Guest Post: Amitha Jagannath Knight on Usha and the Big Digger
“Usha loved trucks. She made them bump and roll.”
Who could not love this child who’s equally fervent about things on wheels and things in the sky? In advance of the Spanish edition to come in July (Usha y la Gran Excavator) I invited Amitha Jagannath Knight, writer and author of this charmer of a book, to post about how her Usha came to be. She reminded me that I’d posted on her blog years ago about my middle grade novel, The Problem with being Slightly Heroic.
Welcome, Amitha!
My debut picture book, Usha and the Big Digger, actually started as a pitch to an editor and a math expert, and together, through numerous revisions, we shaped the story into something that could be fun while subtly depicting a lesson about spatial math. Here’s the initial pitch: “My Own Constellation: A child tries to identify constellations based on a star chart, but she lives in the city and can't see more than 5 stars. She decides to use those five stars to draw her own constellations. In the story, the child experiments with connecting the dots in different ways to represent objects that are relevant to the child's own life.”
Photo courtesy of the author
As you can see, we decided to use an actual constellation rather than random stars, and as I got to know the character better, I also pieced in parts of my own life: my children were in a gymnastics class when I was revising; my mom was a former computer programmer for NASA (her name is Manjula, but her nickname growing up was Usha); and I was a girl who loved to play with my baby brother’s trucks. Since this story was meant to impart a lesson, it was important to me that the story have another deeper layer to it too. Now it is a story about three girls: Usha, her big sister Aarti, and their cousin Gloria who all see different shapes in the Big Dipper and have to learn to see things from each other’s perspectives literally and metaphorically. More than one person can be right! Because the text doesn’t contain any overt nods to Indian culture, I asked my editor to try to find an Indian American illustrator, hopefully someone South Indian (like my family), to help bring in some cultural details. To my delight, the team at Charlesbridge chose the talented Sandhya Prabhat, who did a wonderful job capturing three girls with three distinct personalities whose expressive large eyes are incredibly engaging. One concern my editor had was that the night time scenes would get repetitive, but Sandhya’s gorgeous swirly purple color palette is anything but boring! I’m thrilled that the bilingual Spanish version, Usha y la Gran Excavadora, is slated to come out in July.
