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?
South Asian Footsteps in Berkeley, CA
Footsteps. We leave them behind us, and we’re often unaware who has walked before us on the ground we tread.
In Berkeley, California, Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee are long-time San Francisco Bay Area activists and community-based historians who run a walking tour to fill this gap in knowing. You can find more on their Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour on a recent episode of the Atlas Obscura podcast.
The tour is based on oral history and archival research as well as the organizers’ active engagement with historical research in the field. Walking today’s spaces with narration and reenactments allows participants to share these histories. The tours aim to inform, ground, and inspire new activism, in the tradition of movement historians like Howard Zinn and Ronald Takaki.