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?
Process Talk: Melanie Crowder and Megan Benedict on Great Gusts
Great Gusts is a collection of tribute songs to selected winds of the world, those patterns of air that are part of the geographies, cultures, and lifeways of the lands they touch. I sent a bunch of questions to the co-authors, both members of the VCFA Writing for Children and young Adult community I cherish. Here’s the resulting conversation.
Guest Post: Letting Characters Lead the Way by Saumiya Balasubramaniam
Happy coincidence, or inspired planning? On April 2, Groundwood Books will publish two picture books set in India: my Look! Look! of which some more here and still more to come, and When I Visited Grandma by Saumiya Balasubramaniam. Since our books share a publisher and a book release date, I thought I’d ask Saumiya to write a guest post about the making of this book.
Process Talk: Marion Dane Bauer on We, the Curious Ones
I had read Marion Dane Bauer’s books long before I met her. As a newbie on faculty at the legendary Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at what was then Vermont College, I was in awe of Marion and dazzled by her many accomplishments. What I have come to realize over years of residencies and conversations and lectures and all the years since, is my sheer good luck that our paths crossed in this way. Marion has a mind that melds curiosity, poetry, and a keen awareness of the young. She can write the clearest scenes I can think of and create chapter books that fool you into assuming they must have been simple to write. Whenever I had students who struggled to understand what it took to write a scene, I’d make them read Marion’s Runt or one of her ghost middle grades.
Marion also mines complex sources like no one else and extracts texts that sweep through time and evolution, mythology, the spiritual, and science. See my posts on this magnificent picture book, The Stuff of Stars.
Now there’s a companion title, We, the Curious Ones, illustrated by Mumbai artist duo and couple, Hari and Deepti.
Process Talk: Leslie Booth on writing A Stone is a Story
In the manner of Marion Dane Bauer’s The Stuff of Stars, here is a picture book about time and matter. I invited author Leslie Barnard Booth to tell me more about the creation of this book.
What happened when? The challenge of writing a companion book
I started writing the text of a possible companion book to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! last year, with a focus on water and with a girl as protagonist, a contrast in my mind to the earlier story about a boy and a road and a tree.
I thought I’d written a tidy picture book text, stayed true to my young character, followed more or less the shape of the previous story.
Guest Post: Making Connections Through Dosas by Suma Subramaniam
From Suma Subramaniam: In the summer of 2015, I was working with my faculty advisor, the one and only Jane Kurtz in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Children’s and Young Adult literature program, when we both challenged each other to write a story from the cultures we grew up in. The story would be inspired by The Gingerbread Man—a folktale about a man made of gingerbread who runs away from a cast of characters.
Guest Post: Sara Greenwood on My Brother is Away
In My Brother is Away, a young girl speaks her truth about her relationship with her brother, which has been fractured by his incarceration and its impact on family and community.
