hope & a token

My friend Stefanie once said, “Hope and a token will get you on the train.” She denies it now, but I continue to attribute this pearl of wisdom to her because her people are from down south and it’s the kind of folk wisdom her grandmother might have passed along. I come back to it again and again because hope has its place in our lives, but ultimately it takes action to make things happen. I’m not going to stand outside the turnstiles with my fingers crossed, nor am I going to beg a swipe from another commuter. I have thirteen unpublished picture book manuscripts and I realized recently that I cannot publish all of them on my own. So what’s a girl to do? Well, last week I looked up agents who say they’re seeking diverse picture books and sent out a few queries. But agents can take forever to respond—if they respond at all—so I also reached out to a few editors. I’m not optimistic because I’ve been down this path before, but there’s no point in NOT trying. We need multiple strategies to tackle the lack of diversity in children’s publishing, and I will need help if I want to clear this backlog of manuscripts. I could self-publish the autism picture book story I wrote last weekend, Benny Doesn’t Like to Be Hugged, or I could take a couple of months and see if any presses are interested. Patience isn’t a strength of mine, but persistence is…

Last weekend I met a friend uptown to see the Classical Theater of Harlem’s production of The Tempest. It was magical! So well done, and it was actually fun to block out the regular noises of the city in order to focus on the actors’ words. I attended a high school in Toronto where students were required to read a Shakespeare play every year. Then we’d get on buses and trek up to Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare festival held at the Globe. The play we saw almost never corresponded with the play we studied, but I guess it was still “a positive cultural experience.” When I was in college, I spent a semester abroad in England; as soon as I arrived, I was urged to go into town to see a production of The Tempest that was being held in Arundel Castle. That was the first time I saw Black actors performing Shakespeare! Caliban was Black, of course, but so was the prince Ferdinand (Miranda was white). That semester abroad didn’t live up to its auspicious beginning, and I haven’t really bothered with Shakespeare since then. But I really wanted to see this Harlem production with its incorporation of accents and actors from throughout the African diaspora. Ariel was probably my favorite—she sang and howled and enchanted the shipwrecked sailors, sometimes while suspended above the stage. And Prospero was fantastic, too. Not the ideal father but he understood that sometimes you have to trouble the water to get things done…