Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 47

at ease

Where do you feel most at ease? I miss being in the classroom because when I’m teaching, I feel like my best version of myself. I love talking to kids about my books, and this visit to BCS (pictured above) was fantastic—plus they sent me an awesome thank-you letter. But presenting on my books is different than designing a lesson on material that’s not mine. Today I had my first class with the amazing middle grade students at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School. So many hands in the air! And their signals—I LOVE the hand signals they make whenever they agree or disagree with a classmate. No one’s talking over anyone else, there’s no arguing—it’s so efficient! And the students were thoughtful and earnest as we talked about home, humanity, and history…it’s very different leading a discussion with preteens rather than (young) adults, but still satisfying to see students so engaged. I intend to use this same lesson plan with my adult class, though I’m getting worried about enrollment. I need to reach out to some public libraries and churches this week. I really want the class to be intergenerational. In my experience, having elders in the class is always a plus—they teach as much as they learn…

out of the blue

On Monday my SLJ article went up and within 24 hours the kind folks on Twitter had started to spread the word. My inbox filled with notifications and as I was sifting through them all, I came across this message:

Dear Zetta,

I am happy to inform you that your article, “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks.”  which appeared in Jeunesse 5.2 (Winter 2013), has won the ChLA Article Award!  Your official letter will be in the mail but I wanted to say congratulations and hope that you will be able to join us at the conference in Richmond to receive your award. The committee thoroughly enjoyed reading your article.  


All the best,
Dr. Tammy L. Mielke
Chair, Article Award Committee

I was stunned—and immediately emailed the Chair to make sure it wasn’t a mistake. My ChLA membership has lapsed and I wasn’t sure if I’d been nominated by a friend. But it turns out the committee simply reads all the articles on children’s literature that they can find, and my essay grabbed their attention. I nearly trashed that essay after being told by two white male editors that it didn’t match the “tone” of other contributors to their anthology—this after they practically begged me to submit an essay. I suspected they realized at the last minute that they had no scholars of color in their book…anyway. I withdrew my essay and left it on my hard drive for a year before submitting it to Jeunesse —a Canadian journal (!!!)—where it was appreciated and embraced. If you’d like to read my Jeunesse article, let me know and I’ll email you a PDF. Here’s the abstract:

This paper will examine the use of New York City parks as magical sites of discovery and recovery in speculative fiction for young readers. According to Terence Young, the nineteenth-century rationale for urban parks was that they would promote “public health, prosperity, social coherence, and democratic equality;” although city park designers were initially concerned with serving men, they gradually incorporated the perceived needs of women, adolescents, and children. Young further contends that urban park design, with its vision of “a universal sense of nature,” eventually gave way to a modernizing process of “spatial segmentation and specialization;” park designers rejected the need for “generic spaces linked by a composed repetition of earth, water, and the same plant species throughout,” and opted instead for greater variation in order to accentuate specific locations within the park, which were designed to serve specific groups.

It could be argued that speculative fiction for young readers has gone through a similar process of modernization, shifting from “universal” and “generic” narratives with repetitive features (witches, wizards, werewolves, etc. derived from Western European folklore) to a sort of “specialization” that emphasizes the particular cultural practices and histories of the racially diverse urban population. In her thirty novels, Ruth Chew use city spaces like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Summer Magic, 1977) and Prospect Park (The Hidden Cave, 1973) to engage young readers in the magical adventures of white, middle-class children. My own speculative novels (A Wish After Midnight and Ship of Souls) utilize these exact same sites to reveal the complexity and ethnic diversity of urban youth while conjuring the suppressed history of free and enslaved blacks in New York City. Urban parks hold specific significance for African Americans: the construction of Central Park in the 1850s led to the destruction of Seneca Village, a settlement of predominantly black landowners. Yet city parks can also be sites of preservation: the discovery of human remains in lower Manhattan in 1991 culminated in the designation of the African Burial Ground as a National Park Service site, and the Weeksville Cultural Center is currently undergoing a massive city- and state-funded renovation. Urban parks function as sites of tradition and innovation, and thus are central to my “Afro-urban” project, which seeks to represent the various ruptures and responses that shape black history and identity.

Terrence Young, “Modern Urban Parks,” Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 4, Thematic

Issue: American Urban Geography (Oct., 1995), pp. 535-551.

I’ll have to see if I can find a way to get to Richmond in June; right now I’m supposed to spend June in the UK doing research for the CAAR conference, but plans change. I’ll be attending the ACL conference in April and can’t wait to break bread with Laura Atkins, Janine Macbeth, and Maya Gonzalez! Time to plot revolution…

fragile no more

In 2011 I was asked to write an essay for School Library Journal (“A Storied Past“). This month I’ve been given another chance to reflect on my writing life, and this time the focus is on community-based publishing. Here’s a taste:

I know better than to turn to the publishing industry when I seek justice for “my children:” Trayvon, Renisha, Jordan, Islan, Ramarley, Aiyana, and Tamir. I know not to hope that industry gatekeepers will rush to publish books for the children of Eric Garner as they struggle to make sense of the murder of their father at the hands of the New York Police Department. But I also know that children’s literature can help to counter the racially biased thinking that insists Michael Brown was “no angel” but rather “a demon” to be feared and destroyed. I believe there’s a direct link between the misrepresentation of Black youth as inherently criminal and the justification given by those who so brazenly take their lives.

The publishing industry can’t solve this problem single-handedly, but the erasure of Black youth from children’s literature nonetheless functions as a kind of “symbolic annihilation.” Despite the fact that the majority of primary school children in the U.S. are now kids of color, the publishing industry continues to produce books that overwhelmingly feature white children only. The message is clear: the lives of kids of color don’t matter.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my vision—which is shared by others in my community. Right now the west coast is calling my name; my radical women friends will be out in force at this event held by the Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California (ACLNC) Institute—All Due Respect: A Dialogue about Diversity, Equity, and Creating Safe Spaces for All Youth (you can register here, and see the flyer here). Laura Atkins (who contributed to my SLJ article) will be speaking on a panel chaired by Nina Lindsay who just wrote an important article in SLJ on diversity and children’s publishing. Her co-panelists? Jacqueline Woodson, Malinda Lo, and Aya de Leon. I wanna go!

Tonight I’m speaking to Prof. Michelle Martin’s graduate students at the University of South Carolina; tomorrow morning I’m speaking with Kori Miller. Wednesday is my first day at Weeksville Heritage Center. And THEN the novel-writing begins…

Weeksville photo shoot

My talented photographer friend, Valerie Caesar, has taken some fantastic photographs in the 1930s historic house at Weeksville Heritage Center. Out of 130 (!!!) I’ve narrowed it down to 20. Which one do you think best represents me as writer-in-residence?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

frame/work

I’m setting up a reading schedule so I can finally get through this book, Brooklyn’s Promised Land. Nonfiction can be challenging and historians aren’t known for being outstanding storytellers, but the latest book on Weeksville is comprehensive and necessary reading for my residency. I figure I should try to read nonfiction for at least one hour every day, and I’ll read on the train up to Harlem if I find it too hard to focus here at home. Today I’ve been thinking about the picture book I’ve been commissioned to write. I think I’m going to write three—one for each of the historic houses at the Weeksville Heritage Center. Each house represents a different era—1860s, 1900s, 1930s—and I can incorporate historical figures who might have lived in the community during those times. I know I want to write a ghost story and send a contemporary kid back in time…not sure about Book #3. I’m sure looking at the archival material will give me all kinds of ideas. I could write a childhood biography of Susan McKinney Seward, daughter of a Weeksville landowner who became one of the first African American women doctors in the US. For me, the hardest part of writing historical fiction is selecting only a handful of details out of hundreds. I only need one or two “true things” to serve as the foundation for a good story, but I have to comb through everything in order to find the facts that resonate most with me. Aside from The Magic Mirror, I haven’t really written historical fiction for young children (age 5-8). My Texan illustrator is back at work on Billie’s Blues, which touches on the Great Migration and lynching, but mostly I write historical fiction for teens. That way I can write honestly, without feeling pressure to sugarcoat the bitter truth. Judah’s Tale is a lot darker than A Wish After Midnight, which may surprise and/or disappoint readers. But I will be SO glad when I finally finish that book in May and never again have to hear, “When will the sequel be done?”

teachers touch hearts

Maya Gonzalez always urges us to keep our hearts open, even/especially during difficult times. That was my first thought after reading this beautiful letter from a new teacher who shared Bird with a struggling student. I “met” this young woman a few years ago when I Skyped into a class taught by Dr. Rachelle Washington. This is how we build readers—step by small step:

Dear Dr. Washington,

I was in your Children’s Literature class about two years ago and have been doing my practicum and student teaching at *** Academy this year. I have wanted to email you about one of the students in my practicum 2nd grade class first semester named T. He was so below-level in reading, my teacher asked if I could work with him one-on-one during their reading time. He didn’t appear to have any motivation to read on his own and she couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When watching him choose a book, I noticed that he selected an option way above his reading level with an African American student on the cover, and it clicked that he wanted to read literature he could “see himself in”- your advice to us throughout your class. I told his teacher this could be one of the problems, and just got a “shoulder shrug” back. Those books were the only options they had.

The next day I brought in Zeta Elliot’s “Bird,” even though it was above his comprehension level. I knew that we could avoid frustration by reading it together- he would do the words he knew, and I could read the others. I can not tell you what a changed child I saw! I think the drawings got his attention the most, and we would draw a bird together and then look at the word describing the drawing. For instance, one of the birds was “perched.” We would draw the picture, write out the parts of the word, “p-er-ch-ed,” so that he could see he knew the parts. T was sounding out words I would never have guessed he could have- it was just finding a book that motivated him enough to show his teacher what all he could do! At the beginning of reading EVERY day, he would ask, “Miss, did you bring the bird book?” We also looked at Zeta Elliot’s picture and talked about how we Skyped her in class and that if he loved drawing and writing, he could grow to create something like her one day.

Finally the semester ended, and I left the book for T with all of the drawings and hard words broken apart. I wrote his name on the inside cover so he would know it was totally his- he was absent on my last day. He knew that if he worked hard to get through the challenging words, he was going to earn the book to have for himself. I still see the students from that class and give them hugs, but I have to tell you how it felt to see him in the hall just a few days ago, and hear him burst out, “Miss, my mentor at *** (after school care) and I have still been reading “Bird” together. I love it!” He was SO excited and enthusiastic!! It was by far one of the most rewarding experiences I have had student teaching and have realized how important your advice two years ago was.

Thank you Dr. Washington!

 

Magic & Memory

Come write with me!

MAGIC & MEMORY:

AN EXPLORATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORICAL FANTASY

Wednesdays 6:30 – 8:30pm

April 15 – May 6

Writer-in-residence Zetta Elliott will offer a free, four-week writing class at Weeksville Heritage Center. Designed for beginners, this class will offer an introduction to historic Weeksville and an opportunity to write creatively about the 19th-century Brooklyn community.

Participants will be required to keep a writing journal, and will be asked to read texts that combine history and fantasy (including Zetta Elliott’s time-travel novel A Wish After Midnight, which will be provided). Does fantasy fiction offer an escape from reality or can it help us to envision a more just world? Together we will consider whether magic helps African Americans to remember, reconstruct, and/or recover from the past.

Zetta Elliott is an award-winning author of thirteen books for young readers. Her novel-in-progress, Judah’s Tale, is set in historic Weeksville. She earned her PhD in American Studies from NYU and has taught at the college level for ten years. Learn more at www.zettaelliott.com.

To register for this FREE class, email writer@weeksvillesociety.org

Enrollment is limited to 20 participants.

The position of Writer-in-Residence was established with a grant from the Malka Foundation.

 

step by step

My two-month residency at Weeksville Heritage Center will begin in one week! We’ve set up a new blog and this is the official press release. On Friday I had some photos taken in the historic 1930s house, and right now I’m working on a flyer to advertise my writing workshop for adults—Magic & Memory: An Exploration of African American Historical Fantasy. Next step: developing the curriculum for my middle grade writers. Please spread the word!

Weeksville Heritage Center

Contact: Stephanie Cunningham

158 Buffalo Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11213

(718) 756-5250

media@weeksvillesociety.org

Zetta Elliott to be Writer-in-Residence at Weeksville Heritage Center

Dr. Zetta Elliott will be the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the Weeksville Heritage Center for Spring 2015.

Weeksville Heritage Center, a museum charged with keeping the original spirit of the historic African American community alive, seeks to heighten family literacy in our community through innovative and impactful educational programs. Our newest initiative, Turn the Page, is an essential tool for promoting self-discovery, personal expression, and empowerment in Brooklyn.

As Writer-in-Residence, Elliott will teach historical fiction writing classes for children and adults. She will also present on her own historical novels at public schools within the Weeksville district. Elliott will host a literary salon during Poetry Month and will read from her new novel at a community reading in May.

Elliott has worked with children for twenty-five years and is the author of thirteen books for young readers, including the award-winning picture book Bird. Her time-travel novel, A Wish After Midnight, was published by Skyscape in 2010. The sequel, also set in Civil War-era Brooklyn, will be completed during the residency along with a specially commissioned picture book for children.

Born in Canada, Elliott moved to NYC in 1994 after graduating from Bishop’s University. She earned a PhD in American Studies from New York University in 2003. Elliott is an independent scholar who has taught at Ohio University, Louisiana State University, Mount Holyoke College, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. She currently conducts school visits for the Brooklyn Public Library.

As Writer-in-Residence, Elliott will have access to the research materials of the 5th of July Resource Center for Self-Determination & Freedom. She will also have a desk in the Education and Cultural Arts Building to work on her next novel and to meet with community members. Her appointment begins March 15 and ends May 16, 2015.

The position of Writer in Residence was established with a grant from the Malka Foundation.

For further information contact Tia Powell Harris, President and Executive Director of the Weeksville Heritage Center, at (718) 756-5250 or tia@weeksvillesociety.org.

 

we were here

portrait by James Van Der Zee

How do you write a book about a woman with nothing but a name? I have a queue when it comes to writing projects: first in line is this essay for School Library Journal, then the sequel to A Wish After Midnight, then Billie’s Blues, then The Hummingbird’s Tongue. I’m presenting on the latter at a conference in Liverpool in June, but I still think about that project and the challenges that lie ahead. It’s no longer a book about my paternal grandmother because all I have is her name and some anecdotes that may or may not be true. So it’s becoming a different kind of book but one that’s still consistent with my overall project of fighting erasure. Last week I went over to Weeksville for a meeting with the executive director and lead educator. I’m excited to be partnering with Brooklyn Prospect Charter School; their middle grade students will take a historical fiction class with me before publishing their writing in an anthology and taking part in a community reading in May. I’m also looking forward to our literary salon, which will be by invitation only, but we’ll try to film the event. Imagine your favorite Brooklyn artists dressed in period clothes from the 1920s/30s…and I proposed an on-site portrait studio so we can take photos of the guests in all their finery—like the dignified portraits taken by James Van der Zee during the Harlem Renaissance. Everything I do during this two-month residency has to be documented so that funders know what we got up to, but also to leave a historical record. I have nothing that belonged to my grandmother (other than her name) and so have to use my imagination to create a profile of her and a picture of her life. She left nothing behind besides her two children; my father’s been gone for over a decade and my aunt has limited memories. The asylum in Antigua has no record of Rosetta’s commitment; there’s no death certificate. When I was doing research on my mother’s African American ancestors, I met with my great-aunt who proudly pulled out a pair of gloves that once belonged to her aunt. They were going to be donated to a roadside museum—a tiny wood-frame house that most travelers would likely bypass. So I asked to try the gloves on—they reached past my elbows and I felt quite elegant. But my great-aunt grew impatient and made me take them off. And I remember wondering whether it bothered her that I was Black—the only visibly Black person in a room full of people who had been raised to deny their “Negro ancestry.” On another trip to Grey County I stopped at an antiques shop and there was a large framed photograph on the wall of a nineteenth-century Black woman. The shop owner didn’t know the woman’s name and had acquired the piece through an estate sale. It was out of my price range but every once in a while I think about that woman in the portrait…unnamed, unknown, unclaimed. And now in hostile territory because the once interracial community has now become entirely white—and not by accident.

Renee Watson, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, me, Ibi Zoboi, & Dhonielle Clayton

On Saturday we had our second Black Women Writers Hangout up in Harlem. I’d had a full week and did consider pulling out; on Friday night I went to a party and managed to mingle for more than an hour, and then got up the next morning to have breakfast in Chelsea with friends from MA. As an introvert, that meant I only had a little more to give before I shut down and slipped back under my rock. But I was so glad I went to Harlem because spending three hours with these women was invigorating! We talked about the publishing industry, and coalition building, and Empire/Game of Thrones/How to Get Away with Murder. I woke with a migraine on Sunday and took a much-needed day of silence, but I’m already looking forward to seeing these women again in April. On March 18 we’ll all be at the Schomburg to hear Renée talk about her new novel, This Side of Home, with Jacqueline Woodson (get your tickets here). Whenever we get together we always take a moment to pose for a photograph. Most of what we discuss is off the record and not to be repeated, but we still want our gatherings to be remembered. And we want other writers to know that community IS possible when you commit to those who are on the same path. That’s one of the goals of my residency: to create a community of writers on a site that historically served as sanctuary for all kinds of Black people—free, fugitive, and everything in between…

left out

I think about my father a lot. If you read this blog regularly, you’ve probably noticed that by now. There’s a lot of debate around trigger warnings but I do give them in my classes if I’m about to show a film with potentially traumatizing content. But trigger warnings have limited effectiveness because you don’t know just what might set off a heightened reaction in one of your students. When it comes to my father, it sometimes feels like everything is a trigger. Like the time I was on an elevated train and passed over a junkyard guarded by an old dog with a limp. Suddenly everything was a blur because a stab of heart pain filled my eyes with tears as I thought about how frail my father became as he lost his battle with cancer. Last fall I bought The Contract for my cousin Kodie; he’s a mixed-race teenage boy who excels at sports. He doesn’t play baseball but I thought he might relate to Derek Jeter’s story about the code he had to live by to fulfill his dream of playing for the Yankees. I had a few issues with the terms of the contract and found myself wondering if Jeter is a Republican, but mostly I thought about my own brief time as a Little League player and all the other kids like me who didn’t grow up with two dedicated parents. I don’t have a problem with celebrity authors (Pharrell is the latest to get a book deal); we don’t live in a meritocracy, and if a professional athlete or actor can get kids to read, that’s fine by me. The Contract felt very aspirational to me, rather than inspirational. But we don’t have a lot of novels that show Black middle-class families living in the Midwest, and so that book could be a “window” for many urban kids. I did wonder, however, whether low-income urban kids being raised by working-class single mothers would buy into the idea of a contract: if you do X, Y, and Z, your end result will be Q. I’m all for promoting good sportsmanship (what’s the gender-neutral equivalent?) but much of Jeter’s success comes from his family and home life—having two educated, employed, engaged parents—factors that are out of the control of kids. As I was reading the book I found myself thinking about the moment when I realized I would never be a professional athlete. I played softball for two years and loved it, but tennis was my true passion. I had posters of Martina Navratilova (lefty!) and Boris Becker all over my room but I had no one to drive me to and from tournaments, I was paying for my own equipment and trainer with my part-time retail job, and there was no one cheering for me on the sidelines. At fifteen, I was also way too old. This was long before the Williams sisters broke onto the scene, but I’ve never been as hard on their father/coach as everyone else. When I finally let go of my tennis dreams, I knew that my success in life was entirely up to me; I decided only to pursue things that required no parental participation. Like academics—and creative writing.

Ebony Thomas just posted an excellent article (“Left Out” by Andrew McCutchen) on Facebook that addresses the barriers to success that contribute to the decreasing number of African American baseball players. McCutchen uses his own journey into the big leagues to explain the violation that led Jackie Robinson West, the Little League team from Chicago’s South Side, to be stripped of its national title. He asks, “When you’re a kid from a low-income family who has talent, how do you get recognized?” And this question applies to every arena, not only sports. McCutchen’s answer is external support: “If you’re a poor kid with raw ability, it’s not enough. You need to be blessed with many mentors to step in and help you.”

When I was writing my essay on the future of children’s literature, I really wanted to cite this article on “relatability.” Have we become a society of narcissistic consumers who reject “window” texts in favor of “mirrors” only? Rebecca Mead explains that “to demand that a work be ‘relatable’ expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her.” This laziness isn’t only found in readers but reviewers, as Malindo Lo’s recent blog series reveals. Mead rightly concludes that “to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure.” So I tried to be conscious of my own issues as I read The Contract, and I hope it is inspiring to kids of all races and classes, from various family configurations. My cousin’s Black father is largely MIA, and his white mother has her hands full with two younger kids. But he does have uncles and aunts who step in and pay for his equipment and training camps. And I hope that will be enough, even as I know that nothing can take the place of an engaged, present parent.

I recently read When I Was the Greatest by Jason Reynolds and was impressed by the family he created for his male protagonist. Ali’s mother is a social worker but to make ends meet, she works a retail job on the side. His father was once incarcerated for shooting a man during a robbery, and now lives out of his car because selling boosted luxury goods doesn’t pay the rent. Ali’s mother warns him against turning out like his father but she doesn’t forbid her kids from seeing him. They all acknowledge and accept his limitations, and in the end, his ability to trade in illegal goods saves the day. As far as I know, my father never broke the law; he was a Christian conservative who voted Republican and got annual Christmas cards from Jim and Tammy Baker. My dad was a good Special Ed. teacher but he wasn’t a perfect parent, and he encouraged me to play sports but rarely showed up for my games. I’m drawn to texts with dysfunctional families and know I’m biased against Stepford-type families, which seem unrealistic to me. But if I didn’t grow up reading about perfect nuclear families, I wouldn’t know that anything else was possible. I remember my shock when my college roommate’s parents called her EVERY night, listened to her talk about her day, and then hung up only after saying, “I love you!” about a dozen times. People actually DO that in real life? My mother still only calls me twice a year, but we started ending our phone conversation with “I love you” because I aspired to have the relationship my roommate had with her mother. Art can compensate for experience by showing us another way of being in the world, which is why we need windows and mirrors—the latter to show us that we’re not alone, and that we can survive the conditions over which we have no control.

Ok, the sun has finally come out so I better hit the park…