Author Archives: Uma Krishnaswami

Welcoming Vaunda, Remembering Sylvester

Posted on by

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson recently launched her new blog, The Book Itch, with a tribute to William Steig.

SylvesterHere’s a snippet:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig. Winner of the 1970 Caldecott Medal, it was and remains truly deserving. In my 27 years as a children’s librarian, I shared it with thousands of story-time kids.

Oh, Sylvester! How many ways do I love that book? When my son was in pre-school, we borrowed a copy from the library, and then we borrowed it again, and yet again. On the fourth borrowing, it was clearly time to buy the book. Magic, coincidence, the dangers lurking in the world, the nature of happiness, the endurance of love–you could talk for hours about what this book means, all the possible things it could mean.

And now Sylvester is 50 years old! Thank you, Vaunda Nelson, for becoming an unlikely blogger and for reminding me of this jewel of a book.

More: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble was banned in 1977 because of the policemen (and others, but never mind that) being depicted as pigs.

steig-sylvesterStill more: Julie Paschkis remembers the beautiful picnic scene in Sylvester in her Books Around the Table post on summertime picnics. Look at those loving hooves resting on Sylvester’s back, and could anyone bring more purely loving parents to life in strokes of a brush and pen?

Guest Post: Michelle Knudsen on the Evil Librarian series

Posted on by

Michelle Knudsen says:

People sometimes give me the side eye when they learn about my Evil Librarian trilogy. “You wrote Library Lion,” they say. “You love libraries! Why would you write  a book about evil librarians?”

IMG_1387.jpgLibrary Lion occupies a comfortable spot on my bookshelf. My copy is well-thumbed. It’s a book I reach for when I teach, offering nice examples of an outsider protagonist and a matter-of-fact adult ally, raising interesting and important questions about rules and contingencies. So I was curious about the path from this beloved and loving depiction of libraries to…her YA Evil Librarian series. Here’s what Mikki has to say on the subject:

First, just to set the record straight: It’s only one evil librarian, and technically (this isn’t a spoiler; you find out pretty quickly) he’s not an actual human librarian, but a demon posing as a librarian. It’s an important distinction. And when he’s in his librarian disguise, he takes his library duties very seriously. So really he’s a good fake-librarian; he’s just also an evil demon planning to do terrible things in main character Cyn’s high school—including stealing away her best friend and forcing her to live with him in the demon world forever. (The one thing that’s safe is the school musical, because it turns out that demons really love Sweeney Todd.)

Libraries have always been safe and beloved places for me. My mom would take me regularly when I was a kid growing up in Staten Island, NY, and I still remember the moment I discovered the shelf of dragon stories that it’s probably fair to say changed my life. I was a library monitor in junior high school and worked in the Cornell University Library as a college student and later as an adult. I wrote Library Lion while working at CUL, and it was inspired by the amazing people I knew there as well as the feelings of wonder and welcome of that library especially but also of all the libraries I have ever known.

I suspect the reason the idea of an “evil librarian” appealed to me was because it’s so hard for me to imagine anything negative about libraries at all. Placing something evil in such a sacred space seemed to magnify the danger in the story and underscore the wrongness of the villain that Cyn and her friends have to find a way to vanquish. I loved writing this series, but now that the trilogy is complete, perhaps the next library that shows up in one of my stories will be the regular kind—safe and magical and demon-free (except for the ones tucked securely inside the books).

Curse of the Evil Librarian (Book 3 in the YA Evil Librarian series) comes out on August 13, 2019! Congratulations, Michelle Knudsen. Wishing you a safe and joyful passage from demon-gripped libraries to whatever setting lies ahead.

“Waiting for Some Guy…” Toni Morrison Speaking to Cornel West

Posted on by

 

512px-Toni_Morrison_2008-2

Angela Radulescu [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D

At this moment, when we have just lost the incomparable Toni Morrison, it seems like a good time to revisit this 2004 Democracy Now interview with Cornel West. She speaks about truth and love, the perils of political loyalty, the courage of children in the saga of school integration, and more, much more.

belovedEighteen years after 9-11, we are still waiting for “some guy–the mayor guy, the governor guy….”

We are waiting, in the wake of gun violence that never ends.

In the midst of inequalities so great that they can only be explained by corporate theft.

In anticipation of a planet about to burn up.

Now we have lost a voice that spoke the truth with vibrant clarity.

 

 

“Thus, and thus, and thus! . . . Now all is done, and all is ashes!”

Posted on by

In “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,” Herman Melville’s weirdly dizzying gothic thriller, we find the disturbed and disturbing Pierre incinerating everything his father left behind. A portrait curls in the flames, as do stacks of letters. “There is no knowing Herman Melville,” Jill Lepore writes in her article in the New Yorker in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth this summer. In part this is because he didn’t want his papers to be preserved, burning his manuscripts and shying away from photographers.

Moby-Dick FE title page

Source: Wikimedia Commons/ original uploader Chick Bowen at English Wikipedia. Public domain

Moby Dick defeated me for years–I just couldn’t get past the first few pages.  Some books are like that, requiring repeated effort. I did end up reading it many years ago but I have to admit it was work. Despite tripping up on the “idolatrous dotings” of the Egyptians and “the aboriginal whalemen, the ‘Redmen,'” despite being baffled by the endnotes (and that “Sub-Sub Librarian”) I did get glimpses of what all the fuss was about. The vast expanse of the book, like the ocean itself; the ship in peril at the hands of the obsessive captain; all that cetology; all that commentary on the world as the author must have known it, its realities obscure and dim to my 20th century mind; and the other world that was purely about the flaws and blindness to which humans are prey.

Practically ignored in its author’s lifetime, the first American edition of Moby-Dick of 2,915 copies did not sell well at $1.50 and only netted Melville lifetime earnings of $556.37. The rest went up in smoke, literally, in the Harper fire of 1853.

IMG_0699Aside from providing windows into Melville’s life, Lepore’s article reminds me of the value of re-reading and growing into books that we may have chanced upon prematurely in our youth. Re-reading grows the curatorial collection in the mind, a bit like sea-glass getting polished by the ocean’s waves.

Perhaps it’s time to reread Moby Dick. We are now, after all, in the middle of a real-life cetacean Armageddon. Beyond that, we are all playing witness to the actions of deranged captains of the good ship Earth, or perhaps we are, collectively, those captains. Some of us, by default, pick up the pens of sub-sub librarians, taking notes. “Thus and thus and thus,” we write, hoping against hope to escape the ashes.

 

 

Epistolary Day: In Praise of the Quiet Eye

Posted on by

ReaderComeHomeDear Maryanne Wolf,

I was always an easily distractible person. I still am. I can’t write if there’s music playing or if anyone is talking (other than the imaginary people in my head, that is). Sometimes, when I’m working on a draft, I have to pull the blinds down so I don’t end up spending hours staring at falling leaves or dragonflies instead.

As a child, my report cards frequently read, “Does not pay attention.” It was true. I was a hummingbird of a kid, whirling round in dizzy gladness, drawn from one bright object to the next.

But from the time I began to read, one thing always stilled me.  A book.

Give me a book and I would instantly get lost in its pages. I would become somebody else. I would go somewhere else, and somewhen as well. I would be transformed. Back in the 1960’s I didn’t have the bright objects that children have today. No screens with easy click-throughs to tempt my easily sidetracked brain away. Books allowed me to develop the “quiet eye,” the path to theologian John S. Dunne‘s “essence of things.” It would be years before I’d realize what a gift that was.

And because I didn’t have that many books, I reread the ones I had, over and over again. You quoted Anne Fadiman, Maryanne, on reading compared to rereading:

… the former had more velocity; the latter had more depth.

It made me see how I’m skimming so much more now, reading for information and not for immersion. The screen will do this to a person. It can fool you into thinking you know a lot. In reality, that kind of reading can result in knowing about many things, while knowing very little about any of them.

You cited Lorca’s poem, “My Ancient Heart of a Child.” And I wondered, if I, the distractible ex-child, who see myself now as a literate adult, am worrying about losing my own ability to read deeply,  what can I possibly do, as a writer for children, to stay true to the magic of the perfect word? How pass along the lineage I have inherited of generations upon generations of books, all speaking to one another and so, in the end, speaking to me? It seems to me that is the heart of a reading life, something that now feels as endangered as icebergs.

Hans Christian Andersen Travelogues and Juvenilia

Posted on by

My son, on a trip to Rome, recently sent me this photo of a house that Hans Christian Andersen lived and wrote in during his year in Italy.

IMG_9038.JPG

Image © Nikhil Krishnaswamy, 2019

What, I wondered, did he work on there from 1833 to 1834? One of his travelogues? It turns out it was his autobiographical novel, The Improvisatore, and the trip was sponsored by ad usus publicos, a Danish public fund set up in 1765 and used in the 1800s mainly to support literature, art and the sciences. In other words, this was a residency!  Many writers will relate to this experience, this life lived two centuries ago. We may rail against the norms and practices of times past, and we should, but we are also connected to writers who went before us.

9781554983247-1_0When my picture book, The Girl of the Wish Garden, was published, one of the storylines of my life as a reader and writer seemed to come full circle. As an 8-year-old in India in the 60’s, I’d been captivated by

IMG_4485.JPG

Copenhagen, sculpture of The Little Mermaid (Den lille Havfrue) by Edvard Eriksen. Photo © Nikhil Krishnaswamy, 2019

an illustrated collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories, a gift from an aunt who had visited England and bought a copy for me. The Little Mermaid made me cry. I have a visceral memory of a delicious surrendering to an emotional state. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that words on a page could do that to a person.

So when I found out that an unknown Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale was discovered in 2012, that, too, felt inevitable and logical. It was probably written between 1822 and 1826, and shows that whatever else he write, the fairy tale genre came bubbling up for him quite early in his life. Excerpt from the Guardian article:

The story tells of a little candle, dirtied by life and misunderstood, which eventually finds happiness after a tinder box sees the good at its heart and lights it. “The Tallow Candle had found its right place in life – and shown that it was a real candle, and went on to shine for many a year, pleasing itself and the other creations around it,” writes Andersen.

“Pleasing itself and the creations around it.” May we all be as lucky.

“Young girl, you were not born only to cook…”

Posted on by

LetHerFly.jpgWho has not heard of Malala Yousafzai? Her courage, her clarity, her vision so startling for someone so young?

Here is a book by the father who has stood at her side all along. Excerpt from a poem by Malala’s father that serves as an epigraph:

Young girl, you were not born only to cook.
Your youth is not to be ruined.
You were not born a victim, were not born
as an instrument for a man’s enjoyment.

And this from the opening chapter…

I was going to be a father who believed in equality, and believes in a girl as she grows into a woman, and who raises her so that she believes in herself, so that in her life she can be free as a bird.

MalalasMagicPencil.jpgMalala herself, the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, continues to speak eloquently of her journey and her vision for the world’s girl children. Her father’s book is worth reading in tandem with Malala’s own picture book, Malala’s Magic Pencil, illustrated with a suitably delicate touch by Kerascoët, the husband-and-wife illustrator team Sébastien Cosset and Marie Pommepuy.

Cultural Complexity and Women’s Aspirations in The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad

Posted on by

candleandflameBritish Columbia writer Nafiza Azad locates her debut novel, The Candle and the Flame, in Qirat, a land located somewhere on the Silk Road. It’s peopled by royals and commoners, Shayateen who thrive on chaos, Ifrit who seek order, and humans with all their flaws and failings, joys and griefs. Qirat is a place of great beauty but what really drew me into this book is how much its cultures coexist. Deepavali lamps celebrate the Hindu holiday. The Azaan summons Muslims to prayer five times a day–in fact this is probably the best fictional rendering I’ve seen of those recursive calls of the muezzin. Rather than feeling imposed, they take on a kind of temporal force through the story, not to mention that the handsome muezzin turns out to be the love interest in an amusing subplot.

In the novel, the land of Qirat has been severed in two, the result of compromises following a terrible attack by the demonic Shayateen. It’s a backstory that feels subtly infused by the history of the Indian subcontinent itself, creating in the process a kind of aspirational mirror of the real world. The female characters are interesting and complex, sometimes pawns in a bigger game, but often engaged in a struggle for agency in their lives and for justice in their world. Fatima is the one we keep our eye on, but they’re all subtly drawn.

I found it interesting that the fractures in this world are not along religious or linguistic lines. Rather, they are rifts caused by the misdeeds of demons and people. Azad’s immaculately crafted prose weaves in the words of many languages—Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi—seamlessly and mercifully bereft of italics.

Read in e-galley.

“A Rough River of Sorts”

Posted on by

It’s the 4th of July.

Time for the tanks to roll through Washington, DC.

Time to spare a moment to reflect upon young Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and little Valeria, father and daughter, drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to get to an America that no longer exists.

The Fascist menace in the White House responded by saying that the Rio Grande is “a rough river of sorts.” Careless words, cruelly tossed out, landing on the ear in a kind of uncanny poetry.

If you think there’s something wrong with this picture, you might add a dying planet, a rise in hate crimes and the new empowerment of white supremacist groups. The SCOTUS endorsement of partisan gerrymandering. The war on science. And more.

This Fourth, we are indeed trapped in the surge of a very rough river.

There is much to overcome.

What does this have to do with children or children’s books, you ask? Everything. What kind of country do we want to leave to the children we write for? What kind of world?

Epistolary Day: A Quality of Attention

Posted on by

ReaderComeHomeDear Maryanne Wolf,

Your chapter on the processes of deep reading stopped me in my t-r-a-c-k-s.

I was particularly struck by your account of former president Barack Obama’s conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson and the capacity for empathy that fiction builds within us.

Excerpt:

…Obama told Robinson that the most important things he had learned about being a citizen had come from novels: “It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with someone else even though they’re very different from you.”

It’s an ability we desperately need in the world today. It makes sense to me that reading can hold the antidote to a “culture of indifference.”

As I turn off my cell phone and computer and prepare to read for the sake of reading, I’m going to be chuckling over Eileen Gunn’s short short story. It would take me many more words to explain that story than the six words that it consists of–or, to be precise, five words, because the word “computer” repeats itself.

Praise the sentence, its opportunities, its limits. Praise reading for the worlds it opens up and keeps on building, in the only mind I have.