Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 8

Banned Books Week

A couple of weeks ago I learned that SAY HER NAME has been banned or at least pulled off the shelves in a school district in TN. Like so many others, the ban targets LGBTQ books but for some reason they threw in a few anti-racist titles as well. You can read about it at Bookriot. So that makes three titles of mine that have been challenged so far; I’ll be talking about it this Thursday on a panel hosted by the Virginia ACLU (register here). You can find resources from PEN America and the NYPL has made a list of books that have been targeted, including A PLACE INSIDE OF ME. To my knowledge, my picture book hasn’t yet been banned—folks fought back in VA and I just heard from a parent in TN that they successfully pushed back on an attempted ban there as well. Students in York, PA reversed the ban that included MILO’S MUSEUM so I’ve got a lot to be thankful for this week. As long as most of us continue to support kids’ right to read, #Freadom will win!

in between

I finished a new poem yesterday and shared it on social media so figured I might as well post it here as well. I started it on the 4th and then the Queen passed away so I took a few days to think about what I really wanted to say. It came together a week later and now I have no MS Word documents open for the first time in a long time. I’ve been weepy all week and suspect it has more to do with menopause than recent events. I cry at cat food commercials and I’m definitely not a monarchist so I can’t say that I’m mourning the Queen. But I did remove one line from the original version of this poem—“good riddance, I say”—because it just didn’t feel right. I have no problem with folks dancing on the grave of their enemy; someone heckled Prince Andrew (a “disgraced duke”) as he walked behind the hearse in Edinburgh today and I fully support that person’s right to do what he did. I wouldn’t make that choice but I don’t really have any impulse to defend the members of the royal family. One of the poems I wrote earlier this year is called “You Made Me Love You” and it’s all about the ways culture can be used to seduce and/or gaslight oppressed people. What did Malcolm X say? “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” And it’s not just the media—look at the popularity of shows like Downton Abbey and The Queen. They’re designed to humanize royals and aristocrats whose wealth largely came from the exploitation and oppression of “the masses” and people of color in particular. It’s important to be critical of problematic institutions and there will be no “reform” now that the UK has a king. After spending most of his life advocating for the preservation of the environment, Charles is promising to hide his political views because of “tradition.” If you can’t use your power and platform to create change, to correct the wrongs of your ancestors, then what’s the point? I’m tired of the endless media coverage but I recognize that the Queen was a person and a symbol, and she means different things to different people. I finished my poem and that’s all I have to say…for now.

preorder deal!

June feels like a long ways away but my next picture is already on sale! Today and tomorrow at Barnes & Noble you can preorder A SONG FOR JUNETEENTH and get a 25% discount by using the promo code PREORDER25.

blue boy

I’m in Toronto but my head is still in Glasgow. I even priced a week-long visit in late October; it might be nice to return and spend my fiftieth birthday there. I got back Sunday night and woke the next morning with a story forming in my mind. For weeks I’ve been thinking about a blue boy—couldn’t “see” much more than that, but then last Friday I took a walking tour of Merchant City and learned about a wealthy “tobacco lord” who built the door of his home wide enough so his servants could carry him across the threshold in a sedan chair. These Scottish merchants, whose wealth built Glasgow and relied on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, lived in urban mansions and conducted their business on streets that linked them to New World plantations in places like Virginia and Jamaica. My tour guide told us about an enslaved child named Frederick who was given away in Virginia Court as an incentive for traders to buy the loose tobacco leaves left after all bales were sold. The next day I visited Kelvingrove Museum and saw a painting of the Brownie of Blednoch (below), a troll-like creature that will perform chores in exchange for a bowl of cream. Suddenly the blue boy, the blue door, and the brownie came together in a strange narrative that I’ve been working on all week. I also contacted a genealogist who specializes in Irish/Scottish ancestry and she gave me some really helpful feedback on my recently updated DNA results. 23&Me was calling me Scandinavian not that long ago so I’m taking this with a grain of salt, but Ancestry.com made the same update. I grew up believing we were Irish on my mother’s father’s side, but now it’s clear we’re Scotch-Irish. I have some Scottish DNA on my Caribbean side, too, so maybe between both my parents I really am 37% Scottish. 23&Me was even more specific, listing Glasgow as a place where I share the most DNA with folks. Did I feel at home in Glasgow? Not exactly, though it was easy to get around on foot and the few folks I met were friendly. Mostly I hung out with my friend Bre, and it’s the connections with people that form the basis of any community, I think. But she just accepted a job in California so she won’t likely be spending much time in Scotland. Will I? I don’t know. I found a neighborhood in the West End that was appealing—close to the botanic garden and the university, full of Victorian row houses with stained glass above the front doors. I’m not looking to move and still love my home in Hyde Park, but it’s nice to have a new focus for the fall. After turning in a few manuscripts this summer, I’m feeling sort of adrift. I’ve got loads of unfinished novels that could use my attention; I’ve decided not to apply to the 8-month puppetry lab but found someone who offers private tutorials online so will keep working on Seeds from the Stars. Tried to sign up for a drawing class at an art center near my home but it filled as soon as registration opened. Saw lots of art in Glasgow but haven’t seen any this week. The more art I see, the more I want to try my hand at painting or photography. Meanwhile my mother is still in the hospital, still on a feeding tube. She’s in good spirits but is understandably tired of being in the hospital and her next move will be to yet another…this time for rehab. And then? We’re not sure. She misses her friends at the retirement home but it’ unclear whether she can get the care she needs there. I showed her my photos during one of my visits and felt a slight pang of guilt. I’ve always been aware of the luxury of travel, especially when my friends were touring Europe as teens and I could only boast of going to Florida. My friend’s mother is in her nineties and is getting her passport ready for her first trip to England this fall. I might try to meet them over there. Travel is a privilege I don’t take for granted and tourism is a complicated industry. I haven’t been able to find any sources that verify my tour guide’s story about the enslaved boy in Virginia Court. Did my guide, an actor, embellish or entirely fabricate the story? Does it matter if my narrative is based on another fiction? I can forge a connection with Scotland whether or not my DNA ties me to its people. In a way, their involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade gives me all the permission I need to write my own triangular narratives. Maybe it’s time to dust off my memoir, The Hummingbird’s Tongue, and reflect some more on archipelagoes…

Zetta Elliott & Thomas Taylor Meet Us at The Lamp-Post

A joint interview on middle grade fantasy series hosted by Read to Them. Watch the recording here.

 

how it feels to be free

It’s Emancipation Day in Canada. I woke up to notifications on social media letting me know that CBC Books had included A PLACE INSIDE OF ME in their list to celebrate the holiday. Emancipation Day was hardly ever mentioned when I was growing up in Toronto; we were told that slavery was something that had only happened in the US and instead the focus was on the big Caribbean parade downtown that was organized by recent immigrants. A cousin in Nevis recently sent me a video of performers dancing onstage—lots of feathers, flesh, and glitter. My memories are from the 1970s, before the parade got too big and became a ticketed event instead of a chaotic string of flatbread trucks clogging the city’s main artery. My father took us once, lifted us up onto a truck carrying throbbing, massive speakers, and then joined the crowd of revelers and disappeared…joy and panic. That combination of feelings is part of most memories I have of my father and it seems we spent more time together in the summer. Both my parents were teachers so they were busy with work during the school year. In the summertime, we hitched the camper to the station wagon and took I-95 down to Florida. Or we went to my uncle’s cottage on Mink Lake…or, after the divorce, we flew down to Clearwater Beach with our mother and stayed in a crummy motel for up to a month. I’m heading to Glasgow in a couple of weeks and since my trip to San Juan have been thinking about what it means to take a vacation, what it means to be free. This time around I’m hoping to squeeze in some research; the Viking exhibit I missed in Edinburgh will be in Aberdeen until October. If the train workers aren’t on strike, I should be able to spend a day up there. Last weekend I checked one thing off my summer To Do list—I visited the National Park Service visitor center at Pullman. There are a couple more museums I want to visit here in Chicago and I plan to tour the African American museum in Richmond when I go there this week. I want to swim in Lake Michigan and go hiking, kayaking, maybe buy a bike. I finished Book #5 yesterday and turned it in; I’ll probably still have to do edits for Book #4 this month but I cleared my calendar last week so I have more flexibility to travel this fall. My mother is still in the hospital so I might need to return to Toronto despite my visits in June and July. I have a book festival up there in late September but right now that feels like a long ways away. An author friend’s mother just died and he reached out this morning to let me know how much she respected me. I think I only met her once at the Brooklyn Museum book fair. She was so proud of her son and spent hours at his table as he stopped passerby to talk up his books. I don’t think any of my kid lit friends have ever met my mother. She and I aren’t close but she congratulated me yesterday when I told her I’d met my deadline. When my father was dying, his care fell to me because I was the only child of his that lived in the US. Now the tables are turned. I’m the one who flies in for a couple of days and then gets to go back to my regular life without the daily burden of managing a sick parent’s care. There’s a new British pub in my neighborhood; a friend and I tried it out last week and took a photo to share with a mutual friend in Japan. I look fairly carefree, I think. Not so stressed about my deadline that I stayed home to write. Not so worried about my mother that I couldn’t enjoy an excellent, expensive meal. I sometimes feel guilty about my wide open days and the privilege of having the means to leave one comfortable place to visit another. I worked for these days, planned and schemed to have them. But something is still owed. Will have to work on striking the right balance, I guess. Service to others isn’t the opposite of freedom but sometimes it feels that way…

The Importance of World Read Aloud Day

Zetta Elliott (Award Winning Author), Jenny LeFlore (Parent, Community Builder and Advocate) and Pam Allyn (Literacy Expert and founder of World Read Aloud Day) discuss the importance of World Read Aloud Day.

What Are You Afraid Of? Authentic Representation in Books for Kids

If you missed our 2022 nErD Camp PA spotlight session, you can watch the panel here.

another cover reveal

Are you ready for this gorgeousness by Bea Jackson? Geneva B did an excellent job with the first three covers in the Dragons in a Bag series but this one is simply sublime…and Bea was very patient as we kept tweaking it here and there. I just got preliminary cover options for my next picture book and hope to share that final cover soon. But for now I’ll just let you know that I’m working hard on Book #5 (closing in on 20K words!) and Book #3 has mysteriously gone on sale at Target.com this weekend—with Amazon automatically matching the low price. So if you haven’t had a chance to grab a copy of The Witch’s Apprentice, now might be the time! If you’re not familiar with the series (where have you been?!), head over to Edi Campbell’s blog for a recap.

If you’re looking for virtual summer events, join us for nErD Camp PA on July 15th. This year’s theme is banned books so I’ll be sharing my experience with challenges and bans while my co-panelists emphasize the need for books that reflect a range of realities. You can register for the conference here.

Wildseed Witch: a Conversation with Marti Dumas

Have you seen the gorgeous cover of Marti Dumas’s latest fantasy novel WILDSEED WITCH? THIS is the sort of book I wish I’d had when I was a tween. I received an advance copy and it came in a beautiful box filled with flowers and a very official-looking invitation to the Belles Demoiselles Academy. Marti and I share a love of dragons and witches (read our previous conversation here) so I asked her to offer some insights into Hasani, the YouTube vlogging wildseed witch from New Orleans.

First of all, congratulations on writing such an appealing and original story! I think a lot of young Black readers have been waiting for a book (and a cover) like this. Can you elaborate on the distinction you made between magic and charm? Hasani has too much of the former and needs to acquire the latter. 

I tried to stick really closely to what would have been Hasani’s experience in the story and, the truth is, Hasani doesn’t quite know yet, so the reader doesn’t either. All Hasani knows is that the belles demoiselles consider charm superior to magic, so when she’s not getting yelled at or frowned upon, she assumes she’s using the former and not the latter. She gets a better (though not perfect) understanding in book 2, but I’m happy to drop a little spoiler now. Charm is using one’s own power to improve oneself. Self-love. Self-care. Self-knowledge. Self-awareness. Self-improvement. All of those things fall in the category of charm and, elevating yourself in that way is something that can and will last a lifetime. Magic, on the other hand, is trying to use that same power to change the world around you. In can be done, but not in perpetuity. At the start of the story, Hasani is so focused on changing other people, that magic is the main thing that happens.

You seem to be subtly critiquing respectability politics and snobbery in general. Were you a debutante?  In the twenty-first century and in the midst of the #metoo movement, “charm school” seems like an archaic institution. Would it have appealed to you when you were a tween? Would you send your daughter to one? Why or why not?

I was not a debutant, though my older sister did make her debut, in a way. It was one of the ceremonies at the private school she attended. I went to public school and by that point, no one would have attempted such niceties on me. More Brienne of Tarth without the athleticism, less Margaery Tyrell, if you’ll forgive the Game of Thrones references. I have two children, neither of whom I have encouraged in that direction. It’s not my thing but, don’t get me wrong. If either of them expressed interest, I would support them 100%. Making a debut is a positive, self-affirming experience for many and results in business and personal connections that last a lifetime. So, not my thing, but definitely someone’s thing, and I think that’s cool.

How did you develop the curriculum for Les Belles Demoiselles Pensionnat des Sorcières and how would these courses prepare young Black witches to operate in the world?

Respectability politics is certainly a thing. Whether we like it or not, it is often easier for young people of color to navigate our colonized world when they are able to apply the things that one would learn in a traditional finishing school. Do I think that’s cool? Not really. Do I think it’s true? Yes. However, Belles Demoiselles is not a traditional finishing school. While there are many respectability traps all around, the curriculum focuses on things that might seem superficial at first glance, but on deeper examination are all meant to bolster the self. In the end, the best way to navigate the world is by being truly grounded in who you are.

As someone who isn’t a fan of social media, I definitely felt my age reading this novel! But I also marveled at your ability to meet tweens where they are. You’re a parent and an author with a following—how do you use social media personally and professionally, and what’s your opinion on the debate around its negative effects on young people? The novel’s conclusion suggests you feel these platforms can be redeemed or reformed. 

I think that social media is a tool and, like most tools, there are both helpful and destructive ways to use it. I actually think of you as a skillful user of social media, so it’s interesting for me to hear you say that you’re not a fan of it. Oddly, I’m not much of a fan, either. Twitter feels like shouting into a strong wind, and no amount of tutoring has helped me make an image that would do well on Instagram. However, most of the young people I know can make posts that regularly get hundreds of likes, thousands if it strikes just the right note. And a few of those young people have learned to harness the power in that. It’s not the power of likes or having followers. It’s the power of communicating and feeling that something—anything—you have to say is worth being heard. As a classroom teacher, I spent most of the year trying to help my students get to a place where they felt like their lives, their experiences, were worth writing about. Now kids have more tools to potentially find that power. It doesn’t always work, though. Sometimes social media makes kids feel like they need to imitate and conform. I’m well aware of that, but I’m equally impressed with how much social media has begun to democratize whose voices get amplified.

There are subtle references to Africa in the novel. What, if anything, makes the magic in your story “Black” and/or different from conventional (European) magic?

The simple, yet possibly annoyingly straightforward answer is this: I am black. I don’t have to try to be black. I don’t have to reach for or dive into my blackness. It just is. And because I am black, everything I do is black, and that includes the magic in this book. HOWEVER, to be slightly less annoying I’ll also say this: the magic system in this book comes from a feeling I had the first time I went to Vacherie as an adult. I could literally feel my ancestors in my blood the moment I set foot on the ground. It was like they were welcoming me home to a land surrounded by water that they had nurtured when they wanted to and even when they didn’t. That’s why the magic in this story is genetic. That’s why the feeling of it is water based. That’s why it felt right when I decided to pay homage to Octavia Butler, who used Louisiana land as refuge for some of her own powerful beings. These witches may not be connected to Anyanwu by blood, but they are at least partially the result of Octavia Butler’s influence and legacy.

I hope readers of Wildseed Witch will reach for Butler’s 1980 novel Wild Seed someday—you’ve definitely planted a seed in young minds that can develop into a further exploration and love of Black speculative fiction. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me, Marti!

If you’re looking for inclusive MG fantasy fiction, Marti has some great recommendations—you can find her list over at Embrace Race. Learn more about Marti’s other books for young readers here.