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—Venn diagrams, anyone?
Guest Post: Megan Benedict on Sea Wolves: Keepers of the Rainforest
Soon after Sea Wolves: Keepers of the Rainforest by Megan Benedict and Melanie Crowder was published this past summer, I read it to my 3-year-old granddaughter. She listened to it all the way through, echoed a couple of lines, and then went through its pages and found all the wolves hiding in plain sight on every spread. She proceeded to spend some time that afternoon pretending to be a wolf, scratching on the sand (rug) and howling. To my mind, that's the ultimate validation of a picture book, when the youngest reader/listener can find something to take away and hold close.
Process Talk with Jen: Rina Singh on Creativity, Resilience, and Centering Children
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
I was utterly moved by Rina Singh’s 2020 picture book biography 111 Trees, which profiled Shyam Sundar Paliwal, an Indian village leader and eco-feminist who, with trees and compassion, replenished the villages water and food supplies, and established equal rights to education for girls. Rina followed that up in 2023 with two more moving and meticulously researched profiles of Indian feminist and conversation activists. I am thrilled to talk with her about her process.
Time-travel and Y2K in Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being
For those intrigued by offbeat days dedicated to strange pursuits, December 8 is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. By whom this was first declared, and why, remain unclear, but let’s celebrate here by considering Erin Entrada Kelly’s middle grade novel, The First State of Being.
It takes a visitor from the future for the protagonist, 12-year-old Michael Rosario, to find himself. The novel raises questions about what it means to be human and to live in a particular time and place, and about how history is fashioned and shaped out of the lives of people.
The Afterlife of Deleted Text or Thank You, Ben Holzworth
When I talked about Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest at the Fort Collins Book Fest earlier this year, I mentioned that the book began its life as a collection of twenty-two poems about Mount Everest, of which only one, a poem in two voices, made it into the final picture book. I showed my middle grade audience some slides with a couple of the other poems, whose content became transformed into two spreads of back matter. And I showed them a couple more that didn't even make it that far.
“Will you do anything with those unused poems?” Amy Holzworth, Children’s Services Librarian at Council Tree Library, asked me. I said, “I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think there’s another book in there.”
Lantana Publishing’s Ten-year Anniversary
I met Alice Curry years ago when I brainstormed with a group of talented writers and storytellers with the objective of designing a MOOC on Coursera with a focus on writing for children. It was a fascinating process. Among all the other ripples those early conversations generated was the remarkable growth of a publishing house under Alice’s leadership. This year Lantana Publishing celebrated its 10th birthday. Here’s my conversation with Alice about this uncommon milestone.
The Complexities of Nonfiction
Greetings, readers of Writing With a Broken Tusk ! This isn’t a guest post or an interview or random musings from Uma. Instead it’s a conversation between Uma and Jen about writing nonfiction. If this format works, we’ll post occasional chats on subjects related to crossing borders while writing for young readers.
A Might-have-been Tale of Electric Cars
Today the US election is hurtling along to its conclusion. Over the last year, we’ve seen a most peculiar alliance take shape between a man with extreme views who adores the internal combustion engine and another, views equally extreme, who founded a company that revolutionized electric cars. It seems like a good time to see what all this means for children’s books, the little industry that could, the focus of this blog.
Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, GM produced a children’s book meant to educate kids about EVs. Daniel and his parents are shopping for a new car. Here’s a snippet of the text.
Rajani LaRocca on writing a Little Golden Book on Kamala Harris
How often does a children’s writer get the chance to step onto history’s pathway? I met Rajani LaRocca at Kindling Words five years and an emotional/existential eon ago. I’ve been thrilled to follow her work and successes. In the light of next week’s historic US election, whose outcome is certain to change the world, I invited Rajani to tell me about the Little Golden Book she’s written about Kamala Harris.
Guest Post: Monique Duncan on Centering Black Stories and Experiences in Children’s Literature
Once in a while, you come across a writer with a big idea—an idea in search of the words it needs for its telling. That was Monique Duncan when she took the picture book intensive semester with me at VCFA. She’d written that idea out, using a many words and plenty of compassion, all of it held aloft by a ton of historical research. Once in a while, you see a project like that settle into a pure, clear distillation of its early self. You see it combined with art that lifts the text so that the book becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Which is why I’m overjoyed to welcome Monique Duncan to this blog, as she writes about the history and personal experience that inspired her picture book, Freedom Braids, illustrated by Oboh Moses and published by Lantana Publishing.
Process Talk with Jen: Archaa Shrivastav on Families
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing with a Broken Tusk]
The Stonewall-Mike Morgan and Larry Romans Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award and Honors are “given annually to English-language works of exceptional merit for children or teens relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience”. When We Are Little Feminists: Families won the award in 2021–the first and to date only board book winner or honoree–the committee wrote:
“Beautiful photos of real-life families showcase all the wonderful forms of family, while poetic text builds both vocabulary and family connection. Families helps families and educators celebrate gender and ethnicity at home and in the classroom. Understanding queer identities and representation can be this simple.”
Process Talk with Jen: Yamile Saied Mendez on The Beautiful Game
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
There are similarities and differences between Yamile Saied Mendez’s The Beautiful Game (out now) and bestselling, beloved novel Furia (2020). Both are exceptionally compelling fiction led by talented and passionate female soccer players, raised in close-knit Argentinian extended families, who are trying to find the place in the world they believe to be theirs, even though others say different. From there nuance and difference unfold. The biggest difference, obviously, is that in the YA Furia, Camila is seventeen, and in the middle-grade The Beautiful Game, “Magic” is thirteen.
Jen talks to Yamile about The Beautiful Game.
Process Talk with Jen: Elizabeth Partridge on Golden Gate
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
Elizabeth Partridge’s The Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge tracks the epic construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s–at the time by far the world’s longest suspension bridge and commonly thought to be an “impossible” project–from an utterly child-centric POV.
Here at Writing With a Broken Tusk, we are preoccupied with crossing borders, and it strikes me that a bridge is as much of a transitional space as a border between countries. But there’s something about the scope of a bridge–especially one as long, and striking as the Golden Gate–that gives us a physical reminder of being in liminal space that crossing an invisible, imaginary, pencil-thin border between countries.
There is No Map for This: Guest Post from Tom Birdseye
This title is a writer’s dream. Take the words “there is no map for this” and you can use them as preface for anything doubtful, anything scary, a day gone wrong, a question unanswered.
You can use them to refer to life itself.
Fertile Ground for a Dialectic
by Tom Birdseye
Process Talk: Jasmine Warga on A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall
At the ABA Children’s Institute in New Orleans this summer, I ran intoJasmine Warga and picked up an ARC of her middle grade novel, A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall. It’s a delightful middle grade that spins outward from the main character’s diffidence and self-deprecating humor to a theft at the museum where his mother works as a cleaner. The starred review in Kirkus calls it a “slowly unfurling delight.”
Here’s my email conversation with Jasmine about the book:
Process Talk: Tina Athaide on Wings to Soar
I love it when histories usually considered obscure find expression in fiction for young readers. I’m doubly delighted to see verse added to the mix in Wings to Soar, from my colleague, friend, and former student, Tina Athaide.
Young Viva’s family is from Goa, embodying the syncretic cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions of that previously Portuguese colony in western India. They’ve made their home in Uganda but in 1972, they are expelled from there by dictator Idi Amin, and sent to a resettlement camp in England. Not all of them make the trip. Viva’s father was supposed to meet them in London, but he never shows up.
Here’s my conversation with Tina Athaide.
Intersecting Lives in a Larger Cause in Evan Griffith’s Wild at Heart
You know I’m mildly obsessed with storylines in which two lives intersect: Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary. There’s something deeply human about such stories of people finding their way in the world, sometimes against great odds, driven by powerful passions or convictions.
Evan Griffith’s tenderly written dual biography, Wild at Heart: The Story of Olaus and Mardy Murie, Defenders of Nature begins in his subjects’ respective childhoods:
Guest Post: Is Writing a Picture Book Really That Hard? by Veera Hiranandani
Veera Hiranandani writes heartbreaking, devastating, tear-spilling, and, yes, hopeful historical and contemporary novels for young readers about nuanced characters whose identities and experiences figuratively, literally, and literarily cross borders. She’s really really good at it. Her middle grade novel, The Night Diary, won a Newbery Honor. Her most recent releases are Amil and the After, the historical middle grade sequel which continues The Night Diary’s story in post-partition India; and The Greatest, a tender picture book about intergenerational family love, illustrated by Vesper Stamper (released on September 3).
For novelists, the process of writing a picture book can present its own challenges. Here are Veera’s reflections on tackling the “concentrated feel” of a picture book.
Guest Post: Ritu Hemnani on Lion of the Sky
“An exquisite, memorable story about new beginnings and the quest to belong.” That’s how Kirkus Reviews described Ritu Hemnani’s Lion of the Sky. It is a novel about friendship, set against the tormented backdrop of the 1947 Partition of India. Hemnani uses unrhymed verse, with all its lightness and white space, to tell a story with a weighty context and a deeply wrenching storyline. She pulls the challenge off with grace and sensitivity. From the beginning, and through the tumult that is to come, the story anchors us close to the child character, 12-year-old Raj, free as the wind, his most earnest hopes pinned on winning the Kite Festival. Read the opening of this poem, “Daring,” to see what I mean:
I fly/ through the fields of Sindh,/ of wildflowers and birdsong,/ my suthan pants flapping/ cool wind against my cheeks.
Process Talk: India’s History Through the Lens of After Midnight by Meghaa Gupta
We are all aftermath to the people who went before us, whether we knew them or not, whether they could even imagine us, whatever they might think of us and what we have become. We create for ourselves the story of who they were, and with our lives we write the next chapter. And because we’re in the middle of present-day events, we can’t see how they will build into history.
That is why, in the context of August 15, 2024, India’s 77th Independence Day, we take a longer view of India’s history through the lens of Meghaa Gupta’s nonfiction book, After Midnight: A History of Independent India (Puffin India, 2022) in which she seeks to “contextualize the challenges of the present with the past and make greater sense of the times we live in.”
I asked Meghaa how a book about the past can shed light on the present.