Lola Opatayo is a crafter of words and the host of a generous, welcoming literary podcast, Journey of the Art, on which she invites writers and storytellers to talk about their art.

I asked her to write about what she gets out of creating space for others’ writing. Here’s her piece on one of her interviews, a lovely meditation on what happens when you refuse to treat this writing business as a competitive sport:

The Gift of Fire

by Lola Opatayo

When I logged on to speak with Radha Chakravarty for Episode 24 of my podcast, I was immediately arrested by her calm disposition. Her burgundy scarf complemented the calm in her brown eyes as she softly asked if I could hear and see her clearly. It was 6:30 am in Delhi, where she lives and works, and I suspect she feared that the dawn was casting a gloom over her face. Little did she know that she herself was the light and that she had come to alter my life in a special way.

From its mango-yellow endpapers with letters scribbled across them in multiple Indian language scripts to its freshly voiced text and the colourful, energetic illustrations by Ashok Rajagopalan, 5 Fantastic Facts About the Indian Constitution is a charming invitation from the writer-editors of Tulika Books to young readers.

I emailed Radhika Menon about the book and this is what she wrote:

It really was a challenge to do a picture book on the Constitution for five and six year olds as their first introduction to the Constitution. It is personally a very important book for me to have our children - and grandchildren -  grow up with the knowledge that we have a fantastic constitution…and why it is fantastic. The idea had to be introduced visually with humour and affection for it to stay with them. Ashok was the perfect illustrator. 

When Jenn Bailey contemplated a chapter book series about a character she’d only intended to write a single picture book about, she asked herself these questions:

Was my character big enough? Did he have more (and more) to share about himself? And in a unique way?

I worried that Anil, the third of my trio of characters from Book Uncle and Me, who needed to be the subject of Book 3, would be tough to pin down. When I wrote him as a secondary character, first in Book Uncle and Me and then, more than ten years later, in Birds on the Brain, I had to admit that what I had on my hands was a lad of few words.

Taraneh Matloob’s new picture book, Dear New Friend, feels like an invitation to step into its pages ro meet the Persian family she portrays. Many little touches set this up—a secret knock, a grandmother humming a tune, and watermelon!

Oh, and watermelon seeds—and you can tell what comes after that, can’t you? Taraneh’s path has crossed mine in other ways in the past, in her capacity as a translator (she translated my friend Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner into Farsi) and a children’s literature scholar. I’m delighted to have this conversation with her here.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Egyptian Canadian journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad, was selected for discussion in the Ink Book Club earlier this summer.

A title that begins like a story (One Day…) contains a promise about the narrative to come. The comma, with its implied pause, suggests that this will be a complex book and I ought to pick it up and expect to spend some time trying to come to terms with it.

And how could I not find irresistible the use of the future perfect tense, “will have been…?”

Paul Lynch thought his novel would never be published. He thought the book would destroy his career. It won the 2023 Booker. He also sees it as a personal rather than a political book. Well, okay.

Prophet Song is the story of Eilish, a biologist and mother of four whose life in a suburb of Dublin is upended by the secret police showing up at her home looking for her husband Larry, who is a teacher’s union leader. Larry disappears and never returns. The backdrop is a country sliding into totalitarianism and civil war, a setting that feels uneasily like the present time in the United States.

The beauty of this book lies in how its story unfolds in the small frame of one woman’s experience, told by a narrator who is at once painfully close to her and yet aware of dangers she cannot yet sense.

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” These lines are by Italian philosopher, politician, and linguist Antonio Gramsci, written from within a Fascist prison. Amitav Ghosh points out that Gramsci would have had difficulty comprehending the monsters of our time.

A cultural anthropology take on the quote and its meaning can be found here.

Ever since my Book Uncle and Me turned into the Book Uncle trilogy, I’ve been paying extra attention to books that start out by standing alone and then take off on their own paths. Some characters seem to demand that their writers turn their lives, adventures, families, and communities into multiple books.

VCFA graduate Jenn Bailey’s wonderfully whimsical character Henry first caught my attention with A Friend for Henry. Henry is a wistful little character, a kid who notices stuff, who’s capable of gleaning insights from the classroom goldfish—a kid with an inner life of consequence. So I was thrilled to see Henry sequels appear: Henry, Like Always, Henry and the Something New, and Henry’s Picture-Perfect Day, with still more to come. Henry, I hasten to add, did not disappoint. Each book enriches and expands on its quirky young character and his lovingly drawn community.

In Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, botanist, biochemist, biologist, and poet Diana Beresford-Kroeger challenges us all to explore the deep connections that forests offer us. Here’s a scientist who listens to trees and in this book she opens up her life and experience in brief, lively chapters—her childhood, her personal arboretum where she nurtures rare and endangered species, navigating the contradictions and commonalities in old wisdom and new science.

The Ink Book Club calls itself Democracy in Action. From their web site:

Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”

We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.

Eclectic as my reading fare tends to be, I probably would not have picked up, of my own accord, the book they selected for discussion. It’s Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an argument for a politics of abundance as opposed to one of scarcity. But since Anand Giridharadas was suggesting it, I figured I’d give it a try. I’d really enjoyed his India Calling, part family memoir, part travelogue, and I like the posts on The Ink! Substack, so I picked up a copy and got to work.