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: Julianna Swaney on Illustrating Birds on the Brain
Birds on the Brain—Book II in what has now become the Book Uncle trilogy!—is out today from Groundwood Books!
When we first asked Julianna Swaney to tell us about the cheerful, lively art she’s created for the book, we hadn’t quite understood the extent to which her love of birds informed her work on this story. What a lovely surprise! Here’s what Julianna wrote:
Guest Post: Jen Breach on Nonbinary Narrative Structure in Solstice
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
…And by nonbinary narratives, I don’t mean narratives about characters with a nonbinary gender identity,* I mean narratives that are fundamentally structured to embrace spectrums of experience, prisms of identities, and the countless ways we humans can be in the world.
Visualizing the Long Project
Thank you to Caroline Starr Rose for letting me know about this marvelous graphic depiction of a process with which I am all too familiar, having been in "this writing business. Pencils and whatnot" for about thirty years now. Being the slow, plodding writer I am, stubbornly Poohish, I know all about the arc of the long project and have occasionally surprised myself retracing my own footsteps in search of Woozles, or could they be Grandfathers?