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 with Jen: Rina Singh on Creativity, Resilience, and Centering Children
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
I was utterly moved by Rina Singh’s 2020 picture book biography 111 Trees, which profiled Shyam Sundar Paliwal, an Indian village leader and eco-feminist who, with trees and compassion, replenished the villages water and food supplies, and established equal rights to education for girls. Rina followed that up in 2023 with two more moving and meticulously researched profiles of Indian feminist and conversation activists. I am thrilled to talk with her about her process.
Guest Post: Monique Duncan on Centering Black Stories and Experiences in Children’s Literature
Once in a while, you come across a writer with a big idea—an idea in search of the words it needs for its telling. That was Monique Duncan when she took the picture book intensive semester with me at VCFA. She’d written that idea out, using a many words and plenty of compassion, all of it held aloft by a ton of historical research. Once in a while, you see a project like that settle into a pure, clear distillation of its early self. You see it combined with art that lifts the text so that the book becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Which is why I’m overjoyed to welcome Monique Duncan to this blog, as she writes about the history and personal experience that inspired her picture book, Freedom Braids, illustrated by Oboh Moses and published by Lantana Publishing.
Process Talk with Jen: Elizabeth Partridge on Golden Gate
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
Elizabeth Partridge’s The Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge tracks the epic construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s–at the time by far the world’s longest suspension bridge and commonly thought to be an “impossible” project–from an utterly child-centric POV.
Here at Writing With a Broken Tusk, we are preoccupied with crossing borders, and it strikes me that a bridge is as much of a transitional space as a border between countries. But there’s something about the scope of a bridge–especially one as long, and striking as the Golden Gate–that gives us a physical reminder of being in liminal space that crossing an invisible, imaginary, pencil-thin border between countries.
Intersecting Lives in a Larger Cause in Evan Griffith’s Wild at Heart
You know I’m mildly obsessed with storylines in which two lives intersect: Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary. There’s something deeply human about such stories of people finding their way in the world, sometimes against great odds, driven by powerful passions or convictions.
Evan Griffith’s tenderly written dual biography, Wild at Heart: The Story of Olaus and Mardy Murie, Defenders of Nature begins in his subjects’ respective childhoods:
Guest Post: Is Writing a Picture Book Really That Hard? by Veera Hiranandani
Veera Hiranandani writes heartbreaking, devastating, tear-spilling, and, yes, hopeful historical and contemporary novels for young readers about nuanced characters whose identities and experiences figuratively, literally, and literarily cross borders. She’s really really good at it. Her middle grade novel, The Night Diary, won a Newbery Honor. Her most recent releases are Amil and the After, the historical middle grade sequel which continues The Night Diary’s story in post-partition India; and The Greatest, a tender picture book about intergenerational family love, illustrated by Vesper Stamper (released on September 3).
For novelists, the process of writing a picture book can present its own challenges. Here are Veera’s reflections on tackling the “concentrated feel” of a picture book.
Guest Post: Srividhya Venkat on Seeker of Truth
Kailash Satyarthi’s campaigns against child labor and advocacy for the universal right to education earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, when he was co-recipient along with Malala Yusufzai.
I was delighted to hear of Srividhya Venkat’s picture book biography, Seeker of Truth: Kailash Satyarthi’s Fight to End Child Labor. Her publisher sent me an e-galley of the book, and I ended up writing a jacket blurb—not something I agree to do that often!
Here’s Srividhya on how she overcame her own doubts and questions and decided this was a book she needed to write:
Process Talk With Jen: Rasha Hamid on Hello, Beech Tree
In a guest post about writing nonfiction for children, Rasha Hamid wrote “Historian Robin D. G. Kelley coined the term freedom dreaming to describe the power of imagination as a strategy for collective liberation - imagining the world as it should be so we can make it so. Powerful nonfiction writing at its best stems from freedom dreams.” And Rasha’s nonfiction–including How to Bird and the brand new Hello, Beech Tree!–is certainly powerful.
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: 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.
Guest Post: Suma Subramaniam on Picture Books Rooted in Culture and Geography
Suma Subramaniam has not one but two picture books celebrating Indian culture releasing in May. A Bindi Can Be…, illustrated by Kamala Nair, released on May 2 and My Name is as Long as a River, illustrated by Tara Anand, comes out on May 28. In a recent cover reveal interview for My Name is as Long as a River, Suma said “A name when pronounced correctly is a comforting feeling to everyone involved. That is what we all need—a little comfort.” That thread of seeking and enjoying comfort connects both of these books.
Process Talk with Jen: Barry Wittenstein on The Day the River Caught Fire
Today Jen talks to Barry Wittenstein about his narrative nonfiction picture book The Day the River Caught Fire: How the Cuyahoga River Exploded and Ignited the Earth Day Movement, illustrated by Jessie Hartland.
Process Talk with Jen: Caroline Kusin Pritchard and Sidura Ludwig on Tender Jewish Family Traditions
[Posted by Jen Breach]
[Jen] When I saw that Caroline Kusin Pritchard and Sidura Ludwig, two generous and insightful writers, had books coming out within months of each other, I pounced at the chance to turn an interview post into a conversation.
Caroline, Where is Poppy? (illustrated by Dana Wulfekotte) is based on your beloved grandfather, who has passed, and his Passover seder table. And Sidura, you make challah every week for Shabbat, just like the characters in Rising (illustrated by Sophia Vincent Guy). How did you turn these tender family traditions into picture books that intertwine family and religion?
Process Talk with Jen: Joanna Ho on We Who Produce Pearls
Posted by Jen Breach
In an interview with Caroline Richmond at We Need Diverse Books on the 2021 release of her picture book biography of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, author Joanna Ho said, “When you boil down so much of political activism, it often comes down to inviting people to recognize humanity in others and treat people accordingly.” In those terms, Joanna’s newest book We Who Produce Pearls, illustrated by muralist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, is a warm and assured invitation to readers to challenge the dominant white-centered version of history that has held sway since the founding of the United States.
Process Talk with Jen: Uma Krishnaswami on Look! Look!
In Uma Krishnaswami’s own words on her book Out of the Way! Out of the Way! (Groundwood, 2010), after many drafts of editorial interference were tossed aside that had insisted the story be more plot-based, more in line with mainstream US children’s publishing: “I told the story the way it showed up in my mind, with a long timeline, a single action taken by one young boy, and the place itself as the center of the tale. It became a story about a child in a community, about the power of a single action unleashing a long spiral of consequences. It relies on repetition, on rhythm, on auditory effect, as much as it does on the beautiful illustrations of my almost-namesake, artist Uma Krishnaswamy from Chennai.”
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.
Poetry and Wondrous Facts in The Wisdom of Trees
Author-illustrator Lita Judge (Flight School and Something Beautiful) delivers for children the understanding that Suzanne Simard elevated with her research—forests are more than just a bunch of trees that all happen to be growing in the same place.