Author Archives: Uma Krishnaswami

Standing Up for the Landscape

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The Whanganui River in New Zealand was declared a person in 2017. Here is an article about what that means.

Excerpt:

“The great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River, the River is me.”

With these words, the Maori tribes of Whanganui, New Zealand, declare their inseverable connection to their ancestral river. The river rises in the snowfields of a trio of volcanoes in central North Island. The tribes say that a teardrop from the eye of the Sky Father fell at the foot of the tallest of these mountains, lonely Ruapehu, and the river was born.

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View from Tongariro Alpine Crossing, 2018

I knew Ruapehu as the first mountain climbed by Edmund Hillary when he was only 16, when Everest had not yet lodged in his heart and mind as the dream and life’s focus that it would become. I have been fascinated for years with Everest, the Himalayas, and the role of mountains as Earth’s sentinels.

But now the snows of Everest are threatened and the waters of our rivers are polluted beyond recognition.

7483.groundswell-indigenous-knowledge-and-a-call-to-action-for-climate-change.main.b3rw6d6drl.pngIt is past time to turn to Indigenous peoples for help in untangling the horrible mess that colonization, industrialization, commercial farming, dams, fossil fuel extraction, and so-called “forest management” have wreaked upon this planet.

 

Edited by Joe Neidhart and Nicole Neidhart, Groundswell is a collection of stirring and heartfelt essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. It highlights Indigenous knowledge for teenaged and adult readers and issues a call to action for climate change.

Perhaps the naming of rivers is a place for non-Indigenous people to recognize that a groundswell is what we need, if we want to stave off ecological disaster in our children’s lifetimes, if not our own.

Sharing Space in Foreshadow

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My VCFA colleague and friend Nova Ren Suma is part of an Internet labor of love, Foreshadow, a project of the heart dedicated to offering “a unique new online venue for young adult short stories, with a commitment to showcasing underrepresented voices, boosting emerging writers, and highlighting the beauty and power of YA fiction.”

Years ago, I worked with a student who wrote short stories all semester long. From her very first packet, I knew I’d struck gold with Rachel Hylton. Rachel was one of those intuitive writers with an unerring instinct for revision. I’d send her long letters detailing all my questions and listing all the points at which I’d wondered where she might be taking me. She’d fix a word or two and the entire story would settle into place, with all my bullet points magically addressed.

I’m more than happy to be sharing space with Rachel Hylton in the current issue of Foreshadow. Her story, Risk, was selected by none other than Laurie Halse Anderson. You have to read it. It is one of those pieces that needs every one of its words to express its essence. You couldn’t sum it up. It’s Kafkaesque in the manner of David Cerny’s sculpture.

Right away we find out–this:

We were there for Marnie Vega long before she became a lobster.

And then there’s this line:

Marnie was different—she wasn’t fake, she was authentic.

That’s Rachel. Each word perfectly laid out, crafted with loving care. Authentic to the bone. I hope some editors are paying attention.

There are two other stories in this issue: Pact by Mark Oshiro, and my story, Affinity.

Thank you, Nova Ren Suma, Emily X.R. Pan, managing editor Diane Telgen and all the wonderful writers and editors who help give life to this project.

 

A Child’s-Eye View of History: The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

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On the day in 1947 that she and her twin brother turn 12, Nisha yearns for her mother: “It was the day we came and you left…” She begins to write a diary each night. In it, she composes letters to her mother, even as the country around her fractures in the historical event known as the Partition of India.

Veera Hiranandani (see my 2012 Process Talk with her) has created a sensitive, watchful child character in Nisha, who embodies the fracturing of the country, because her mother was Muslim and her father and his family are Hindu. It is a month out from the independence days of the two newly created countries, and Nisha’s letters unpack her uncovering of family secrets, the relationships they leave behind and the perilous journey they must undertake to escape a place that is no longer home.
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At another level, the simple, direct first person narrative in these letters delicately probes a young girl’s dawning understanding of how the world works:

I didn’t want the new India. I wanted the old one that was my home.

As well the letters document the events unfolding around Nisha, as she sees how hate can raise its ugly head readily in a place where it didn’t exist before. Or did it? Was it always there, waiting for the machinations of governments and politicians to give it permission to grow? At its most personal, this is a story of a sister and brother fleeing with their doctor father and their unwilling grandmother, facing along the way the hazards of starvation, illness, and frenzied mobs fueled by religious hatred.

History writ small in this way reels us close into itself, with passages like this:

But here is the question that is most on my mind. I’m afraid to say it, even afraid to write it down. I don’t want to think about the answer, but my pencil needs to write it anyway: If you were alive, would we have to leave you because you are Muslim? Would they have drawn a line right through us, Mama? I don’t care what the answer is. We came from your body. We will always be a part of you and this will always be my home even if it’s called something else.

Here is a fictional rendering of the author’s family history. Its epistolary form makes it intimate and tender. It renders one of the world’s great tragedies accessible to young readers. In the end, this Newbery Honor-winning novel reminds us that love can be present even when it isn’t verbally expressed. It can bind people together. It can give rise to generosity and kindness in the midst of suspicion and hate.

 

The Greening of an Old Tale

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In 1841, John Ruskin, eminent English art critic and social thinker, wrote a children’s book for a twelve year old girl, Euphemia (Effie) Gray, who would later become his wife, staying married to him for some six years and disrupting his life considerably in the process. From such unpropitious beginnings, remarkably, Ruskin’s only children’s story has survived.

King_Golden_River_PLC_CC2018.inddSet in a “valley of the most surprising and luxuriant fertility,” The King of the Golden River is the story of 11-year-old Gluck, a kindhearted underdog whose two wily older siblings, Hans and Schwartz, work him to the bone, withhold food, and subject him to incessant cuffs and punches. When Southwest Wind, Esquire, pays Gluck an unexpected and, it must be said, inconvenient visit, Gluck nonetheless feeds him and puts up with him, unwittingly acquiring a powerful ally.

Gold and greed figure in the story, as does a king entrapped by magic, the promise of transformation through three drops of holy water cast into a river, and more.

The twists and turns of story lead to a happy ending for Gluck, with rewards given for kindness and generosity and punishment duly meted out for cruelty and selfishness. At a deeper level, this is a fable about how humans treat the earth. (“They killed everything that did not pay for its eating.”) It links social and environmental justice in quirky and astonishingly modern ways. The one note that rang false to me in today’s social context was the unthinking equation of black with evil in the naming of the ill-fated wicked brothers.

Still, it is just possible that the passage of time, since Ruskin’s penning of this tale, allows us tap some of its essential truths in new and powerful ways.

Cliff Swallows and Building Narratives

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The architecture of stories fascinates me but I think of it in terms that are organic rather than designed, springing from a mental landscape. And sometimes, truth be told, I miss the landscape of the desert. So here’s a reprise of an old post about cliff swallows in New Mexico and the creation of story, maybe because I want to return if only briefly to a moment that was purely joyful, purely sufficient unto itself. Those moments feels rare these days. The world intrudes far more than it seemed able to do just a few years ago.

The cliff swallows nested just down the road from where I lived in the desert. I’d been watching them every summer for over a decade.

All those years, I’d drive past, slow down to glance at the swarms of birds overhead, feel the smile breaking out on my face in the way that bird-swarms make a person smile. Then I’d go on my way. I’d think, I ought to stop and take pictures. Really. Someday I will.

For some reason it sank in at last that those somedays didn’t just stretch forever into my distance, so one day I decided to act on my impulse.

The swallows came pouring out with flapping wings and shrill, squeaky cries, perhaps in response to me and my blundering around at the foot of their cliff palace. Life just burst out from that rock. In contrast to the extravagance of sound and motion, look at those nests. How perfect they are, a whole community on this rock face, built one little dollop of mud at a time, flown up from the riverbank a couple of miles away.
They remind me of Nader Khalili‘s ceramic homes.
What can we learn from swallows about form and structure? A lot, I think. There’s a deep sense of the organic and whole about this little colony of homes, each little cavity containing a bobbing beak or two. Nothing wasted. Everything with a purpose. Who needs heaven? Perfection is right here.

Think about building memory. I no longer live down the road from that cliff. The birds in my neighborhood are different ones, the cliffs in the region volcanic rock rather than sandstone. But the little mud houses painstakingly clustered on the cliff face evoke a place and a time–and they return me briefly to the person I was then. Story builds that way too, with that kind of care and concern for setting and context, space and sky, river and rock, that intensity and life force driving the whole endeavor.

Rajani LaRocca on Midsummer’s Mayhem

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Midsummer's Mayhem final cvr.pngRajani LaRocca‘s Midsummer’s Mayhem is a marvelous mashup of two things you might not think were capable of working together–Shakespeare and fusion cooking! I asked Rajani:

[Uma] How did Shakespeare and fusion cooking come together for you?

[Rajani]  I’ve loved Shakespeare since I was a child. I played Cassius in our (very abridged!) 5th grade class production of Julius Caesar, and that sparked my interest. The next year, we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I was smitten with the tale of feuding fairies and the hapless humans who got ensnared in their mischief. And there is a connection to India that I noticed as a child and remembered as an adult when it was time to write MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM!

My greatest joy—my half-Indian, half-Italian, all-American family—is fusion personified. I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with flavors, but writing this book made me take this pastime to a new level, translating favorite foods from my own childhood into tasty baked treats.

[Uma] Your Mimi’s charm comes largely from her uniquely quirky eccentricities. Tell me how you went about developing this most endearing character.

[Rajani] Much of Mimi’s personality came to me as if she were a real person whom I happened to meet. For example, I knew that baking was Mimi’s great passion, so I made her point of view very baking-centric: that’s the lens through which she sees the world, and there are lots of baking and foodie terms sprinkled throughout the book. I also knew she was the youngest child in a large family full of accomplished people. Like a lot of youngest children, Mimi tries many of the activities her older siblings love, only to find that they don’t really bring her joy in the same way. Mimi tries to find her place in in the world, and wonders what she can do to distinguish herself. But at her core is her affection and concern for her sometimes exasperating, often wacky, always loving family.

Rajani_LaRocca__Author 1.jpg[Uma] Every book you write teaches you something. What did writing this book teach you about writing–or about yourself, if you like?

[Rajani] It took me several years and many revisions to write MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM, and the process taught me so much about the craft of writing a novel, about how to take a story idea and turn it into the book I want it to be. But I’ve also come to realize that Mimi’s story is a metaphor for my journey to becoming a published writer. At any age, there is a gap between what we are currently capable of doing and what we wish we could do. It is uncomfortable to be in that gap, but it’s also where we grow and learn so much about ourselves. Just like Mimi, I’ve learned to appreciate what I have to give to the world. I hope MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM inspires young readers to create with their hearts and to have the courage to share those creations

 

[Uma] What’s one joyful and unexpected outcome of writing this book?

[Rajani] Although writing is often thought of as a solitary pursuit, for me the process of writing and publishing has been about connecting with other people. I can’t count the number of people who have helped me: my first writing teachers who gently guided a newcomer without crushing dreams; my incredible critique partners who read, suggested, laughed, and cried with me; and my tremendously generous, brilliant Pitch Wars mentor, Joy McCullough, who helped me in my final push with MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM. The connections continued with my amazing agent, Brent Taylor, and my fantastic editor, Charlie Ilgunas, who helped the book become even better. I’ve become friends with some wonderful fellow 2019 debut authors, and we’ve supported each other through this zany debut year. And in just a couple of weeks, my book will connect me to young readers…and that is the ultimate dream come true!

Congratulations, Rajani! Much luck with this quirky, funny book, and with your future writing projects.

Your Voice Matters: Guest Post by Carmen Oliver

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Last month, at the Royal BC Museum, I got to see the IMAX movie about the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the planet’s most spectacular wild places.

Great Bear Rainforest IMAX Trailer from Pacific Wild on Vimeo.

A Voice for Spirit BearsAnd I got to read Carmen Oliver‘s picture book, A Voice for the Spirit Bears, about Simon Jackson, the founder of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition. What a happy coincidence! The rush of water and the leap of salmon in the IMAX movie, the incredible close views of those amazing bears, and the voices of the First Nations people who are the stewards of that land–all that was fresh in my mind. I asked Carmen to tell me what sparked this story for her. Here is what she wrote:

One Labor Day, as a girl, I watched a muscular dystrophy telethon on television. Many of these kids were younger than me. And their lives were filled with mounting physical challenges but they radiated strength, positivity, resilience, and hope. My mom explained to me that the money raised would help scientists to find a cure. That people all over the world could be a part of the solution. That year a seed was planted in my twelve-year-old mind. So I harnessed the help of my brother and friend Dana to go door-to-door Christmas caroling and to ask for donations for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I can’t remember exactly how much we raised (fifty or sixty dollars rings familiar) but I’d felt that in a small way I’d made a difference.

Now fast-forward twenty years. In my early thirties, I read an article about a rare type of black bear called the spirit bear. One in ten of these bears are born with creamy white fur and they’re found only in Canada. I’d never heard of them before. As I dug into the research, a young boy’s name kept re-surfacing—David Simon Jackson. At the age of thirteen, Simon learned about the endangered spirit bears living roughly six hours away from his home in British Columbia and he wanted to help use his voice to save their habitat and keep them safe. He was bullied in school and overcame his own stuttering problem to speak out and raise awareness about the many issues affecting their habitat including over-logging. He created a youth run organization (Spirit Bear Youth Coalition) of six million members from eighty-five countries to ensure their survival.

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This story spoke to my twelve-year-old activist heart. It spoke to the shy girl who could relate to being bullied in school and to loving wild life—especially bears. It spoke to the girl who wanted to make a difference in the world. And still does. So when I came across this quote by Simon, I knew I had to turn his journey into a book for children. This is the book I needed when I was twelve-years-old. A book about strength, positivity, resilience and hope.

I think Simon’s story found me. And in telling his story, I want children to understand that every voice matters. They have important things to say. They can make a difference in the world. Their voices are our future.

If I could go back in time and talk to my twelve-year-old self, I’d tell her that no matter how many times people put you down, shun you, make fun of you – you matter. Your voice matters.

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I began this book in 2006. Along the way, I had many people tell me Simon’s story was an article at best. That it would never become a book. But I didn’t listen to the naysayers. I believed a story about a young boy with no remarkable skills or intellect, but armed simply with a passion, can take hold of a cause and unite the world was – remarkable. All change begins with one voice speaking out. Your voice can change the world.

In Simon Jackson’s words:

“If together we can succeed in saving the spirit bear, we will have proved that one young person with no remarkable skills or intellect, but armed simply with a passion, can take hold of a cause and unite the world. After all, we are the voices for the sick, the poor, the children, the dreamers…and the bears.”—Simon Jackson

Here is a video Q & A with Simon Jackson about the book on Canadian Geographic:

Marina Budhos on Mentoring Writers

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Whom have I learned from? In whose footsteps have I followed? What have I done to nurture those who will follow me? Having been in this writing business now for some 30 years, and taught writers for about twenty of them, I suppose it’s natural to think about such questions from time to time.

I have followed Marina Budhos‘s work for years, ever since I read her incandescent novel, The Professor of Light.  So when I learned she was part of the WNDB 2019 group of mentors, I asked her if she’d write me a reflection on what mentorship means to her.

Here is what she wrote:

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Photo courtesy of the author

I was recently thinking about mentorship, because I was listening to a writer speak about her own experience.  In this case, she has been mentored by very strong figures—for better or worse—and yet she herself kept a distance from too much entanglement with students.

I never had any clear mentors, and I wish I did.  As an undergraduate student, I dove into writing and some of my professors recognized my seriousness as a writer.  In graduate school, while I had professors who taught me a good deal about writing, I really had no close mentors.  I came to be largely self-taught and self-sufficient. Thus, when I came to New York City and began to publish short stories and sought out an agent for my emerging novel, I was confused and easily discouraged. Indeed the person who taught me the most about developing myself as a writer and making certain career choices is my partner, co-writer and husband, Marc Aronson.

I have been teaching a long time, in many settings, so there is no doubt that I’ve been a mentor to many emerging writers, in different ways.  When I taught in a low-residency program, the structure is much more one-on-one and I developed sustained relationships with those students, some of whom went on to publish and thrive.  I am a professor, so when I notice a gifted undergraduate student, I will pull them aside and put books or stories in their hands; for some of my graduate students, I’ve tried to guide them with their work, and how to start to imagine and envision a finished manuscript and real publication.  Sometimes, with some students, they interest me so much that I will probe and prod and reflect with them so as to open them up to other possibilities in not just their writing, but their thinking and feeling in the world.

In terms of my mentorship for We Need Diverse Books, I have a few aims.  One, I’m hoping that a gleam in my mentee’s eye can become a reality for her.  And I’m hoping I can give her some professional sense of what it takes to write the kind of nonfiction book she has proposed, and what publishers will be looking for.  When I was coming up as an emerging writer, I had no one explain to me the path toward publishing; I had no sense of how to ask for help, or where I should put my energy.  I virtually gave away my first novel to a fledgling press with no proper representation.  I’m hoping that I can provide this, because otherwise writing, and writing to make a project a reality, is so amorphous.

marina_longride.jpgThe other aspect of this, which is particular to We Need Diverse Books, is my aim is to encourage more writers of color to write nonfiction.  So often when we speak about diversity, we’re thinking about fiction, but in my mind, I’d like to see more diverse writers in the realm of nonfiction.  Not only can they bring to the world stories, histories, discoveries that readers have not seen, but simply put, I’d like to see more writers of color conceive of themselves as nonfiction writers too.  I often think it’s an arena that writers of color don’t realize they can succeed in, and the more they succeed, the more editors will come to them with topics or contributions to anthologies.

Marina Budhos’s latest YA novel, The Long Ride, is a story of friendship that builds and sustains three mixed-race girls in the 1970’s era of bussing.

Deborah Ellis on “A Day Before…”

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Image courtesy of Deborah Ellis

Canada’s 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award author nominee Deborah Ellis has become known not only for her books and the awards and acclaim they’ve garnered, but also for the causes she has espoused over the years, from literacy to peace activism.

This excerpt from her keynote presentation at the 2018 IBBY International Congress both moves and inspires.

The best of children’s literature can help create a Day Before — a Day Before the order is given to toss chemicals in a river. A Day Before the order is given to massacre a village. A Day Before the order is given to manufacture a new batch of guns that will be used to shoot up a school, a church, a gay bar, a country music festival. A Day Before the order is given to move a child-abuser to a new county and new victims. A Day Before the order is given to bomb a school bus full of eight year olds returning home from a much-needed outing. We must have a Day Before!

The best of children’s literature can remind us who we are when we are at our best. It can remind us we need not be afraid of differences, and that we have the power to create beauty out of pain.

I believe that we are responsible for the information that gets into our heads. If we are raised on nothing but Nazi philosophy, then we have an excuse for being Nazis. But the moment an alternative piece of information enters our brains, then we are making a choice. We are choosing which story to follow.

An alternative piece of information. Never was there a greater need than now for precisely this. We writers, too, need to choose which story to follow, which story to bring to the world.

The speech can be found in full in Bookbird, the IBBY journal.

Visions of Revision

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Art_of_losingA recent issue of the AWP journal, The Writer’s Chronicle, includes an article by Philip Metres titled “The Art of Losing (and Other Visions of Revision).”

Metres (is that not a fantastic name for a poet?) had me with his opening:

Recently, when I asked fiction writer Derek Green for a nugget of wisdom about revision, he relayed what Caryl Phillips had told him: “you never finish a work, you only abandon it.” I’d always heard that 19th century French poet Paul Valery had served up this wisdom, but I discovered that’s it’s much older than that. Five hundred years ago, Leonardo DaVinci apparently said that “art is never finished, only abandoned.” And probably DaVinci heard it from somebody else. No doubt, we’ll soon discover some grumpy cuneiform writer who is complaining about his busted stylus and the ending of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

This blog is named for the mythic scribe with an elephant head who broke off his own tusk to use as a stylus in order to keep a writing bargain. How could I not be hooked?

“The Art of Losing” goes considerably beyond common revision narratives of drudgery and loss.  It suggests that we need to make revision our friend. We need to move toward the work as it reveals itself.

Move toward the work. Here is the missing piece in how I have tended to think about writing. One half of the process, the way I see it, is to keep in mind the impulse that led to this story bubbling up for me in the first place. To honor my intention for it as a writer, and to gauge all critical readers’ comments in the light of that intention. That has always worked when I’m in draft mode, or even while I’m assessing feedback on a work in progress.

But somehow, by the time I get to revising, my beautiful intention always seems to get fragmented. What shows up on the page rarely gleams as brightly as the original spark. I begin to question my intention, and in that questioning, the work itself threatens to disintegrate. But Metres says the work is not full of mistakes and it’s not broken. It’s just not itself yet. So in revision, he suggests the writer needs to move towards the work that is still unfolding. Even, or maybe especially, if it’s going in a different direction from the one I might’ve envisaged for it? There’s a thought.

The other reason this article made so much sense, of course, is that it cited a poem I loved when I first read it and have loved more with each passing year. The poem is Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, which begins:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
The intent to be lost. That’s exactly it. Many of the other revision wisdoms in  the article have to do with words and lines and stanzas, the stuff of poetry. They’re all worthy and interesting but they won’t change how I revise.
But placing revision in the context of losing and loss, and celebrating it–that gives me a whole new metaphor to live with and write by.