Process Talk: Zetta Elliott on Dragons in a Bag (Part 1)
Zetta Elliott has long been fearless in calling out the elephants in the rooms of children’s literature that others might have preferred to ignore. Back in 2010, in a Horn Book article, she wrote about decolonizing the imagination:
I marvel at the girl I once was. Why would a plump, brown-skinned girl with an Afro embark on a quest to read all the books she could find by Frances Hodgson Burnett? Was I an Anglophile in training, or was my taste in books (and music, and clothes) a way of rejecting popular representations of blackness, which fit me just as poorly (if at all)? Up until grade three I started each school day by singing “God Save the Queen,” so perhaps my taste in literature was the inevitable result of Canada’s colonial legacy.
Image courtesy of Zetta Elliott
All of this really spoke to me, since these are the very elephants I’ve done my best to engage with (speak to? question? Those are some resistant elephants!) over the years. So I was interested when Zetta said in her 2023 Zena Sutherland lecture that “fame and visibility shape systems of recognition.” I assumed that her Dragon books have managed to hit the fame button nicely on the nose, but what I wanted to know was what made her write the first book. So I reached out to ask her. Here’s what she wrote back:
[Zetta] That's funny--I don't think of the dragon series hitting the fame button! Since publishers mostly market to White middle-class readers, I think the dragon books aren't even on the radar of most readers in the Black community. I didn't even have a publicist for the first two books...then the series was dropped after Book 2...so my dragon tales seem to succeed without a lot of the usual supports that publishers offer certain authors. Initially I thought I'd have to self-publish Book 1 since my other urban fantasy novels (the City Kids series) had been rejected by editors. But since I'm used to making my own books at this point, I just wrote freely about characters that appealed to me. My friend Marie sent me four tiny plastic dragons and I still carry them in a mint tin in my own bag; I thought the story would be more exciting if the bag belonged to a witch so that was one starting point. I always write about my own neighborhood because I grew up reading fantasy fiction that always/only took place in distant England. I lived in central Brooklyn for 20 years and the guardhouses at the entrance to Prospect Park look kind of like tiny castles...the black lacquered lampposts in the park reminded me of the one in Narnia...when I'm writing fantasy fiction I'm always "talking back" to the books I read as a child. I try to upset conventions that led generations of White authors to center the same kinds of kids over and over again in the same setting. Read enough of those narratives and you start to believe magic only happens to certain kids in certain countries and/or contexts.
[Uma] Yes. That’s why when I was a kid back in the last century and trying to write, I kept scratching up stories about white kids in some magical space that was emphatically not mine! Here’s a follow-up question—in many ways, I see the same wacky disruptiveness in this book as in your Chicken Wonders…Why? in which you directly set out to speak to book banners. Different idiom, different context, but the same funny subversion of what’s taken to constitute a story. If I'm reading this right, can you talk about what you aimed to disrupt by putting together the characters and magic, story and community that feel like the building blocks of the Dragons series?
[Zetta] Sometimes I worry that AI could easily copy my writing style because it does feel a little formulaic.
[Uma interjects] Has to be a vexing formula that refuses easy answers, but go on….
[Zetta] My mission *is* to disrupt because so many folks in the children's literature community are a bit too comfortable with convention and prefer to uphold the status quo. Self-publishing allowed me to respond fairly quickly to a would-be book banner who asked at a school board meeting why we couldn't go back to the days when children's books were about chickens. I wanted to demonstrate that books with animal characters are not race-neutral and still reflect hierarchies and power dynamics. I just self-published a YA fantasy novel set in Scotland that centers a Ghanaian-Glaswegian teen; he references Treasure Island and the fairytales he heard as a child that never centered a boy like Kofi. With Dragons in a Bag, I wanted to upset expectations around witches and get beyond the pointy black hat, broomstick, wart-on-nose stereotype. There are real Black witches in the world and their primary purpose is to serve and heal their communities. Magic is power and the stories we tell signal to kids which kinds of people deserve to be empowered.
I knew my novel would have no castles in remote places or cottages in the woods, no training academies that remove would-be witches from the real world. I wanted my urban setting to be recognizable to kids who live in Brooklyn. Then I moved to Chicago and brought the series with me, which allowed Jax to explore a new city with its own particular history of segregation. I'm an immigrant and the dragon series focuses on community and belonging. How do we create a world where those who are different feel safe and accepted?
[Uma] Questions to live by and write by. Why do you think those assumptions of default readership remain unchanged? What’s making it so difficult to turn this ship around?
[Zetta] I think the homogeneity of the publishing industry remains the greatest barrier to creating a more diverse, inclusive community. Most major corporations realized decades ago that they couldn't access "niche" or "ethnic" markets with their all-White marketing teams. So big companies like Ford, McDonalds, Pepsi, etc. hired consultants who understood how to reach African Americans or the LGBTQ community. Publishing, as far as I can tell, has refused to do that. So they generally use the same old professionals with the same old strategies, knowing they will produce the same old results. People often say that publishers are driven by the desire to make money but that's really not true--what matters more to them, I think, is power and sharing power with outside consultants (of color) isn't something they're prepared to do. Black women spend millions on books every year...it's a wasted opportunity. Years ago I had a publisher include my novel in a promotion at Panera. That's not the best way to reach Black people.
More to come from Zetta Elliott on Books 2, 3, and 4—and Book 5, which hits the shelves today! Congratulations, Zetta!.
