Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 53

hot off the press!

They’re here! Two new illustrated books from Rosetta Press. Please share with the kids in your life and with the adults in your social networks. This has been a difficult summer, and I’m proud to share these beautiful books, which celebrate our strength and honor our ancestors.

The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun

On the outside, Zoe looks like an ordinary little girl, but her father knows just how special she is inside. On cloudy days, they pretend that she has swallowed the sun, and then together Zoe and her father put it back up in the sky. After the terrible events of September 11th, Zoe decides she must secretly swallow the sun both to keep it safe, and to fill the void left by her missing father. As the days pass, however, the sun inside Zoe becomes too heavy a burden to bear. With her mother’s help, Zoe learns to accept her father’s death, and she puts the sun back in the sky where it belongs.

$10.00 book/$3.99 ebook    

 

The Magic Mirror

When a boy at school hurts Kamara’s feelings, she goes home and asks her grandmother if the mean words are really true. Gramma tells Kamara to go upstairs and clean the old mirror in the guest room. But when Kamara starts to rub the glass, she discovers that the mirror is magical! Kamara sees brave women from the past who faced many challenges yet never gave up hope. When the historical journey ends in the twenty-first century, the mirror once again shows Kamara her own reflection. She sheds her self-doubt and instead draws strength from the courage of the women she met in the magic mirror.

$10.00 book/$3.99 ebook          

Rosetta Press titles can be ordered online, from Baker & Taylor/Ingram, and at bookstores. Learn more at www.rosettapress.wordpress.com/for-kids/

 

Treasure or Trash? The Argument for Reviewing Self-Published Books

I’ve got two new books coming out this week and so I’m thinking about how to connect with readers. A friend let me know that some bloggers were disappointed that I hadn’t reached out last spring, but my decision was based on the widespread policy of many bloggers: indie authors need not apply. If you’re a book reviewer and you would like copies of The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun and/or The Magic Mirror , feel free to leave a comment or email me at info at zettaelliott dot com. Below is a “pitch” I made to a kidlit review journal a few months back—it was warmly received so maybe a change is gonna come after all…trying to keep hope alive!

  

***

Treasure or Trash? The Argument for Reviewing Self-Published Books

     The bias against self-published books is not unjustified; many are poorly written and shoddily produced but when the traditional publishing industry excludes so many talented writers of color, self-publishing is often their only recourse. If we all agree that the traditional publishing industry is not as inclusive as it needs to be, is it fair punish those writers who have sought out alternative ways to tell their stories? There is a large pool of talent in this country, yet the publishing industry is only giving certain individuals the opportunity to shine.


     The marginalization of writers of color is the result of barriers placed along the path to publication for far too many talented writers. Some Black organizations recognize this reality: awards like the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the NAACP Image Award, and QBR’s Phillis Wheatley Award accept nominations of self-published books. Respected bloggers at The Pirate Tree and The Book Smugglers don’t discriminate against self-published books, and their reviews prove that indie authors can contribute a lot to the field of children’s and YA literature—if they’re given a chance.


     Members of the children’s literature community are paying close attention to the diversity debate but the industry will not change overnight. If the most trusted review outlets exclude self-published books, then they are upholding the status quo by privileging a system that clearly disadvantages writers of color. They are also denying their followers access to titles that might help to fill the “diversity gap.”


     The Brown Bookshelf recently published a series called “Making Our Own Market.” They note that although many African American authors have been publishing independently for decades, “self-publishing still brings a stigma. The books are less likely to be reviewed, considered for school and library collections, and seen as on par with traditionally published titles. At The Brown Bookshelf, we grapple with covering them too. We receive a range of work from outstanding to less than professional. But if we want to change the face of publishing, we need to welcome self-published treasures too.”

another way forward

A while back I wrote a post about “queering kidlit” in which I critiqued the attempt to prove that books by/about people of color are “just like” books by/about whites. I later asked my friend for some further reading and she pointed me to this article by Cathy Cohen. This was JUST the quote I needed:

transformational politics…a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.” ~Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens

I plan to cite this article in my Kidlitcon presentation in October. It looks like a really great line-up; if you’ll be attending, please let me know. Right now I’m trying to prepare a short video statement about the relationship between the crisis in Ferguson and the crisis within the children’s publishing industry. I’m struggling because I don’t know what language to use—can’t be too angry or bitter (and lose the softness that makes me a woman people will listen to) but I’m not feeling optimistic these days. Yet to write for kids, you do have to have hope—and all artists do, right? Otherwise why create? So my bit of sunshine for today is the cover for my 9/11 story The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun. When systems fail, you have to find another way forward…

 

thin skin

©2013-2014 Nemki

I’ve been thinking lately about this essay by Marita Bonner, “On Being a Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925). Black women have been trying to hold onto their humanity for such a long time, and it makes one so very, very tired. I think I wrote my latest story about a bunny because that’s one way of staying “soft”—same with all the cat videos I post on Facebook. I don’t have a whole lot of faith in human beings these days, and I am working on that. But it’s hard… 

Every part of you becomes bitter.

But—“In Heaven’s name, do not grow bitter. Be bigger than they are”—exhort white friends who have never had to draw breath in a Jim-Crow train. Who have never had petty putrid insult dragged over them—drawing blood—like pebbled sand on your body where the skin is tenderest. On your body where the skin is thinnest and tenderest.

You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder even if you can manage a smile around your eyes—without getting steely and brittle and losing the softness that makes you a woman.

For chips make you bend your body to balance them. And once you bend, you lose your poise, your balance, and the chip gets into you. The real you. You get hard.

…And many things in you can ossify…

a place inside of me

I’m back on Facebook, but I’m limiting myself to 30 minutes per day. This week I’ve felt a lot better, and I’m extremely grateful for my friends who can help me think and talk critically about the crises facing Black people in this country while still remembering to count our blessings. In some ways it feels strange focusing on children’s books when there’s so much chaos in the world. I’ve spent the summer preparing two new titles for publication—The Girl Who Swallowed the Sun and The Magic Mirror—and I’ve resized three of the four titles I released last spring. Next week I’ll develop my strategy for getting these books into kids’ hands. Even the children of Ferguson are heading back to school, and children’s literature always has a role to play in helping kids to better understand their world and their emotions. When I first started writing for kids I kept a chronology so I’d know how my stories evolved. Right after I wrote The Magic Mirror I wrote a long poem called “A Place Inside of Me.” I can’t remember what prompted me to write it—the shooting of Amadou Diallo? The brutalization of Abner Louima? The lynching of Laura Nelson? This is one of the many manuscripts I will have to self-publish because white editors would be too scared to touch it. There are ten stanzas altogether but here are a few:

A Place Inside of Me

there is a place inside of me

a space deep down inside of me

where all my feelings go…

there is joy inside of me

a happiness deep down inside of me

that glows as bright and warm as the sun

and shines delight on everything I see

there is sorrow inside of me

a sadness deep down inside of me

that is cold and dark

as a watery grave

at the bottom of the sea

there is hunger inside of me

a yearning deep down inside of me

that refuses to be silenced or bound with chains

and insists on being

free

there is pride inside of me

no shame deep down inside of me

for I know how long and hard we have struggled

and against all odds my people have emerged

strong

triumphant

& beautiful…

© Zetta Elliott

How do Black children process the endless killing of members of their community/family/race? How should artists and authors help these kids? Why does the kidlit community so often remain silent on subjects that matter to Black people?

comfort zone

I took a peek at Facebook today and think I may need to take another week off. I missed it at first and I have some beautiful artwork I’d really like to share, but I can’t tie together all the angry, sorrowful threads that stem from the situation in Ferguson. Last week someone posted a graphic on Facebook that read, “The more you stay in your comfort zone, the smaller it gets. The more you leave your comfort zone, the bigger it gets.” Right now I’m stepping out of my comfort zone by filling an order for 250 books. I’m an organized person, but I don’t have much experience as a book distributor, and after lugging 300 books home from my office in a broken suitcase, I have no real desire to haul boxes of books to the post office. But I did it today, and I’ll take another box tomorrow until my new hand cart arrives later this week. I don’t want to be a publisher; I’m doing this because I feel I have no other choice. But if I’m going to do it, I’m going to try to do it right. That means making mistakes and learning as quickly as I can so I can keep moving forward. I’m negotiating a contract right now for a picture book and it feels *so* good to be treated with respect by this publisher. I have a tendency to withdraw and I can live in the world inside my head for days on end. That’s why I consume so many hours of television and radio news—I know I need to stay connected to what’s happening in the real world. And as an artist, I need to bear witness. PBS just aired a segment on perceptions of racial bias in the Ferguson situation; not surprisingly, most whites feel race isn’t an issue and most Blacks feel that it is. My impulse is to pull back, to avoid all those who refuse to face reality—including those Facebook friends who post pictures of cupcakes and nothing about Gaza or Ferguson. But if I practice avoidance then I can’t be too hard on others who do it too. Maybe art is the bridge between us…

props

Finding Fela is a (long) cautionary tale: be original, be defiant, build knowledge, but don’t be an egomaniac. There were a few too many gratuitous booty/crotch shots in the film, and I found myself saying over and over in my mind, “Lord, don’t ever let me be a prop in someone else’s play.” Someone really needs to make a movie about Fela’s wives. His daughter by his first wife, Yeni, provided some insight into her father’s chaotic household/lifestyle, and his African American lover, Sandra Izsadore, got to share her point of view. But the only funeral they covered was Fela’s; he died of AIDS and refused to practice safe sex, so what did that mean for the dozens of women fighting each other to have sex with him each night? The footage in the film shows his wives endlessly applying makeup, smoking joints, styling their hair, and sitting silently behind Fela during interviews when they aren’t gyrating on stage. Much of the film focuses on Bill T. Jones’ experience bringing the musical Fela to Broadway, and it helped that he expressed his discomfort around Fela’s treatment of women. He also insisted on Fela’s “madness,” which I found interesting because those who were close to Fela only wanted to focus on his greatness. He was a genius but does that make his destructive behavior inevitable?

I left the theater trying to think of an ending for “The Last Bunny in Brooklyn.” It’s an allegory about race and dislocation. Every time another Black person is killed and it makes the news I think to myself, “It won’t be long now.” But as my wise pigeon explains in the story, “Extinction is a lengthy process.” When angry outbursts occurred following the murder of Eric Brown, I thought of the well-known passage anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells once wrote in her diary:

I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things for my people generally. I have firmly believed that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.

In the 19th century, Ida advocated for migration—if they’re lynching your people in the South, go west. But today, in the 21st century, where should Black people go to avoid “gradual extermination?” If it were possible for me to “gather my race in my arms,” there are a few fools I might leave behind. I’m listening to R&B on Pandora as I write and half the time I have to click on the album cover to see whether the person singing is Black. Whites have learned to sing like Blacks, white writers win acclaim for writing about experiences not their own. Chloe, the last bunny in Brooklyn, asks the wise pigeon, “What’s an artifact?” And he explains, “an artifact is something or someone that is no longer of use to anyone.” Allegories are meant to be subtle and subtlety isn’t a strength of mine…but I’ll see if I can find a way to wrap this story up. Maybe another trip to the garden is in order.

swoon

I’m almost done with this new story, “The Last Bunny in Brooklyn.” The idea came to me a few years ago when I first noticed the absence of bunnies in the botanic garden. Yesterday I decided to do some research and found two helpful women gardeners who answered some of my questions. Turns out rabbits aren’t the main problem in the vegetable garden—that would be rats and raccoons! I never imagined scavengers feasting on fruits and vegetables but I guess it makes sense. Who wouldn’t prefer fresh food to the moldy stuff you find in the trash? And the gardener in the rose garden said she uses cages for young bushes since they’re most vulnerable to rabbits—which are plentiful if you’re around at dawn or dusk when they come out to eat. This story is meant to be an allegory; I’m not sure it works but it felt good to be writing steadily yesterday. No Facebook, a few hours of news consumption, lots of music, a bit of time in nature, and an amazing discovery at the Brooklyn Museum. If you haven’t yet gone to see Swoon’s exhibit, Submerged Motherlands, you need to go NOW. It closes on August 24th and I suspect I’ll be going back again next week. If only Swoon had made Beasts of the Southern Wild…

If I can finish this story in the next couple of hours I think I’ll go see Finding Fela. Keep on feeding the spirit…

no reprieve

I’m taking a break from Facebook. I start each day by turning on the computer, turning on NPR, and checking my email and updates online. But yesterday there were so many posts about police brutality in Ferguson, MO and all over the country—I just had to stop. I went to the park and had to cross the street to avoid the lech in the liquor store and the construction workers at the end of my block. An ambulance slowly wove its way through traffic and the blaring siren brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had enough. Going to the garden today and maybe the museum. Had lunch with a friend yesterday and she encouraged me to add something “light” to my life. I haven’t figured out just what that will be. Right now I’m listening to the radio and Ta-Nehisi Coates is discussing his article on plunder and reparations. It’s not news to me, but many whites in this country—if they bothered to read the article—were no doubt shocked. Whites and Blacks view things so differently—the former seem unwilling, despite overwhelming evidence, to admit that white supremacy shapes our society: the police force, the courts, the banks, the schools, the publishing industry—and the blogosphere (alcohol is not the problem I have with that SLJ cover). A white “friend” on Facebook recently suggested that self-publishing was like “eating at a local place” rather than holding a sit-in to desegregate a Jim Crow lunch counter. In other words, choosing to self-publish is cowardly and less noble than subjecting myself to abuse and rejection at the hands of racist whites. Which prompted me to repost my 2011 essay on women in publishing.

…when I reflect upon my involvement in the literary world, I find that little of my time and energy has gone toward addressing “the fundamental wrongness of gender disparities.” When everyone in your world is female, gender tends not to be the focus. For me, the main problem isn’t that men are impeding my progress as a writer. The truth is, behind every door that has been closed in my face…there’s another woman.

 

Sometimes that woman looks like me, but more often than not, she doesn’t. She belongs to a different race, a different class, and a different culture…

I don’t mean to suggest that publishing is a white women’s club, nor is it my intent to diminish the very real obstacles faced by women writers. I do feel, however, that when we talk about women in publishing, it’s important to consider who’s climbing, who’s lifting, and who’s being left behind.

Allies are out there and they are valuable to me, but against the overwhelming ignorance and denial, I don’t have much hope these days.

I’m working on a new website and my designer asked me to think of songs, colors, and images that define my visual style. We talked for an hour and then hours later I woke up thinking about plantation ruins. I don’t want to romanticize the plantation; for me, it is a symbol of dominance, exploitation, and brutality. But I like the idea of nature overtaking that symbol. My designer asked me to start a board on Pinterest and so now I’m digging through photos from my four trips to Nevis. The one below was taken at Golden Rock Plantation back in 2003. I was a more hopeful person then, even though I had just finished writing my dissertation on lynching. I wonder how I’ll feel about this country ten years from now…

queering kidlit

Tonight I watched a Frontline special about Facebook and today’s teens’ quest to accumulate as many “likes” as possible. It’s a big business, of course, because corporations are closely monitoring internet trends and they’re eager to exploit those who have thousands if not millions of followers. I’m not a Luddite and I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook, but watching this report made me ill. The content that goes viral has little if any value to me and I certainly don’t blog about provocative issues in order to gain subscribers. I use blogging as a way of organizing and sharing my thoughts, and I use Facebook as a way of staying connected to the world even when I’m indulging in an introvert episode of silence and/or seclusion. Last week a friend, author Olumide Popoola, posted this quote by the late José Muñoz and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I had the chance to take a course with José while I was in grad school at NYU but didn’t. I missed a few important opportunities in those days and still regret that I gave up a chance to “study with the best.” I never took a course on queer theory but I think it’s time I took a closer look.

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”

– José Ésteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

Lately on Facebook I’ve seen a lot of shared posts from WeNeedDiverseBooks in which popular books about white kids are placed alongside similarly-themed books that feature kids of color: “If You Liked X, Read Y Next.” One person posted so many of these that I nearly unfollowed her. The more I saw these “comps,” the angrier I got. It’s a clever idea, but one that seems designed to attract white readers. That’s always troubling to me but I was more concerned by the way in which “comps” end up reaffirming the status quo. I think again of that article on relatability—do you really need to be lured across the color line by the promise of sameness? Amazon uses this sales strategy quite effectively on its site and I am often interested in seeing which other books people buy when they purchase one of mine. But what happens when you write a book that doesn’t have a white comp? If you can’t say, “It’s just like Divergent!” does that mean no one will find value in your particular narrative? My publisher listed A Wrinkle in Time on the back cover of A Wish After Midnight, which is a ridiculous comparison. I insisted they add Octavia Butler’s Kindred, but of course, many (if not most) white readers don’t even know about Octavia…

A friend of mine is a scholar who focuses on transgressive sexuality and we’ve often talked about the impact of the marriage rights campaign. Like many others, it bothers her that so much time, energy, and resources are going into this single issue when the LGBTQ  community (and queer youth in particular) have other pressing needs to address. Like me, she’s single, child-free, and uninterested in marriage. She wishes that the LGBTQ community had pushed for something far greater than marriage, which in some ways reduces the message of equality to, “See? We (homosexuals) are just like you (heterosexuals). We just want what you want.” Marriage across the developing world is on the decline, so why invest so much in a ship that’s sinking? Of course, I support marriage equality and want that right to exist for anyone who wishes to claim it. But I don’t want a nuclear family. And I won’t have access to the benefits that are reserved only for married people. Queerness, it seems to me, is about what else is possible when we stop clinging to the status quo.

So what would that look like in the children’s literature community? It might mean taking a course with Maya Gonzalez’ School of the Free Mind instead of being the only person of color in an MFA program. It might mean self-publishing uncomfortable or unusual books instead of pruning our stories until they conform to “mainstream” standards. My black feminist advisor in grad school used to insist: “There’s always a third way.” That’s what’s on my mind tonight…