Writing With a Broken Tusk
Writing With a Broken Tusk began in 2006 as a blog about overlapping geographies, personal and real-world, and writing books for children. The blog name refers to the mythical pact made between the poet Vyaasa and the Hindu elephant headed god Ganesha who was his scribe during the composition of the Mahabharata. It also refers to my second published book, edited by the generous and brilliant Diantha Thorpe of Linnet Books/The Shoe String Press, published in 1996, acquired and republished by August House and still miraculously in print.
Since March, writer and former student Jen Breach has helped me manage guest posts and Process Talk pieces on this blog. They have lined up and conducted author/illustrator interviews and invited and coordinated guest posts. That support has helped me get through weeks when I’ve been in edit-copyedit-proofing mode, and it’s also introduced me to writers and books I might not have found otherwise. Our overlapping interests have led to posts for which I might not have had the time or attention-span. It’s the beauty of shared circles.
Alone Together: The Magic of Shared Reading—Part 1
I joined a book discussion last month through the Democratic Party’s Global Women’s Caucus. The book we all read is an iconic text—Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which I’ve focused on earlier in this blog. The first of the trilogy, it was published in 1993, and behold! The years that it’s set in have become our present.
“The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me.”
Fire dreams feel like the reality of our time. (For more on a fictional depiction of fire in our pyrocene age, see Caroline Starr Rose’s reflections on her novel, The Burning Season.) But fire is just one of the elements that make Butler’s work feel astonishingly prescient.
One thread we discussed was the struggle between the comforts and costs of living in the modern industrial world. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, dreams of the stars:
“The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,” I said. “That's the ultimate Earthseed aim, and the ultimate human change short of death. It's a destiny we’d better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs—here today, gone tomorrow, our bones mixed with the bones and ashes of our cities, and so what?”
In reality, look how that dream, which feels so boldly innocent in Butler’s telling, has now been coopted by shamelessly rich men toward their own selfish ends.
Process Talk: Susan Fletcher on Sea Change
Susan Fletcher is no stranger to my bookshelf, to my circle of writer friends and colleagues, or, for that matter, to this blog. I’ve been enchanted by her Journey of the Pale Bear, by the luminous setting and the endearing band of waifs in Falcon in the Glass, and by the spirited character of Marjan in Shadow Spinner. Her Dragon Chronicles (Dragon’s Milk, Flight of the Dragon Kyn, Sign of the Dove, and Ancient, Strange, and Lovely) play out over a timespan that stretches from a Welsh-inspired storyscape all the way to the thump of an egg and the life of a girl in Oregon, in a polluted present time.
Now Susan brings us Sea Change, a reworking of the story of The Little Mermaid. It’s a YA science fiction tale of a gill-breathing girl contending with family and community and love on a climate-impacted Texas coast.
Shape, Space and Scansion in Picture Book Text—Part 2
As a picture book writer who is not also an illustrator, I only have my mind to work with, so when people ask me how my process works, it’s easy to freeze, to default to not knowing. Not knowing makes me inclined to wonder if the art and craft of it all might be purely instinctive. Or worse, perhaps a fluke. So while I was looking at my own book, Look! Look! in this context, I thought I’d ask a couple of writers in my critique group (affectionately dubbed The Autodidacts) to weigh in: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and Caroline Starr Rose.
I asked each of them to think about one of her picture books to find something that changed between the early draft and the final book.
Vaunda wrote about Almost to Freedom (2004 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book):
I was working on the final phase of Almost to Freedom. The story is historical — about a family trying to escape slavery — and I am always concerned about getting the history correct.
Shape, Space, and Scansion in Picture Book Text—Part 1
I’ve always been fascinated by writing picture book text, which is in effect, the work of writing what feels like half a book. Only the words, but we know the book won’t be complete until pictures arrive to fill in most of the spread that our words get sprinkled over. So I thought it might be fun and maybe informative as well, to take a look at how I did this, exactly, with one of my picture books. What did I put in? What did I leave out?
To start with, here’s the final draft of the first manuscript page of Look! Look! that I submitted to Groundwood Books in 2023.
Guest Post: Mima Tipper on Kat’s Greek Summer
Post curated by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk
When I began teaching at Vermont College in 2006, my hope was to show my students the gaps between their intentions and the words on the page. I wanted to offer a range of different ways to bridge those gaps, to point out where the draft words were pointing. Then the writer would find her way, would happen upon his own path, would craft the work they wanted to write. Whatever my students might have learned from all this, I’m convinced that reading their work and thinking about it taught me to hold my own work to standards at once generous and critical.
Mima Tipper was my student early in my teaching career. She was among those students who taught me how to teach. So I’m delighted to welcome Mima to Writing With a Broken Tusk to discuss her young YA novel, Kat’s Greek Summer
Guest Post: Caroline Starr Rose on The Burning Season
Stephen Pyne’s article in Scientific American compels and informs but it’s also surprisingly lyrical.
“Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know of. Earth has fire because it has life.”
Fire, Pyne says, is like a virus—not truly living but needing the living world to spread by contagion. We humans provided the one thing that naturally occurring fire does not have—ignition. And so it happens, he suggests, that we have created a new kind of earth, a planet on fire in a time he dubs the Pyrocene.
One thing writers do is bear witness. My very dear friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose has done just that, with her middle grade novel, The Burning Season.
Missing But Not Gone: Shared Symbols and Community in Little Moons by Jen Storm
Jen Storm is an Ojibwe writer from Couchiching First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. In her graphic novel, Little Moons, illustrated by Ryan Howe, young Reanna mourns the loss of her sister, who goes missing on her way home from school. On the surface this slender volume is a deeply felt tribute to shared grief and healing. But it’s more that that, because the sources of the strength Reanna comes to feel as she navigates this impossibly difficult journey, are—everywhere!
An Indian Ocean Archipelago in Fiction and Real Life
The Andaman Islands lie in an expanse of water in the northeastern Indian Ocean 80 miles away from the coast of Myanmar. I’ve never been, although I grew up knowing they were out there—a far-flung Indian territory. A notorious penal colony was initially established there by the British. It held exiled Indian soldiers who took part in the 1857 rebellion, the same event that resulted in the British Crown taking the governance of India out of the hands of one of the world’s first multinational companies.
What I didn't know then was that among the people of the subcontinent who wanted to throw the British out were the indigenous Jarawa people of the Andamans, a tribe who still call the islands home, and have deep knowledge of the forests they have lived in for over 50,000 years.
Guest Post: Michael Thompson on The New Othering of Amerika
In all the conversations I’ve heard about the present events playing out in the United States — A constitutional crisis? An autocoup?A hijacking of executive powers? — one set of voices has seemed conspicuously absent: those of Native American people. So when I heard that my Writing Project friend and colleague in New Mexico, Michael Thompson, was interested in disseminating a piece he felt compelled to write, I invited him to post it here on Writing With a Broken Tusk. Welcome, Michael.
Process Talk: Nicola Davies on Ride the Wind
I read Ride the Wind by Nicola Davies in an e-galley, which isn’t the ideal way to read a picture book. Still, even with the limitations of the format, there was something moving and engaging about this book. I enjoyed its depth and scope, and loved how Davies uses the boy’s story to access the albatross’s plight. She also doesn’t shy away from the complexity of human relationships—a representation that’s difficult to pull off in the small container of a picture book. Finally I loved that the child secures his place in his world and finds healing through bearing witness to something larger than himself. So I invited Nicola to tell me more. Here’s the result of our exchange of emails.
Three Things I Know From 30 Years of Writing
I only understand what I am ready to hear. My readiness is the contingency, always.
Here’s a list of three things I’ve learned from editors. I rediscovered them in a notebook in which I’d scribbled notes during lectures at the July 2016 residency at VCFA.
Chasing the Revision Butterfly
My friend and writer colleague Caroline Starr Rose suggested I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (reflections on stories he’s lovingly taught for two decades at Syracuse). Also Saunders is the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a storytelling feat in its own right.
Caroline sent along a snippet of text from A Swim…:
The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.
Process Talk: Cynthia Leitich Smith Discusses On A Wing and a Tear
Indian Shoes by Cynthia Leitich Smith was one of the books I used to make my students read to get a feel for a story that was about more than one kid. A story, in fact, that was more than one story. It was a set of interlinked tales about family and community and connections and a whole way of being in the world. So, when I found out that Ray Halfmoon and Grampa were going to make a grand return in this new book, I thought I knew where I was going. I should have known better.
On a Wing and a Tear delivers the same family warmth and loving humor that is so endearing in Indian Shoes but oh, my! This is a book with layers—history, adventure, humor, and perhaps the most marvelous of all, there's a whole wonderful animal storyline. This middle grade novel is packed with satisfying familiarity and delightful surprises. I asked Cyn to tell me more.
On the Burning of Books: Kenneth Baker’s Illustrated History of Book Burning
The subtitle of Kenneth Baker’s gorgeously illustrated history of book burning across histories and geographies carries a lyrical note of hope:
How flames fail to destroy the written word.
Breathe that in. I hope it’s true.
In our age of division and conflict, in a time when so many people around the world are retreating into their own little corners of religion and ethnicity and ideology, I read this book looking for the long view.
Really, America? The Curious Appeal of Dystopian Fiction
With the election of 47 as United States President in the rear-view mirror and the reality of a clownish, arbitrary, self-obsessed administration playing out in the present moment, you wouldn’t think there’d be any comfort to be gleaned from dystopian fiction. Yet what did I find myself downloading in audiobook format? Children of Men by P.D. James. It’s set in an England that is rather quaintly dated 2021, which must have seemed far away in 1992 but now feels counterintuitive. But honestly, that was the only point at which I had to work to suspend disbelief.
Guest Post: Caroline Carlson on Wicked Marigold
I smiled my way through Wicked Marigold, a middle grade novel by Caroline Carlson. In honor of Tell a Fairytale Day (February 26) I asked Caroline to tell me more about her experience writing this romp of a fractured fairytale. Here is her reply:
Old Narratives, New Worlds: Some thoughts on the long tradition of fracturing fairy tales
Process Talk with Jen: Kim Rogers on I Am Osage
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
Kim Rogers (Wichita and Affiliated Tribes) comes from a military family. Many of her family members served at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, named for Clarence Tinker, the first Native American Major General in the US Military, and the subject of Kim’s recent picture book biography I Am Osage.
Finding Clarence’s story was a surprise to Kim–she stumbled across a record of him in the Oklahoma Historical Society while researching something else entirely–and the process of writing the biography was likewise unexpected.
Border-crossings of Many Kinds in Burn by Patrick Ness
“The enforcers of law in Canada and the United States sometimes coated their bullets in anti-coagulant. Not for when they shot men. For when they shot dragons.”
Set in the Pacific Northwest, Ness’s YA novel Burn takes readers back and forth across the border between countries. But it also crosses the borders between worlds—parallel universes of possibilities playing out in the lives of the characters.
Process Talk: Sarah Aronson on Abzuglutely: Battling, Bellowing Bella Abzug
You know you’ve heard this quip before: “This Woman’s Place is in the House — The House of Representatives.” But do you know who said it? Bella Abzug (1920-1998) was a lawyer, politician, social activist, and pioneer in women’s rights. Here’s Abzuglutely: Battling, Bellowing Bella Abzug, a loving picture book portrait by Sarah Aronson, illustrated by Andrea D’Aquino. I asked Sarah to tell me more about the making of this book.
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and Tina Athaide on Historical Verse Novels
I was privileged to read Radiant by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson poem by poem, as she wrote it. A few months earlier, I’d been delighted to read Wings to Soar by Tina Athaide.
Those two verse novels spoke to each other, with their musical threads, their self-aware young characters, and the histories unfurling in and around those characters’ families. So I knew I wanted these writers to talk to each other, and to me, about their books.