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?
(Dis)Organizing a Draft, Part 2
As I work my way through drafts of the opening chapters of the nonfiction book that is my current work in progress, I find myself needing to read—Ted Kooser’s slim little volume of practical advice to poets, The Poetry Home Repair Manual:
Why this particular craft book when poetry is not what I am writing?
Process Talk: A Conversation with Translator Keiko Nagatomo, Part 1
While Keiko Nagatomo was working on translating Book Uncle and Me into Japanese, she sent me some questions through my agent—things she was puzzled by or want to know more about.
Never has a translator of any of my books reached out that way before. We ended up having a delightful correspondence. In turn, Keiko graciously consented to answer my questions.
Vocabulary Word: Monopsony
Over the years I have tried to be more of a writer than an author, which has meant not focusing on the business end of publishing more than I have to. It’s a weird business that sometimes pretends not to be a business at all and mostly behaves like no other business I can think of. But it's hard to ignore the fact that the United States Department of Justice has brought an anti-trust trial against two of the Big Five, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.
(Dis)Organizing a Draft, Part 1
I am now writing a drafty (very drafty) version of what I think will become Chapter 4 of an upper middle grade (possibly YA) nonfiction book. I intend to present the intersections of two large topics. I intend to go back quite a way in time.
I know I need to organize my research, keep track of pictures and sources, maintain a running reading list and lists of physical sources as well as links. Set things up so I don’t lose all that good stuff I’ve found by delving into rabbit-holes of history and science.
But how do I keep it from setting into the mental equivalent of poured concrete?
Chapter Openings of Opening Chapters: The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
I’m always curious to see how writers handle the opening lines of early chapters. My own first chapters often fall off between the first draft and the last, or else they get heavily revised as the story settles into place. It’s always encouraging when opening sentences manage to remain intact, telling me that my story instincts were sound to begin with.
Guest Post: Sathya Achia on In My Hands
Sathya Achia weaves the complexity of gods and demons and magic with the life of 16-year-old Chandra, who’s confronted with rising danger from a supernatural enemy that threatens everyone she loves. Achia’s cultural backdrop is particularly interesting because it’s very specific, drawn from the author’s own ancestral Kodava culture (related to a specific ethnolinguistic group of southern India).
“Selavu is not so much of a weapon as it is a shield. Same with those cuffs they are part of traditional Kodaguru warrior armor,” Gowramma says, forcing me to think, but I can’t because my head is throbbing, and my thoughts are foggy. “Learn to look deeper. Nothing is ever as it seems.”
— In My Hands by Sathya Achia
In this fast-paced tale of curses and battles, but also of family and community and one girl’s struggle to meet her destiny, nothing is as it seems. I’m delighted to welcome Sathya Achia to tell us more about her novel, from Ravens & Roses.
Setting: Interior Landscapes
There are interior landscapes among us badly in need of just the kind of rewilding that ecologists are calling for in the real world. It’s worth remembering that the Indian subcontinent, like the planet itself, is shared space.
A couple of years ago, right around the first uneasy rumbles of the Covid pandemic, I received a request for a short story from Sehyr Mirza, a Pakistani creative writer and journalist who was planning to edit an anthology of short stories for young readers. Here is the ethereal jacket image now created by Priya Kuriyan for that anthology, The Other in the Mirror: Stories From India and Pakistan, coming soon from Yoda Press in India and Folio Books in Pakistan!
Setting: The Case for Rewilding
Singer-songwriter and UN Ambassador Ellie Goulding makes the case for rewilding the spaces we live in—and ourselves. Snippet:
We know that for clean water, you need healthy forests; to balance carbon, you need healthy seas and peat bogs, mangroves and seagrass. Nature isn’t just nice scenery. We are nature – and we depend on it.
In Karachi, Pakistan, architect and activist Tariq Qaiser is desperate to save an island he sees as a ”terrestrial incarnation of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the patron Sufi saint of Karachi, who protects the city from storms, disease, and hunger.”
“Sometimes humans get it right”
Darcy Pattison’s picture book, Diego: The Galápagos Giant Tortoise, illustrated by Amanda Zimmerman, is a loving account of a place and the story of one species within its complex ecosystem. It’s also the story of a species climbing back into the world from the terrible brink of extinction.
The Words in Picture Books: The Snail With the Right Heart by Maria Popova
The Snail With the Right Heart by writer and much-beloved blogger Maria Popova takes on gender and genetics, love and death, evolution and the surprise of unexpected mutations, in the same way that Marion Dane Bauer’s The Stuff of Stars engages with cosmology and evolution and the big, beautiful questions of who we are and why it matters.
Guest Post: Amitha Jagannath Knight on Usha and the Big Digger
“Usha loved trucks. She made them bump and roll.” Who could not love this child who’s equally fervent about things on wheels and things in the sky? In advance of the Spanish edition to come in July (Usha y la Gran Excavator) I invited Amitha Jagannath Knight, writer and author of this charmer of a book, to post about how her Usha came to be.
Process Talk: Rajani LaRocca on Red, White, and Whole
I’ve been wanting to write this post ever since I first read Red, White, and Whole, Rajani LaRocca’s novel in verse about grief, loss, and coming of age as a desi kid in America. I asked Rajani if she’d tell me a little about the process of writing this beautifully crafted book, which has been so deservedly recognized (Newbery Honor, Walter Dean Myers Award Winner, Golden Kite Award Winner).
Small Perfectly Balanced Story Containers
For the last few months, because of the Picture Book Intensive, I’ve posted mainly about that small, perfectly balanced story container, its blend of images and words served up for the youngest of readers. The short story is another small container whose compactness calls for distilling the essence of a story.
Universal Rule or Historical Power Grab? Reflections on Show-Don’t-Tell
I often tell the story of the publication of my picture book, Out of the Way! Out of the Way! It’s a cautionary tale I was reminded of when I read Namrata Poddar’s pointed, articulate essay in LitHub, “Is ‘Show Don’t Tell a Universal Truth or a Colonial Relic?”
Voice and Humor in It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel
Middle grade humor is a funny thing. It’s belly-laughs and puns. It can be self-deprecating and sometimes dark.
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.
The Words in Picture Books: Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies
In Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Sarah Fox-Davies, we enter the liminal space between day and night and encounter one small creature that inhabits it. Nicola Davies lifts the reader into bat’s world with perfectly chosen words.