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 2024, Jen Breach (writer, VCFA graduate, and former student) 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.
Ancient knowledge meets science in Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
In Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, botanist, biochemist, biologist, and poet Diana Beresford-Kroeger challenges us all to explore the deep connections that forests offer us. Here’s a scientist who listens to trees and in this book she opens up her life and experience in brief, lively chapters—her childhood, her personal arboretum where she nurtures rare and endangered species, navigating the contradictions and commonalities in old wisdom and new science.
Personal Geographies
Place is at the heart of who we are. We hold it close. We mourn its loss. Time makes this a constant, because the place that made you keeps changing, long after you have left it. In a very literal way, maybe it never existed except in your fleeting experience of it.
Dorthe Nors writes of the grip we keep on a place, and how it both holds us and eludes us, in her book of essays on the North Sea coast in her native Denmark, A Line in the World.
The Right Ghost
A couple of weeks ago, I was tinkering with the ending chapters of a middle grade novel that has resided in my files for some time. I’ve read pages from it occasionally at VCFA residencies. But now I’m down to the last stretch of writing it, and I’m noticing something.
I tend to be picky about what I read at this stage of a draft. Something very different seems best, as if I ought to put a wall up between the reading and writing spaces in my mind.