Yamile Saied Mendez is an American writer, a VCFA alum, and the author of The Beautiful Game, Furia and the powerful, moving ode to the power of music, Hear Ye Mortals. But I have long wanted to talk to her about another way of writing, in another set of books she has worked to bring into the world—the small, vibrant form of the picture book. Here’s our conversation, that has emerged from a series of emails traded, dates set and reset, and complicated travel schedules navigated. Welcome, Yamile!

1984 and Animal Farm may be the most obvious Orwell picks these days. Me, I’m reading Why I Write, a little Penguin compilation of four essays:

The titular “Why I Write” begins:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about 17 and 24 I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

A writing group is more than the sum of everyone in it. You share manuscripts at various stages of progress. Some fall by the wayside, others make it to completion. You celebrate successes and commiserate over the inevitable disappointments. You get to know one another and develop shorthands of communication that no one else understands. And every once in a while, you get to witness a story idea that the writer knows has arrived as a gift in her life and you are lucky that you are going to run alongside as she develops it.

Here’s one of those projects: Books Up the Mountain, a picture book by my friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard. And here’s Caroline, e-chatting with me about the book.

An attempted murder at a large, noisy, unwieldy Indian American family reunion in New Jersey forms the inciting incident in Dinesh Thiru’s YA comedy-mystery, or maybe it’s a mystery-comedy—My Killer Family Reunion. When a rich and cantankerous woman like Grand Mom gets knocked down by a car, what’s not to be suspicious about? Because wasn’t she really knocked down by her nephew in order to get her out of the way of said speeding car, and if that’s the case, why did he have to push her down so hard that she suffered a severe concussion?

I thought I’d made peace with the writing demons of insecurity by acknowledging them and expecting to encounter them in the process of writing every single book. Then a recent review knocked me off my wise-woman pedestal.

Towards the end of last year, a time that seems now like an eon ago, I wrote about the oddities of a 1996 children’s book from GM, no less, that aimed to push—really!—an American electric car.

With little fanfare, electric cars had begun to appear on California’s roads. They were tested on select groups nationwide. They were quiet. They emitted no fumes. Their drivers loved them. Yet ten years later they were all gone. It would take another two decades for the EV to reappear as a viable, if partial and imperfect, way to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. A 2006 documentary asks, why should we be haunted by the ghost of the electric car? Why, indeed?

In similar vein, The White House Effect (2024), directed by Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk, and Bonni Cohen, is a thoughtful, often unsettling look at a moment when political leadership had an opportunity to change the trajectory of global warming. Policy windows were open. Scientific consensus that global warming was real and human-caused was solidifying. And yet, here we are today.

I’ve always been fascinated by doors. I’m even trying to use one as a portal in a novel that is, I’m sad to say, currently refusing to bend to my will.

This door. with its brass crossbar latch and its loop for a dangling padlock, used to hang in my grandparents’ house in south India. When the house was sold, my parents moved the door to a new house they were building in a different city. As a result, I have this sense of doors being more than stationary objects that let people in and out. Also who can forget the doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? (The humble one remains my favourite.)

Electric Birds of Pothakudi is a picture book based on the true story of a villager in south India who took extraordinary action to protect a pair of nesting birds. It’s a strikingly illustrated book, in a bold mix of manual and digital work, with a palette that ranges from brooding to brilliant. I’m continuing my conversation with author Karthika Naïr, and also, I’m happy to add, looping in illustrator Joëlle Jolivet. Karthika kindly sent me several page scans scans from the French edition of the book, which I’m happy to include here as well. It’s always wonderful when a book finds expression in more than one language.

I was a part-time cashier in a rare-books store when I died…

That’s the funny, idiosyncratic voice of the first-person narrator in Cry by Alisa Valdés. Altagracia Martínez (known as Grace) is a 16-year old bisexual goth filmmaker in Austin, Texas. She’s also battling internal demons, on account of having lost her own mother to suicide two years before the story begins. Grace isn’t wild about the “stenchmother” who is her father’s new wife, so there’s plenty of conflict brewing.

Electric Birds of Pothakudi is a picture book based on the true story of a villager in south India who took extraordinary action to protect a pair of nesting birds. The book is an ode to its rural setting as well as to an act of compassion and really, you can’t disentangle the two. The titular birds (oriental magpie robins for all you English-speaking birders), are known in the region as vannathikuruvi. The name derives from the Tamil word for a person who washes clothes on a riverbank or lakeshore, as flocks of these passerine birds are seen in such places. Bird names in southern India are not only colloquial but utterly embedded in the landscape and somehow this story manages to capture that essence.