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  • It’s Complicated!: Authentic Voices Series Continues

    One week down, one more week to go! 
     
    Last week this It’s Complicated! series highlighted authors who wrote brilliantly from outside of their perspectives including Graham Salisbury, Elizabeth Kiem, Walter Dean Myers, A.S. King, and Patricia McCormick. Some great takeaways?
    A writer writes, and doesn’t really worry much about complaints, anyway. We’re seeking the dramatic and emotional intricacies of life wherever and however we can find them. Our job is to explore them, enlighten ourselves, and try our best to move our readers. We may all look different, but we are all intimately and infinitely connected. We are one. We are beings with parallel heartbeats. The only race out there is the human one.—Graham Salisbury, Parallel Heartbeats
    My central characters all have some aspects of my personality. I don’t intend to write this way but it’s inevitable. I know I can use my personal view to create a character of depth, but I have to vary that character so that I’m not constantly writing the same book over and over again.—Walter Dean Myers, Character Development
    My characters are me. I couldn’t write them if they weren’t. None of my characters are autobiographical, but every one of them is human and so am I. In the end, we all have too much in common to go on separating ourselves. We eat and we poop. We are born and we die. We struggle through. While diversity is a celebration of every type of human, I am most interested in that humanness that connects us.—A.S. King, What is Personal Perspective, Really?
    It’s Complicated!: Authentic Voices continues this week by looking at insider authors who craft outstanding stories featuring protagonists that in some way relate to a part of their personal identity.
     
    First up? Alex London, author of the new dystopian novel Proxy. Get ready for some truth bombs later today. To get you started, here’s a teaser from his upcoming post It Doesn’t Have to Be True to Be Truthful:
    Just because we might have the same romantic inclinations, I couldn’t presume his way of being in the world was anything like mine. To do so would have done the character, and the countless young people in our world whose lives do, to an extent, resemble his, a great disservice.
    As always, we look forward to reading your comments and questions that are brought up by any of the posts you read on CBC Diversity. Let’s keep this conversation going, shall we?

  • 23 Top Illustrators Discuss Their Craft

    “I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. …

  • Author Meg Medina Recounts Censorship Battle

    “The timing could not have been more ironic. September is the month when the American Library Association celebrates Banned Book Week, our annual reminder about the importance of intellectual freedom.” Read the full …

  • Daily Beast to Announce National Book Awards Longlist

    “The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, will partner exclusively with The Daily Beast to announce its 2013 Longlists. The categories consist of ten books each from the genres …

  • New James Patterson Series on the Way

    2014 will mark the arrival of two new middle-grade series from the prolific James Patterson, bestselling writer of middle-grade, YA, and adult fiction. Homeroom Diaries, cowritten with Lisa Papademetriou, chronicles the life …

  • Publishers Weekly Provides Common Core Toolkit

    “As the beginning of the school year gets underway many are continuing to prepare for the Common Core. Schools across the nation are at various stages of implementation. Publishers and …

  • Taking the Risk and Taking the Heat


    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Patricia McCormick.

    When authors try to write about experiences far outside our own, we run a number of risks. We’ll be accused of getting it wrong, of slumming in someone else’s pain or,  worst of all, of being insensitive or patronizing. But for me, it’s only through trying on the experience of another human being that I’m able to recognize the limits of my imagination – and, more importantly, my unconscious biases.

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    For instance, in Sold, a novel based on my interviews with young Indian and Nepali women who were sold into prostitution, I chose to include a white American character. He is a photographer, based on the real-life activist who introduced me to the issue of human trafficking. It was a thank-you to that young man. But the inclusion of an American character was also a way to give my primary audience a character with whom they could identify.

    Some readers criticized the book for repeating the myth of the noble white American rescuer in the land of savages.  And upon reflection, I have to plead guilty.  If I were to write the book over again, I’d probably base the ‘rescuer’ on the women in India and Nepal who are fighting trafficking. Or on the male police officers now doing that work.

    Lesson learned.

    My most recent book, Never Fall Down, about a boy who survived the genocide in Cambodia by playing music, is based on the true story of Arn Chorn-Pond. Arn is now a very accomplished man with a college degree. But when he speaks about the genocide, it’s almost as if he becomes that terrified young refugee all over again. Trying to capture that voice was like trying to bottle a lightning bug. When I imposed standard grammar and syntax on it, the light went out. So I chose to mimic that voice in the book.

    image

    Some readers complained that the voice was hard to get used to. Some said it was ‘pidgin English,’ a criticism that implies that those who speak non-standard English are somehow intellectually inferior.

    But to me, Arn’s voice had a kind of poetry. If anything, it conveyed his keen intelligence, his heart and his humor more than the King’s English ever could. And most readers have said that it’s that voice – that innocent, terrified, lively, funny, lyrical voice – that gets them through the worst of the story.

    The danger there was even greater because it risked reducing a real person to a stereotype. But in the end, I think it brought readers closer to him.   

    I’m currently working on a story about a Haitian girl who lit the spark that ignited the only successful slave revolution in recorded history.  As a white woman, I run the risk of getting it wrong, perhaps in ways that a Haitian author might not. But it’s an idea that sprang from my imagination, and something about this story of defiance speaks to me.  

    It’s a risk, writing outside one’s own racial, socio-economic, gender or ethnic experience. I try to be mindful of criticism of my earlier work; those responses help keep me honest. But the limitations of my own experience pretty much guarantee that I’ll make a mistake somewhere along the way.

    In my view, though, it’s precisely by taking those risks – and making mistakes — that we become aware of our blind spots. It’s only when we inhabit someone else’s experience, we see our limitations and biases. And it’s only in stretching the limits of our empathy and imagination that we are able to find what’s universal.


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    Patricia McCormick, a two-time National Book Award finalist, is the author of five critically acclaimed novels – Never Fall Down, a novel based on the true story of an 11-year-old boy who survived the Killing Fields of Cambodia by playing music; Purple Heart, a suspenseful psychological novel that explores the killing of a 10-year-old boy in Iraq; Sold, a deeply moving account of sexual trafficking; My Brother’s Keeper, a realistic view of teenage substance abuse; and Cut, an intimate portrait of one girl’s struggle with self-injury.

  • J.K. Rowling to Pen Script for ‘Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them’ Film

    This textbook, whose authorship is attributed to the character Newt Scamander, is first introduced in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Rowling wrote the book and her publishers released it back in 2001. The …

  • CBC Diversity: What Is Personal Perspective, Really?

    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, A.S. King.
    Writing outside of my “personal perspective” is easy because I am fascinated by human beings, and not particularly fascinated by myself.

    And what is personal perspective? Is it the body I am in? This physical, sometimes smelly, sometimes sunburnt, sometimes arthritic shell? Is it the color of my skin? The house I grew up in? The amount in my parents’ bank account in 1984? Is it my family’s traditions during holidays? How often we went to church—or the fact that it wasn’t often? This question of personal perspective concerns me because it seems to be the thing a writer is supposed to transcend when he or she writes a novel. It’s also the thing a writer is supposed to plug into. It’s tricky like that.

    When thinking about my characters and how they relate to me and more importantly, how they don’t relate to me, I find the dissimilar parts the least important. For example: I am not a young man. I never have been a young man. I am also not a child from a poor home, I’ve never lived in a trailer park, neither have I lived in a gated community of mini-mansions. So how do I write authentically from the point of view of a young man? How do I write authentically from the point of view of a poor girl who lives in a trailer park? A boy who lives in a mini-mansion?

    My personal perspective is far wider than my childhood, my skin color, or my sexuality. Every one of my characters is a part of me. Not my shell, but my emotional experience. Emotion knows no race, gender, or tax bracket. When a human being is sad, they are sad, and sadness is not limited to any one type of person. The same goes for love, happiness, anger, jealousy, and list-all-other-emotions-here. Emotions are universal.

    I think we live in an allocated world. We like to have sections and subsections and keep everyone in tidy little boxes. I suppose I would fit in the white, raised middle-class, straight box. What is sad about these boxes is that once we put a human inside of one, we take away the possibility of them having experiences outside of the box we assigned to them. This is silly. And dangerous. In life, it leads to being a single-minded, judgmental meathead. In writing, it leads to stereotypical characters. Inventing authentic characters is about a lot more than what we can see from the outside. What’s important, like in life, is the character’s interior. And every one of my characters connects directly to my interior and my emotional experiences, of which I have had many.

    My characters are me. I couldn’t write them if they weren’t. None of my characters are autobiographical, but every one of them is human and so am I. In the end, we all have too much in common to go on separating ourselves. We eat and we poop. We are born and we die. We struggle through. While diversity is a celebration of every type of human, I am most interested in that humanness that connects us.

    imageA.S. King is the author of the forthcoming Reality Boy and the highly acclaimed Ask the Passengers, which received six starred reviews, appeared on ten end-of-year “best” lists, and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner. Her previous book, Everybody Sees the Ants, also received six starred reviews, was an Andre Norton Award finalist, and was a 2012 YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults book. She is also the author of the Edgar Award–nominated, Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz and The Dust of 100 Dogs, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. When asked about her writing, King says, “Some people don’t know if my characters are crazy or if they are experiencing something magical. I think that’s an accurate description of how I feel every day.” She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and children, and her website is www.as-king.com.

  • Gene Luen Yang on the Inspiration for ‘Boxers & Saints’

    “As an Asian American, I grew up in both Eastern and Western cultures. When I read books about the Boxer Rebellion, I found myself torn. I couldn’t decide who the …

  • Tumblr Launches First Official Book Club

    “…because this is a book club the Tumblr way, you can express your feelings about the book however you choose — a written review, fan art, gifs, poems, letters… Maybe …

  • Character Development

     
    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by 2012-2013 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Walter Dean Myers.

    What I knew about the character I wanted to create was that he was based on the Moroccan hero Tarik ibn Zayad. In late April, 711, Tarik led his soldiers across what is now known as the strait of Gibraltar onto the Iberian Peninsula. My problem was to keep the book as time specific as possible while making it interesting to today’s young reader.

    Knowing the subsequent influence of Islamic and Moorish culture in Spain, I decided to take the trip to the areas I would be writing about. I took my usual research assistants – my wife Constance and our son Christopher. We flew from Newark Airport to Malaga where we spent a few days checking out the food and staring at the people. Christopher noted that many seemed to be of mixed race. We then rented a car and drove to Granada.   

    Granada is flat out beautiful, and I knew I wanted to include the lush scenery in my book. So throughout the book I made references to the vegetation and thus gave Tarik a careful and interesting appreciation of the wonders of nature.  

    Tarik, in my story, is on a mission of vengeance. His family has been killed by Visigoth raiders and he is angry. But, needing to control that anger I gave him martial arts training from two people, one who teaches him to fight and the other who teaches him self control.  His character is coming along nicely, thank you. 

    My character is angry but self-controlled, and I lend him my feelings about his family. If my parents were killed by some tyrant I would be driven to avenge them. Off he goes looking for the bad guy who I make into kind of a hyper-evil dude who doesn’t even have a clear sexual grounding. But my character is too good.  He’s pure and wonderful and I need to add some spice to this dish. I find it in a second character, Stria, who is as ferocious a fighter with a sword as is Tarik, but she is almost blinded by her rage against the Visigoths.

    My central characters all have some aspects of my personality. I don’t intend to write this way but it’s inevitable. I know I can use my personal view to create a character of depth, but I have to vary that character so that I’m not constantly writing the same book over and over again. In this story there are clear variations. The setting is 8th century Iberia rather than my familiar Harlem. Tarik’s weapon is a sword, rather than a gun. And the largest variation for me, the antagonist is the larger than life figure of an evil conqueror. 

    We traveled by car (my wife drives, I don’t) from Granada down through the Moorish influenced villages to the southern tip of Spain. We then took a ferry across the strait of Gibraltar into Tangiers, where, allegedly, Tarik once lived.

    In Tangiers we mingled in the marketplaces, ate in charming little restaurants, and took pictures of everything. Chatted with grade school boys who called me ‘Ali Baba’ and had a great time. One brown skinned youngster with dark eyes offered me a thousand camels for my wife. I said no. The images I would later use in the book. But more than anything I would use the contrasts between Tarik and the mindless villainy of the Visigoth baddies to create what I hoped would be a memorable character.


    Walter Dean Myers is a critically acclaimed author of books for young people and the National Ambassador for the 2012-2013 term. His award-winning body of work includes Sunrise Over Fallujah, Fallen Angels, Monster, Somewhere in the Darkness, Harlem, and Scorpions. Myers has received two Newbery Honor Awards and five Coretta Scott King Awards. He is the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award (for excellence in young adult literature, given by the American Library Association) as well as the first recipient of Kent State University’s Virginia Hamilton Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is considered one of the preeminent writers for young people, having written over 100 books.

  • #1 Bestselling Authors Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl Return to the World of ‘Beautiful Creatures’ with All-New Series

    New York, NY – Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will publish Dangerous Creatures, a new young adult book series from Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, it was announced today …

  • This Week on Girls Scouts’ The Studio: ‘The Show Must Go On!’ Author Kate Klise

    “Everyone tells stories. It’s what our species does, right? It’s what cavemen did, sitting around the fire. I’m guessing it’s what Girl Scouts do at camp, even today. I’m lucky …

  • CBC Diversity: Write What You Know

    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Elizabeth Kiem.
    Last month, as the release date of my Cold War thriller Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy drew near, these were the things I worried about:
     
    Would Russian readers question why I nicknamed Marina, my heroine, ‘Marya’ rather than the more usual ‘Marinka?’

    Would American readers check Google earth and find that the building where Marya lives is not as close to the riverbank as I implied?

    Would anybody notice that Marya flies out of Moscow on a Tupelov 134, which is actually an unmanned drone?

    In other words I worried that readers might question the authenticity of my story, my setting, or my props. But it never occurred to me that I might be challenged on the authenticity of my character – a Russian ballerina with a psychic streak and a lot of family baggage.

    I have been preoccupied with Russia since I was a pre-teen. I wrote my first paper on ‘Détente and Perestroika.’ In college I studied Russian Imperial History and the Great October Revolution. A month after the Soviet Union collapsed I moved to post-Moscow where I lived for four years and watched as monuments toppled and lifestyles crumble. 

    But as I experienced Moscow in real-time, I remained fascinated with the not-so-distant past … and with the youth of my new friends. Every trip to the dacha was a voyage in time; every visit to an antique shop, a glimpse into another generation. When Olga bent my ear about her love life, it was a cultural epiphany. When Stas and I split a bottle of lemon vodka I internalized a new ideology. 

    Writing Marina was as easy as writing Olga and Vika and Dima and Stas – friends whose Soviet childhood became so familiar, I sometimes felt it was my own. I enveloped her in the nostalgia I had been leant and placed her on streets I knew. Her embrace of these comforts is what made her real to me.

    When, in the course of my story, I moved Marina to Brooklyn, I had to invite another model. She had gone from being the personification of an era to a girl out of her element. For the remainder of the book I allowed her to be the character I had initially created, but informed by experiences that were my own. (No – I have never been a fugitive and I am not more extra-sensorily perceptive than most – but I know very well the discomfort of feeling ignorant in a new land; and I also know how dance can remove almost any discomfort.)

    So, there you have it – I’m a dancer and a Russophile. I have lived in Moscow, I have Russian friends, I love Russian movies, and I have real-life experience and passionate research in my arsenal. I’m also a Brooklynite, so I know Brighton Beach like the back of my hand. 

    Is that all I need tell the story of a Soviet teen defector?

    It is if she is me … in another life.

    Elizabeth Kiem studied Russian language and literature at Columbia University and writes novels, essays, reports, reviews, grocery lists and more. She has lived in Brooklyn for more than 15 years, and before that she lived in Moscow as it entered a new era, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Besides Brooklyn and Moscow, her favorite places are Alaska (where she was born), Istanbul (where she understood that all great cities straddle the water), and Haiti (where life itself straddles the water). In Russian, she is Elizaveta Ivanovna. Dancer Daughter Traitor Spy is her first novel.

  • Scholastic to Publish ‘Sinner’, Companion Book to the Internationally Bestselling Shiver Trilogy by Award-Winning Author Maggie Stiefvater

    New York, NY — September 10, 2013 — Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, announced today that it has acquired world rights to Sinner by #1 New York Times bestselling and Printz Honor …

  • CBC Diversity: Parallel Heartbeats

    An It’s Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Graham Salisbury.
    image image New Cover My second novel, Under the Blood-Red Sun (1994), is about the power of friendship as seen through the eyes of two young boys in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor is bombed. One is Billy, a white boy, who’d moved to Hawaii from California, and the other is his best friend, Tomi , a Japanese boy born and raised in the islands. I wrote the first draft of this novel from Billy’s point of view, figuring, well gee, I’m a white guy … I had to write it from Billy’s point of view.

    But that first draft wasn’t working; the editorial letter said, in effect, “This novel has no heartbeat. Try again.”   
     
    Wow.

    So … should I start over, or chuck the three hundred pages and move on to something else? That may sound like a tough decision, but it wasn’t, because I realized that my problem was really quite simple: I’d written the book from the wrong point of view. This was Tomi’s story, not Billy’s.

    But could I, a Caucasian, write a novel in first person from the point of view of a young Japanese-American boy? I had an audience of young readers that would very likely believe that I actually was Tomi, and must be Japanese. If they were to ever actually see me they might feel betrayed! And what about reviewers and other adults? “The nerve!”

    Still, the idea of changing point of view made perfect sense. The problem with my first draft was that I knew very little about a boy from California. And I knew close to everything about a Japanese boy in Hawaii, because I grew up there and had Japanese friends. I knew Tomi. I knew what he ate, how he spoke, what his traditions were, how he treated his family, even his dog. Eventually, I knew his hopes and dreams. In effect, I became Tomikazu Nakaji.

    This was exciting! And scary. I could get clobbered for thinking like this.
     
    But so what?

    I felt such an urgency to tell Tomi’s story that I jumped into his head and began an entirely different novel. I shared it with Japanese friends in Honolulu to make sure that the details of culture and language were correct, and that I hadn’t written anything that a Japanese-American reader would find offensive.

    The book was well-reviewed, and won the Scott O’Dell Medal for historical fiction, among other prizes. I‘ve published about twenty novels so far, and Under the Blood-Red Sun remains the most popular, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold … all because getting into the right character’s head, no matter what his cultural background, gave it a heartbeat.

    Tomi’s story inspired a group of stand-alone novels about Japanese-Americans from Hawaii during World War II, which includes House of the Red Fish, Eyes of the Emperor and the forthcoming Hunt for the Bamboo Rat. I plan to write at least two more books under the overall series title of “Prisoners of the Empire.” 

    I’ve been waiting twenty years for someone to get all riled up at me for thinking that I could write “outside of my race,” and I have yet to receive a single complaint about any of these books. 

    imageWhen I created my Calvin Coconut series, I had the same problem. I wanted my lead character to be multi-racial, as many, if not most, kids are in the islands. I wanted to write about them. They deserved to be represented in the world of literature for young readers. Again, I became my character, and it was so easy because I was a lot like Calvin as a kid growing up in Hawaii. For me, what really matters is what a writer is made of, that he/she speaks from an earned place of authenticity where faking it is forbidden, if not impossible.

    A writer writes, and doesn’t really worry much about complaints, anyway. We’re seeking the dramatic and emotional intricacies of life wherever and however we can find them. Our job is to explore them, enlighten ourselves, and try our best to move our readers. We may all look different, but we are all intimately and infinitely connected. We are one. We are beings with parallel heartbeats. The only race out there is the human one.

    imageGraham Salisbury’s family has lived in the Hawaiian Islands since the early 1800s. He grew up on Oahu and Hawaii and graduated from California State University. He received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he was a member of the founding faculty of the MFA program in writing for children. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon. You can visit him at his website www.grahamsalisbury.com.

  • Julianne Moore to Visit Kids in Need at Harlem Daycare Center, Sept. 9

    Children’s author and award-winning actress Julianne Moore will visit Round the Clock Nursery in Harlem on Sept. 9, along with Kyle Zimmer, president and CEO of First Book, to celebrate …

  • Scholastic to Publish Two Middle Grade Novels by Bestselling Author Peter Abrahams

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SCHOLASTIC ACQUIRES TWO SPENCER QUINN MIDDLE GRADE DOG DETECTIVE BOOKS BY BESTSELLING AUTHOR PETER ABRAHAMS Bowser & Jolene to debut in 2015 New York, NY (September 5, …

  • Sign Up to Receive the CBC Diversity Newsletter

    Sign Up to Receive the CBC Diversity Newsletter: Click to view CBC Diversity Newsletter September v. 1 on GLOSSI.COM

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