Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 6

posthumous apologies

I met with a psychic for the first time last week. It’s something I’ve always wanted to try, and there’s a shop around the corner with one of those neon palms in the window advertising $10 readings. An Ifa priestess reached out to me on Instagram saying she’d been contacted by my guides but there are a lot of scams on IG so I didn’t respond. But when a friend mentioned that she found a psychic through her cousin, I figured the woman must be legit. I often write about ghosts and believe I saw one as a child so despite childhood warnings from my mother to avoid ouija boards, I made an appointment and kept an open mind. There were two options for the session—she’s a medium and I guess some folks only want to communicate with loved ones who have passed on. Not me. I wanted the second option—a chance to ask about my future—but I agreed we could admit any ancestors who happened to “stop by.” And before we even began, my father apparently started knocking on the psychic’s door. I wish I could “see” what her mind looks like. We started out on Zoom but had to switch to the phone after encountering technical difficulties. She would close her eyes, press a finger to both her temples, and listen before opening her eyes and reporting back to me. It took a little while to figure out who was speaking, which made me wonder if the dead just wait on the other side, desperate to find someone who can see/hear them. My father seems quite enlightened now and I was happy to hear that he had reconciled with his own father. He apologized more than once—something he NEVER did in life—and I wrote everything down but still felt somewhat annoyed. As in life, my needs seemed to come second to my father’s; stopping by to say “hello” or “I’m sorry” is one thing, but I didn’t think he’d dominate the hour and definitely didn’t expect to be tasked with finding my estranged brother—whose estrangement stems at least in part from the abuse he sustained at my father’s hands when he was a boy. I’ve searched for Denzil myself in the past and always said I would hire a private investigator someday. But because of my session with the psychic, that day was today! I don’t know what she’ll find but my expectations are quite low and I’ve set a cap on what I’m willing to spend. The psychic said she could see my father holding a birth certificate and he repeated the need to trace family, even take a DNA test. During the session I thought about my favorite film adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol when Marley’s ghost laments his inability to help those he might have helped in life. It’s a good reminder to do what you can for others and say what you have to say while you can…

Juneteenth

In 2020, I wrote a poem for Juneteenth, which was later acquired by LBYR; our picture book, A Song for Juneteenth, was meant to come out last month but in March we learned that the illustrator had been arrested and so everything changed. The publication date has now been pushed to 2026 and award-winning illustrator Noa Denmon will be generating new art. Last year I wrote another poem for Juneteenth; I included it in Perennial and thought I’d share it today. It’s a tricky holiday for me…and one I’ve never celebrated. I’m writing another difficult poem today, hoping to clear some things before the summer solstice on Wednesday. If you celebrate Juneteenth, I hope you’re enjoying your festivities. You can find a conversation about my second Juneteenth poem over at Diverse Verse.

 

Alaska…

…was amazing. I’m exhausted and the airlines were a hot mess coming and going, but overall it was a wonderful way to end the school year. My hosts at the Juneau Public Library were lovely, the students were great, and community members were open to the idea of self-publishing as an act of “love & resistance.” I saw a pod of orcas, hiked through the Tongass National Forest, and toured two museums featuring incredible art by Native women. WordPress isn’t allowing me to upload any photos for some reason, but a librarian took this picture during my talk last Tuesday. You can see my photos and videos on Instagram. I slept for most of the day after landing at O’Hare at 4am yesterday and feel ready for a nap right now, but hope to get back into a writing routine so I can finish my time-travel novel this week. I’m on the very last chapter and found a talented artist in Fife to do the cover. My illustrator in Inverness is making progress, too, so next on my To Do list is to send her some notes…

The surprising thing about Alaska was how Canadian I felt while I was there. I’m writing a poem a day for the month of June but struggled to explain my affinity for the landscape and the Native art. My mother took us across country from Toronto to Vancouver by train when I was five or six years old. I don’t have any photographs but my memories feel quite clear. I remember the mountains and the towering trees, the rocky seashore, the totem poles and distinct Haida aesthetic. Juneau isn’t that far from Vancouver; there are definitely overlapping cultures, histories, and geography. I still felt moved by the beauty all around me in AK but it was also familiar—and I must have driven my hosts nuts with my constant references to Scotland. Amelia even pulled down a globe while we were at the elementary school to see whether Glasgow is about the same latitude as Juneau. But for the extensive deforestation of the Highlands, their landscape would look much like Alaska’s. Scotland has just reintroduced beavers and I saw firsthand in the temperate rainforest how the clever little creatures transform the environment. I lucked out and had two sunny days during my week but generally the sky is gray and there’s rain. I brought my Isle of Skye gear and so managed to stay warm and dry. I love being prepared (it’s one way I manage my anxiety) but maybe I need to try going somewhere that will be totally unfamiliar—if such a place exists. I suspect I would find connections to my childhood anywhere I went. Another reason to finish this novel so I can start organizing these thoughts into my memoir…

Mural of Tlingit civil rights activist Elizabeth Peratrovich by Crystal Kaakeeyáa Worl (Athabascan, Tlingit)

My May 5 Sutherland lecture is now available on YouTube. If you’re looking for tips to teach about Juneteenth using poetry, please head over to the Diverse Verse blog for my conversation with fellow poet Padma Venkatraman. The Dragons in a Bag boxed set will be available on June 13. Those are my announcements! Let summer begin…

2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture

The Sutherland Lecture honors the late Zena Sutherland, Professor Emeritus and retired editor of the “Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.” This special annual event is intended for teachers, educators, librarians and other interested adults and is co-sponsored by Chicago Public Library, the Zena Sutherland Lecture Committee and the University of Chicago. The 2023 Lecture, “I Am Myrtilla’s Daughter: Weaving Scotland, Slavery, and Siths into Historical Fantasies,” was presented by Zetta Elliott. Watch the recording on YouTube.

ready to launch

I’ve been out of sorts since I delivered the Sutherland lecture last week. At first, I was just tired and unprepared to tackle all the things I set aside in order to finish my *very* long paper. I woke with a migraine the morning after and took it easy for the weekend. I submitted a clean copy for the Horn Book and will share the YouTube link to the recording once I’ve got it. We had a very small crowd at the Harold Washington Library, which is about what I expected. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a paper for a whole hour…I worried that I was boring the audience, or that my tone wasn’t engaging…at least I had lots of slides so folks could focus on the photos if my narrative wasn’t riveting.

A friend who watched the talk on Zoom shared this screenshot; I’m glad my slides took up most of the screen! It felt good to piece my five Scotland trips (1991, 2018, 2022 x 2, & 2023) into a single narrative. I wore a new dress and my amethyst thistle brooch, and dug through my dusty albums to find lots of old photos. My cousin Carlene in Canada even sent me a photo I’d never seen before of her mother, my great-aunt Ellen, and “my Scottish granny” Nellie McKay. I’m in NYC right now for the PEN World Voices Festival and I was trying to explain to a friend earlier today that I feel like a rocket getting ready to launch. It’s strange being back in the city; my last visit here was in 2019, I think, a few months before the pandemic shut everything down. Yesterday in Chicago I thought about all my favorite places and I visited a few of them today…but it’s not the same. The bakery didn’t have my favorite cake, and the familiar, friendly guys weren’t behind the counter at the Indian restaurant I used to visit every week. We can’t recreate our former lives; the only way is forward. We outgrow relationships and routines and the only option is to replace them with new ones. I feel like I’ve been shedding a lot over the past few years; sometimes that makes me feel blue and other times I feel ready to let go of everything familiar and reach for something new. Not all rockets launch successfully but I feel the rumble building inside of me. I hope my launch doesn’t end disastrously like Elon Musk’s latest attempt to get to space! Though we do learn from every failure…

Fantastic Chicago! MG Authors of Color panel

Zetta Elliott, Rena Barron, Julian Randall, and Reese Eschmann join the Center for Teaching through Children’s Books for a deep discussion about the vital importance of writing–and reading– inclusive stories, especially in light of current book challenges and bans. Joined by moderators Kelly Campos and Duane Davis, these four amazing Chicago-based middle grade and YA fantasy authors share their personal experiences and challenges as Black authors, and their hopes for the future of inclusive fiction for young people. See the video here.

2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture

I was surprised and honored when the committee informed me last year that I had been selected to deliver the 2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture at the main branch of the Chicago Public Library. I’ll be talking about historical fantasy as a genre and my own research into Scotland’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. At our Midland Authors panel this past Tuesday, folks gave me a round of applause when our moderator announced my upcoming talk. Some folks weren’t quite able to hide their surprise that I was this year’s presenter. I suppose compared to Neil Gaiman and Yuyi Morales (last year’s speaker), I’m an unknown quantity. It reminds me of the reporter in VA who interviewed me over the phone and then asked, “Why aren’t you famous?” He subsequently decided not to write or run the interview so I guess my answer wasn’t adequate. I don’t think much about fame but apparently a lot of other people do. Fame has so little to do with talent sometimes…I know I haven’t invested in my social media profile so I don’t have thousands of followers, but I have definitely invested time and effort in my writing. I don’t expect a packed auditorium next month but then academics are used to presenting at conferences before an audience of three or four; my decade as a professor taught me that the content of your talk shouldn’t depend on the number of people who show up to hear it. Say what you want to say, present your findings, act as though your words matter—because they do.

My Store Explorer column is now up in Chicago Magazine—my first feature in a local publication. I hate shopping but appreciate being asked to shine a light on some great local businesses. I’ve been discovering new places in my neighborhood this past week as I try to fill the hours while my contractors are hard at work. I miss working at home but at least the weather has been nice and I’ve mostly managed to meet my thousand-words-a-day quota. Hoped to finish up by the end of this month but next week I’ll be in TX for TLA and then I fly to Toronto for GritLit Fest in Hamilton. I’ll be leading a workshop on the 22nd and chatting with Ainara Alleyne the next day—if you’re in the area, join us!

Art & Abolition

Diverse Verse is a collective of poets of color who write for young readers, and this month we’re taking turns writing “love letters” to poetry. My essay went up today: “Art & Abolition.” Here’s an excerpt:

I am still surprised (and somewhat ashamed) of the way my imagination simply shut down at the possibility of a world without prisons. I have spent most of my life writing poetry, plays, novels, and picture books for young readers; I earn a living writing fantasy fiction precisely because I have the ability to dream up alternate realities. And yet instead of embracing abolition as an opportunity to create a more just world, I dismissed the idea outright. My imagination wasn’t “limitless,” as I had believed. Instead I had internalized ideas about criminality and policing that diminished my capacity to understand, envision, and experience true liberation. This was a sobering realization.

It’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) so I’m writing a poem a day, and I actually wrote this essay while I was still in Scotland. I’ve been back for just over two weeks but my time in Glasgow feels like it happened ages ago. I’m making good progress on The Ship in the Garden and hope to finish that by the end of this month. This is my year to finish all the incomplete novels that I’ve neglected for far too long. If I stand my ground and keep saying NO to fall gigs, then I should have enough time to travel some more and finish the three novels. My friend Edi suggested Samoa, but New Zealand has been on my list for a long while…and I just got an invitation from a new friend in Porto, Portugal. She lives there half the year so I’d need to go before she leaves in August. We talked for three hours this morning and then I went for a run; came home and wrote this haiku:

a cloudless blue sky

a day without urgency

time to dream and scheme

And write!

the world and wands

I had my third tarot reading yesterday and “The World” was the first card pulled. I love that tarot isn’t predictive—I don’t go to Owen at Nonna Terra so he can peer into his crystal ball and tell me what to do or what will happen next week. For me, tarot provides clarity, it’s a reminder of your power and potential and a 90-minute reading with Owen leaves me with lots to reflect upon. Reading a tarot card each morning is a way of incorporating affirmation into my routine; I have The Gentle Tarot but tried a new deck designed by two Black witches and might order that one, too. Routine was actually something that came up for me in relation to “The World”—in the four corners are fixed signs reminding us not to lose sight of what is unchanging as we grapple with forces that seem beyond us. Taking some of my Chicago routine to Scotland was a way of feeling anchored amidst a whole lot of change and newness. I crave beginnings and struggle with commitment so it was challenging to come back to Chicago last week and have several unpleasant encounters with folks in the real and virtual world. My mail is being tampered with—checks are disappearing—and there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it. I get informed delivery so my mail is scanned before it’s delivered, which is how I’m able to spot and report missing checks. One check I reported as stolen was delivered to a neighbor, who left it at my door while I was away. But two other checks have just vanished and I’m expecting another one today. My magazine subscription also hasn’t been delivered so I filed an online complaint about that. One of the missing checks is from a NYC bank and it had already taken me two months to close that account. Now the process is dragging on because the bank won’t fill out its own affidavit but expects me to get it notarized; not surprisingly, the notaries here in IL won’t comply. I’m having problems at my local bank, too…everything I left unresolved at the start of March was simply waiting for me when I got back. Which was sobering and upsetting but my tarot reading reminded me to “zoom out”—not obsess over small things that can leave me feeling powerless and victimized. I’m not a victim; I have agency and I know how to respond to the various challenges that come up. Perimenopause makes everything seem worse than it actually is, I think, and hostility from strangers brings up some childhood trauma that I clearly need to address…another card, “The 7 of Wands,” was a reminder that not everything that rises up in confrontation is a threat. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to sit with doubt, or to remember our strengths and capacity to create change. If we look at our lives, we have abundant evidence of our abilities but it’s easy to get triggered and forget that we’re adults on the path to healing rather than a frightened child. There are lots of things on my To Do list but I have time to do it all. My contractors won’t arrive till next week so I have my space to myself and I went for a run this morning and just ordered some groceries so I don’t have to go back out. Yesterday I went to the airport to give my friends some baked goods and chocolate; she lost her father while here in Chicago sitting shiva for her partner’s mother. Folks in MS are recovering from devastating tornadoes and there’s a report on the radio right now about the ongoing need for food banks in this country. When I zoom out, even just a little, my problems can be seen in proper perspective. Humza Yousaf won the election back in Scotland (yay!) and will lead the country toward independence. I miss Glasgow but I’m going to dive into this novel and see if I can recreate the world I discovered just a few weeks ago. I’m rebuilding my Chicago routine: buying myself flowers, lifting weights after my run, cooking what’s in the fridge instead of ordering in. It’s much colder here but the sun is shining so my office is bright and warm. I’m ready to get to work!

fairy overload

I’ve been off with the fairies this past week on the Isle of Skye and now I’m finishing up Season 2 of Carnival Row. In Portree I bought three more books on fairies only to then buy a bestiary that has me rethinking the mythical creature in my novel. I’ve basically decided to let myself be a sponge for as long as I can. I was worn out after that three-day tour but I’m glad I went. The fairy pools (left) were impressive despite the rain and the fairy glen was mystical. It’s a fairly desolate landscape—“Iceland without the ice,” as our guide explained—but I’m glad I spent some more time in the Highlands. We had snow the first day, rain the second day, and sunshine on the third. Now I’ve got just four days left and I’m trying not to pack too much in. I went for a run in the rain this morning and then saw the name of a primary school on a banner at an anti-racist rally in George Square. I’d seen on Twitter that their students had self-published books to create their own mirrors so came home, cleaned up, and went back over with a bag of my dragon books. Found them easily and the head teacher invited me to stop by on Monday! My other contact has arranged a secondary school visit for Tuesday afternoon and then it will be time to pack. I’ve easily managed to write at least one poem a day this month but the novel is mostly unfolding in my head rather than on the page. Hopefully I’ll have time when I get back to put all those ideas into words. For now, I’m going to grant myself a bit more dream time, returning to Pollok House for my last visit tomorrow afternoon. I keep wanting a retreat, to get farther away “from the madding crowd,” but I haven’t effectively designed my life that way. I joke about living in a cave somewhere but I don’t want to be totally cut off. While in Skye I realized that my inbox keeps overflowing because I haven’t set the right boundaries. I want this transnational life and I appreciate the freedom of being able to write anywhere, but I’m not fully IN Scotland when I’m still booking gigs back in the US. Technology was a blessing during the pandemic but now it has become a sort of tether. You’re never fully free because folks expect to be able to reach you no matter where you are. I thought about making a yearly “booking box”—I’ll do school visits and conferences within a three-month period but after that, I’m done for the year. So whether I then return to Scotland or stay in the US, I’ll live a life outside of the kid lit arena. But when a new book comes out, you have to promote it and if you’re lucky enough to have a publisher who’ll send you to conferences, you can’t say, “I’ll only do the ones that fall between January and March.” Can you? Isn’t that like sabotaging your own book? We had some ugly drama last week; the illustrator of A Song for Juneteenth has been arrested for abusing his foster daughter 17 years ago, which means we won’t be going forward with his illustrations. So the May pub date is scrapped and I won’t be presenting at the picture book breakfast at the ALA annual convention in June. When I first heard the news, I just felt ill. I hardly dare to hope that the criminal justice system will help this survivor, but I pray that confronting her abuser will lead to healing in some way. My editor listened to my concerns when drafting an official statement to release about the book, and we’re going to discuss alternate illustrators when I get back. If something like this came up outside of my 3-month “box,” I couldn’t very well choose to ignore it. So maybe three consecutive months won’t work…maybe I have to pick the months when there are festivals or conferences and work “full time” then. NCTE is in November, ALA is in June, TLA is next month…my publisher is still sending me to TX for that conference since I have other poetry books I can promote. I agreed to do a small festival in Hamilton at the end of April and can visit family while I’m near Toronto. I’ve got a festival in NYC in May, then my week in Alaska at the start of June. I think that’s it for trips. Will I come back to Scotland for the fall? It’s a nice idea. IF I can sublet my apartment, and IF I can find a more affordable place to stay here in Glasgow, and IF I can cut the cord so that it doesn’t feel like America’s calling me every single day…