even some teens’ ever-evolving (and occasionally appalling) priorities.

And we must be equally wary of the temptation to preen over our craft, over how we express ourselves, if it’s at the expense of saying something that truly matters to our intended audience. Art should be thrilling, satisfying, and yes, unsettling. To the reader and also to the artist. There are no safe spaces. Joyful innovation doesn't come from playing it safe. But it does spring, at least in part, from valuing its intended audience.

[Uma] Thank you Cynthia. And so to the menu. Here's the antipasto, the trailer of Diabolical. Congratulations!

Note: Cynthia is now working on Smolder, which is set in the Tantalize universe, but begins a new arc and features new protagonists, two of whom were previously introduced as secondary characters. Cynthia Leitich Smith blogs at Cynsations and is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Best Endeavo(u)r

2011-12-05T08:47:00.001-07:00

This was the first book I ever owned, and I won it.

It had been a rough year in kindergarten. I started out in one school where Anita with the pigtails stole my lunch regularly and threatened to beat me if I told. Then I moved to another school and thought I was in heaven. I loved the big pieces of paper we got to draw on and often got into trouble for using more than my allotted number of sheets.

School opened up worlds to me. One time I didn't hear the end of day bell due to being deep in conversation with a girl named Ritu about the possibility of scaling the tamarind tree. I missed the bus, and my mother had to drive all the way out from Delhi Cantonment to come and fetch me home. Come to think of it, I often lived on the fringes of reality, a little abstracted, caught up in daydreams. Their possibilities were so much more enticing than the day to day.

So when the end of year awards ceremony rolled around and came to a clacking stop, I didn't expect anything. When my name was called I sat there astonished. "Go," said my mother. "Go." In the end my father had to hold my hand and walk me up, because I was so convinced there had been some mistake.

But there it was. The Three Little Kittens, in soft colored soft-cover, kittens and mittens and mother cat and all. My own book. Mine. It said so.

I read those kittens several hundred times, from mishap to mishap. I myself had regularly lost earrings, lunch boxes, and even once a shoe.

I still have this book. It's a little moth-eaten but it has managed to hold together. The label inside reads: Prize presented to…and then my name. Underneath it says, For Best Endeavour. I don't remember what I did to earn that consolation prize. But really, as a goal, best endeavor isn't so bad. It still holds up. It's something to reach for.

Beyond Visual Literacy

2011-11-28T07:57:00.001-07:00

There's been a lot of talk about the demise of the picture book. Parent Tracy Grant summarized the heated debate in this piece in the Washington Post. Maurice Sendak chimed in to say that the picture book is blighted by misguided notions of childhood innocence, although he admits at the same time that he hasn't read very many lately. Some of us who watched the National Book Awards streaming from New York recently were a little perturbed by celebrity writer John Lithgow's attempts to be funny. In the process of self-deprecation he managed to dismiss the entire form of the picture book by suggesting it wasn't "real."

Is it, as Karen Lotz, Candlewick publisher suggests in the NYT article that started the brouhaha, a matter of the picture book being an analog artifact in a digital age? I'm not so sure. The codex book might be analog in structure but the picture book, if we pay attention to how young children "read" it, is far from analog in application.

Adults may read it from front to back and left to right but look at this child poised to turn a page.

Left? Right? Depends? If the book topples and ends up upside down in the process, a two-year-old might continue "reading" it that way. Nothing linear about that.

Toddlers react to the whole book as an object, without privileging the words on the page. They also react to the voice and the presence of an adult reading to them. They memorize text (another skill we tend not to privilege for some odd reason) and will often catch the lazy adult reader trying to flip two pages at once. Young children will want to visit a beloved book over and over, as they define it for themselves auditorily and visually, finding comfort in prediction. And of course they will imitate the reading behaviors (or lack thereof) of the adults in their lives. In all these ways, the picture book is meant to be a multi-sensory experience.

Its future is obviously tied up with the future of the book itself. But as with hybrid cars, we haven't quite found the right combination of green, cheap, tough, and accessible, not yet. Meanwhile, the codex book with pictures continues to allow children to acquire meaning in the often ambiguous spaces between text and image, and to do so with their entire bodies, which is what young children need to do. Speculating on causation in a narrative is a very different skill from touching a screen to create it. The two are not interchangeable, nor is one better than the other. But they are different.

If we let the picture book slip away while we dither around trying to decide if the form is dead, then the thing we may be endangering is the potential of the young child's brain to take in multiple stimuli, find meaning, react with all senses at once, and thereby create the active engagement with the world that we call literacy.

Note: This post appears simultaneously on Write at Your Own Risk, the VCFA faculty blog.

Picture Book Month

2011-11-22T14:23:00.001-07:00

Among all the voices wailing about the demise of the picture book, and those trying to figure out the reasons behind that assumed demise, here's a new collective vision from authors and illustrators of picture books.

More on Audience

2011-11-17T08:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday's questions yielded several more opinions on audience:

Stacy DeKeyser wrote her forthcoming midgrade fantasy, The Brixen Witch, with herself as the audience:

I tried to write something I would like to read, and my favorite genre is midgrade. Also, I honestly can't gauge the reading taste of anyone else. (Though I've tried, and my editors and agent usually tell me I'm wrong. For example, I allowed myself to think of my potential audience as "boys" when rats--a lot of rats--entered the story during the first draft. Later, my editor told me that my primary audience would be girls. So what do I know?)

The book has a fair number of long sentences and big words, because that's what I like to write, and read. And because I hated it when some critiquers told me to simplify if I wanted to sell it, and I wanted to prove them wrong. (Lots of what I accomplish in writing is out of spite, I have come to realize.)

Kimberley Griffiths Little started writing Circle of Secrets on deadline:

I had...to turn a new book in to my editor within a 6-8 week period. A book I had barely begun to think about, let alone write. I had just launched The Healing Spell and hadn't received any of those first, wonderful fan letters from kids around the country who were begging for another book like it, so I was writing this story just for me, which is how every story begins. Although this time my editor was hoping for a beautiful, poignant family story with a vulnerable, troubled girl like The Healing Spell contained. The pressure was on in spades! But when I say I was writing this book for myself, I am literally talking about the stories I love to read - stories I loved to read when I was 9-13 years old and stories I still love to read and never stopped reading even when I became an official grown-up.

Since I love weaving my character's relationships together in various emotional ways, as well as concocting a plot with some suspense and twists - I'm still thinking about that child reader in me, but I also start thinking about the readers out there who want an exciting story with surprises....Of course, this usually doesn't occur until the first draft is completed. Before that I'm too worried about actually getting the story down...in some sort of coherent and chronological sense. During my second and third drafts I'm honing the depth of the characters and making sure all the little connections and surprises in the plot works, and fixing holes and inconsistencies, etc. During revisions and the production work with my editor, I start really dreaming about the kids out there who (I hope!) are going to connect with the book. Now that Circle of Secrets has launched, it's happening: letters are coming in from adult readers who tell me the story describes their own feelings and situation when they were kids as well as kid readers who love the small, secret connections within the story. Once the book is out in the world, hearing that kind of marvelous feedback makes me feel like the readers and I are connected in a very special, magical way.

Bonus: Book trailer, Circle of Secrets:

Barbara Brooks Wallace talks about how readers' tastes can change, recalling two of her books, Claudia and Peppermints in the Parlor. More about Peppermints in this video interview with Bobbie:

...a lady in our church informed me that her daughter "hated" Claudia. I simply told her that everybody doesn't like everything, and one had to understand and accept that, and one shouldn't be angered by hearing an opinion, even though negative. A year later, that same woman, with girl in tow, pushed her toward me after church. "I just loved Claudia!" said the child. Well, a year older and better able to understand what Claudia was going through then. This happens often. But I never gave a thought to who might or might not like the story when I wrote it.

And, of course, there's Peppermints in the Parlor. Even grown-ups have read and told me that they enjoyed, even loved, the story. As usual, I never gave a thought to who might read it or like it when I was writing it. I simply sailed around the moon when Jim Trelease and others referred to it as "Dickensian"! Charles Dickens...my hero! I wonder if he might have liked it?

Ah, yes, the conversation of books. Perhaps that's the real reason we write, because we need to talk back to books we have loved or loathed, resented or revered.

Interview Wednesday Portal Right Here Today on WWBT

2011-11-16T07:23:00.001-07:00

The magic window to today's Interview Wednesday posts on Kidlitosphere is right here on Writing With a Broken Tusk.

First up, Holly Thompson talks about food, influence, life in Japan, operating in two cultures, and more on Gathering Books.

On Playing By the Book, Victoria Griffith, author of The Fabulous Flying Machines of Alberto Santos Dumont, talks to Zoe about her journalism background, research, and books that inspire her.

A five-way interview with Candlewick authors Paul Janeczko and Ruth Thomson, editors, and a publicist on The Whole Megillah, the writer's resource for Jewish-themed books.

Watch for additional interview links during the day.

This post itself will be an all-day group interview in response to a single question. Years ago, Mem Fox wrote a piece in Bookbird journal titled "For Whom Do We Write?" It can also be found in variant grammatical mode under the title, "So Who Are We Writing For?" In it she talked about sending all potential readers out of the room when you write a book--silencing all those possible voices that hover around the writer, seeking to influence the work. She says only then can she allow the work itself to take shape. Audience has always been of interest to writers, perhaps most of all to those whose work is read by young readers. Maurice Sendak once used to hate being called a children's writer.

I'm asking a group of children's and YA writers to think of one of their books--any one--as they answer these two questions:

Who was your audience when you wrote this book?
At what stage in the life of the work in progress did you allow that potential audience into your mind?

Kathi Appelt wrote The Underneath over the span of three years. She writes:

My original audience was a boy, someone who resembled my own son when he was around thirteen or fourteen years old. It was an incident that occurred with him that gave me the impetus for the story to begin with. So I had him in the back of my mind over the course of writing, but I confess that as I got deeper into the story, I actually lost track of any audience at all. It felt as though I was writing for the story itself and the characters in the story, as if they were the only “audience” that mattered. I kept writing and writing and writing until it seemed like I got the characters’ stories right within the context of the bigger story. I was writing to find the stories that my characters had to show me.It seems like the intended audience was the first and then the last thing that I kept in mind.

Tom Birdseye's most recent novel, Storm Mountain (trailer here) began on a the 41-mile Timberline Trail that circles Mt. Hood, the highest mountain in Oregon. He describes the experience:

Halfway around, gazing up at yet another stunning view of the iconic peak, it suddenly occurred to me that although I loved mountains and scaling them, I had, in fact, never written anything with a climbing focus. What was with that? Why not combine two of my passions -- writing and the alpine realm? It was a head-slapping moment, and in it a book idea was born. I'll write a middle-grade adventure story, I declared, set in the high Cascades. So the audience, middle grade readers, was set in my mind very quickly.

It wasn't until I was well into the first draft that it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just a climbing adventure, it was also a story about the grief that the protagonist, Cat, feels at the loss of her father. My father died when I was young. I never really processed his passing -- I didn't know how -- and instead pushed the pain aside and moved on with my life. Writing Storm Mountain became a conduit for finally dealing with a scarred-over wound. In the end it was a much for an audience of one -- me -- as it was for kids.

Shutta Crum comments on the differences in audience awareness between novels and picture books. Her picture book, Mine! just made School Library Journal's list of Best Books of 2011.

I'd hazard a guess that most writers don't think of a particular audience--other than themselves--when they are first creating. I don't. Sometimes I don't even start to think about the audience until my editor makes me think about it.At some point, when a novel is ready to submit, I simply give it over to my agent/editor. I always figure that a good book will find its audience.It is not until after the editor has her hands on it that I worry about word choice, white space, sentence length, etc., all those kinds of things that one worries about with an audience of a particular age.The one exception to this, I find, is when I am working on a picture book for the very young, such as Mine! (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). For that book my editor challenged me to write for the very youngest of audiences. So I had my audience firmly in mind. The book ended up only having 10 1/2 words.

When Sharon Darrow was writing her YA novel Trash, she thought the audience might be the same people who read The Painters of Lexieville because they had some characters and settings in common. But, she says:

I found that Trash had more boy readers than Painters did, at least I got more mail from boys. At first I thought that might be because of the graffiti writing in it, but later I learned that the boys liked the poetry, too. Just about all the readers who wrote to me mentioned liking the white space on the page.

I thought a lot more about the audience when I was writing Trash than when I was writing Painters, partly because I was thinking about how the words looked on the page, almost as if that were a part of the graphic aspect of the book and I was hoping my audience would enjoy that.

When I was writing Painters, I felt like I was the audience for the character as she 'told' me her story, then when I was revising the words for the readers so that they might be able to 'hear' her voice, I thought about how words sound when spoken and about how feelings come through the sounds a voice gives to words. I hoped my audience would be able to experience Pert's voice in a way similar to the way it had come to me, except I wanted the reader to feel much more like she or he were living the story along with Pert as it happened. The revisions were for my imagined young teen-aged reader, mostly girls I thought, but, in a way, I imagined Pert herself reading and deciding if I'd done a good job writing her story!

Jane Kurtz has written two picture books with her brother, Only a Pigeon (soon to have a new edition with a new title, Pigeon Boys of Ethiopia) and Water Hole Waiting. They've also worked on a novel together. Here's Jane's take on audience and co-authorship:

We've also worked on a novel together. One of the interesting things that happens with a co-author is that we both get audience reaction right away...from each other! I will think some word or sentence is funny or apt or touching or just right in some other way, only to discover that it falls flat for Chris--and vice versa. We argue for our choices. Often we talk about audience as part of that because it's useless to say, "Well, I'm doing this because it pleases ME" if it doesn't please the other person. With this new edition of Only a Pigeon, we had the advantage of having tried our story with lots of actual elementary aged kids so we talked about what confused or frustrated or interested or amused kids as we revised. I kind of wish I could now re-do all my books.

Julie Larios says she wrote her second picture book, Have You Ever Done That? in response to a prompt at a small writing workshop conducted at the home of her friend and colleague Laura Kvasnosky:

As a general target audience, I had in mind young children who have hesitated when asked to do something brave, as a way to suggest that courage often comes in small packages and doesn't look like what we think it's going to look like. I knew right away that what I had to say was for a young audience, picture book age, because I imagined it as a series of questions that could be talked over at bedtime. I love questions, no matter what the age of the audience, and the read-aloud moments before bed, when a parent lingers and talks over what's been read, those feel especially important to me. Why not put the kind of questions out there that can be pondered while falling asleep? And if I'm going to be perfectly honest, I'll admit that the specific target audience was actually the child I was at about four years old, staying with my family at the beach cabin my grandparents built. One hot summer night, I was granted the special privilege of sleeping outside on the open porch; I could hear the waves and see the moon and stars. It should have been Heaven, but I was terrified. So I wrote the book for the little girl I was that night, as a way of holding her hand across the years and telling her it would be alright. And I knew from the moment I had the idea - before a word was ever written - who the audience was.

David Lubar (Attack of the Vampire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales--see this great review on A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy)says:

I am going to answer the question by explaining that I have no answer. (So let's call this a meta-answer.) Perhaps it marks me as a mutant, curmudgeon, or semi-solipsist, but I generally write with no audience in mind. I have a story to tell. It seizes me, and I set out to write it. The only time an imagined audience becomes an issue is when I get sidetracked by worrying that some group, such as the award givers, or the fans of whatever genre my last book fell into, will not like my current work. Then, I have to heave that audience from my mind and get back to telling a story. That approach seems to be working out pretty well, so far.

Leda Schubert admits to having trouble with the idea of audience when she wrote Ballet of the Elephants:

I think, as many writers seemto think, that I write for myself. I become passionate aboutsomething and have to get it down on the page. Then I try to figureout what I've got. With Ballet of the Elephants, for example, Ididn't know what I would find when I began to do what would turn outto be months of research. It took a very long time to figure out howto tell the story in a way that might make sense for children,knitting together disparate elements into a whole. When I realizedthe story was in the performance itself--in the coming together ofall these geniuses (including Modoc, the elephant and primaballerina)--I began to think about the child reader. I'm still notentirely positive that it's a children's book, and I always promisemyself to do better next time. With my three newer books, Reading to Peanut, The Princess of Borscht, and Feeding the Sheep, I began withthe idea of the child.

Keep coming back, audience! There may be more.

Barbara Brooks Wallace on editor Jean Karl

2011-11-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

Ever since I read Dear Genius, Leonard Marcus's collection of correspondence between Harper and Row editor Ursula Nordstrom and her authors and illustrators, I've been intrigued by the experiences of writers, a few of whom I'm lucky enough to know, who got to work with some of the greatest editors in children's publishing. It seems to me that when I talk to Eleanor Schick, who worked with Ursula herself, I can in some way touch that experience. Vicariously, some semblance of it becomes a part of my narrative as well. In our time, when things are changing more rapidly than ever before, it seems important to me that we acknowledge our links with these editors who left their stamp on the field. Without them, somehow, we would collectively be diminished.

Jean Karl, founding editor at what is today Atheneum Books for Young Readers (one of my publishers) was one such.

When I was in the Washington DC area in September, I was lucky enough to visit for a while with my friend Barbara Brooks Wallace. Jean was Bobbie's editor. In an editorial letter, she described Bobbie's middle grade novel, Peppermints in the Parlor, as "marvelously funny" and "a true children's Gothic." Bobbie went on to win two Edgar Awards for The Twin in the Tavern and Sparrows in the Scullery. Thirty-one years after its publication, Peppermints is still in print.

In this brief video, Bobbie tells me about the process of submitting Peppermints in the Parlor to Jean Karl, and hearing about its acceptance.

Jeanne Walker Harvey on My Hands Sing the Blues

2011-11-11T14:30:00.001-07:00

My Hands Sing the Blues by Jeanne Walker Harvey, from Marshall Cavendish (a publishing house with vision, judging by just a few recent and backlisted titles) is a childhood biography of artist Romare Bearden. Jeanne has recently taken her picture book on the road. She's been to The Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte, North Carolina, which has been hosting a Romare Bearden retrospective in honor of the centennial of the artist's birth. She was the featured speaker at Bearden Family Fun Day, when children had a chance to do Bearden inspired collages.

In an e-mail message to me Jeanne wrote, "Such fun! And, it was so exciting for me to be talking...where my book takes place -- his birthplace! I met such nice people, including those at the Harvey Gantt Center for African American Culture which is also hosting a Bearden exhibit. And I spoke at the Family Day at the SFMOMA so I've gotten to be at the two places most important to me for this book."

[Uma] Congratulations, Jeanne. As someone who saw this work in manuscript, a long time before it found its voice and current form, I'm delighted to see it in print. (Note to anyone who doubts the power of e-mail: Jeanne and I have never met in person, yet our creative lives connected indelibly over this work!) I'm so pleased to be talking to you now about My Hands Sing the Blues. So, to start, why Romare Bearden, and why a picture book? Talk about how this project came to be.

[Jeanne] I'm a docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a number of years ago I gave tours to school groups of an exhibit organized by The National Gallery of Romare Bearden's amazing art. The students and I LOVED his art, especially his huge collages, and the stories they tell about himself and his African American heritage. I realized I wanted to write a book about how the people, places and experiences in his childhood, specifically Charlotte, North Carolina, influenced his art. I felt this book had to be a picture book because the story is all about the creation of visual art, and I could not be more thrilled by the incredible illustrations Elizabeth Zunon created for this book. I feel magic happens with a picture book -- something incredibly special happens when the illustrations and words are joined.

[Uma] What's one thing you learned about yourself while writing this book?

[Jeanne] I learned that I need to trust my instinct about how a story should be written, even it's outside my comfort zone. I wrote this book in a loose blues format (three line stanzas with end rhymes and repeating phrases) which was totally new to me. I felt that the story I wanted to tell about Romare Bearden needed to be told in this format because of his passion for jazz and blues music. He felt that the way he created his paintings, his collages, was inspired by the give and take, the improvisation of jazz music.

[Uma] What's one thing you learned about writing?

[Jeanne] Trust the writing process/journey because you never know what will happen! I learned to trust that I'll get past the pain of those first "drafty drafts" as you call them.

[Uma] That's right. I won't use the Anne Lamott term, not because I'm squeamish but because I don't believe a draft should be quite so easily dismissed. A first draft contains the spirit that made me want to do the work in the first place, so why should disparaging it make me feel more competent? Drafty I can live with. [Stepping off soapbox...]

[Jeanne] I was enrolled in your online writing course in 2007 with Writers Workshop when I hit this (drafty) phase. I had submitted an early version of this book to the group. But then I reread it and felt remorse that I had let the piece out into public, even though it was a supportive group of writers. I asked you if I could withdraw the piece. You said, hold on. You referred me to your article which so articulately set forth the phases of the writing process:

read, exult
reread, despair

Then you shared one of your tips from your wonderful "20 writing tips that I wish I'd heard 20 years ago": "The beginning is often not what you think it is." You suggested that I begin the book with a line from the middle of my text, "Snip a square of color" which ultimately became "I snip a patch of color." That truly made the difference. My focus became more about Bearden's connections to his childhood, and less about his New York City life as an adult. I was then able to read and absorb the class comments, and move forward.

The last line of my book is what I've ultimately learned about writing and the creative process: "When I put a beat of color on an empty canvas, I never know what's coming down the track." That is, as long as I remember to stick with it and believe in the process!

[Uma] It's true, isn't it, of writing as of any other kind of art? Congratulations on a beautiful book.

Interview on KSJD, Dry Land Community Radio

2011-10-30T22:49:00.000-06:00

I meant to post this earlier but it got brushed aside by all the travel.

Here's my September 2011 interview with Danielle Desruisseaux on All Lit Up, KSJD Radio in Cortez, Colorado, whose fall membership drive is currently under way.

The brown and white object in the sign, I'm told on good authority, is a pinto bean.

Process Talk: Martha Alderson, Plot Whisperer

2011-10-28T01:00:00.000-06:00

For more than fifteen years, Martha Alderson has worked with hundreds of writers in sold-out plot workshops, retreats, and plot consultations. Her clients include bestselling writers, New York editors, and Hollywood movie directors. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA. Follow her blog, workshops, videos, or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I consulted with Martha some years ago over a work in progress that was in danger of stalling and possibly fizzling away. The novel has ended up ceding room to other work that was closer to being developed, but I learned a lot from the interaction I had with Martha. I learned to pay attention to the shape and energy of a story. I learned to nudge parts of my writing mind that didn't always want to cooperate. I learned to push my vision for my story to the next level. And perhaps most important of all, I learned to look beyond the words on the page to the story that ignited those words in the first place.

I'm happy to welcome Martha to WWBT now to talk about her new book, The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master. More links to Martha's blog tour on her blog, Plot Whisperer for Writers and Readers.

[Uma] The Plot Whisperer is a terrific title for your book and an intriguing role for you to take on in your work. It seems to me that you're after the Theory of Everything as far as fiction writing is concerned. What led you to this intersection of working with story and writers?

[Martha] I observed first-hand how people learn from working with children who had speech, language, and learning disability in an earlier profession. When I started working with writers in plot workshops, I gained a deeper insight into the process writers go through writing a story from the beginning to the end.

[Uma] Martha maybe that's why we connected! I was also in counseling and special ed before I came home to writing. What was that insight?

[Martha] Along the way, I discovered the two main types of writers – plotters versus those writers who write with little or no advanced planning. I was relieved to understand why some writers love the plot and structure work I share while other writers resist with dagger eyes when asked to learn the same information.

Beneath all of it, however, I find that every writer goes through the same trials and tribulations when crafting something out of nothing. The more writers I work with the more easily and clearly I spot the universality in everyone’s journey.

[Uma] Of course. I see that too, the more I teach.

[Martha] That writers can learn how to craft a successful story by studying the Universal Story and, at the very same time, learn more about themselves delights me.

[Uma] And me. I'm fascinated as well with what you call the ebb and flow of energy in a work. Most of us look for this energy in the words on the page. You help writers find it in something underneath the words, maybe even something that hasn't been developed yet. Talk about that process and how this book breaks it down for a reader.

[Martha] Writers, especially right-brained, highly creative, write by the seat of your pants-type writers, often get lost in the beauty of their prose and end up boxed into a corner where their story lacks fullness and refuses to come to completion. When these same writers replace resistance with an openness to step away from the words they write, they learn to see new and for them difficult concepts and how those concepts translate not only into the development of their story but into their own life too.

Before long, all writers find the Universal Story’s energetic pattern becomes like a life raft, saving you from drowning in all the words you write.

[Uma] What appeals to me in this book is that you're offering a set of tools and a way of thinking, and not a formula. How much variation have you seen in how people use your ideas and suggestions and adapt them to their own needs?

[Martha] The ideas and suggestions morph with every single writer who uses them because writers not only adapt the ideas to their own needs but also because a writer is able only to grasp and then use in their own writing the plot and Universal Story concepts they are developmentally ready to grasp.

The more you write, the more new skills you develop which open you up in readiness to grasp yet more new concepts. That readiness grows and changes as you grow as a writer.

[Uma] A subtitle in your chapter on antagonists reads, "Never repeat, deepen." It's something I've had to remind myself in revision. How can writers train themselves not only to recognize patterns when they show up but to intensify them incrementally?

[Martha] I suggest using what I call a Scene Tracker. It’s a template or worksheet that allows you to plot out the seven essential elements in every scene you write. To analyze scenes at a thematic level before you have written a draft or two is usually premature. Far better is to wait until you better understand the deeper meaning of your piece. Then, stand back and analyze each scene for thematic elements which allows you to see where they show up now and where they could be inserted to create the most pleasing patterns for the reader and for the greatest good of the story.

[Uma] Your book promises nothing short of transformation, not just of the work but of the writer. Talk about that.

[Martha] I’ve been fascinated with energy for most of my adult life, which has lead me to lots of insights into the deeper level of life itself.

I have always loved stories of transformation, of ordinary people or characters confronted by extraordinary circumstances and not only overcoming but excelling in the face of fear and even death.

Transformation is part of the nature of life as all of us evolve and change. The changes we undergo sends out ripples of energy that touch and transform those lives around us.

Thank you, Uma. I remember hosting a blog stop on your blog tour for your picture book Out of the Way! Out of the Way! (which I love!). I had such fun that day interacting with and supporting a writer I love and respect. Thank you for returning the favor.

[Uma] Thank you Martha, it's my delight. Good plotting to you and here's to many more transformative moments!

Two Icons: A Celebration and a Loss

2011-10-27T17:27:00.000-06:00

Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth with illustrations by Jules Feiffer, turns 50 this year. I didn't read it until I was an adult, although it was published the year I turned five. It's a tour de force filled with wit and whimsy, riddled with wordplay, light and airy yet deeply satisfying. Monica Edinger interviews Leonard Marcus on the publication of the 50th anniversary edition. On the NPR site, Norton Juster writes about "My Accidental Masterpiece."

An equally iconic picture book is The Shrinking of Treehorn. Its deadpan quirkiness and undeterred little character carry the day. The trilogy edition with its two sequels, Treehorn's Treasure and Treehorn's Wish, is a cheerful, chubby affair, complete with Edward Gorey's surreal illustrations. On Monday morning, or perhaps on Sunday night, Florence Parry Heide died at the age of 92. In the Treehorn books and her many others, she leaves joy behind in the world. Hear her voice spring to life in this interview on Curious Pages, the idiosyncratic blog that recommends "inappropriate books for kids."

Hurray for The Phantom Tollbooth and hurray, hurray for Florence Parry Heide.

Connections: California Research and IBBY Regional

2011-10-24T18:30:00.001-06:00

I'm back from a physically and emotionally exhausting and at the same time an oddly energizing trip to San Francisco, Yuba City, and Marysville, California, with the 9th IBBY Regional Conference in Fresno on the heels of all that travel.

Here is what I've learned about researching the historical background for my fiction related to a very particular period and the cultural fusion of a very particular community:

I pursued all possible sources of information and didn't know until very close to the trip that I'd find the ones I truly needed. For me, this research, much like writing itself, was an act of trust.
I needed to find many perspectives on a single event, story, period, so that triangulation could give me a fuller picture, with greater depth.
I'm very glad I read those many perspectives over a period of nearly three years before I talked to anyone who could be considered a primary source.
Generous, giving people showed up along the way to help me. Trusting the process paid off.
Resources (maps, books, phone books, photographs, and more) showed up to give me answers to questions I hadn't even thought to ask.
I realized I would not know who the right people were to speak to until I'd found them.
When I'd found them, I realized I needed to toss my notes and my prepared questions and just practice the fine art of listening.

Thank you to Sharon Levin for getting me to Fresno and helping me make the transition from research to conference mode!

The 9th IBBY Regional Conference (sponsored by USBBY: the theme was "Peace the World Together With Children's Books") was chock full of inspiration, connections, and marvelous conversations about the rich international world of children's books.

High points for me included:

listening to Adwoa Badoe's deeply stirring storytelling
hearing Beverley Naidoo's marvelous talk and learning from it (hurray!) that my friend Jamila Gavin's School for Princes will shortly be available in the US!
hearing Grace Lin and Alvina Ling give a wonderfully funny, thoughtful author-editor-friends talk about (among other things) the development of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
discovering the mysterious and evocative art of Brazilian illustrator Roger Mello
joining an energetic book discussion about Pam Muñoz Ryan's beautiful book, The Dreamer, illustrated by the brilliant Peter Sis
hearing talks by Pam Munoz Ryan, Margarita Engle, David Diaz, Roger Mello
meeting old and new child-lit friends.
seeing Rumana Husain and her work in the slides from the Nambook Festival.
walking to the library with IBBY President Ahmad Redza Ahmad Khairuddin: finding familiar common ground in that conversation about children's publishing in Asia
and of course seeing familiar VCFA faces: a special shout-out to Jessica Powers, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, and Nancy Bo Flood!

And now back to breathing for a while, and then to work. But for now, I'm filled with gratitude for the wealth of material this trip has yielded me. And gratitude as well that even in a world where life can be daunting and peace is still a faraway dream, I am able to do the work that I love.

Debby Dahl Edwardson on Names, History, and Novel Structure

2011-10-13T09:24:00.001-06:00

Last week I raced through Debby Edwardson’s novel, My Name is Not Easy, consuming it in one big gulp! Her writing is beautiful, touchingand true to the hearts of her characters. Quite apart from the importance of this story, and how needed it is in the world, the book appears deceptively simple,then gets you in the jugular when you’re not expecting it.

And now we have the incredible news that My Name is Not Easyis a National Book Award finalist. Congratulations, Debby!

[Uma] As someone whose name many people "choke on...like crackers"I'm fascinated by the issues raised by names and naming in your book. Talkabout why names matter and how the claiming of a name can shape a person. Howand why does this resonate for you?

[Debby] In order to explain why this issue resonates withme, I have to explain it from an Iñupiaq perspective because this is where Ilive and it’s where the book is rooted. In the Iñupiaq belief, a person’s namehas a spirit of its own and that spirit travels from person to person such thatwhen you name a child after someone—and you always do—you are essentiallybringing the namesake back to life. In this way, an Iñupiaq name implies an additional level of kinship,serving to extend one’s family ties. If I name my daughter after yourgrandmother, for example, she becomesyour grandmother and you will even call her grandmother, sometimes, recognizingthe kinship. From this perspective, naming is a very serious matter, so seriousthat I felt compelled to put a disclaimer in my first book, Blessing’s Bead, explaining, essentially,that there is no such thing as a fictional Iñupiaq name because all Iñupiaqnames come with their own history and their own kinship. All the names I use inmy books are either family names or invented names—because the use a person’sname is a very serious thing. You can’t just say, “Oh I like the sound of thatname, I think I’ll use it.”

This is culturally specific, of course, but actually, that’sthe point: names have a significance specific to specific groups of people. Sowhen you’re speaking of a people who have been forced, throughout theirschooling, to leave their cultures and their names at the schoolhouse door, andwhen the people in question, believe that a name has a spirit or soul attachedto it, then the act reclaiming one’s name becomes both spiritual andrevolutionary.
I love to watch the way growing numbers of young Inupiat arereasserting their right to their Iñupiaq names, by the way, and I suspect it’sa global movement. My oldest daughter’s husband is Tamil and they have neverused their English names with each other. My granddaughter doesn’t have anEnglish name—she has an Iñupiaq name and a Tamil name and nobody is worryingabout how the world will react to this. The world will just have to adjust!That’s the new order—and it’s a very promising one, I think.

[Uma] I love that, Debby. Alaska and Tamilnadu, bound by names! Let’s talk abouthistory. My Name is Not Easy spans the period from 1960 through 1964. What'sthe history that made you choose this time?

[Debby] The easy answer is that this book is based on a truestory, the story of my husband’s experiences at a parochial boarding school inAlaska, and these are the years he was there. And of course I was a child ofsixties, too, so it resonates with me. But the real answer, I think, is thatthis was an era of political awakening, nationwide, and My Name is Not Easy is essentially a political coming of age story.The students at Sacred Heart are coming of age in a situation that is difficultand painful in many respects but it’s also one that will prepare them to play alead role in securing the future of their peoples.

As I said in my Author’sNote: “students similar to the students of Sacred Heart becameleaders in their home communities—state legislators, city mayors, and tribalpresidents. These people lobbied for change in Washington, D.C., and unitedtheir tribes to speak forcefully with one voice through the Alaska Federationof Natives, the organization that was instrumental in securing passage of theAlaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).”

I’m not writingabout ANCSA (which returned 40 million acres of Alaskan land to Nativeownership, paying a cash settlement of $900 billion for lands lost) and I amnot writing the story of the young Alaskan Native leaders, all in their earlytwenties, who in 1968 successfully stood up to the most powerful politicalforces on the planet and beat them. But the truth is that all of the leaderswho fought the land claims battle in Alaska were boarding school alumni andthis is their story. If you focus in on it, My Name is Not Easyis the story of a group of young people from diverse tribes who came togetherand created family. But if you pull the lens out a bit, you see ageneration on the cusp of a political awakening that shook Alaska to its core.

[Uma] The era of boarding schools is such a painful one. Have you heard frompeople whose stories may find echoes here? Why is it important for us topass on the remembering of such wrongs to the next generation?

[Debby] Other than my husband and fellow Alaskan writer William L. Iååiagruk Hensley, who wrote a blurb for the book, Ihave not heard from the people whose experiences might find echoes in thesestories. The book is on backorder right now, so most of them haven’t had achance to read it. In a way, though, I think I’ve already answered why it’simportant to remember this history. Willie—who incidentally was one of theleaders of the land claims movement —said it very well in his blurb, when hekindly referred to the book as “an excellent work of fiction with importanttruths to be remembered.”

Some of the truths, like the ones mentioned above,are empowering, but others are very painful. The boy at the end of the book whocan understand and hear his language, clear as birdsong, but will never again speak it, is myhusband. And as I was writing this book, our daughter, Naÿinaaq, was making a documentary entitled Nipaa Iøitqusipta—The Voice of Our Spirit, whichexamines the decline of the Inupiaq language. It’s a very painful subject formy daughter’s generation. Taqnak Rexford, one of her peers, voiced itelequently on Facebook recently:

I amIñupiaq, and I live most of this lifetime without my language and sometimesthat pain becomes too much to carry. Most often I’m not even aware I carry thatenergy around in me, but sometimes it leaves me in deep, almost violent wavesof tears. Theseare ancestral tears. I am absolutely positive it’s not just me crying, it’s allof my relatives who have passed away who are witnessing our youngergenerations' lives without their language. This is a collective andgenerational weeping.”

This younger generation has grown up understanding that theydon’t have the language because their parents and grandparents were punishedfor using it—but in a very real sense, they don’t really understand what thismeans because they weren’t there and they haven’t felt, on a purely viscerallevel, what it means. Fiction can take them there and let them experience itand through experiencing it, they can understand and through understanding theycan heal....

For non Native readers, these stories are important becausethey allow us to bear witness. We cannot change what happened and we cannot fixit but we can bear a portion of the pain and in doing so we strengthen our ownhumanity and increase our understanding of what it means to be human.

I know this from personal experience. As a child growing upin Minnesota, I lived in a community that had a sizable Jewish population.Because it was the story of my friends and classmates, the Holocaust became ashared story for me, one I internalized in ways that to this day affect me inprofoundly. If I can effect that same experience for the readers of my book, Iwill have done my job as a writer.
[Uma] What were the challenges of writing in the shiftingviewpoints you adopted for this book?

[Debby] I wrote this book as my creative thesis when I was astudent in the Vermont College MFA program in Writing for Children and YoungAdults. I started it with a blank page on day one and when I was asked, at thattime, to talk about how I planned to tell this story, I said, with absolutely noforethought, that I was going to tell it in multiple voices.

It was an obvious choice, of course. It’s a communal story—amulti-tribe story—so the need to tell it in multiple voices seemed almost agiven. There are many indigenous tribes in this country with cultures that arein many ways very different from one another but one striking commonality isthat indigenous peoples tend to put the needs of the community above the needsof the individual, thinking “we” more often than “I.” It’s interesting, though,that I started this telling as first person present tense moving back and forthfrom character to character—interesting, because this is hardly the equivalentof the indigenous “we” voice. Andit resulted in a first draft that was huge and rather shapeless.

After much groping and fumbling around in the dark, my finaladvisor—Marion Dane Bauer—suggested that I try telling it as linked stories.This gave me the freedom to play with it and allow it to become what it wantedto become—a novel told in stories, I guess. As soon as I let it out of itsforced container, it seemed to develop in a fairly organic manner, moving fromfirst person accounts in the beginning to multi-voice omniscient accounts, nearthe end. This seemed to fit. It was a long journey, but one which I thoroughlyenjoyed.

[Uma] And one that has brought you well deservedrecognition, Debby. Thank you so much for talking to me on Writing With A Broken Tusk.

2009 Cynsations interview with Debby Edwardson.

National Book Awards 2011

2011-10-12T14:25:00.001-06:00

It is not my scheduled day to post on Write At Your Own Risk but hey! This is enough reason to shout out. Look at the National Book Awards finalist announcements! Just look--one faculty finalist and two-count-em-two finalists who are VCFA grads from our own MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Congratulations to all the finalists: Franny Billingsley, Debby Dahl Edwardson, Thanhha Lai, Lauren Myracle, and Gary D. Schmidt.

VAQ, or Very Annoying Question

2011-10-07T10:30:00.000-06:00

If you're a children's writer, you occasionally (or perhaps not so occasionally) get asked this VAQ (Very Annoying Question): So...when are you going to write a novel for grownups?

Children, I might add, never ask me this. Only a certain kind of adult, the kind who look down upon children for R2C2E (Reasons Too Complicated To Explain)*.

To them I say, just look at the letters I get from children. Just look. They are voiced, genuine, no pretensions. They are illustrated! Does it get better than this?

A letter I received in yesterday's mail read:

"...so I want to kno. Did you always write from wen you were little and how did you now how?"

Need I say more? Children are as real as anyone else, perhaps more so. They are the finest of audiences.

They are us, because like it or not, we grownups still carry around remnants of our own younger selves, like so many backup copies waiting to be accessed when we need them. Sometimes those are our genuine selves, bursting with questions, seething with just anger, or filled with possibility.

Why on earth would I want to write for anyone else? Especially people who ask those VAQ's.

And lest anyone think this acknowledgment of the young is a sentimental affectation of our times, here's something about child artists of prehistory from NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture Blog. As a former child wall-writer, I find this rethinking of prehistory exciting--if overdue.

*anyone get the Haroun reference?

Dorje's Stripes by Anshumani Ruddra

2011-10-05T13:51:00.000-06:00

The Bengal tiger is a gravely endangered species, its population estimated at fewer than 2,500 animals and dwindling at an alarming rate. How do we bear witness to such a tragic fact about our world? Is there any hope at all?

Yet to come*, an interview with Anshumani Ruddra, author of the glorious picture book Dorje's Stripes, published by Karadi Tales in India and now available in North America from Kane Miller.

*or maybe not. I sent those questions weeks ago and the writer hasn't replied yet (as of today, October 26, 2011). So maybe what's here is it for Dorje's Stripes.

Touching Silence

2011-10-05T05:53:00.001-06:00

Essayist Reg Saner says, in Reaching Keet Seel, his collection of reflections on the Colorado Plateau, "Mountains echo whatever you tell them, but desert space is always a listener, its only voice a quiet so unbroken it hushes you, thereby making you fit to enter in."

Some days it seems as if I'm being badgered by voices, all kinds of voices telling me all the things I ought to be doing, all the things I should have done already, all the hundreds of ways I'm falling behind. This is not a frame of mind conducive to entering into real spaces, let alone fictional ones. Listen to all the voices and it's likely I'll begin to feel the way I do when I hear about symptoms of some rare disease--they all sound familiar and they all sound so final, so impossible to argue with!

The desert rescues me at such times. It gives me sky and 360 degrees of horizon, and silence.

But it seems to me that I ought to be able to recreate that for myself, an interior space that can be summoned up when the voices of reality become too loud and insistent, when the work demands quiet, to allow those other fictional voices to make themselves heard. It doesn't matter how. Walking, exercise, music, daydreaming, gardening. Whatever it takes. The rituals might change from one person to another, or even with the passage of time. But they matter because the ability to touch silence matters in the life of a writer.

Autopost from Write At Your Own Risk, the VCFA faculty blog.

Beyond the Blue River by B. Vinayan

2011-10-02T18:58:00.004-06:00

When Tulika Books editor Radhika Menon first told me about this novel, I must admit to having been slightly dubious. At least in part, this reaction was to the protagonist of Beyond the Blue River, Grace, who is not human. Nothing against non-human protagonists, but she's not even animal.

Mineral? You'd be closer. Grace is an autorickshaw!

Yes, that's right. One of those little cabs mounted on a sputtering engine that serve as transport vehicles all over the Indian subcontinent and parts of southeast Asia. Known variously as autos, scooters, autorickshaws, phat-phatti, tuk-tuk....

"An autorickshaw?" I said.

"Read it," she replied. "I would love to know what you think."

I did read it.

Ten pages in, I still wasn't sure. By page 20, I was murmuring, "Hmm..." and by the time I hit page 23, the close, careful, funny language of Grace and her autorickshaw buddy Rani was creating a sort of comfortable internal hum in my mind. Oddly, the point of view was starting to feel credible, in this eccentric, Yellow-Submarine-reminiscent world painted by Vinayan with unmistakably Indian tints.

While it took me 20-plus pages to suspend disbelief, that could have just been my adult mind at work. I suspect that as a 10- or 12-year-old, I'd have lapped this up. Even now, adult skepticism and all, I found much to love, to be amused by, and to linger over, all of it aided by big helpings of wonder.

A tune hummed by Guru, her driver, is what sends Grace off on her journey. The journey itself is replete with marvelous landscapes. A truck at the seventh milestone is a kind of mentor figure. A mountain is endowed with breath and rocky shoulders. And then there's the legendary Blue River itself.

Even the antagonist is a worthy one--Karuth Aarg is an embodiment of the power of creation itself, born of a flame reminiscent of the Big Bang. From the wind walls to the Tweedledum-Tweedledee figures of the Itsians to the etceteras ("extremely tiny creatures"), the quirky inhabitants of this world seem set against the cosmology of our own. It all somehow finds expression through the imaginings and longings, and eventual awakening, of a small and lovable machine. Yes, Grace the autorickshaw whose mineralness initially gave me pause. By the end of it, I was prepared to love her unconditionally.

I know. It sounds crazy, and it is. But it all works in a weird way. I think it works because the original fantasy in this book comes right out of a particular place with its very specific sense of relationships and frictions, rights, wrongs, and pressures. Beyond the Blue River is a gentle, odd, engaging story about "the whole wide world, and, who knows, maybe even everything beyond it."

Still more on the Washington DC trip: Barbara Brooks Wallace Interview to Come

2011-10-01T15:39:00.001-06:00

When I read books like Leonard Marcus's Dear Genius, I always feel jealous of those writers who entered our field in its "golden days." You know, back when Ursula Nordstrom ruled children's books at Harper and Row. Those days. So when I talk to writers who worked with some of those editors of legend, it always makes me feel as if I can somehow touch those days, catch a little glow of another time for myself and use it to warm my own little corner of the writing universe.

Photo by Sally Canzoneri

In the virtual world of emails and bulletin boards, Barbara Brooks Wallace has been a colleague and friend for years. So on this trip to Washington DC, I was delighted to be able to snatch an afternoon to go meet her in person. A more detailed interview will follow on the Children's Literature blog, but here's a picture for starters.

Thanks in spades are due to Sally Canzoneri for navigating DC and VA traffic to get me there and back so we could still be on time for a quick dinner before the Takoma Park Maryland Library event. Of which (the event, not dinner, although that was grand too) more soon, as soon as a few pictures arrive.

More on the Washington DC trip and the National Book Festival

2011-09-29T11:20:00.002-06:00

Photo courtesy Paul Crichton of Simon and Schuster

I'm still in a slight daze after the magical experience of the National Book Festival.

the reception at the Library of Congress the evening before.
the tents on the Mall
the crowds
the fabulous line-up of speakers
running into Toni Morrison for two seconds in the Media tent
running into Jim Lehrer for thirty seconds in the hospitality tent
chatting with Lourdes Catalano, my generous escort who kept me from getting lost and made sure I got to things on time
rushing to catch the tail end of Rita Williams-Garcia's talk
the kids who came to my talk and then accosted me later in the day for photos, signatures in books, and conversation
kids who had been at my Friends Community School event the week before, who spread the love by bringing their families to the National Book Festival
friends from years ago who reconnected with me at the event
a teacher who had come all the way from my little corner of the desert, Aztec, New Mexico, and who happened by pure coincidence to be in DC for the 50th anniversary Peace Corps celebration.
squeezing in time to videotape the moon gates in the Enid Haupt Garden outside the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. A little research there for Dini and Dolly Book 2 (in edits now--keeping my eyes crossed and saying no more on that for the moment).
and of course I would be most remiss not to mention the Ritz of all port-a-loos!

In all, the 11th National Book Festival was one for the memory archive.

My DC days after the Festival continued to be filled with kids and books. Tuesday morning at Politics and Prose (September 27) brought 80-something kids from two schools, along with the high energy that comes from gathering so many 4th and 5th graders together in a single room. Great questions, great response to The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. We ran out of time. We ran out of books!

Many, many thanks to Gussie Lewis, Children's Events Coordinator at Politics and Prose, to everyone at the store, to Lydia Finn, publicist at Simon and Schuster, to parents who ordered books, and to the teachers who brought students in for this event.

And more thanks still to Politics and Prose for organizing book sales the night before the store event at the Takoma Park Library. Tami Lewis Brown, my fellow panelist along with Katie Kelly, has blogged about this lovely event over at From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors. Thanks to Karen MacPherson for coordinating our middle grade panel and making this event possible.

Still more to come from my week in Washington DC.

Stay tuned for a visit with Barbara Brooks Wallace, author of Peppermints in the Parlor, The Twin in the Tavern, Ghosts in the Gallery, and other wonderful middle grade mysteries set on the east coast of the United States in a time of lanterns and carriages, forbidding mansions and children set adrift in a Dickensian world.

Washington DC trip and the National Book Festival

2011-09-27T07:10:00.000-06:00

Hghlights: My visit to Friends Community School in College Park, Maryland, my son's old elementary school. What a delight! More to come on that, but here are a few photos to begin with.

Speaking at the Children's Book Guild of Washington DC.

Visiting the WETA-TV studios in Arlington, Virginia for an interview for the Book Festival web site. And more.

The New Deal Cafe in old Greenbelt, Maryland

Dinner with Connie Belfiore and teachers from Friends Community School

Good food and company at the New Deal Cafe

Driving through campus, University of Marylnd, College Park

With Mary Quattlebaum, Children's Book Guild of Washington DC luncheon

At the WETA-TV studio

With Lydia Breiseth, who interviewed me for the Book Festival web site

VCFA at the Book Festival!

And finally, the National Book Festival was beyond wonderful. The tents overflowed. The weather held. And people came--from the DC area, from the suburbs, from Philadelphia and Richmond and New York. What can I say? It restored my faith in the future of the book. Young people came in droves. Teachers brought their classes. Thank you to the organizers for inviting me. Thank you to Paul Crichton and his team at Simon & Schuster for making this possible.

Consider Supporting Literacy and Prose

2011-09-19T08:51:00.002-06:00

This is a note to all of you who have read my books, held my virtual hand, read and commented on posts in this blog, and in other ways supported my writing habit over many years. I don't often put out calls for donations on this site, but this is an exception. Because in Washington DC, the capital of the United States, there should not be children without access to books.

DC area school visit by T.R.Simon and Victoria Bond

When I'm in DC next week, in addition to a host of other engagements, I will also donate a school presentation in support of the efforts of an organization called Literacy and Prose. You can also find them (and "like" them) on Facebook, where you'll see pictures and video of past events and a calendar of future events.

The goal of the Literacy and Prose Foundation is to improve literacy among disadvantaged children and teens in the greater Washington, DC area by giving schools and students books and access to authors and illustrators. The foundation excites children about reading by bringing books alive, then gives each child the specific book in which his or her interest has been sparked by the author visit. It is this heightened interest and ownership that entices children to read and leads to increased literacy.

When I speak to 4th and 5th graders at the Washington Middle School for Girls, where 87% of students qualify for federal free lunch, Literacy and Prose will give a copy of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything to each student to get signed and take home. They'll also give copies to the school and classroom libraries.

Sometimes the book a child takes home from a Literacy and Prose donation is the first book that child has ever owned. Think about that, and please consider supporting this wonderful program. Send your check to: The Literacy & Prose Foundation, 3215 Morrison St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20015. Tell them I sent you.

National Book Festival and other DC area events

2011-09-17T17:43:00.000-06:00

This year the 11th National Book Festival organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. will be a two-day affair, on September 24 and 25. President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are honorary chairs for the event. The festival is free and open to the public.

Over 100 authors will speak at the festival and sign books. Last year's festival, with 70 authors, drew a crowd of 150,000 people. A video of reflections on last year's festival can be viewed on the Book Festival web site. Authors from previous years reflect on their experiences of the festival as well. This year, I get to go, which seems completely unbelievable but it's true! Packing right this minute! I'll be speaking and reading from The Grand Plan to Fix Everything at 10 am on Saturday morning, and signing from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm.

Here's the schedule for both days. If you're in the DC area of course you'll want to drop everything you're doing the weekend of September 24 and 25 and show up. Really, what could beat joining this enormous conversation of books sponsored by the nation's leading library?

Here's the Festival Guide for kids and teachers.

In addition to speaking at the National Book Festival, I'll also be visiting Friends Community School, speaking and signing at Politics and Prose, visiting the Washington Middle School for Girls courtesy of a wonderful organization called Literacy and Prose, and speaking on a middle grade authors' panel at Takoma Park Maryland Library.

Process Talk: Tami Lewis Brown on The Map of Me

2011-09-16T04:00:00.000-06:00

Road novel? Middle grade? Hmm, how does that work with a protagonist too young to get a driver's license, not to mention a tattletale sister ready to report her every transgression? The Map of Me is a warm, lovely, loving road trip book, full of the joys, disappointments, and absurdities of life, including chickens! Yes, that is correct--chickens. All of it is seen through the unflinching perspective of 12-year-old Margie.

I got to send some questions by e-mail to Tami. Here are her replies, all the way from Scotland where she's currently visiting. Nope. Can't drive there from this side of the Atlantic.

[Uma] Talk about writing materials as carriers of emotion in this book--the paper ripping insmall pleats, the paper of Momma's note, the whiff of ink from the oldballpoint leaking in Daddy's pocket, the pens Daddy gave out at World of Tires,and of course the Map of Me, that assignment with tensile strength that pullsright through the story, even to the point of being smeared right onto Margie'spalm right along with her life line. How did all these begin to clustertogether for you to create momentum in the story?

[Tami] Wow. I’ve heard lots of other writers say this and never quite believed it but—I didn’t noticethe cluster of writing instruments until you pointed it out. But you’re right,of course. Capturing emotion on paper is at the heart of this book. I startedthe novel when I was a student at VCFA. One of the scariest and most excitingthings Vermont College taught me is how to tap into my emotions and translatethem into story. Margie’s struggle with her revealing her “insides” on the pagemirrors my own… and the rest was organic.

[Uma] Do you yourself have a writerly love affair with paper and pen? With maps?

[Tami] I’m a tactilewriter. I do most of my first drafts and my best brainstorming writing by handwith a fountain pen. The physical connection of brain to hand to paper ties meto story in a way that tapping a keyboard doesn’t. I do love maps, and I have several framed maps in my house, but I especially love maps in thefront of books. Once I realized that maps could be a literal and metaphoricthread in The Map of Me I began to pay a lot more attention to how maps andstory work together. I was tremendously inspired by Julie Larios’s 2010 lectureabout mapping the fictive dream.

[Uma] Me too! That lecture was fantastic. I'm mapping a novel right now, revising the map in fact as the story changes and finding that this kind of visual revision is telling me things I didn't know about it.

But back to your book. I was joking about middle grade protagonists and road trips but in fact a road trip is a particularly evocative story map for a middle grade novel, since those yearsfrom 8-12 are so much about crossing the borders between childhood and theteenage years. Your character takes several steps which make that crossingespecially vivid. It's her transgressions, in fact, that lead the journey fromimpulse to hope and finally to realization. Talk about how that emotional mapcame to be.

Tami Lewis Brown. Photo by Jill Smith

[Tami] My critical thesis at Vermont College was on juvenile road novels because I feel verystrongly that the middle grade years are all about crossing thresholds andmoving from one physical, mental, and emotional place to another. Most greatjuvenile road novels start out at home then enter a transitional space—neitherhere nor there. The unsettling experiences on the road give the protagonist thepower to return home with greater strength or knowledge. Sociologists andliterary theorists call this a liminal journey. Setting up that liminal structure was my first task. Next I had to find out what tests Margiefaced on the road and how those challenges changed her. Crossing all thosemiddle grade thresholds involves risking, failing, learning from those mistakes(or not!) and trying again. Margie took big risks and suffered great failures,stealing a car and trying to bring Momma home, for example, but tiny flubs, too.

[Uma] So tell me more. About giving a series of disasters some resonance, meaning.

[Tami] Modulating the messes, making some worse, stringing the repercussions of othersover a long time frame so they had deeper resonance, was a matter of revision.Ironically, I guess, I see revision as a lot of trial and error. I write tofind out if something works and usually it doesn’t. But after lots of attemptssuccess is even sweeter.

One of my favorite disasters is “the unfortunate square dance incident,” which seemsrelatively minor when it’s first described. In fact the whole thing is justretold, not played out in a scene. Briefly, Margie has a crush on JimmyMcDonald, but when he holds her hand a little too long during a gym classsquare dance Margie pulls away and sends Jimmy flying. Nobody gets romanceright on the first try and Margie’s attempt is public, disastrous, and (I hope)a little bit hilarious. The experience teaches Margie about love and caution,especially when Jimmy doesn’t defend her when she gets in trouble over theincident. At the very end of the novel Daddy arrives and demonstrates that hegenuinely cares about both of his daughters. Margie finally understandsunconditional love and loyalty. When he reaches out she’s able to take his handand hold on. The individual scenes were there early on but the connectionbetween them came in revision.

[Uma] Revision. The best part. The real deal. The Map of Me is the real deal too. Great voice. Rings true. I flew through it, then went back and savored passages that left a mark on my mind. Congratulations, Tami!

Process Talk: Conversation With Joanne Rocklin, Part 2

2011-09-14T04:35:00.000-06:00

In this part of my ongoing exchange with Joanne Rocklin, author of One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street and other novels, Joanne opens the conversation.

[Joanne] Why do you write middle grade?

[Uma] I think we all have ages in our lives that are emotional turning points. Mine is very much located in that 8-12 range. I read voraciously. I spent a lot of time in imaginary worlds (sounds crazy but that's how it was). I think that was the age when I first learned the habits of a fiction writer, although I didn't know it then. So it's a natural age group for me to speak to when I write. And you?

[Joanne] I've always written middle grade; it's my natural voice because, yes, that was the age I read voraciously, too! I also wrote reams and reams of letters to my best friend during summer vacations when we were at different summer camps. At some point over the decades we exchanged our letters--I have a box of my "middle grade voice" sitting in my garage. I love that age--innocent yet knowledgeable at the same time, which gives lots of opportunity for humor! So...my turn. A somewhat related question: Can voice be taught?

[Uma] I'm going to assume we're talking about narrative voice here, as opposed to a larger authorial Voice with a capital V. Can narrative voice be taught? Hmm, can writing be "taught" in that sense? It can be learned, I do know that. What I don't believe is that voice is something I need to "find," as if I'd misplaced the darned thing somewhere. Rather, I believe it's my job to create many voices, each one suited to the story it needs to tell.

I think one can train one's ear to become sensitive to voices on the page, and by that too I mean many voices. For instance, when I get stuck with writing I read. It's that simple. And when I read I'm absorbing voices of characters and I'm also absorbing the narrative choices made by the writer. There may be some people who have a tin ear. Maybe they just won't get this way of learning to write, but in that case maybe they shouldn't be trying to write. There may be people who are more sensitive to narrative voice than others. Even so, I think one can learn to read to pick up the rhythm and flow, the echoes and recursions, of a narrative voice.

As to the other meaning of "voice"--the uppercase meaning of an author's stamp that carries across many works--I prefer not to pay any attention to that. It's just too bewildering to think of my own work that way. Crafting one story at a time is hard enough.

So maybe narrative voice can't be taught, exactly. But you can create circumstances that will allow it to rise to the surface, as it obviously did for both of us, in both these books.

Over to you now, Joanne. How did that voice come about for you? What were the circumstances that allowed it to emerge? Did it emerge suddenly or incrementally?

[Joanne] I love thinking/talking about "voice" because often it's what separates mediocre from good to excellent work. It's fascinating, even more so because it can't be defined--or perhaps because different people are often discussing different things--even when they assume they're on the same page (excuse the pun!)

I think you've delineated its aspects beautifully just now, distinguishing between narrative voice and "Voice". There's the voice of a particular character, with all its particular quirks There's the voice of the times, and the slang, lingo used...And also the sheer voice of using lovely, poetic language...which may relate to voice with a capital V, as you put it.

That Voice is what editors are looking for. I think it means originality, fluency, courage, openness to intuition, personality, and what makes the reader enter your world and forget the real one, or at the very least, enjoy the writing. (Sometimes a voice that's too unique makes the reader aware of the author at the expense of the story!)

Anyway, I don't think THAT Voice can be taught--you either have it or you don't. BUT, there are ways to make it more easily appear, if indeed it's buried in there somewhere. And that's to clear out extraneous critical voices in your head (i.e. critics, colleagues, other authors' characters, your mother, your own Superego) and just plunge in, listening hard to the voices of the characters in your head.

In both our cases, this time, the omniscient voice did something interesting for us--liberating our stories and characters, as well as adding some richness to our Voices.

[Uma] I think it's true that writing is an act of courage. For myself, I do need to get all possible critical chatter out of my mind. Only then can I listen to the potential of my own stories and move beyond the obvious. You?

The real tree that Joanne magicked into her book

[Joanne[ For One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street, I knew I wanted to get inside all the characters who lived on Orange Street, even animals and that tree. The omniscient voice served to link them all, and to enter and leave each character.

At the time, I was fortunate to attend a 6-week artists' retreat at the Ragdale Institute. Nothing to do but listen to all those voices in my head. I was in heaven. (I realize saying that makes me sound slightly mad. But it is a crazy life we lead, isn't it?)

The real house that crept into my book

[Uma] Yes, in the best possible way. A few years ago, I ended up spending some time in the Nilgiris, the mountains featured in The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. It was important for me to keep that "real" to the extent I could, so I listened to the "music" of the place--the wind, the echoes of faraway traffic, temple bells, goatherds driving flocks down dirt roads. All those sounds that fed a kind of melody that was starting to take shape in my mind.

Indian writer Ruskin Bond, a legend in his lifetime, says he's willing to read anything "if it has tone, style, and substance." I think it's the qualities of voice that give tone and style to the substance of a story.

The final installment of this conversation is still to come. We don't even know what it is--yet. Stay linked.

Goodbye to Yoda

2011-09-11T14:01:00.001-06:00

Today our old tabby, resident feline wise man and champion sneezer, Yoda, reached the end of his road.

He was eighteen years old, by our best calculation. I'm happy we got to share several of them with him.

Interview Wednesday: Karen Sandler on Tankborn

2011-09-07T06:31:00.000-06:00

I'm talking to Karen Sandler here, about her new YA release from Tu Books, Tankborn. Today's Interview Wednesday roundup can be found at Tales From the Rushmore Kid.

[Uma] A post-apocalyptic setting, a dystopian world, and the remnants of a caste system loosely related to ancient Hindu practice and their fragmented extrapolation into this fictional future. How did these particular elements come together for you in this novel?

[Karen] Believe it or not, this story was 30+ years in the making. Not that I was working on the novel for that long, but the first elements (caste system/Indian influence) started germinating back in the mid-1970s.

From 1976-1978 I worked as a software engineer for the aerospace company Rockwell International in Downey, CA. Rockwell was contracted to build the Endeavor, the first space shuttle (which never flew a mission). I had a newly-minted BA in math with a minor in physics and had taken a short course in Fortran (a programming language), so I was wetter behind the ears than most.

One of my co-workers was Dr. Azad Madni, whose simulations modeled the as yet untested space shuttle’s flight path. Azad told me stories of life in India. We remained friends for years and I’ve recently made contact with him again through the internet.

So that started my fascination for Indian culture. The next piece of the puzzle, genetic engineering, came about in the mid-1980s. That topic area intrigued me as well and led to me writing a screenplay titled ICER. ICER portrayed a dystopian society in which genetically engineered slaves (gene tricks, or jicks) did the scut work for the privileged bio-norms. The characters were adults rather than young adults, it took place on (a perhaps post-apocalyptic) earth, and there were many spaceships crashing into one another. The script underwent many re-writes over the years, was optioned a couple of times, and Steven Spielberg’s company actually read it at one point, but it was never produced.

I always loved that story though and often pondered novelizing it. When I was considering making the switch from adult romance to YA, I started thinking about ICER and how it could work with younger characters. I ended up retaining very little of the screenplay’s plot—only the idea of genetically engineered slaves and Kayla’s name and sket transferred over directly. Devak’s name was originally Davik (which I made up), but I changed it when I decided Indian culture would have a heavy influence on Tankborn’s society. Exactly when in the creative process that happened (India’s influence) I don’t recall. I do remember thinking, Well, it could be China, considering that nation’s growing influence. But thanks to Azad, I felt more of a link with India. (There is one Chinese character in Tankborn—Junjie. You’ll see more of him in the second and third books of the series).

The religion also evolved as I wrote the book. One night at dinner I had a long conversation with my son and daughter-in-law (and my long-suffering husband) about how incorporating religious beliefs increases the complexity of a fantasy or science fiction novel. We brainstormed ideas of how the religious beliefs of Tankborn’s castes might have developed. I’ll be touching even more on Lokan religion in the second Tankborn book.

[Uma] Friendship and loyalties lie at the heart of this novel. Talk about how the structure of the story came to be, in the intertwining narratives of Kayla and Mishalla.

[Karen] After writing 16 adult romance novels, I wanted the freedom in Tankborn to focus on strong, non-romantic relationships. I knew there would be a romance plotline in the book (two, actually), but from personal experience, I know how important friendships can be to teen girls. In the frightening new world that Kayla and Mishalla enter, where they truly don’t know who to trust, where one wrong step can lead to obliteration, their friendship with each other is their only bulwark.

Mishalla started out as a passing mention. Early in the book, Kayla thinks of her friend, sent far away, now lost to her. I hadn’t intended to do anything more than that with her. But as the story developed, Mishalla demanded her voice be heard. I then had to justify hearing the story from Mishalla’s point of view. Her experiences had to be inextricably linked to Kayla’s and their goals had to ultimately become the same one.

One of the most challenging aspects of storytelling is weaving in all the strands and knowing (to quote Bob Seger) “what to leave in, and what to leave out.” I can have a perfectly lovely scene or exciting action, but if it doesn’t move my story forward, I have to cut it. Interweaving Kayla’s and Mishalla’s POVs in Tankborn didn’t happen all at once. It took many iterations and much brainstorming to figure out how they would each tell their part of the story.

[Uma] Thank you Karen! Good luck.

Process Talk: Conversation With Joanne Rocklin, Part 1

2011-09-06T08:20:00.000-06:00

Joanne Rocklin and I are talking about our writing, our systems (or lack thereof) and our middle grade novels, One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street and The Grand Plan to Fix Everything.

[Uma] What came first for you in this story?

[Joanne] I would have to say that the tree came first, the beautiful, generous orange tree in my Los Angeles backyard, which so captured my imagination, and provided so much solace, to my surprise, the summer after my mother died. I'd stopped writing for a long while and spent my time gardening, reading, playing with my dog, spending time with friends and family, and generally living in the moment. I'd always been ambitious and striving, and this was a "new me." And I wanted to write about a city block in L.A., that complicated, beautiful, orangey city I knew I'd be leaving soon. And I wanted to write about the kids on it, present, past and future, and their relationship to this tree. ALL the kids--which meant many viewpoints, and a somewhat omniscient voice, as well. It seemed the only way to write it! So I would say that place and voice came first, no matter who tried to talk me out of it! (crit group, editors I submitted to, etc.) My agent believed in my format, confirming my joy in writing this story. Telling the story over 24 hours came early, too--a long, summer day.

[Uma] That sounds similar to my experience with The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. I'd had a character and a premise knocking around in my mind for a while, and going nowhere, but it wasn't until the place came into the story that things began to click for me. My shift from single viewpoint came when my character wrote a letter, and on impulse, I followed it instead of staying with her. I returned to her, of course, but by that time all the other players on two continents had begun to do their little dances. It was exciting and energizing to find the plot growing in this very intuitive way. And you? Talk about how your plot evolved.

[Joanne] As for the plot, I knew that I would have a mysterious stranger, but I didn't know why he was mysterious, at first. I knew I wanted an adult who held the street's past in her memory. I knew that each child would have his or her own problem, and that one of the children would be recovering from an illness. I knew that the ending would culminate with some resolution to their issues, and all having to do with the tree. I trusted that these big holes would be filled in as I wrote my drafts, and they were. Writing is wonderful that way, isn't it?

The amazing thing that happened, for me, was the discovery of my theme, which arrived as a gift during my later drafts: appreciating the ordinary, beautiful moments of the Magic Now, so important for my healing during my mourning period.

[Uma] That's extraordinary. I should tell you that my big surprise in The Grand Plan... came with all the adult characters who showed up to play comic counterpoints to the kids' serious roles. I had no idea when I started out that this was going to happen, and I think it's all due to the omniscient voice that slid in and began telling me about all the things going on in different places while the girls were trying to cope with being separated.

So I want to ask you something related to this. There were so many of those magical moments in your book--all the things and people appearing and disappearing and causing the story to shift and change. Can you talk about the surprises you had as you wrote successive drafts?

[Joanne] Yes! Isn't that omniscient voice kind of magical itself, sort of like a master puppeteer, leading the writer to interesting interpretations and layers! It really opened things up for me. (and I loved the way your adult characters' mirrored a Bollywood movie, and the kids' were often the sensible ones...only by using the O.V. could that have been so apparent!)

I didn't actually think of my characters appearing and disappearing; more like "having their turn."

[Uma] Okay, that makes sense. And yes, those shifting viewpoints only became possible when I moved away from the conventional single viewpoint narrative. But you were saying...surprises? Realizations?

[Joanne] Yes. When it came to Ruff the dog's turn, I began to contemplate memory and feeling and perception as it relates to an animal, and I think that led me to think of memory in general. And so, a turning point in a second draft-- I realized that Ms. Snoops' memory is failing in the short-term, but not in the long-term, which changed the tenor, and added to the poignancy of the book, I think. (and a friend's husband was declining in that respect, too, at the time...)

Gertrude's Great Depression story came in later drafts, too, quite late, actually. The orange tree was "telling" me to add another story about its past life.

Certain physical details of the plot: the wishing stone, Larry's poem, the hummingbird, surprised me (in later drafts) with their symbolic relevance to the needs of the kids: the poem shows Larry's growing understanding about what it means to be a man, or a human being; the hummingbird shows Leandra's capacity for love...

And the surprise of the ending was how very easy it was to write--all the disparate elements coming together naturally, like the parts of an orange. All the flaws, fears and desires of my characters are transformed to strengths. And also, in that space of time they suddenly understand what is important in life--the beauty of the ordinary present moment, best when experienced with others, and which makes life worth living.

[Uma] I found that to be true in The Grand Plan... as well. The ending was inevitable. In part it was dictated by my intentional spoofing of Bollywood tropes (so there had to be a dance, in some odd location!) but in part it was the point of connection for which all the characters' trajectories were headed. Many roads in this case to a single intersection.

More of this conversation to come. As in the writing of both our books, we're letting this exchange pace itself, take its own time and wander in whatever direction seems likely. I can't predict when the next post will happen, but stay linked.

Celebrating India in Irving, Texas

2011-09-02T04:00:00.000-06:00

This weekend I'll be speaking and reading from The Grand Plan to Fix Everything at the Valley Ranch Library in Irving, Texas, where they're Celebrating India. More details here.

Presented as part of the Celebrate the Cultures of Irving series.

Alice's Story: An Anti-Bullying Play From Making Books Sing

2011-08-26T14:14:00.000-06:00

This just in from Making Books Sing, the people who produced Tea With Chachaji, the musical theater adaptation of my picture book, Chachaji's Cup.

A fundraiser on Kickstarter to back Alice's Story, an interactive theatre production designed to help kids put a stop to bullying.

UPDATE: This project's been funded!

Congratulations to Cynthia Leitich Smith on Tantalize: Kieren's Story

2011-08-23T09:27:00.000-06:00

Cynthia Leitich Smith is a writer of picture books, a chapter book made up of interlinked stories, short stories,YA novels, and now a graphic novel! Tantalize: Kieren's Story, illustrated by Ming Doyle, releases today from Candlewick Books. Congratulations, Cyn! I'm proud to call you my friend and colleague in the book and VCFA worlds.

Howling Great Giveaway on Cynsations.

More from Cyn on her nod to Bram Stoker, and how she handles diversity in her bestselling series.

Sandip Roy on Enid Blyton

2011-08-22T06:15:00.014-06:00


Enid Blyton and her daughters in 1946. Wikimedia Commons image

August 11, 1897 was Enid Blyton's birthday. Sandip Roy posts an ode to Blyton on the occasion.

Snippet: I didn’t read Enid Blyton because I wanted to be white. I didn’t read her because I wanted to escape a world of uncaring adults. I read her because the plucky children came out on top.

Mind you, as a writer working in the trenches of the children's publishing market I'd take him to the (yoga) mat over this sweeping generalization: Children’s fiction has long become obsessed with depicting reality. Broken homes. Race relations. Adoption. Religious intolerance. Drugs. If it’s not about the pressing social issues of the day, it has to be educational – about history or inter-faith harmony or metaphysics. It has to teach something.

I could name a dozen books published in the last few years that could counter that statement, but that's for another post. I'd argue that Blyton's books were pretty darned teachy in their own way. Rashna B. Singh has a terrific chapter on Blyton in her book Goodly is Our Heritage: Children's Literature, Empire and the Certitude of Character.That I, eating up all the books I could lay my hands on in 1960's India, missed that aspect, says more about me and my circumstances than it does about Blyton. Children have a protective filter in their minds. They get what they are ready to get.

This part, however, is certainly true for me:

...Enid Blyton had some 800 books. She got to be there through our entire childhood...

Racist, sexist, classist, and xenophobic as the worldview in her books was, Blyton was a staple of my childhood as she was of Sandip Roy's.

In many ways, she was part of my writing journey as well. Had I not read about a talking parrot in her books, could I have written a chirping girl, forty-five years later, in mine?

Reading the World Challenge: Three Titles Plus One

2011-08-16T09:26:00.004-06:00

A reminder that the Reading the World Challenge continues on PaperTigers.

The first three books in my response to the challenge are part of a guest post over at The Brain Lair.

The titles I chose:

Good Night, Commander by Ahmad Akbarpour, illustrated by Morteza Zahedi, translated from the Farsi by Shadi Eskandani and Helen Mixter and published in Canada by Groundwood Press.

I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. by performance poet, storyteller and teacher Arthur Flowers, with illustrations by Patua scroll artist Manu Chitrakar from rural Bengal. Designed by Guglielmo Rossi and published in India by Tara Books.

Reading the World asks readers to choose at least one book set where they live. My "local" book, set in northwest New Mexico, is Songs of Shiprock Fair by poet, writer, teacher, storyteller Luci Tapahanso, illustrated by Anthony Chee Emerson and published in the USA by Kiva Publishing.

Next on my Reading the World list is Hurricane Dancers by Margarita Engle, a fictional account of a Caribbean pirate shipwreck. It's told in spare verse with shifting first person viewpoints. We hear from Qebrado, dubbed "the broken one," the pirate captain Bernardino de Talavera, Alonso de Ojeda who is in chains below deck, and the young lovers Narido and Caucubu. The collision of the Taino and Spanish-speaking worlds is both tragic and inevitable. The roles of captor and captive become reversed, ambitions are thwarted and hope can lie only in reinvention. Images of trees and ships echo throughout, the heart of one speaking in the creak and roll of the other; always, close at hand, is the sea. Engle charts the troubled waters of history with her customary combination of skill and heart. Published in the USA by Henry Holt.

Process Talk: Conversation Ahead with Joanne Rocklin

2011-08-15T17:33:00.001-06:00

I've been trading e-mails with Joanne Rocklin, author of One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street, which caught my fancy because like my own middle grade, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, it derives its momentum from many stories intersecting in a single place. It breaks with some of the same conventions, while the same kind of energy seems to hum at its heart.

In both books, a number of narratives of children and a host of eccentric adults, intertwine and are brought together by a narrative voice that spans past and present, and can hop nimbly between places and people.

Joanne and I are digging into questions about process and trust and how you keep going--all that good writerly stuff. Look for more as we find themes that connect our thinking about the writing of these books.

And check out One Day and One Amazing Morning.... Among other things you will never look at an orange construction cone in quite the same way again! Here's an audio excerpt:

The Fragility and Robustness of Humor

2011-08-05T10:11:00.000-06:00

Remember a time when you laughed so hard you nearly cried? They're very close sometimes, those particular extremes of emotion. I've been watching this video from the Philoctetes Center (unfortunately closed now) about poet Marie Ponsot's struggle with aphasia. It's moving and wonderful for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that this amazing woman and gifted poet is 90 years old!

But if you watch for just a few minutes from about 1:35:55 onward, you can listen to a writer in the audience speak about his stroke. What's so peculiarly moving is that he is a writer of humor, and that this part of his work is not returning to him.

In discussions of craft, we often hesitate to talk about the writing of humor, as if it were something so flimsy and frangible that it would die if we did.

But humor can be much more robust than that. Humor's tough. It often comes from having grown a thick skin, and it can help others do that. Leonard Marcus's collection of interviews, Funny Business, is compelling precisely because those thirteen comic writers are unafraid in this regard.

On page 88 of Funny Business, there's a picture of the 8- or 9-year-old Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) at Cub Scouts. He's out of uniform. He's looking right into the camera. His chin is set. He has a scowl firmly fixed upon his face. There are universes of intent behind that scowl.

A couple of other kids in that picture, like the young Daniel, are not engaged in the knot-tying that's going on. They, however, are not taking on the world.

I hope that writer finds his funny voice again. When he does, we may learn something about how humor operates in the brain. Unfortunately there won't be a Philoctetes roundtable to bring that knowledge to the world.

"I hear them like migrant birds." A Conversation with Audrey Couloumbis

2011-08-03T07:59:00.005-06:00

This week's Kidlitosphere roundup for Interview Wednesday is at Gathering Books. Myra's on Singapore Time so if you're anywhere in the Americas, watch for additions through part of tomorrow.

The borders we're crossing in today's interview are those that exist between the adult writer self and the child character.

In Audrey Couloumbis's latest middle grade novel, Lexie, ten-year-old Lexie deals with the aftermath of her parents' divorce during a week spent at the beach with her father, who's invited his girlfriend and her two sons to join them.

From a starred review, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June 2011:

As she did in Jake (BCCB 12/10), Couloumbis demonstrates her skill at writing with quiet understanding and unstudied polish for younger readers. Her ability to walk through complicated emotional dynamics in kid-accessible language...is impressive, making Lexie a perceptive narrator but not requiring her to be implausibly sophisticated.

I have known Audrey for years in the way that one can get to know people through letters and then e-mail and phone conversations, through correspondence about the things that matter to both of us in writing and in life. I'm very pleased to be able to talk to her now about this book that is sometimes funny, sometimes tender, and always spot on.

[Uma] Lexie's voice rings so true, endearing and compelling yet completely unsentimental. How do you tap the sensibility of the middle grade child with such perceptiveness?

[Audrey] I start writing the moment a character has something to say that interests me—I hear them like migrant birds, listen now or let them go on their way, probably never to return—and go from there. For Lexie it was a comment that let me know we had something in common: waiting for a father to arrive. Mine was always coming in on a plane that was late, late, late. And in my case, people around me never came to realize that tardiness was, if not deliberate, at least a condition he didn’t object to. He liked arriving to be greeted by a welcoming entourage.

[Uma] "Like migrant birds." I love that. So how did Lexie's story arrive on the page for you?

[Audrey] Working with Lexie, I drew on the reality of being met with an awareness that life went on without me. Oh, a stepmother. Oh, a pregnant stepmother. Oh, no longer traveling, but not coming home to live either? On the rare occasions I think of those surprises, I wish my grandparents were around so I could ask, What did you really think of all that? Because they were being surprised too.

So there was more than a little of my father in Lexie’s dad. Funny to realize that now, because recently I was asked if I’d patterned any of the characters after someone I knew. I said no, I didn’t think so. I liked bringing a little of the childhood experience of separation out into the open with Lexie.

But isn’t it funny how writing works to bring out a little of the old stuff we’d shoved into a drawer years ago, and even then we don’t recognize it right away.

[Uma] How do you know when some of that old "stuff" might be ready to grow into a story, or don't you always know?

[Audrey] Usually I start with a piece of dialogue that ends up somewhere in the story, occasionally it’s more of an image that evokes the mood. In both cases, although I sometimes realize there was a trigger, the starting point rises from some mysterious where, like champagne bubbles. Once I start writing, the voice is steady on.

I realize that’s a less than helpful answer.

[Uma] No, actually it's a good one. I think we often go looking for the superficial story event as a trigger when what we need to be attending to is something much deeper, something that creates the conditions for that mysterious bubbling up of story.

[Audrey] I’ve tried starting stories from something overheard and fascinating—“He was killed by a tornado ! Drug right outta the winda!” but it never seems to work the same way. Probably the main criterion I use for writing a story is the willingness of the characters to offer up their points of view.

[Uma] And they do. Listen to this:

He sure could yell. Vicky picked him up and sat on the bed and rocked him, crooning over him. Harris's face had turned beet red. But he wasn't bleeding and he didn't look broken, the first thing Mom always checks. He looked like he would live.

In your writing the bonds between children are luminous, almost magical even though stories are realistic fiction. We had Willa Jo and Little Sister in Getting Near to Baby, which is to my mind one of the most wonderful renditions ever of a sibling relationship in fiction. And in Lexie we have the evolving relationship with the three-year-old Harris. What's the importance of these connections, child to child, in your writing? How do they serve to enable your child characters to maneuver through a complicated adult world?

[Audrey] You’ve approached the question with a very generous compliment, which I warn you, I resist.

[Uma] Resist away, Audrey! I insist on it. I love that book!

[Audrey] The first thought to come to mind is, my experience of these moments in a sibling relationship, often couched between the various conflicts of age, gender, family placement, circumstances, and just plain old chemistry, are about those events that require us, any of us, to step up to a higher level of understanding and tolerance, even if only temporarily. So while an instance represents those ultra protective moments when siblings recognize a need, they aren’t representative of the entire relationship by any means.

That said, I think the relationships that grow between the child characters in all of my books reflect that moment, partially or wholly, when kids recognize their essential helplessness in the face of a difficult situation—their helplessness to change how the adults are likeliest to respond, that is--or their dependence upon the adults in charge of what happens next.

Kids do realize they have to depend on each other to some extent in a crisis, and they are largely more trustworthy, in my view, than adults. They’re pure in their intent. I remember living from that feeling, and if I can’t always operate from there now that I’m “older and wiser” I can reexperience it with my characters over and over.

[Uma] It is true, isn't it, that your child characters draw on inner strengths they often didn't know they had?

[Audrey] Kids are rarely truly helpless. They extend themselves in quietly heroic ways, rising to an occasion to a degree most adults don’t expect of them and possibly won’t appreciate—even though that adult is expecting a kind of cooperation, a moderated behavior, that they might or might not get—and kids are selfless in the way of people who think they’ll last forever, that nothing of themselves is finite. I admire children, generally, and I like to show that not-so-helpless side of them. But I also like looking at how that intersects with some hapless adult’s expectations.

[Uma] Thank you Audrey. Here's to heroism and rising to the occasion, and to good books for children, books with humor and heart!

[Audrey] Thanks, Uma, for the opportunity to talk about Lexie, and writing.

[Uma] My pleasure. Come back and talk to me any time.

Oh, and another thing about this book. It's charmingly illustrated by Julia Denos. Look at this picture of Lexie reading in the window. I love the fact that so many middle grades these days are getting the benefit of interior art!

Finally, here's Audrey's interview with Erika Rohrbach on the Kirkus blog. Here's a snippet from that interview:

Conflicting emotions are where you begin to find characters like Ben—where there will be real ambivalence about what they’re dealing with. I hope that I deal with conflicting emotions well in whatever I write because it seems to me that any experience of emotional value is going to have some of that; it’s going to have places where other people looking are probably going to make judgments.

A summer-perfect read that captures the eccentricity of its child characters, and will warm the heart anytime.

Write at Your Own Risk

2011-08-01T07:25:00.001-06:00

A new blog, Write At Your Own Risk, launches today from faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Several of us will be posting to the blog, writing at our own risk.

Thank you, Sarah Blake Johnson, for the photograph that led us to the blog title.

Speaking of writing and taking risks, Neesha Meminger has a wonderful article up at Hunger Mountain on the politics of story.

Interview Wednesday: Sheela Chari on Vanished

2011-07-27T06:35:00.003-06:00

Please welcome Sheela Chari, debut novelist and author of the middle grade mystery Vanished just out from Hyperion. From Kirkus Reviews: Chari, in her debut novel, strikes the right note with this engaging, intricate story that spans generations and two countries.

[Uma] I was thrilled when I first heard about Vanished, because I've long been calling for South Asian American fiction for young readers in which culture and social issues do not in themselves constitute the story. Here you have mystery, music, school friendships, honesty and self-awareness all converging in a most engaging novel. What made you pull together these particular elements?

[Sheela] Uma, thanks so much for having me on your blog! Vanished started off as a birthday present to my niece, whose name is Neela, just like the heroine. I had forgotten to mail her a present, so I started writing a story about her. The real Neela also played the veena, so I wrote about her and her instrument. I wanted to make the whole thing a fun mystery for her to read, so I asked myself, what would happen if Neela’s veena disappeared? How would she get it back?

That was how the book started, but as I continued, I began to seriously imagine the story not just as a birthday present for Neela, but as a real, legitimate novel for kids. At first I wondered, could I really write about an ancient, stringed instrument from India?

No one knew what a veena was, or what it sounded like. More importantly, could I write about Neela and her instrument in a way that would interest kids? But once I started asking these questions, I found that they became easy to answer. I began to see that Vanished was not just a writing challenge, but that it became the kind of book that was important for me to write.


Master veena player Jayanthi Kumaresh and veena. Source: www.veenaijayanthi.org

[Uma] It's true that few people in the US are familiar with the instrument. (Note: Here on Jayanthi Kumaresh's web site you can listen to samples of the veena's evocative voice.) By that same token I'll bet you didn't see much of yourself and your background reflected in books you read as a child. Care to comment on that?

[Sheela] Throughout my childhood, I had grown up on mystery and adventure novels. My favorites were books like A Wrinkle in Time and The Secret Garden. But as an Indian child living in the United States, I had never read a book about a person like me. By the time I was an adult, there were several good books out there about self-identity and the challenges of living between two cultures, or else there were books set in India. But what I wanted to see were mysteries and adventure stories about Indian Americans who were out there experiencing life and solving mysteries, similar to their American peers. I wanted to write something fun and exciting that the real-life Neela could read and still say yes, this could happen to me.

That’s how Vanished came into being: partly through happy circumstance, partly through deliberate contemplation. As for the other elements – music has always been a very important part of my life. I was trained as a violinist from an early age, and I still play. It seemed only natural to write about something I felt deeply about. And if you think about it, music is truly the universal language that people can converge upon, regardless of their social or cultural backgrounds.

[Uma] For the purpose of this blog, I define an insider narrative as one set within a cultural group or geographical setting of which the writer has personal experience. One of the things I love about Vanished is how you draw those links between Boston and India, mirroring aspects of both realities, but in ways that blur the boundaries. Thus we have an American veena player, dragon motifs that cross many cultural boundaries, classical south Indian music tradition, and an Indian-American protagonist trying to be herself. What were the delights and the challenges of writing from such perspectives of hybridity and flux?

[Sheela] I’m not sure I set out to write with these hybridizations in mind. I do think I was concerned with balance, so as I wrote, I thought about the people the fictional Neela might interact with in her life – and then I tried to make them interesting! I wanted to make sure different types of people came into her life – young and old, male and female, Indian and not, and from different cultural backgrounds and cities around the world. I wanted anyone reading the book to find some part of the story relatable to them.

Church door, model for interior art. Arlington MA

Beyond that, I think a lot of the composites were a result of me being both Indian and American, and having a “dual insider perspective,” if I can play a little off your term! I was born in Bangalore, India, but grew up mostly in America. I was raised in a fairly traditional household. My parents brought up my brother and me vegetarian, we observed religious festivals regularly, and we spoke a mixture of Tamil, Kannada, and English in the home. But outside the home, my school friends were all American. I listened to rock music, then later to Western classical music. I dressed and spoke like everyone I knew in school, and never thought of myself as being different. It was only after I went to college and met other Indians, as well as people from all around the world, that I began to get a sense of my own heritage and background – when I saw it reflected in others! So I guess that’s a lengthy explanation of why my personality and upbringing have made me a blend of East and West, and why it would be inevitable that these two halves would appear in my writing.

[Uma] You use images of objects with delicacy, so that their occurrence and recurrence not only create visual echoes, but convey to the reader a sense of Neela's growth over the course of the book--the snapping string, the dragons of course, and others. Were you aware of these as you wrote or was their placement intuitive, or a bit of both? Tell me about the importance of physical objects to you in this story.

[Sheela] Objects are important in that they carry meaning with them, both as the writer might intend, as well as what the reader associates with them. If you look more closely at the veena and wyvern for example, you will find that they carry interesting dichotomies. In the Author Notes section of my book, I talk about how in Indian Hindu mythology, the veena is both the instrument of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, as well as Ravana, the arch-villain in The Ramayana (a religious text). Likewise, the wyvern (the dragon that appears in Vanished) is also a symbol of valor and strength in medieval history, as well as one of pestilence and revenge. I didn’t go looking for these qualities. But interestingly, as I dug deeper into my story and did more research, I discovered that these objects “resonated” in unexpected, meaningful ways.

It’s interesting how you observed the appearances of the objects throughout --– I would say it was intuitive to the writing of the story. However, the veena was the most important object of all, not just because the mystery was constructed around its disappearance, but because the instrument represents the desire to own and covet it. At the heart of the novel is the issue of wanting what you can’t have, and how different characters deal with it.

[Uma] Vanished contains moral ambiguity in the person of good people who make poor decisions, past and present. Without giving anything away, I want to comment in particular on the wonderful turning point in which Neela herself makes a single decision that seems to right everyone else's mistakes as well as her own. Can you talk about how you arrived at the very interesting ethical through-line of this novel?

[Sheela] I know exactly which scene you’re talking about! And I must say that this scene, which takes place towards the end of the novel, is one of the earliest ones I saw in my mind. It was the scene that I was working towards as I wrote the novel.

[Uma] That's interesting. It shows, I think. Sometimes those ideas that first grab us have great tensile strength, and can pull a whole story toward them.

[Sheela] I think for many writers, we have such a scene on our horizon – it might be at the very end, or somewhere in the middle, it might be the scene where something important is revealed, or by which the main character undergoes a crucial moment of change. Whatever it is, it’s the reason we’re writing the book. This scene where Neela makes her decision was important to me because that was how I saw her becoming a better person, and the chance to be a real musician at last. Her quest throughout isn’t just to find the lost veena, but to find her reason for playing music, that would sustain her in the long run, and help her overcome her fear of performing.

[Uma] And finally, you catch the vulnerability of preteens deftly and with humor: Neela's stage fright, Matt's hesitation when he talks about his music, Pavi and her swimming, and other instances. How did you go about tapping the emotional lives of your characters?

[Sheela] Good question! I can only say that I had a lovely stroke of luck in having so many kids in my life – my own two daughters, as well as my nieces and nephew. Neela was also someone I knew from the time she was a baby, and I have watched her grow, talked to her at length, and know her like my own child.

But I think the truth is that like many children’s writers, I write from the memory of being a young person. One of the reasons I write middle grade is that its age group is the part of my childhood I so distinctly remember… it’s the voice that comes most naturally to me.

[Uma] And it speaks naturally in this very interesting first novel. Congratulations, Sheela.

The Kidlitosphere Interview Wednesday portal this week is Anastasia Suen's Chapter Book of the Day. Scroll down to the end of Anastasia's post to see the roundup.

Culture, Craft, and Fictional Worlds

2011-07-26T07:31:00.005-06:00

Tomorrow, an interview with Sheela Chari, the author of Vanished. In the next few weeks, I'll be posting about a few more books with cultural contexts, both insider and outsider narratives.

Girls reading The Broken Tusk. Photo courtesy of Pardada Pardadi.

It's easy to talk about authenticity, but who knows what that is? I was born in India and grew up there, but my slice of the reality of India is only my slice. I can't absolve myself of all responsibility, however, because it doesn't end there. A reader who doesn't know India will assume that my representation is "real." One who does may find my sense of the place and people is at odds with her own. So I may protest that I can't represent a country, but by default, I'm doing so. Writing, especially for young readers, comes with a certain responsibility. A sort of "do no harm" principle can't be denied.

I'm well aware that every choice I make in my writing either sustains the illusion of a credible fictional world or dissipates it. That's true of large choices of structure and premise, or small choices of details in a scene, or rhetorical choices in narrative and dialogue.

If it's all illusion, is it possible for writers to learn how to create that illusion so it rings true, does not patronize, and is not reductive and essentialist? It seems to me that if we pay close attention to elements of both the source culture and the target audience, and if the writer has a generous vision and an intelligent approach to it, it's possible to use the smoke and mirrors of the craft to do precisely that. We can avoid the kind of crashing and burning that we see in books where the writer has not given much thought to such matters, or worse, has adopted the faux colonial view that "othering" a whole culture is fine because, well, didn't Frances Hodgson Burnett and Laura Ingalls Wilder get away with it?

This attempt to analyse the nuts and bolts of technique assumes that the writer is aware of the passage of centuries and can write from a space beyond pure nostalgia. For the insider writer, it assumes an awareness of two emotional spaces--the one of the story and the shared understanding of possible target audiences. Inside and outside--concepts that apply to the story, the writer, the audience to come.

This is not to say that there won't always be readers who will find even well crafted books disappointing for completely personal reasons. If a reader's been taught to expect Jungle Book in every rendition of India, urban traffic jams (or girls reading books) may disappoint, although I'd argue that's precisely why we need new visions of those "other" spaces.

Still, just beginning with an examination of the pitfalls of writing across cultures is a start. What do those look like for the insider writer and for the outsider?

More to come, starting tomorrow with this week's Interview Wednesday.

Connections: Washington Post blog on Potter, VCFA at the Tollbooth, and more Grand Plan reviews

2011-07-18T07:00:00.010-06:00

Harry Potter as Children's Literature: Diminishing Returns? by Daniel de Vise, with a follow-up guest post by Ernie Bond drawn from a discussion on child-lit. Literature? Mass market? Do young readers care?

Through the Tollbooth features a series of posts on the current VCFA summer residency, MFA program, Writing for Children and Young Adults. Mostly for alums and faculty and prospective students, but look past the cafeteria/dorm nostalgia for the interesting takes on craft that keep so many of us, alums and faculty, engaged with the program.

On a personal note, more reviews of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything:
Chicago Tribune
Sawnet (South Asian Women's Network)
James Patterson's READKIDDOREAD.com
India Currents
AARP books grandparents can find for their grandchildren

And just for fun, a few book sightings of The Grand Plan:


B&N, NYC, courtesy of Kate Hosford

BookPeople, Austin, courtesy of Cynthia Leitich Smith

ALA conference, courtesy of Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

Vaunda engaging in "book sighting" behavior at ALA

Interview Wednesday: Stacy Whitman of Tu Books, a Lee and Low Imprint

2011-07-13T08:21:00.000-06:00

In 2010 Lee and Low acquired a spunky little startup called Tu Publishing, which had just launched itself on Kickstarter with a focus on diverse fantasy, science fiction, and mystery for middle grade and young adult readers and, it seemed, reader interest and support to match. "This is a natural fit for us," says publisher Jason Low. "Our customers have been asking us for years to publish stories for older readers. Tu represents an excellent way for us to bring diversity to a whole new audience."

Tu Books launches in September 2011. Individual title pages will be up shortly. You can also follow Tu Books on Twitter.

As a longtime fan of the work and mission of Lee & Low, I've been intrigued by the whole story of Tu's founding and acquisition. I was pleased to be invited to consult with editor Stacy Whitman on their forthcoming dystopic fantasy title, Tankborn. The experience got me thinking about the use of cultural consultants as a way to bridge gaps between outsider authors (culturally speaking) and insider readers, so I asked Stacy for her thoughts.

[Uma] Why use cultural consultants for the books you publish at Tu?

[Stacy] It's something that Lee and Low has done for years, and it seemed a natural extension for our books, particularly for writers who are writing cross-culturally. While fantasy and science fiction draws upon folklore and culture for its inspiration, sometimes those roots are obscured, so it might not immediately seem like there's a need, but if the conclusions we draw in a futuristic dystopia, for example, are rooted in incorrect assumptions, or if the language we use is based upon incorrect translations, readers familiar with the culture would be pulled out of the world and find it insincere at best, and appropriative or offensive at worst. The best way to avoid misrepresenting a culture (even if it's a twisted version of that culture, as in a dystopia) is to make sure to consult an expert--if the writer him or herself isn't an expert. The author of Wolf Mark, Joseph Bruchac, is the expert we'd go to for books about Abenaki main characters, so of course we trust his expertise for his own books.

[Uma] Under what circumstances would you ask a cultural consultant to weigh in on a book?

[Stacy] Particularly when a writer is writing cross-culturally, we'd want to ask a cultural consultant to make sure that we got it right. A writer can do all the research right, live in the country they're writing about, and be fluent in the language, and still get a few small details wrong. Galaxy Games author Greg Fishbone lived in Japan for a while and can speak the language, but our Japanese expert felt as if sometimes the kid characters were a little too formal with their close friends. Greg didn't go to elementary school in Japan (he was a law student), so that expert perspective helped us to know where to improve.

We might also seek an expert (or two or three) when we're dealing with a historical subject (to double-check the writer's research where necessary) or a controversial one that might bring out inflamed opinions. And as far as writing cross-culturally goes, worldbuilding for a high fantasy setting in ancient China or Korea will require a lot of research even for an author who is Chinese or Korean--while they know their own culture, they might not know specific ways that people lived or what their bows were made out of or how peoples' beliefs changed over a couple millennia. (This should also be true for writers who write medieval Europe-inspired fantasy, though sometimes that doesn't happen as often as I'd like; hence some books are more derivative of another author's view of the Middle Ages rather than reflective of how people actually lived.)

[Uma] H.G.Wells is supposed to have said, "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." How do you even begin to look for readers who will read for specific aspects of content and yet refrain from leaving their own footprint upon it?

[Stacy] It's a challenge sometimes! We reach out first to people who we know in the children's book industry, such as yourself, who know how things work in this industry who are also members of the culture we're seeking an expert in. Generally these people are also well-read and informed about diversity issues, so they know the kinds of mistakes we hope to avoid making. We also reach out to children's and young adult librarians through their listservs--though most librarians aren't writers, they're often involved with diversity discussions in their professional circles, and we might find a cultural expert among them. I've also approached university librarians, public librarians who are subject experts, and university professors with varying degrees of success. For those not familiar with children's literature, we often just need to explain who the intended audience is and exactly what our intent is (to entertain first, to educate incidentally, worldbuilding through specific detail rather than infodumps, etc.). In theory--though this hasn't happened to me yet--we might get detailed feedback that misses the mark, but even then hopefully that feedback would give us the information we need to address the core problem the reader sees with a particular mistake, even if the expert didn't understand the writer's reasoning in a particular spot.

[Uma] Reading Tankborn as a consultant, for a particular extrapolation of cultural context, was an interesting experience for me. It left me with a renewed understanding of just how deeply such content runs through a book, from linguistic factors and the names of things to the beliefs of people and their resulting actions. Talk about the vision of Tu in regard to the representation of diversity, relative to the kinds of fiction you publish.

[Stacy] Fantasy is often inspired by folklore and myth, both from living beliefs and ancient ones. So often, though, fantasy has a distinctly Western European flavor, mostly because the fantasy that we know here in the US is mostly inspired by the fantasy of the British Isles--Tolkien, inspired by Norse mythology and folklore of the British Isles; Lewis, inspired by Victorian fantasists and Christian theology. Tolkien created a whole language for his elves. Worldbuilding in fantasy can go quite deep, though few contemporary authors spend decades worldbuilding as Tolkien did. Whether the inspiration for that world is a historical one, such as an agrarian society in a land that resembles the British Isles, with social hierarchies that resemble historical British hierarchies, or modern urban fantasy, such as fairy-tale creatures entering the real world, we tend not to venture much beyond Western European folklore, with perhaps a caveat that vampires and werewolves might have Eastern European roots in some tales.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is an extrapolative sort of fiction. Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek universe was an inclusive one for its time, as were Heinlein's science fiction "juvenile" stories that often featured characters of color because these visionary authors pictured the future as one in which equality had already occurred. Science fiction isn't always as hopeful these days--dystopias aren't always science fiction by definition, but they're usually extrapolation of current social situations. But whether it's a hopeful or dismal picture of the future, it just makes sense that the people who are currently nearly 50% of the elementary and high school student population in this country would also have a strong presence in our future.

Tu is dedicated to diversity in fantasy, science fiction, and mystery. That might be expressed by a contemporary main character of color in a modern American world--which would require knowing the character's similarities and differences compared with their white peers, what their family culture was like, how much "old country" culture the family retained and how much they'd assimilated into American culture if they're immigrants or descendants of immigrants, what kind of neighborhood they lived in and what their socioeconomic status is. There's much there that could be quite individual to the character. So a cultural inspiration might be as (seemingly) simple as a story starring a modern-day Japanese American boy meeting squid-like aliens and heading off for adventure in space--and learning that his family takes their shoes off at the front door and that they're vegetarians, one thing being a very traditional Japanese practice and another being a practice that may or may not be Japanese, but is a detail of that particular character's life.

Or it might involve deep worldbuilding in which a whole new world has to be created, and the inspirations for that world are complex. The more different from our present-day world a fantastic or speculative world is, the deeper the worldbuilding has to go, such as Karen Sandler's Tankborn, a dystopian world that bases its culture on the Indian caste system but in a very twisted way; every layer of life from language to socioeconomics to family groups is inspired by that culture, though there are complications because it's an extrapolation of our world, just one in which the most powerful people in a particular group happened to be Indian (and not just some generic "Indian" but of a particular region of India).

[Uma] When is a book ready for a consultant's reading and comment? How do you broker the feedback with the author and come to decisions that will work for everyone without sacrificing the intent and integrity of the work?

[Stacy] Occasionally I might ask an expert to look at a book before I acquire it to be sure that my impression of it "feeling authentic" is actually a good one. But generally I ask for a consultant's feedback shortly before the book is ready for copyediting--late enough in the process that the author and I have gone over the book a couple of times at least. That way, we've been able to fix most of the pressing problems a book might have, and the consultant would be able to avoid stumbling over problems that would get in the way of focusing on culture issues. By then the author would have done basic and deep research, and I would have investigated a few things that I had questions about.

Generally I go over the feedback from the consultant before sharing it with the author so as to add my own comments and suggestions on how that feedback might be implemented. Usually the feedback isn't pointing out problems that are so huge that we should go back to the drawing board, and authors are happy to implement changes that would make their book better.

For example, in Tankborn, the linguistic inspiration for most of the language came from Sanskrit, and you caught a term that didn't sound quite right to you. While changing that term was a little painful because the author had been using it for a long while, she was also glad for the suggestion of a new word that would fit the linguistic pattern better.

Sometimes the author might have a reason for a particular decision based on a culturally-appropriate situation that the consultant hadn't been aware of, so sometimes it just takes some discussion for us all to realize that both points of view are valid--and then the author might revise to make sure that the situation he or she was referencing became more clear.

Sometimes, though, you can't please everyone. Sometimes you might need to consult experts from opposing viewpoints within the same culture (or two clashing cultures within the same country). Then it can get difficult! Sometimes experts will insist that their point of view is the only right point of view while their opponents will argue that no, *theirs* is the valid point of view. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes not. Then you and the author have to make educated decisions, doing your best to use the feedback you can but also allowing that in fiction, a character has a certain point of view and sometimes you can't always reflect ALL points of view. This is where the unreliable narrator might come in, leaving questions in the reader's mind that *should* be there. I haven't worked on a book that dealt with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, for example, but there are strong feelings on both sides that I imagine couldn't *all* be appeased in a work of fiction about it.

[Uma] Any other thoughts on the process?

[Stacy] I love getting feedback from cultural experts because not only do I learn more about the culture that has already fascinated me for upwards of a year by the time we get expert feedback, I get a check on my editing and research skills--it's another pair of eyes to catch anything I didn't. I am a Swedish-Irish-Scottish-English-Prussian-German-tiny-bit-Cherokee-maybe woman from the rural Midwest. I may be able to give feedback on growing up poor or on a farm--and in fantasy, my experience raising horses has often been useful!--but my experience with many cultures is limited to the friends I've made from those cultures and any reading or travel I might have done. But even if I was a Latina or Asian woman, I'd have a particular cultural and socioeconomic point of view that wouldn't necessarily mean I had any understanding of cultures outside of my own experiences, and that is where cultural experts come in, helping the editor to ask questions from a different point of view, so that the writer to consider can make their book better.

Also, I want to add that even an expert has a particular point of view that might not be shared with everyone in their culture. No culture is monolithic. There may be a Japanese American--or several, even--who reads about Tyler Sato's life in Galaxy Games and says, "That's not MY experience as a Japanese American." (Well, NO Japanese American, that I know of, has met aliens yet, but hopefully you know I mean the realistic parts of his experience.) But I feel it's better to consult someone who can give us their point of view than have no point of view from that culture at all, and there are of course some things--like language--that can be quantified and universalized more than others.

[Uma] Thank you Stacy. I look forward to the launch this fall.

[Stacy] Thanks so much for having me!

More from Stacy Whitman's Grimoire: Thoughts on post-apocalyptic world-building and three posts on diversity in science fiction and fantasy for young readers.

Interview follow-up: Beyond Lucky by Sarah Aronson, Part 2

2011-07-07T07:58:00.002-06:00

Today I'm continuing my conversation with Sarah Aronson about her new middle grade novel, Beyond Lucky. Sarah teaches classes on writing for young readers online at writers.com and is a graduate of the Vermont College MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

[Uma] Let's talk about character development. At the outset, Ari's way of being in the world is highly ritualized and related to external factors--the card, his reliance on Wayne as role model, the Presidents. Yet as the story progresses we can feel him beginning to take the position of starting goalie, so to speak, in his own life. Talk about how Ari's character evolved for you. Did he surprise you along the way?

[Sarah] Boy did he!

Ari may start out unsure, but as he plays, as he becomes a bigger part of his team, as he studies for his bar mitzvah, he understands his place in his community. At the start, he looks to his role models—the presidents and his heroes—for guidance. By the end, he changes.

I’ll just say: Ari is tougher than he may look! I talked to a lot of goalies, and they are pretty intense people. Most are confident, and it was important to me that Ari’s confidence grow. There was one scene in one game where he literally stepped out of the scene and demanded to nab the ball. It seems sort of hokey, but when you can really hear a character in your head, that’s what it’s like. As I wrote the final version of the book, I was really proud of him. I like him, too. He knows that there are ideas and concepts worth standing up for. In one scene, he does what I sometimes have a hard time doing.

[Uma] Ari's Jewish identity is established clearly in the book, but with a light touch. Religion and culture are backdrop and context but they are not the story. Talk about those choices.

[Sarah] As the granddaughter of a rabbi, I read a lot of Jewish books--Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family was definitely my favorite. (As an adult, I found out she lived in the apartment below my aunt and uncle and complained all the time about their noisy baby--my cousin!)

Anyway, other than that, most of the Jewish books I was given were about the Holocaust. It was pretty hard trying to forge a positive Jewish identity on that reading diet. When I decided to write, one of my goals was to write about Jewish characters in secular settings...without being preachy or didactic. I hope I succeeded.

[Uma] Sarah that is so important. Not that oppression stories or social issue stories don't matter, but no group (oh, this is my ongoing refrain!) should be defined solely by them. In your book, Ari's bar mitzvah preparation runs headlong into the larger story because both are a part of his life.

[Sarah] I really wanted Ari's Judaism to add context and relevance, but not turn readers away. Judaism, like all religions, offers a foundation, a community, and some big time conflict. It helps define who he is. In my real world, sports and religious commitments often clash. At 12, he would be in the thick of his bar mitzvah studies. It's an amazing time of self discovery and learning.

There were a lot of Torah stories that could have worked in this book, but I love this portion for him because it is about responsibility...and burdens. Like a lot of my students, Ari got the portion he was meant to read and study.

[Uma] What are your thoughts on the role of friendship in this story?

[Sarah] Wow. That is one big question. When I first started writing this book, I thought a lot about Mac and Ari. In fact, Uma, I think you once asked me why these two very different boys were friends.

[Uma] I'd forgotten about that. You're right. I guess I was intrigued by the question even before the story had fully taken shape.

[Sarah] I had to dig for that answer.

But once I knew, it opened up a lot of emotion.

Friendship begins and grows in the strangest ways. Sometimes friends are so similar; sometimes, they are different. What really interested me with my characters: as boys, how do they express friendship and loyalty? How does the team fit in? Is there really no “I” in team?

That was the tip of the iceberg.

Sarah's connectivity chart

I think all of us—boys and girls, men and women—have all had friends who’ve made dubious choices. We’ve all had disagreements with friends. And we all have tentative friendships. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t sometimes have a hard time navigating friendships, especially when they are not completely mutual, when we are the vulnerable ones. Ari is vulnerable—on and off the field. And wow, does it hurt when a friend is not who you want him or her to be. I hope that when readers get to the end of Beyond Lucky, they feel strong enough to stand up for what they believe in. I hope they cheer for Ari. For me, this story showed me just how important a good friend can be.

[Uma] And what about the rest of the story iceberg? The subplots, the way that things are connected?

[Sarah] I used a connectivity chart. It really helped me figure out my subplots!

I compared the chart to the important scenes....and analyzed if the important characters (the ones that would logically were the most important to Ari) were there. Some were. Others were not. Thanks to my connectivity chart, I found new scenes for his friends...as well as flashbacks and scenes for Sam.

[Uma] Thanks, Sarah and yes, the very best of luck with this book and with all your projects.

Interview Wednesday: Beyond Lucky by Sarah Aronson

2011-07-06T07:00:00.011-06:00

Writer, teacher, and VCFA graduate Sarah Aronson's new novel, Beyond Lucky, launches this month from Dial. It's a soccer story, a friendship story, a story that crosses from funny to tense to heartful and back again. It was my pleasure to see parts of it in draft form when I was phasing out of teaching on writers.com and Sarah was phasing in.

Congratulations to Sarah on this engaging new book, of which Publisher's Weekly says:

Aronson skillfully dodges the predictability of sports-themed books by creating multilayered characters and an intriguing whodunit involving a valuable missing rookie card....includes a lot of fun on-field action, but the off-field story is just as interesting....Aronson's graceful storytelling will keep even nonsoccer buffs turning pages.

[Uma] Why luck? What is there about luck and the condition of being lucky or unlucky that makes such a wonderful thematic element for a middle grade novel?

[Sarah] Well, in a global way, what could be a more fun theme than luck? It’s unpredictable, and yet, don’t we all believe in karma? That what comes around goes around? Don’t we always want the good guy to get the girl? When I was a middle grade reader, I also believed that luck could be earned. As I got older, I was drawn to stories about the ironic nature of luck.

Even now, I am a little bit superstitious. I’m still obsessed with justice. There is an episode of The Twilight Zone—the one where the guy breaks his glasses after organizing all the books he wants to read—that still find their way into my dreams.

[Uma] Oh I know that episode. It's the ultimate reader's nightmare, just when the poor man is coming to terms with the terrible world he's in. A telling portrayal of a ritualistic reader and of the hope that underlies all ritual. Now talk about the ritualistic athlete. Don't sports superstitions exist in their own strange universe?

[Sarah] When you are talking about sports, you cannot deny the importance of superstition. Athletes are some of the most ritualistic people there are. Sports experts talk about pre-game rituals as the only things the athlete can truly control. At one point, Ari discusses the “sine wave” of luck. How sometimes you have it, and sometimes you don’t. This is something I think about a lot, too.

I guess that is what drew me to the theme. It’s funny—as a writer I have a lot of rituals, too. Every morning, when I sit down to write, I start by making coffee. I take a yoga class most mornings. I keep a stack of notecards by my desk. These notecards contain writerly inspiration. Every day I read one.

Today’s card contained a quote from Vince Lombardi:

"The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand."

But getting back to your question….when I understood Ari’s need for rituals, I also began to know him better. Ari is a goalie—the ultimate position when it comes to a lack of control. And his brother is a fire fighter. I thought about his hero, Wayne Timcoe, and how important his trading card would be to him, and that made me think about one of my favorite books, John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. In The Pearl, Steinbeck deals with luck and the aftermath of finding the very thing the family thinks will make them lucky. I remember reading this book—especially the ending. Rereading that book helped me rethink about Ari and his friends about how we overcome our dependence on luck.

[Uma] I read The Pearl in one big gulp, many years ago. What a great example of how texts speak to us. In our own way, as writers, what we're really doing is speaking back. Thanks, Sarah.

Tomorrow, character development and the role of friendship in Beyond Lucky.

Meanwhile, here's the trailer:

Today's Interview Wednesday portal from Kidlitosphere is at Tales From the Rushmore Kid.

Interview wrap-up: Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy, Part 3

2011-06-29T07:21:00.004-06:00

Here at WWBT, I've decided to embrace the terms "outsider narrative" and "insider narrative," to offer some context on books grounded in specific cultures. I use them without suggesting that one is better than the other, but with the recognition that they are different, and that we need many stories about a single place or people. Each kind of story poses its own challenges, and both challenge readers of all cultures to cross boundaries of attitude and assumption. When I can, I'll be talking to the writers of both outsider and insider books for young readers. E.g., see my interview with Monika Schroder on Saraswati's Way. For an insider viewpoint, watch for my conversation with Sheela Chari on her delightful forthcoming middle grade novel, Vanished.

Here's the final part of my interview with Trent Reedy, VCFA alum, whose novel, Words in the Dust came from his experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan.

[Uma] What's the role that compassion plays in this story--your own, in being driven to write it, as well as in your fictional character's life as she grows and embraces change?

[Trent] I think in some way all stories come from compassion, as writers must have some degree of sympathy for their characters so that they can understand why their characters behave as they do. My war experience taught me a lot about compassion. It certainly gave me a great appreciation for the need for more understanding just about everywhere in the world, but certainly in Afghanistan.

Zulaikha has a lot to learn during the summer in which the events of Words in the Dust take place. She has placed a lot of importance in what I call “The Afghan Fairytale,” the idea that marrying the right man and having lots of children is the ideal existence, the most that can be hoped for. This is especially difficult for her because with a cleft lip, her marriage prospects are dim. A lot changes for her through the course of the novel, but without giving too much away, I think one of the most important changes is her increased understanding for different members of her family.

[Uma] Words in the Dust speaks to a society in transition, and a girl with hopes and dreams that are aligned with her place and time. What choices did you make about the positioning of Afghan characters in the book that prevent it from becoming just another "rescue narrative"?

[Trent] When I began writing Words in the Dust I was determined to write a novel without any bias. I didn’t want a story that condemned U.S. and coalition military forces in Afghanistan. I certainly didn’t want to write a book in which the American soldiers were portrayed as blameless saints who enter Zulaikha’s village, teach the Afghan people American ways, and generally save the day. I tried to avoid judgment of Afghan culture.

The problem I encountered in trying to avoid bias is that real people are always biased. People have opinions, and so I couldn’t have my characters running around agreeing with each other spouting platitudes such as, “This is my culture. This is the way I like things to be.” That would take away most of the conflict, robbing the novel of a story.
I’ve heard people engaged in the cultural authenticity debate say that strong female characters who seek out their own destinies aren’t realistic in certain cultural settings. This assumption troubles me in that it implies that every member of a given group is exactly the same. I think most people would agree that no matter how strong the cultural influences, there will still be plenty of differences within any population. So while some Afghan women might be more passive and have little interest in education, there are many who are very active or who want to be more active in choosing to pursue opportunities. This latter group helped me realize that characters like Zulaikha’s mother and Meena are possible.

While I believe that American troops and their coalition allies are helping the situation in Afghanistan, I knew that any solutions in this novel must come from Zulaikha. Thus, even though the Americans offer her surgery for her cleft lip, that alone does not make everything better. The money from American construction contracts, while helping to improve the local economy in the village of An Daral, also brings problems. In earlier drafts, the American Captain Mindy offers to pay for Zulaikha’s school. This was later revised, making that potential solution come from Meena instead. Zulaikha’s ultimate decision is entirely her own, a surprise to some people, as it was to me, but I hope that it is one that strikes true to the person Zulaikha is. I wish her the best.

[Uma] Thank you, Trent. Any last thoughts?

[Trent] Thank you, Uma, for interviewing me for your blog. I’m grateful to have the chance to talk about Words in the Dust here. It’s a special honor for me since your wonderful novel Naming Maya was one of the books I studied as I was learning how to portray different countries and cultures in a novel meant primarily for an American readership. I hope to talk to you someday back at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

[Uma] I look forward to that as well, and I'm very glad that my book played a part in your journey.

Watch the book trailer.

Interview follow-up: Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy, Part 2

2011-06-28T07:13:00.002-06:00

Here's Part 2 of a three-part interview with Trent Reedy, VCFA graduate and author of Words in the Dust.

[Uma] You use a sprinkling of Dari words in the book, but you use them without italics and you make the meanings clear in context. This makes the narrative feel more surely grounded. There isn't a sense of the narrator stepping out of her story to explain or translate. Can you talk about those writing choices? Why and how did you come to make them?

My strategy with the inclusion of some Dari words is a clue to a little of my personal bias. For the most part, I tried to limit the inclusion of Dari to those words such as “toshak” or “rubab,” that lacked an accurate English translation. However, I could have just as easily written “good bye” when Zulaikha said “khuda hafiz.” I could have written “thank you” when she said “tashakor.” I wanted to keep those words and a few others in Dari because my fellow soldiers and I used them so often during our time in Afghanistan.

I did my best to provide clues to the meanings of these words within the context of the story without having a character stop and explain what the words meant. The good people at Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic were kind enough to allow the inclusion of a glossary to offer more help.

My editor and I then entered into discussions about italicizing those words that would likely be foreign to most readers. In the end, we simply decided to use italics for Dari words only when they were spoken by English speakers, and for English words when spoken by Dari speakers. In this way, the use of italics could signify the words being spoken with heavy accents.

[Uma] That reminds me of the convention An Na used to convey foreignness in A Step From Heaven, with quotation marks reserved for the English speakers whom Young Ju has to work hard to understand.

This novel was your creative thesis at VCFA, right? So you had to learn to write a novel, the craft of it, even while you were figuring out how to write this novel. What stands out in your memory? Any turning points? What were some big realizations or understandings you took away from working on this project with successive advisors?

[Trent] Words in the Dust was indeed my creative thesis at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I had a lot of doubts about being able to write it. During my first residency at VCFA, I was visiting Katherine Paterson. I asked her if she thought I could possibly write a book like this. She said that she thought I should try.

When seeking out an advisor to work with that first semester, I talked to Rita Williams-Garcia. She has written novels dealing with a wide array of complicated topics. I thought if she was that fearless, she might be willing to try to help a guy like me write a novel about an Afghan girl. I was blessed to get to work with her while I drafted the novel in my first semester. She was kind enough to let me stumble through, gently pointing out problems when I began to stray too far from salvageable material.

I worked with Jane Kurtz and David Gifaldi for my next two semesters, struggling to improve my writing while I worked on some other projects.

In my final semester I worked with Margaret Bechard. She’s a genius for asking all the right questions, and for helping me gain a better understanding of what could really be accomplished in revision.

The most important (and embarrassing) example comes from early drafts, when the character of Meena lived in a cave inside the Citadel wall. One day Margaret asked, “Why does she have to live in a cave?” I tried to explain the circumstances that had brought this woman to this desperate situation. Margaret struggled to make me understand that as the writer, I could simply change the story so that the woman lived in the back of her sewing shop. The ability to make this sort of change may seem obvious, but at the time, it felt like a cheat. If I could change that so arbitrarily, what else in the story could be completely altered, and how did I know if the choices I had made were the right ones?

While working on a new novel manuscript with my editor Cheryl Klein we came upon another of these seemingly arbitrary radical revision ideas. I was happily surprised with this change that solved a lot of problems with the story, but felt that I might have found it much earlier if I’d only been more understanding of what I now call the “Bechard Factor,” the idea that a writer needn’t stick to the original order of events or circumstances in a story, that during revision, the writer can change the entire story world at any time.

Here's a two part interview in which Trent talks to his editor Cheryl Klein:

Tomorrow, the role of compassion and why Words in the Dust is not just another "rescue narrative." Thanks, Trent.

ChLA 2011

2011-06-27T10:05:00.000-06:00

Thank you to the organizers of the 2011 Children's Literature Association conference held at Hollins University June 23-25. What a packed, busy, stimulating three days!

The highlights for me:

being on a panel with writers Meg Medina, Wendy Shang, and (my wonderful former student and VCFA graduate) Maha Addasi. Moderated by the amazing Alexandria LaFaye.
being on the diversity panel with June Cummins, Sarah Park, Zetta Elliot and Thomas Crisp. Thank you to Sarah and Tom for organizing this convergence of minds.
meeting Tom Angleberger and Bruce Coville. Learning to fold an Origami Yoda (OK, the simple version)
seeing original art for Goodnight Moon along with work by Thacher Hurd, Ruth Sanderson, and Ashley Wolff in the exhibition titled Goodnight Hush: Classic Children's Book Illustrations. Part of the yearlong celebration of the life and work of Margaret Wise Brown, Hollins University alumna''32.
meeting Thacher Hurd, and hearing his wise, reflective, tender, funny exploration of the legacies of Margaret Wise Brown
meeting Meena Khorana, scholar, biographer, editor, teacher, and the single most passionate advocate I know of in advancing the work of South Asian and diasporic writers in children's literature in America.
learning about Turkey's 100 Essential Readings, ideologically driven translated texts of classic Western children's literature in an informative and thought-provoking panel paper presented by Neslihan Kansu-Yetkiner. In the same session, learning from Marianna Spanaki about the work of the first Greek children's novelist, Penelope Delta.
Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel's lecture on Radical Children's Literature Now!
the Phoenix Award presentation
seeing Mary Downing Hahn after a gap of 15 years and picking up the conversation with no effort at all
and much, much more. A wonderful conference and a warm and welcoming children's literature community.

Finally, because I promised, here is the list of books I referenced in my Diversity Panel paper, No Joke! How Humor Subverts and Interrogates the Imperative of Assimilation in Middle Grade Novels

Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration.” International Migration Review. 31.4 (1997): 826-74. JSTOR. Web. 1 Nov. 2010.

Alvarez, Julia. How Tia Lola Came to ~~Visit~~ Stay. New York: Knopf, 2001. Print.

Berger, Peter L. Redeeming laughter: The comic dimension of human experience. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997. Print.

Krishnaswami, Uma. The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. Illus. Abigail Halpin. New York: Atheneum, 2011. Print.

Look, Lenore. Ruby Lu, Brave and True. Illus. Anne Wilsdorf. New York: Anne Schwartz/Atheneum, 2004. Print.

--. Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything. Illus. Anne Wilsdorf. New York: Atheneum, 2006. Print.

Leitich Smith, Cynthia. “Multicultural Humor, Seriously.” Cynsations, 27 July 2004. Web. 14 May 2011. <http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/2004/07/multicultural-humor-seriously.html

Leitich Smith, Greg. Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo. New York: Little, Brown, 2003. Print.

Pinkwater, Daniel. The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

Wong, Janet. Minn and Jake. Illus. Geneviève Côté. New York: Frances Foster/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003.

--. Minn and Jake’s Almost Terrible Summer. Illus. Geneviève Côté. New York: Frances Foster/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008.

Pictures to come.

Interview Wednesday: Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy, Part 1

2011-06-22T06:00:00.005-06:00

Please welcome writer and VCFA graduate Trent Reedy to Writing with a Broken Tusk. Starting today, over the next week, I'll be posting Trent's replies to questions about his novel set in Afghanistan, Words in the Dust.

The series of interviews will explore the impulse to write, the challenges of writing across cultural and geographic borders, and more.

Note that Kidlitosphere Interview Wednesday is being hosted this week at Just Deb...reading and writing for children and teens

[Uma] It's very hard to pull off an "outsider" narrative, and you chose first person, which is also in itself a difficult and constraining viewpoint. Talk about the challenges of writing across gender, first of all, while simultaneously writing across cultural lines. What cautions or tips would you offer to writers who may feel drawn to write in this way?

[Trent] Several elements in Words in the Dust are inspired by events I experienced during my year in Afghanistan with the Iowa Army National Guard. In particular, the story of Zulaikha’s reconstructive surgery is inspired by a girl with a cleft lip that my fellow soldiers and I were able to help in Afghanistan. I made a promise to tell the story of that girl. Thus, I began the process of writing this novel with a promise and not much else. To say that I chose to write Words in the Dust in first person is a bit of a distortion. When I began drafting the novel, I didn’t have the experience to make an effective conscious decision about which perspective would best serve the story. In other words, I do not think there was a particular moment when I decided that first person was the best. I simply started writing.

I knew I wanted Words in the Dust to be Zulaikha’s story and not that of American soldiers. “Zooming out” into third person might have given me more freedom to tell the story in different ways, but I think that then the focus might have been drawn too far away from Zulaikha’s struggle. For example, in third person, I might have included the experiences and reactions of the American soldiers to Zulaikha’s surgery while she was still unconscious, but that inclusion would shift the focus and sympathy toward the soldiers. We would know that Captain Mindy loves Zulaikha. We would know that Corporal Andrews will spend the rest of his life wondering if Zulaikha is going to be okay and weeping for the memory of bad things he saw. It would make Words in the Dust more of a story about American soldiers and I wanted the novel to reflect my belief that the Afghan people are at the heart of the struggle for peace, hope, and freedom in Afghanistan.

By writing Words in the Dust in first person, I could limit information and understanding, building distrust between the Afghans and Americans. I imagine that my fellow soldiers and I might have scared that Afghan girl when we came to her little village with all our weapons, looking for her. How could she have possibly imagined that we were on a mission to help her? I wanted to include that sense of confusion and fear in Words in the Dust, and that might have been diminished with a broader perspective.

[Uma] And writing in a girl's voice? Talk about that.

[Trent] People have asked me how I wrote a girl’s voice. I wish I had a good answer for this. I don’t really know how I did it. I don’t remember any specific changes that I made in order to make Zulaikha seem more like a girl. Maybe I’m just weird.

Maybe boys and girls aren’t as different as some in the children’s literature community would have us believe. It seems to me that the struggle to capture a character’s voice is about understanding who that character is as a person, regardless of gender. Writing from the perspective of an Afghan girl required some understanding of gender roles in Afghanistan, but beyond that, Zulaikha almost seemed to want to tell her own story.

Writing across cultures was more of a challenge than writing across genders. During my year in Afghanistan, I was blessed with the opportunity to live for some time in an Afghan house. I had the chance to eat Afghan food and to interact with hundreds of Afghans. And yet, Afghans are very private people, living with their families in their compounds behind their walls. I compensated for the gaps in my knowledge with a lot of research.
I’m reluctant to offer advice for those who are considering writing across cultural lines. Too often the debate surrounding this issue involves some writers telling other writers what they should or should not do. I would only ask other “outsiders” to seriously think about the many and complicated implications of what they are considering.
I am very aware of the potential problems that might arise when people write across cultural lines. These problems are magnified when members of a wealthier or arguably more privileged culture write stories about characters from cultures in which the people are typically less wealthy. In an American book market this usually translates to white people writing about races or cultures that are minorities in the United States. At their very worst, such stories can be horribly inaccurate racist propaganda. Yet, even among those writers from the “privileged” culture who are doing their very best to be kind, understanding, and “culturally authentic” in writing about their subject culture, there is potential for myriad unintentional problems.

I think perhaps the biggest problem is that even when a white writer crafts a “culturally authentic” novel (if “cultural authenticity” is truly possible) he is still, in a sense, stealing stories from his subject culture. If his subject is a great deal less wealthy than he is, it could be argued that the writer is profiting from the poverty of others.

I can only hope that my novel might help more people understand what is really at stake in the struggle in Afghanistan. I am also donating a portion of my royalties from Words in the Dust to an organization called Women for Afghan Women, a group that has been working for ten years to help improve educational and vocational opportunities for women and girls in Afghanistan.

I would like nothing better than for the real Afghan girl with the cleft lip to write her own story. However, by many estimates the illiteracy rate for Afghan women is above 80%. That situation may be gradually improving, but too many Afghan girls are simply unable to get their stories out. In spite of this, or perhaps even because of it, I believe it is very important for more stories about Afghanistan to be told, as a greater understanding may help foster peace.
The last time I saw that girl in Afghanistan, she was riding off of our base in the back of a truck. She could not hear me or understand my words, but I promised her that I would do all that I could to tell her story. It was an important story that deserved to be told, and I felt that if I didn’t write it, nobody would. In the army we keep promises. We simply have to. So as I faced doubts about whether or not it was morally right for a guy like me to write a story about an Afghan girl like Zulaikha, while I struggled with the cultural details and endless revision, while I later dealt with rejection letters from agents and editors, I could continue working to make this book a reality, knowing that I simply had to keep my promise to a certain Afghan girl.

Trent's editor Cheryl Klein writes about the book: "I believe passionately that for those who do find the book and allow themselves to be open to it, Words in the Dust is a book they’ll love, and a book that can change hearts and minds in the very best way possible: forming a connection with someone different from you by hearing their story."

I'll be away for a few days, speaking at the Children's Literature Association conference, but we'll be back next week with more conversation about Words in the Dust.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 22: Reading Like a Traveler, The Brain Lair

2011-06-20T07:05:00.006-06:00

And so we come to the final day of this 22-day marathon blog tour for The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. It fits nicely with the PaperTigers Reading the World challenge.

The Grand Plan begins in Takoma Park, Maryland, a small, quirky community with its own unique flavor and sense of architecture and art and culture. It straddles the District line, so like everything in the book, even the place that Dini and Maddie call home is a fusion all its own.

This is India?

So is the place Dini goes to in India. Swapnagiri. Means Dream Mountain. It's a fictional place but it's based on several real small towns in the Nilgiris. Nil=Blue. Giri=Mountain or Mountains. Blue Mountains.

Where's the Taj Mahal?

Hey, I came to see palaces!

Today at The Brain Lair, last thoughts on the mindsets we bring to reading books set in particular places with particular cultural contexts. If they're unfamiliar to us, should we read them like tourists? Or travelers? Inspired by this NPR interview with Pico Iyer and Paul Theroux on making travel meaningful.

Thank you to all the bloggers who took part in this tour. Permanent links to all the blog stops on The Grand Plan BlogTour will be up here in a few days.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 21: The Brain Lair

2011-06-17T07:01:00.000-06:00

KB is a middle school librarian who reviews middle grade and YA books, and blogs at The Brain Lair. I was hooked on her site the moment I found out that "The Brain Lair" is an anagram for "librarian."

Today, she posts the final review on this blog tour. Snippet:

Krishnaswami's multicultural tale of friendship and support is packed with humor and students, aged 9 and up, will identify with Dini's movie obsession and want to sign up for their own bollywood dance camp. I only wish Mera Jeeran, Tera Jeeran (my life your life) was a real movie!

We take this final blog tour weekend off (to breathe, dance, plan, whatever) and conclude with a guest post, also on The Brain Lair. If you heard the Pico Iyer/Paul Theroux interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation, you'll see what sparked this post, in which I'll leap from real travel to the armchair variety.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 20: Le Loop

2011-06-16T06:00:00.004-06:00

On Day 20 of this blog tour, I'm talking to Meena Vathyam at Le Loop, an online magazine of South Asian arts, culture, and community worldwide. Audience, the writing journey, the journeys of characters and more.

And on Darcy Pattison's Fiction Notes, you will find three videos that have appeared elsewhere on this blog tour, including the one that acknowledges my debt to Darcy's shrunken manuscript technique.

Tomorrow, a review of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything on The Brain Lair. We'll conclude the tour on Monday, June 20 with a guest post on The Brain Lair, on the ins and outs of reading across culture and geography: How to Read Like a Traveler and Not a Tourist.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 19: Generation Ginger

2011-06-15T07:39:00.001-06:00

Generation Ginger is a brand new site providing a fresh perspective on the evolution of Indian culture in America. Why ginger? Ritu Nanos, creator of the site, says, "Generation Ginger is a generation growing out from its roots...We are molding what it means to be Indian American." Thank you, Ritu, for hosting today's stop of The Grand Plan book tour. Audio recording included of me reading the first few pages of the book.

Day 20: Meena Vathyam posting all the way from Shanghai on Le-Loop.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 18: Mitali's Fire Escape

2011-06-14T07:51:00.000-06:00

Today I'm thrilled to visit with dazzling, talented, prolific, award-winning writer Mitali Perkins. I'm honored to call Mitali my colleague and friend. I like to think that our books dance together in similar spaces between cultures. Day 18 of The Grand Plan blog tour takes us to Mitali's Fire Escape.

Next, Day 19 at Generation Ginger.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 17: Jacket Knack and Scribbling, Still...

2011-06-13T06:58:00.005-06:00

Today the Grand Blog tour stops at Jacket Knack.

Look for more on the cover art of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything including a note on the tangled arrows on the back jacket.

My writers.com student Katia Novet Saint-Lot is now in Bangladesh and blogging again. She's had Blogger issues (who hasn't had Blogger issues, lately?) but look! Here at Scribbling, Still..., we find The Grand Plan on Katia's global bookshelf.

More, more, more. A Weekend Book Review on the PaperTigers blog. Snippet: Krishnaswami’s brilliant, multilayered book will delight her readers. Younger ones will love the story for itself, while older girls will also appreciate her nuanced message, plot dissection, and linguistic in-jokes.

Finally, another grand review from the BookPeople Kids blog. Snippet: ...this book is fun, sweet, and compelling. The characters are funny and very real, especially Dini’s desire to orchestrate her life just like a movie. Austin book-lovers will understand why my idea of heaven is BookPeople!

Tomorrow, Day 18, we get to look at the world from Mitali's Fire Escape. Congratulations to Mitali on her recent ABA awards. Yes, that's in the plural! Go, Mitali!

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 16: Coincidence and Metafiction at The Pirate Tree

2011-06-10T07:04:00.005-06:00

The Pirate Tree is a collective of children's and young adult writers interested in children's literature and social justice issues.

Now I realize that on the face of it Dini and Maddie and Dolly may not seem to be aware of, much less interested in, social justice. But wait a movie minute! There is Sampy, the watchman who longs to learn to read, and Dini, you know, steps right up with a plan! Dini is nothing if not large-hearted, and did you think that the Everything in the title was just there for a joke or what? More on coincidence, metafiction, and the joys of diversity today at The Pirate Tree.

Snippet:

We...see how knowing Dini and being immersed in her culture has enriched Maddie’s life. This is a major benefit of diversity—by getting to know people from other places and cultures, we enjoy all of the wisdom and creativity that people the world over have to offer.

Take a breath. We're off for the weekend, back Monday for the final week of The Grand Plan Blog Tour, starting with Jacket Knack, where the conversation is all about book jackets.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 15: Minor Characters and Voices in Dialogue at Write Now

2011-06-09T05:27:00.020-06:00

Like many of my students, Paula Kay McLaughlin has kept in touch with me since she took my writers.com classes. As part of my teaching in those classes, when students posted work in progress, I often did as well. So Paula read some of the scenes in The Grand Plan to Fix Everything when, let's just say, they were a bit ragged around the edges. Today on Write Now, she asks me about minor characters in the book, and voices in dialogue. The post includes a draft of a passage that's not in the book and a picture of my running character notes/visual plotline.
Here's another exercise I discovered by adapting what Darcy Pattison calls a shrunken manuscript. Tip: it helps to be in that lovely category of middle age where if you stand up and place material on the floor it is possible to read it but if you hold it under your nose it's all a big blur.
Tomorrow, Day 16 of this blog tour, The Pirate Tree.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 14: Best Friends Day at The Drift Record

2011-06-08T06:59:00.001-06:00

Today, June 8, is Best Friends Day! I wouldn't have known if Julie Larios hadn't pointed it out.

If you don't know Julie's blog, you're in for a treat. Julie's a poet, a master of the playful and whimsical, a juggler of words and riddles and imagery and shape. In a starred review, Booklist says of her Yellow Elephant: A Bright Bestiary, From "a green frog / on a green lily pad" to a "gray mama goose" and her "gold baby," the animals featured in these well-crafted poems flash with color and emotion. Julie can extract the odd from the ordinary, the elegant from the elusive. She's one of those consummate wonderers who can open doors to the varied, shifting forms of words.

I'm so lucky! I get to chat over a cuppa at Julie's virtual kitchen table today, at The Drift Record. I just wish I could strike "virtual" out and make it all real.

More on the real and the imagined, tomorrow on Write Now.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 13: YA Book Nerd

2011-06-07T07:15:00.003-06:00

YA Book Nerd is Jennifer Rummel, a teen librarian who blogs about pop culture, YA books, and mysteries. Here's a nice review of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything in one of her Tween Tuesday posts.

Snippet: A very cute tween read. It fits into the summer reading program's theme this year. I loved the different perspectives....

Also a guest post: Why Bollywood? Enter for book and bling giveaways before the end of June.

And because some people have been asking me this question: Is there a recipe for those curry puffs? The answer is yes. Right here in this pdf file: Downloadable Activity Kit. Have I tested the recipe? Yes, I have. It works. Really. Chocolate and all.

Next up, a virtual kitchen table conversation with Julie Larios on The Drift Record.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 12: From the Mixed-up Files of Middle-Grade Authors

2011-06-06T07:00:00.005-06:00

From the Mixed-up Files of Middle-Grade Authors is a wonderfully energetic community of middle-grade writers and bloggers. They're the same people who held a spring drawing for Skype visits and will hold three more before the year is out.

Today, I'm talking to Sheela Chari about balancing serious and funny, form and content, teaching and writing, and the role of coincidence. Watch for Sheela's new middle grade novel, Vanished, due out this August from Hyperion.

Next, guest post and review on YA Book Nerd.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 11: Dreams and Dreaming at Shelf Elf

2011-06-03T07:05:00.000-06:00

Shelf Elf offers a collection of reviews, news, and opinions about books for children and young adults. Today, a guest post on dreams and dreaming in The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. The post was sparked by a question Marjorie Coughlan asked me on the PaperTigers interview, back on Day 3 of the tour.

The tour resumes on Monday at From the Mixed-up Files of Middle Grade Authors. Not to be confused with From the Mixed-up Files of Jennifer Bertman.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 10: Review at Brown Paper

2011-06-02T07:59:00.004-06:00

Canadian writer Niranjana Iyer posts about Dini and Dolly and Co on her eclectic writing and books blog, Brown Paper. Scroll through the blog for more children's and YA material, romantic suspense, Canadian books with a Japanese connection, and more.

And oh my! What a funny, energetic, just plain grand not-a-review review Niranjana (don't call her "Niru") has written of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything! It includes The Grand List of Everything Specially Indian about the book, and a thumbs-up to Abigail Halpin on that very funny image of Dolly dancing in dreamland.

Also up this morning, on the special-access blog Engage/Teacher to Teacher, for members of the International Reading Association, an interview with Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith. Yes, you will need to be an IRA member to access this blog.

And finally--oh, I can hardly stand it!--another grand review on Shelf Elf, to be followed tomorrow by a guest post on the place of dreams and dreaming in this story.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 9: Lal the mail carrier and more at The OWL

2011-06-01T08:15:00.002-06:00

Whoooo do I admire now? Whoooo did I admire as a kid reader? Whoooo's a character I'm proud of?

The answers and more at the OWL: Outrageously Wonderful Literature for the middle grades, a follow-up to yesterday's nice review.

Tomorrow The Grand Plan to Fix Everything can be found at Brown Paper.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 8: Libraries at GreenBeanTeenQueen, and Tween Tuesday reviews

2011-05-31T08:22:00.000-06:00

Today's Tween Tuesday over at GreenBeanTeenQueen, where I post about two libraries forty years apart. Includes a 40-year-old photograph of a library in India and a video of the Farmington Public Library in Farmington, New Mexico.

GreenBeanTeenQueen also reviews The Grand Plan to Fix Everything for the Tween Tuesday meme launched by her that has since been picked up by other bloggers. Snippet:

The book really does read like a script for a Bollywood film complete with some zany and charming characters, a romance, random happenstance and coincidence-I even expected the characters to break out into song!

Look for a Tween Tuesday review as well on the O.W.L. blog (Outrageously Wonderful Literature for the Middle Grades). Snippet:

It was pretty cool to see how Uma Krishnaswami was able to take all those...story threads and bring them together to a very satisfying ending.

Next up tomorrow, an interview on O.W.L.

Scholastic Asian Book Award

2011-05-30T12:01:00.000-06:00

Stepping off The Grand Plan Blog Tour for this quick announcement.

My unpublished manuscript, working title Book Uncle and Me, just won the newly instituted Scholastic Asian Book Award!

I couldn't make it to Singapore for the awards ceremony, so writer and teacher Pooja Makhijani accepted it on my behalf.

Look! That distinguished gentleman presenting the plaque to Pooja is none other than Nobel Peace Prize winner and President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, H.E. Dr. José Ramos-Horta.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 7: Memorial Day post on Creative Spaces

2011-05-30T09:00:00.001-06:00

Jennifer Bertman's blog takes readers into the creative spaces of writers. I had fun browsing through previous posts. See Laura Resau's trailer and Rosanne Parry's treehouse. Spot the VCFA sticker on Janet Fox's laptop?

Since my "creative space" often becomes as messy as my mind, I was a little worried by this request: Photos? of my office? You don't really want photos!

But looking at my work space turned out to be an interesting exercise. It made me think about why I work the way I do, and where I choose to work at different stages of a story's development. On Day 7 of the blog tour, Jen's readers get to visit my office and some of the extended spaces where I write, revise, and think about story. The post includes Part 1 of a video sequence recorded at my local library.

An additional link: While this is not an official blog tour stop, a nice interview with Jessie Grearson is now up at the Kirkus blog.

Tomorrow, GreenBeanTeenQueen hosts a tour stop with Part 2 of that library video. That post will include homage to libraries past and present including one from 40 years ago.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 6, part 2: Interview at Mother Daughter Book Club

2011-05-27T16:47:00.006-06:00

Yesterday, Mother Daughter Book Club reviewed The Grand Plan. Today there's an interview posted with thoughts on childhood memories, perceptions and misperceptions of India, and more.

There's a note on how Priya, Dini's new friend in that Dream Mountain place, grew to be a one-girl audio department. Here's a snippet:

"I began to think of how unlike myself I could make her..."

And a giveaway--a special giveaway open to mother-daughter book clubs!

US readers, have a pleasant Memorial Day weekend.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 6: A Magical Intersection at Everyday Reading

2011-05-27T06:44:00.000-06:00

Austin mom and former librarian Janssen blogs about children, books, and life at Everyday Reading, our final Grand Plan tour stop for this week. Guest post on the lasting impact of one book I read as a child.

On Memorial Day, we're back on the virtual trail with freelance writer, copyeditor, and proofreader Jennifer Bertman, at From the Mixed-Up Files of Jennifer Bertman.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 5: Review at Mother Daughter Book Club

2011-05-26T09:00:00.062-06:00

Cindy Hudson, author of Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs (Seal Press, October 2009), founded her first mother-daughter book club in 2000 with her daughter Madeleine, and another in 2003 with her daughter Catherine. Her web site and blog provide tons of resources to help moms and daughters read together for life. She reviews books that can appeal to book club members in four age groups (7-8, 9-10, 11-13, and 14+), posts about activities for group members and offers related information that's valuable to all readers.

A nice review of The Grand Plan to Fix Everything is up at Mother Daughter Book Club.

Snippet: "Dini is a delightful character, and by the time the book ends you’ll want to orchestrate your own Bollywood film."

Next up in The Grand Plan blog tour, a guest post courtesy of Janssen at Everyday Reading.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Special Shout-out to AFCC in Singapore with Chris Cheng

2011-05-25T18:05:00.000-06:00

Australian writer, picture book/middle grade author, and member of SCBWI Board of Advisors Christopher Cheng is in Singapore right now for the Asian Festival of Children's Content. I met Chris there last year, and we've been in touch by e-mail (and Skype) since then.

So when he asked if he could mention The Grand Plan blog tour during his session on marketing at AFCC, I was thrilled.

Since the rest of the giveaways on this blog tour can only be shipped to US and Canadian addresses, I'm offering anyone who attends Chris's session the chance to take part in an AFCC Special Grand Giveaway. All you need to do is send an e-mail to UmasGrandGiveaway@gmail.com and make sure you include your name, mailing address, and e-mail address (if you’re under 13, you will need to submit a parent’s name and e-mail address). One entry per person, please, and two signed books will be shipped to the winners, anywhere in the world. Entries must be received by midnight (Pacific Daylight Time) on June 30, 2011. Winners will be selected in a random drawing on July 1, 2011, and notified via email.

So if you're at AFCC, go to Chris's session. He's got tons of good information to share.

The Grand Plan Blog Tour, Day 4: VCFA Connections

2011-05-25T07:15:00.003-06:00

Oh frabjous day! The Grand Plan goes exploring, approves of writer-friendly bookshelves, and ventures through the tollbooth to four grand destinations, each a part of the oh-so-grand-and-fabulous Vermont College of Fine Arts extended family:

Kathi Appelt is the award-winning author of The Underneath and Keeper, and the creator of possibly my favorite picture book characters in the whole world, Bubba and Beau (not to mention many other wonderful books. She was the MFA (Writing for Children and Young Adults) program chair at Vermont College when I was invited to apply there to teach. That was five years ago, and it's changed my writing life in more ways than I can count. I'll be forever grateful. Kathi interviews me on her video-blog, Calloo Callay. We managed to snatch this time on a quick break after lunch at the Writers' League of Texas YA A to Z Conference.

Sarah Blake Johnson, who currently lives in Frankfurt and blogs at Explorations, is a VCFA graduate; I'm proud to say she was my student during a picture book semester. She's also the only person I know who can claim to have cooked a meal in a geyser in Iceland! Sarah's recently joined the sparkly line-up of VCFA alums who blog at Through the Tollbooth. A couple of months ago Sarah and I talked about the intersections of teaching and writing. That interview will be posted on Explorations today.

Bethany Hegedus is the author of Truth With a Capital T (Booklist calls it a "strong story about peer competition, race in a small town, and coming to terms with family history") and Between Us Baxters ("...beautifully described and believable...the richness of the characters is apparent." School Library Journal). She also edits the Young Adult and Children's Literature section of Hunger Mountain, the VCFA Journal of the Arts. Read my conversation with Bethany at Writer Friendly, Bookshelf Approved. Livejournal access here.

And finally, Michelle Knudsen is the multi-talented author of over forty books for children including picture books (the well-beloved Library Lion and her latest, a quirky, funny classroom tale, Argus) and novels (The Dragon of Trelian, chock-full of magic, secrets, an orphaned dragon, a hundred-year war and more, with a sequel on the way). Mikki was also my student, I am happy to add! I get to talk to her about conventions and breaking them, communication, character relationships and em dashes. Yes, em dashes. Where else but at Through the Tollbooth?

Tomorrow, childhood writing, writing for children, the real Sunny Villa. Perceptions and misperceptions at Mother Daughter Book Club.