Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 34

what a day!

It’s so nice waking up to good news and today it just kept coming…

Reading While White is focusing on #OwnVoices for the month of September and I have the incredible good fortune of being the first featured author! Sam Bloom tagged me on Facebook and I had to rub the sleep out of my eyes when I saw “sublimely written” in his post. Allie Jane Bruce wrote this fantastic review of A Hand to Hold: “At once developmentally appropriate and exquisitely written, with a story that anyone experiencing separation will appreciate (especially those on the lookout for books about loving and caring fathers), A Hand To Hold is a much-needed book.”
Then I heard from the good folks at Tilbury House letting me know that Melena’s Jubliee was featured in the Children’s Book Council’s “ Hot Off the Press ” column for September: “This unique online bibliography features anticipated bestsellers, either recently released or forthcoming, published by CBC members.”
Another email from Tilbury followed a moment later sharing Publishers Weekly’s review of Melena.
In May Shelley Diaz at School Library Journal asked me to submit copies of The Door at the Crossroads for review and it was featured in this month’s YA Xpress column! There’s a mix-up in the plot summary but I’m still grateful that my self-published book was not just included but integrated into the column with traditionally published books.
Rich in Color posted news of their giveaway today! Enter to win one of 3 copies of The Door at the Crossroads and then share your thoughts about #Zettasbooks so we can discuss them together at the end of the month!

All in all, this has been an excellent start to the new month! And Mercury’s retrograde! I’ll be heading to Minnesota soon; you can find my public events listed at the website of one of my excellent hosts, Sarah Park Dahlen. She even made up a reading list to introduce folks to Zetta’s “greatest hits”…feeling very blessed.

“Good enough!”

That’s what my grandpa used to say after he fixed something with duct tape, or wood glue, or a bent, rusted nail from the jar he kept under the sink. As a child, I was ashamed of the second-hand clothes, and used cars, and battered furniture that defined us as poor, but as an adult I’m grateful for all the lessons I learned on how to “get by” and “make do.” Some folks think I’m a perfectionist but as someone who lives with anxiety, perfectionism is a luxury I can’t afford. So nothing I do is perfect—I reach a point where I’m satisfied and then I let go. It’s not always easy, but I can’t move on to the next project if I’m obsessing over x & y. I accept that my novels are flawed, and I don’t spend hours poring over each line of a 300-word picture book. I work hard, I try to be honest in my expression, and then I put it out into the world. Those t-shirts that say “flawless?” I’d rather wear one that reads: “deeply flawed.” Because I am. That said, what I have to say still matters. Right now I’ve got a hot water bottle on my lower back and I can feel my sciatica acting up again. By the time I turned off the computer last night, my eyes were streaming and I had a headache from trying (and largely failing) to make clean cuts as I edited the remaining 12 minutes of footage I filmed last week. I now know that I need to STOP recording once I hit the 3-minute mark. It’s really hard to create a coherent message when you’re cutting and pasting film clips. It’s not at ALL like cutting and pasting text, which I do all the time when I’m writing. This little filmmaking experiment has been humbling and I hope I can apply the lessons I’ve learned to the next film session—which should be sometime in September when my two new books come out. For now, the 4 short films can be found on my YouTube channel and my Videos page.

Now, back to the novel…

Black Magic = Black Power for Kids

Angela Davis once said her parents “prepared her for a world that didn’t yet exist.” Can speculative fiction do the same for Black youth today?

Decolonizing the Imagination of Black Children

What would happen if we recreated the Clarks’ famous doll test but used books instead?

Reclaiming Black Magic

Will there ever be enough stories to make up for the lack of inclusive children’s literature?

take 2

I wasn’t quite ready for my closeup, but I managed to post this short film to YouTube yesterday. On Tuesday night I set the tripod up in my favorite corner of the apartment—the walls are lavender, my books are neatly stacked on the bookcase shelves, and my sparkly purple frame holds a picture of my “nuclear family” from back in the day. I turned off the ceiling fan and filmed for just under three minutes. The next day I checked the light and decided to film again around noon; I waited until my hair was dry, then put on some lip gloss, powder, and mascara, and grabbed a dress I love but have never worn in public. I added my Egyptian-esque necklace and flipped the camera screen so I could see what I was filming. It felt like I looked and sounded mostly like my usual self, which mattered to me. I had written down some talking points and filmed for what seemed like five minutes but turned out to be twelve…forgot to mention reparations so sat back down, turned the camera on, and did another 2-minute segment. Then I watched an iMovie tutorial on YouTube and added titles and captions to that short clip. Folks on Facebook had a lot of great advice; despite fussing with the frame and flowers, the composition still wasn’t quite right…the wall looks grey instead of violet, and folks wanted to see more than just my head and shoulders. I’m taking an editing class at Apple today and then will look at the rest of my footage and decide whether to shoot it over again or move forward. I didn’t use a microphone but might need to invest in one if I’m going to film outside. I can’t figure out how to post the video to Twitter but friends are helping with that. I might break the footage up into 3 or 4 short segments and make them part of a series…too many possibilities can make me anxious, but this time I feel like I have lots of room to grow. I have a LOT to learn but it’s empowering just to say, “Today I’m going to try this,” and then make it a reality. Not aiming for perfection, just letting myself evolve…

Reparations in Kid Lit

What would reparations look like in the children’s literature community?

message in a bottle

I bought my first TV when I started grad school in 1995 and it still works. I’ve thought about getting a flat screen TV but why waste money when my current model still works? Sure, it can’t support widescreen footage so the captions sometimes get cut off, but that’s a fun word game to play while watching the news! I’m certainly not a Luddite; I do write on a MacBook, but I also vowed years ago that I would never get an iPhone. Too expensive, ethically iffy, and far too fancy for a person like me who rarely uses actively avoids talking on the phone. But then I made my 5-year plan and decided I needed to make my first short film by the end of the year…and Virgin Mobile had a $25/month plan to go with their $200 iPhone 5s, so…I now own an iPhone. And for the past 3 days I’ve been at the Apple store taking advantage of their free workshops. I may go back again tomorrow if I think I’m ready to brush up on editing with iMovie. For now, I’m working on my script and I’m thinking about an important conversation I had yesterday with my radical friends on the west coast. We’re not crazy about social media and the pressure for creatives to “maintain a presence” on platforms like Twitter, but we also recognize the need to get OUR message out into the world. So what’s an introvert to do? I’ve got a few videos that don’t circulate all that much, but they exist and so give other folks a chance to hear my voice. It’s a bit like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea—my little film won’t compete with flashier productions on trendier topics, but maybe my thoughts on “Black magic” will find that one person who feels stranded, hopeless, or adrift. My BlackademicsTV talk is on the long side at 15 minutes, so I’m aiming for under 3 minutes this time around. Not going to worry about what I’ll look like—this is about VOICE and believing we all have something valuable to say. Will anyone hear me? I figure if people find my books, someone somewhere will find this little film. And maybe they’ll be inspired to make their own film. At the iPhone Basics workshop on Friday, my friend Rosa and I were the youngst people at the table—everyone else was elderly and an immigrant! They’ve embraced smartphone technology so it’s about time I did the same. Look for Film #1 next month!

island dreams

I woke up on Tuesday thinking about Whale Rider. There are two films that absolutely destroy me, and that’s one of them (the other is Billy Elliott). Last week I was in a writing slump so I did some research on folktales for a write-for-hire gig; I’ve always wanted to write about a mermaid, and was happy to come across a Sirena story from Guam. A few days later, I watched a documentary on veterans in Guam and realized I have a lot to learn about the Pacific Islands (Disney’s version of Polynesian culture is on its way). On Wednesday I wrote over a thousand words and decided to treat myself to a matinee; Hunt for the Wilderpeople was playing at the Angelika so I went to see it without knowing much about the film (spoilers ahead). It is HILARIOUS but there were some problematic parts for me and I left the theater unsure whether I wanted to watch Lord of the Rings or Whale Rider (I love both, but chose the latter). This month I’ve committed to seeing films that have people of color at the center, and Wilderpeople met that criteria because one of the stars is a Māori boy, Julian Dennison. He brilliantly plays Ricky Baker, a 13-year-old foster child who has been labeled “a bad egg” by Paula, the caseworker responsible for finding him one last placement on a remote farm with Bella and Hec. Paula sees Ricky as a “thug” who is beyond redemption and the boy is clearly inspired by US hip hop culture (he sports a hoodie, tags walls with graffiti, aspires to be a “gangsta,” and at one point he admits the deceased rapper Tupac is his only friend). Bella is loving and welcomes haiku-writing Ricky into their modest home but Hec is a loner who has no use for the boy; when Bella dies suddenly, the caseworker returns for Ricky but he sets a fire to fake his own death and flees into the bush with his new pet (a pitbull named Tupac). He quickly gets lost but is found by Hec and the two wind up bonding as fugitives on a five-month run from the police and child welfare services. As you can probably tell from the images I’ve included, the problematic parts of the film for me were the moments when Ricky “played Indian” (see Debbie Reese’s analysis of this same issue in Lane Smith’s latest picture book) The film’s writer/director is Māori and half the actors in the film are as well, but there was no mention of indigenous history, which I found odd. What percentage of kids in foster care in NZ are indigenous, and what is that experience like? Ricky inadvertently and then deliberately accuses Hec of “molestering” him, but in a serious moment he also reveals that a friend from the group home committed suicide after being abused by her foster father. When Ricky and Hec venture into the bush, there’s no mention of the history of land ownership. How did those thousands of hectares become a national park? When Hec admits that he can’t read, Ricky cruelly teases him by performing the role of a “dumb savage” (I’m not sure how to describe it, but that’s how it read to me). By the end of the film, Ricky does end up placed with a Māori family he met while in the bush, which gave me hope (he also invites Hec to live with them). Before she died, Bella told Ricky about a lake that seems to feature in Māori mythology, and that possibly served as his introduction to his cultural heritage. Isolated from his cultural community, Ricky immersed himself in US hip hop culture, which does create some comedic moments in the film (at one point he cocks a hunting rifle and hollers, “Shit just got real!”—a dramatic gesture mimicked by elderly White Hec who doesn’t grasp the cultural significance). But it also makes Black culture look ridiculous and/or only violent, and even though I know that rap music has empowered marginalized youth around the world, it hurts to see young brown men modeling themselves after Black “gangstas.” While watching Whale Rider last night, I noticed that a father recently released from prison leaves the cultural heritage school his son attends to join his tough-guy friends in a car blasting rap music—so rap figures as the antithesis of indigenous cultural awareness rather than the tool to heighten, promote, and preserve one’s history/heritage. I’ve been watching HBO’s The Night Of and EVERY Black character in the show is criminal and/or pathological. In a way, the young Pakistani-American wrongly charged with murder is in Rikers because he wanted to “be cool” and party with the Black male athletes he tutored at college. Now he’s in prison being mentored by the kingpin Black criminal who controls the inmates (all Black) and corrections officers (also all Black). I keep saying I won’t watch another episode but…I’m probably going to see Disney’s Moana, too. We look for the value, right? I should say that I thoroughly enjoyed Hunt for the Wilderpeople and will probably see it again in the theater just so I can discuss it afterward with a friend. And the film IS a comedy, so perhaps it’s unfair and/or unrealistic to “burden” it with these considerations. And clearly I’m viewing it through a US lens. If you’ve seen it, let me know what you think.

summer slide

It’s August! Summer is winding down and I’m wrapping up some projects in order to start others. Last week I finished Dragons in a Bag; at 24K words, it’s lower middle grade with illustrations—or will be whether I publish it myself or if my agent finds it a home. The next day I started working on a story for my write-for-hire gig; you’re basically writing on spec, which hasn’t worked out for me in the past, but my boss seems pleased with this story so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. An extra check this summer would make it possible for me to self-publish some books this fall, and right now I’m focusing on The Return and Milo’s Museum. Purple Wong is working on the illustrations for the picture book, and I just got the first sketch from Sara Golish for the cover of the YA novel. So much talent! I feel truly blessed to have the opportunity to work with these amazing artists.

Last Wednesday my BookUp reading club came to an end out in Hollis, Queens. I’ve worked with kids since I was 16, but this job is really the only chance I’ve had to just READ with kids—that’s the focus of the club, and the kids absolutely LOVE to read aloud. We wrapped up with Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and had a really great conversation as we read about whether it’s okay to tease others just because you have been or are being bullied. On Sunday I was in Queens once more for the inaugural book festival. Our panel on the evolution of YA lit was fantastic—I got to meet Sarah Beth Durst, Marina Budhos, Denise Patrick, and Stacy Whitman shared her birthday Butterfinger with me as well as Tu Books’ latest release Perfect Liars by Kimberly Reid. I connected with some aspiring writers, book bloggers, and filmmakers before heading back to Brooklyn. At one point we discussed When We Was Fierce, an offensive YA novel that Candlewick has wisely decided NOT to release this month after online agitation by Black women and their allies. If the book had been released and our concerns had been ignored (as they often are), what are the chances that WWWF would have gone on to win the Newbery Medal? I keep thinking about the saying, “Never cast pearls before swine,” which isn’t about calling anyone a pig. To me it means, “Don’t give something of value to someone who can’t appreciate its worth.” There’s a part of me that resents the fact that my novels don’t often get reviewed, which is why I pressured Booklist to create an inclusive indie review column (mission accomplished). But what’s the point if white reviewers can’t discriminate between racist stereotypes deployed by an outsider and hard truths presented by an insider? At the end of the day, I have no control over that so I’m going to focus on what I can control—my own writing. The goal this month is to finish The Return. It’s been 2 years since I went to Senegal but I picked up some Senegalese food for lunch yesterday and hope that will help put me in the right frame of mind….

Much of this is summed up in my latest newsletter, which you can read here. Time to get back to writing…