Politics

2014 Statistics on Children's/YA Books by Race/Ethnicity

Yesterday, the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin released its annual report on the number of children's/YA books by and about people of color published in 2014. I made up the following chart for use in my NYU Editing Workshop, shared it on social media, and put it up here so it has a permanent home (click for larger view):

It should be noted that the CCBC does not create or provide statistics on either the U.S. population or the number of books by white people; those are my additions for comparison's sake. The percentages are also my math, so any errors are my own. Further to the question of how many protagonists of children's books are objects or animals and thus less likely to have an obvious race/ethnicity, KT Horning, the director of the CCBC, pointed me to this blog post she wrote in 2013 on that topic.

I am delighted to see the year-over-year almost-doubling of the number of Black and Asian book creators. But still:  We can do much better, people.  

A New Episode of the Narrative Breakdown & My NYPL Panel on Native American YA Literature

Guess what? Those two things in my subject line are one and the same thing! We have a new episode of the Narrative Breakdown up, which also happens to be a recording of a panel I mentioned many moons ago:   me, fellow editor and publisher Stacy Whitman, and our authors Eric Gansworth and Joseph Bruchac, respectively, discussing their books If I Ever Get Out of Here and Killer of Enemies, respectively. It was a really great, meaty, interesting conversation (IMO) about how Stacy and I came to edit these books, editor-author relationships in general, writing YA, privilege, and cross-cultural publishing. And now you can see a writeup of it from Publishers Weekly at this link, and listen to the full recording here. Thanks for checking it out!

A Ramble: Ferguson, President Obama, Diverse Books, Time and Space

Earlier in this week of awful news out of Ferguson, in my home state of Missouri, my friend and colleague Rebecca Sherman commented on Twitter:

I do too. That speech remains the best speech I've ever heard a politician give in my lifetime, both honest and inspiring, both personal and national in its implications. It acknowledged the complexities of Mr. Obama's candidacy, of his relationship with the Reverend Wright, and indeed of the whole history of race in America after slavery. Rereading it now, I was astonished to see these lines:
We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.  
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students. Legalized discrimination — where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments — meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.  
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families — a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.  
. . . What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations — those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.
This anticipates nearly everything in Ta-Nehisi Coates's brilliant article "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic earlier this summer -- except, of course, Mr. Coates's conclusion, which is that Congress should investigate the idea of reparations for African-Americans. Rather, Mr. Obama describes this legacy of pain as an opportunity for all Americans to come together, first to listen to and acknowledge each other's sufferings across racial lines, and then to work to address that suffering:  the lost jobs, the lack of health care, the poverty and poor education that afflicts the 99% (to draw on another political metaphor). The speech received near-universal acclaim, and while politics, being politics, quickly reverted to the usual game of sound bites and wins and losses, it did create a quiet moment in the hullaballoo of that 2008 campaign, a moment when most people heard what Mr. Obama said, and glimpsed that opportunity, even if we did not take it . . .

Like Rebecca, I wish very much that Mr. Obama had the time and courage and clarity and political daring to make another speech like this in the wake of events in Ferguson -- to be our storyteller-in-chief of sorts, to help one part of America listen to and understand the anger and fear of another, and to point the way toward dialogue among and a shared mission for all our citizens. I am sorry that he doesn't make this a priority, because I think perhaps he could do some good. But in his absence, we have to do that work.

I am moderating a panel this Tuesday for Scholastic's Teacher Week -- a conversation with Varian Johnson (The Great Greene Heist), Lisa Yee (Millicent Min, Girl Genius), Sonia Manzano (The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano), and Sharon Robinson (Under the Same Sun) about diversity in children's literature and the need for all children to see themselves in books. There are a lot of dimensions to the diversity conversation, but the moral use of such books (and the moral necessity of publishing them) is fairly straightforward:  More than any other media, a book allows a creator to control and tell their own story, to reveal the world they see in all its joys and sorrows, complexities and nuances, and to have that story be heard. For readers, books provide that opportunity to step into someone else's story and hear it -- to be affirmed by the story if some part of it speaks to your own experiences, emotionally or racially or religiously or physically, to know that you are not the first to go through this; to learn from it, both intellectually and emotionally, if it does not match your experience; to be challenged by and grow from it all around. (I wrote more about this, and the moral and sociological necessity for diverse books, in the opening of this talk.)

And I can't help thinking:  How different might Ferguson have been if all the policemen had read Walter Dean Myers's Monster? Or Fallen Angels or Sunrise Over Fallujah, for something closer to their own quasi-military experience? Or Ta-Nehisi Coates's article, or The Beautiful Struggle? Or even listened to the "This American Life" stories on Harper High School -- about a very different place than suburban St. Louis, certainly, but unforgettable in showing some of the pressures on young black men? Or best of all, if the policemen had heard the stories of the people of Ferguson as individuals? If they had shared their own?

Perhaps nothing would be different. These can be seen as highly naive and facile questions, given the money and history and societal factors that went into the making of this as-yet-ongoing tragedy, and I acknowledge my highly privileged role in asking them. But I also believe that books, stories, do what not-yet-President Obama did with his "More Perfect Union" speech:  They reveal the complexities, allow us to see things as both individual and universal, make other people real, open up space for dialogue -- if we'll take the time to listen and talk and learn. I wish we could find more of that time and space.


We Need Diverse Books.

Damn straight.

There is all kinds of great and exciting stuff happening with diverse children's literature these days! By the time you're reading this, the #weneeddiversebooks campaign should be live on social media, May 1-3 -- follow it on Twitter and Tumblr and please share your own thoughts there. Kudos to the awesome team who put that together!


Closer to home, The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson -- a modern, middle-school, multicultural Ocean's 11; a book I edited and am immensely proud of -- is getting a ton of awesome attention from indie booksellers and Varian's fellow authors, who are asking everyone to take the #greatgreenechallenge and help us get a diverse book on the bestseller lists. Kate Messner threw down the initial challenge; Shannon Hale raised the bar; and some guy named John Green sweetened the pot further for bookstores. You can check out all the action at Varian's blog post here. The book has received wide praise from many authors and a starred review from Kirkus, and it was named a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book of 2014! If you still need more convincing, you can check out this wonderful little prequel as a taster, or just join the challenge and preorder it now. (I advise the latter.) Out officially on May 27, 2014.

Equally exciting:  Sarwat Chadda is going to be in New York for the PEN World Voices panel this coming weekend, and appearing at Books of Wonder and a conversation on writing superheroes on May 3, and a great panel on sex and violence in children's literature on May 4. Good stuff!

Finally, I'm going to post this list here for anyone who might still need diverse book recommendations -- a list of books I've edited featuring diverse protagonists. Diversity has been a priority at Arthur A. Levine Books since the imprint was founded, and it's been a particular passion of mine for years, so I'm very proud of both this list and the many great books on our publishing lists to come.

Books I've Edited Featuring Diverse Protagonists

  • Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time by Lisa Yee (MG; Asian-American)
  • Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally) and Bobby the Brave (Sometimes) by Lisa Yee (chapter book; biracial, Asian-American)
  • Eighth-Grade Superzero by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich (MG: American of Black Jamaican descent)
  • If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth (YA; Tuscarora Native American)
  • The Path of Names by Ari Goelman (MG fantasy; Jewish)
  • Marcelo in the Real World, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, and Irises by Francisco X. Stork (YA; Latin@)
  • The Nazi Hunters:  How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World's Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb (YA nonfiction; Jewish) 
  • The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman (YA; Chinese)
  • Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg (YA; Gay)
  • Gold Medal Winter by Donna Freitas (MG; Latina)
  • The Savage Fortress and The City of Death by Sarwat Chadda (MG fantasy; British of Indian descent, Hindu(ish))
  • Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy (MG; Afghan, Muslim)
  • The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers (MG; biracial, of British-Caribbean descent) 
  • Moribito:  Guardian of the Spirit and Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (YA fantasy; Asian-inspired) 
  • Above by Leah Bobet (YA fantasy; differently abled cast -- which is putting it mildly -- and biracial protagonist of French and Indian descent)
Yay diverse books! 

In Defense of CBC Diversity, and on the Complexities of Publishing Diverse Books

[The CCBC-Net listserv is currently debating the state of multiculturalism/diversity in children's and YA books in 2014. I'm posting this e-mail I sent to the listserv about a year ago here for reference in this discussion. I also encourage readers to check out the great posts at the CBC Diversity Tumblr, particularly the recent Industry Q&A with Donna Bray.]

February 16, 2013


Hi Everyone,


I am a co-founding former member of the CBC Diversity Committee, and an editor at a large publishing house here in New York; and as such, I’d like to write and correct some misconceptions both about the committee and about publishing diverse books in general. (I am a former member of the committee because I chose to rotate off of it at the end of 2012 to let fresh voices come on; I do not speak for CBC Diversity officially here, but I support it 100%. And while I’m doing disclaimers, I’m not speaking for my company here either; these are strictly my views as an editor who has long published diverse books and authors and thus has been thinking and talking about these issues for years.)

The CBC Diversity Committee was originally founded by a small group of editors after conversations at a writers’ conference in, I believe, early 2009. We were all passionate about publishing books by and about people of varying races, ethnicities, religions, and sexualities, and we all had a number of these books already on our lists; and for a couple years, we met to discuss many of the issues that have been raised in this CCBC-Net discussion. However, we were also all editors, with time-consuming responsibilities to our beloved authors and illustrators and publishing houses, and it was difficult for us to get much momentum going as a group. In 2011, one of our members met with someone from the CBC, which had been thinking about diversity as well, and the CBC invited our group to become an official committee working on these questions.

In the year or so since, with the organizational support of the CBC and the truly wonderful people there, we’ve started a blog to foster discussions of the many facets of publishing diverse books and raise awareness of these books among the public; hosted an event for agents to introduce them to editors interested in publishing diverse books (beyond the committee members), a panel on creating covers and the awareness panel at ALA (which was not sponsored by ALA), and private discussions for publishers; launched a “Diversity 101” series on the blog to help educate children’s book professionals and general readers about the basics of various kinds of diversity (check out Cris Beam’s terrific post on transgenderism:  http://www.cbcdiversity.com/2013/02/diversity-101-transgender-perspective.html); and reached out to high schools and Career Days around New York City to try to educate a more diverse population of students about the career opportunities available in publishing. We also created booklists featuring diverse authors and topics on our website; the books suggested come directly from CBC member publishers, so if the publisher of a particular book hasn’t included it on the list it sent along, then it’s not included on the CBC list.


Contrary to an earlier assertion, the committee does not think of itself as the one and only ”place to go” for books with diverse characters; but it is doing its best, with entirely volunteer efforts, to highlight those books and issues and get them more widely known. And very little of this industry action was happening before the committee existed! So the CBC Diversity Committee is on the side of everyone fighting to create more authentic and diverse books, and I am puzzled and grieved by commenters here who are treating the committee as if it’s the enemy, simply because it has not 100% matched their ideological standards of publishing purity, or solved all of the complexities of publishing diverse books.


And there are complexities! I could write an essay on each of these topics, but briefly:


The pipeline issue:  We editors don’t see enormous numbers of manuscripts from writers of color, certainly not in percentages proportionate to the population, and we can’t publish manuscripts that don’t come to us.


The suitability issue:  It’s a publishing fact of life that we must turn down 97% (guesstimate) of the manuscripts we see from writers of ANY race or ethnic background, because we can only take on so many books, and because many titles simply aren’t unique enough for publication, or right for our house or a particular editor’s list (as every editor has a slightly different definition of “good,” just as every reader does).


The staffing issue:  It’s true that publishing houses and publishing staffs are overwhelmingly Caucasian in complexion — which is again partly a pipeline issue, as we see far more white applicants for jobs than we do people of color. (Which in turn ties into many larger socioeconomic factors:  Publishing does not pay a great deal compared to being a lawyer or doctor or financier, say, so those industries siphon off a lot of prospective talent.) That’s one of the things the CBC Diversity Committee is designed to address, with our outreach to colleges and Career Days.


-- How CCBC-Net Readers Can Help --:  If you know a smart young reader of color, particularly one in high school or college, tell them how books are made! Tell them it takes not just authors, but editors and publicity staff and salespeople, and they can be one of them. Take them to ALA or BEA so they can see these people in action. Tell them internships are available. Tell them about my blog post here about how to get  into publishing:  http://chavelaque.blogspot.com/2006/08/faq-2-how-do-i-become-book-editor.html, the blog posts linked at the bottom, and the “How I Got Into Publishing” Posts on the CBC Diversity blog. If there’s more awareness of these jobs among people of color, hopefully more of them will get into the industry.


The editorial issue: All editorial relationships require careful conversation, honesty, and sensitivity on both sides. When an editor is working cross-culturally, that necessitates an added layer of sensitivity, humility, and listening regarding these cultural issues, which might then require balance with the narrative and aesthetic needs of the book. This is another thing the CBC Diversity Committee is designed to do, is to help make editors aware of cultural sensitivities and mentor them in working cross-culturally.


Authors have responsibilities here too:  to speak up for what’s important to them in the text; to do as much research and reading and listening and vetting as possible if they’re writing cross-culturally; to educate editors, sometimes, as a book’s editor will usually not be able to go into as much depth on a topic as the author will, simply because the editor has to monitor a large number of books and authors. Every editor-author relationship is different; every book is different. But contrary to the impression prior commenters here might have made, it is totally possible for an editor and an author with different ethnic backgrounds to publish books successfully and happily on both sides. (You can ask Francisco X. Stork and Lisa Yee on my own list, or Rita Williams-Garcia, Sherman Alexie, Kadir Nelson, Jacqueline Woodson, Joe Cepeda, Allen Say, Yuyi Morales . . .)


The sales issue:  In thinking about the diversity question a few years back, I reviewed a decade of Publishers Weekly end-of-year sales roundups (the top 100 titles sold each year), and if you took out award winners and Dora the Explorer, there were very, very few faces of color on those lists. (The PW Top 100 numbers are not a very good measure, granted, but it was the best I could do in trying to consider sales across all houses, as sales figures are proprietary information.) Bestseller lists are not the be-all and end-all of publishing; we know full well that not every book can become a bestseller. But it is a Publishing Law that strong sales of one title encourage publishers and booksellers to take on similar titles. 


-- How CCBC-Net Readers Can Help --:  BUY BOOKS BY AND ABOUT PEOPLE OF COLOR. Oh my goodness, I can’t say this enough. Buy them, and then put them out on displays year-round, and handsell them to your customers, even those who are resistant. (Bonus points if the book features a person of color on the cover.) Show a strong pattern of support for these authors and books, even make a bestseller here, and that will change publishing more than all of our talk can.


And all of this plays into the marketing issue — how publishers and book creators reach “mirror” audiences (to use Rudine Simms Bishop’s excellent phrase; please read http://www.rif.org/us/literacy-resources/multicultural/mirrors-windows-and-sliding-glass-doors.htm if you’re unfamiliar with it); how we communicate with window audiences; how we can maximize our resources to maximize sales for the book. We talked about this a lot at the CBC Diversity Committee when I was on it, and we publishers are always trying to do better at it. No publisher WANTS to see any of its books fail — we all want to keep our jobs, for one thing! And those jobs are predicated on the success of our business and our books.   


-- How CCBC-Net Readers Can Help --:  Do indeed look for books by and about people of color in catalogs and at conferences and bookstores; and then TALK ABOUT THEM — not just in the “I could only find X number of authors” way (though it’s important to make those figures known), but in the “Look at these X number of awesome books I found at ALA and I’m so excited to read the ARCs!” way. Name those titles! Blog about them! Invite the author to speak or to Skype with your class! Retweet links about them! Bring them up here at CCBC-Net -- right now, in fact: If everyone on the list wrote in with their favorite Latino picture book of the last few years, it would increase awareness of those titles tenfold. (Here's mine, with an editorial bias alert:  Welcome to My Neighborhood: A Barrio ABC, by Quiara Alegria Hudes, illustrated by Shino Arihara. Runner up: Tia Isa Wants a Car by Meg Medina, illustrated by Claudio Munoz.)

E-mail publishers to say you're glad to see them taking on diverse books and you’d like to see more. E-mail your local public library to encourage him or her to buy the book, and your kid’s teacher or school librarian (if you’re lucky) or school district to make them aware that it’s a title you’d love to see read more widely. I LOVE the idea raised here earlier about getting even a fraction of Chicago schools to buy a book — let’s figure out a way to make that happen! Positive reinforcement tends to be much more effective than shaming, with children and with children’s publishers. 


And if you have ideas about where and how we publishers should be finding diverse authors, or marketing and promoting these diverse books in a way that we aren’t already — please, share that here! Our resources go only so far, but if there’s an opportunity we’re missing and a market we can grab, we’d love to know about it.


Books break through with support from not just publishing houses but readers – librarians, booksellers, book buyers, book bloggers. To say this louder:  READERS MAKE BOOKS “HAPPEN,” not publishers. Every publisher can cite an incident in which they threw their entire marketing weight behind a book and it disappeared – and then that one book that nobody expected to break through at acquisition or even publication, that took off like a shot once that one librarian on a committee raved about it, or that one blogger, or just one kid talking to another kid talking to another on the playground. When publishers DO make books succeed, it’s most often because we people who work at publishing houses are readers too, and WE talk passionately about a book and get other people to read it. But the power is in readers’ hands foremost.


I’m sorry to have written at such length, and to have made authors and books of color an “issue” here when so many of the books are just great books in and of themselves. But I wanted to raise some of the practical complexities we editors face on the ground in trying to publish more diverse books — complexities that are real facts in our lives, and that I haven’t often seen raised in the discussion so far here or elsewhere. Editors and publishers and the CBC Diversity Committee are operating with limited resources, just like authors and librarians and everyone else on this list, but like you, we also work with the very best of intentions and hopes for creating great books for all readers. Thanks to all of you who support these books in whatever way you can.


With best wishes,


Cheryl Klein

A Brief Rant Against My Own Interests, but for My Own Beliefs

Katha Pollitt, a critic, feminist, activist, and liberal who I greatly respect and admire, posted this on Twitter this morning:
Half of laity members who voted against women bishops in Anglican church were women.
And I wanted to say, "Sister, please." Because that "#slavementality" hashtag reflects a fundamental misunderstanding -- or perhaps better put, a fundamental willful blindness -- on the part of my fellow liberals about the way that my fellow people of religion or faith sometimes think or behave . . . and in particular, a willful blindness by my co-feminists toward women who make choices that don't advance the cause.

Those women who voted against women bishops were quite likely ladies who read 1 Timothy 2:12* literally and who find that more important or compelling than their own rights. This is a perfectly valid way to think and behave in the private sphere. It may not be the way we feminists personally would interpret Scripture or vote -- but other people's religious beliefs aren't any of our business, and liberals have fought long and hard to make sure everyone's religious beliefs stay their private business and don't come into the public sphere.

All of this goes ditto for women who vote, based on religious grounds, for a candidate who opposes abortion rights**. That does come into the public sphere, as those women's choice of a candidate can influence all women's choices about life and death, literally. But that's still a valid belief and choice, and the work of those who support abortion rights then is to argue better and either change their minds or convince other people to outvote them. Same goes for the Anglican vote:  The work lies not in insults, but in a more wide-ranging theological discussion that might open up these women's minds, if they're willing to go there (which they may not be). It's complex and hard, but not cheap, as Ms. Pollitt's comment felt to me.

[A side note if you're interested in issues of Biblical literalism and religious mind-changing:  The New Yorker from November 26 has a terrific, thoughtful, even-handed profile of Rob Bell, the founder of Mars Hill church, and his journey from strict evangelical to someone still faithful but rather more nebulous in religious definition.]

Feminism is, or should be, nothing more and nothing less than the fight for the rights of women to maximize their personal choices and opportunities within a culture that often represses them -- including those choices and opportunities some feminists might disagree with, such as those that reinforce the repressive culture. Calling those women who make different choices idiots does not advance the cause here, and I wished we did it less and argued for complexity more.

_____________________________
* "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet," as quoted in the New Yorker article. 
** I should note that my own feelings about abortion are extremely squooshy, so I will not argue it one way or another, nor do I welcome arguments about it in the comments (goodness, no).

To Anyone Who Has Ever Blogged About YA Cover Design

... and complained about how there aren't enough people of color,
... or too many girls in fancy dresses,
... or not enough people in everyday street clothes,
... or how you hate seeing girls in pieces,
... or overly sexualized,
... or from behind,
... or on a black background,
... and why can't we just get a real girl on the cover for once:


HERE IS A COVER FOR YOU. 
BUY THIS BOOK. 
IF ENOUGH OF YOU DO IT, 
IT WILL MAKE EVEN MORE OF 
A DIFFERENCE THAN YOUR BLOG POSTS. 

Need more cover awesomeness? Here is the back, for anyone who's ever wanted to see a person with a disability on a book jacket:


And you can read the starred review from PW here.

Links to Put Your Money 
Where Your Mouth Is: 

(This is not a book I edited, by the way. But I swear to God:  Support the covers you want to see, and change happens.)

A Ramble List: the Dinner Table Debate, Religion, Bigotry, and Monkey Brains


As they agreed last spring, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage and Dan Savage of the Savage Love column et al. met recently at Mr. Savage's home to debate same-sex marriage. I was fascinated by their conversation, learned some stuff, and think it's worth watching through at least the two opening statements (which would take about twenty minutes). Some observations on this dialogue:

1. They are working from fundamentally different and incompatible definitions of the word "marriage" here. Paraphrasing, Mr. Brown says "Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman"; Mr. Savage says "Marriage is a gender-neutral package of civil rights and privileges." Mr. Brown does not acknowledge that his covenant includes that civil package -- rights that all same-sex couples are being denied -- while Mr. Savage obviously does not agree that marriage is dependent on differing genders.

2. They're also working from fundamentally different ideas of the purpose of marriage -- though here I suspect Mr. Brown of double-dealing, or maybe just being a bad debater. He says repeatedly that marriage is for procreation, thus subscribing to the only point of marriage that truly excludes gay people . . . but then he also repeatedly fails to address the issue of why heterosexual couples who are unable or unwilling to have children should then be allowed to marry, or whether their marriages are any less valid than those of couples with children. Mr. Savage, for his part, asserts that marriage is for the pleasure, companionship, and support of the two adults involved. I wager Mr. Brown would have agreed with him on this (as at least one aspect of marriage, anyway) up until gay marriage became a major issue in the United States, when he had to retreat to procreation to keep his position at least somewhat intellectually coherent.

3. And in general with language, truth, Scripture, legal and romantic relationships, academic studies, love:  There are so many sides to each jewel, and each debater turns the stone in a different direction. Whenever the Regnerus study comes up, Mr. Savage asserts its methodology was flawed; Mr. Brown asserts the methodology was fine, and the only reason it hasn't been repeated was because Mr. Regnerus was so brutally attacked for his study's conclusions. It seems as if there ought to be a scientifically sound way to determine whether the methodology was flawed, but according to the Times article in the link, there are only more things to weigh:  whether the child lived with the parents, whether the parents truly lived as gays or lesbians or only had had a same-sex relationship at some point in their lives, the economic status of all involved, the funding of the study — all of which nuances both Mr. Savage and Mr. Brown bring up as evidence for their respective sides. So many facets to every human story.

4. The most irritating thing about this debate for me: In almost every statement Mr. Brown makes, especially his opening one, he comes back to how he and other Christianists* have been called bigots and how much this upsets him -- making this endlessly about himself and his pain. It was the same dynamic that played out in the Chik-Fil-A controversy a few weeks ago, where Christianists bought chicken sandwiches in order to practice their rights to free speech, which were supposedly under threat. While the Boston and Chicago mayors’ claims that they’d ban the chain were definitely stupid, in both cases, the claim to injury was truly an attempt to level the emotional playing field, both at this dinner table and in the media: Our enemies are in pain (here because of the denial of marriage rights); pain creates sympathy for them—pain sells; we need some pain of our own; let us blow up an insult to us to make our pain as great as theirs. Mediawise, I'd agree, the Christianists don't come off well, because it's hard for the media to portray their position without saying "They think God hates gays." But at the end of the day, the vast majority of marriage laws in this country (and all of them at the federal level) still favor the Christianists, so Christianists pretending that the two pains are equal is rather ridiculous.

* As defined by Andrew Sullivan, “Christianists” are "those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression."

5. Which is not to say that Christianists are the only one who practice this dynamic; Jews and Islamists the world over do it; atheists do it; God knows the Republicans and Democrats do it; Mitt Romney and Barack Obama do it; MSNBC and Fox News; Todd Akin has certainly done it in the last few weeks. And all of them (all of us) get rewarded for it with money, media attention, more support from their side. . . . The “fight” instincts in all our little monkey brains light up at being attacked, and into the arena we go.

6. But as a practicing Methodist, I find this particularly troublesome when Christianists do it—when we jump to be offended at the first opportunity. Because if Christianity is about anything at all in practice here on this earth, it is about imaginative empathy with others, about sacrificing one's own ego to share others' pain and take on their burdens. "Love your neighbor as yourself," repeatedly named as the greatest commandment, means that we must imagine ourselves in our neighbors' positions and treat them as we would treat ourselves. Christ's death on the cross was an act of imaginative empathy:  It was taking on the sins of the world in order to spare humanity the endless suffering from those sins. Turning the other cheek and offering our cloaks also demands that the other person receive all we have. The New Testament calls us to make this our first priority:  to listen, to empathize, to give, to love.

7. This is not to say that there are no limits on this giving, nor that the law does not exist or is nullified; a literal reading of the scripture would certainly make same-sex sex an abomination. But many Christianists seem to see only the law, not the humans behind it, so they don't extend empathy to the genuine pain of a young man who believes passionately in Christ and also falls passionately in love with his male best friend; or to an elderly long-term lesbian couple who cannot be together when one partner goes into the hospital. . . . What to do with empathy when it conflicts with the law is a vexing and vexed question. But in cases like this, where no harm to others has been committed, I believe a Christian's first responsibilities are always to empathy and humility, never to self-satisfaction and simplistic judgment. If we practice these latter things instead, we deny the humble, generous, radically honest and complicated God-in-man we claim to serve.

8. This might sound juvenile, but I keep coming back to this word as the one that best expresses the principle:  Above all, Christians should not be mean. People who have power and use it for their own pleasure in causing pain are mean. People who have power and ostentatiously wave it in the face of those who don’t are mean. On the day of the eat-in at Chik-Fil-A, the Christianists who lined up to buy chicken sandwiches were actively demonstrating their distaste for people who have often already suffered and continue to suffer for being the people God made them to be; and that felt to me like a profoundly mean and un-Christian thing to do.

9. I admit I did not behave well during the Chik-Fil-A contretemps myself. A high school classmate made a remark on Facebook that somehow linked the issue to the Muslim community center near Ground Zero. Non-New Yorkers being self-righteous about Ground Zero is one of the things that stirs up MY monkey brain, and the remark was so completely counterfactual (Mayor Bloomberg did not threaten to ban Chik-Fil-A), and the comments supporting it so obviously equally ill-informed and self-satisfied, that I gave into my worse instincts and wrote a dissenting comment. I then tried to be as matter-of-fact as I could in the comments “discussion” that followed, not to submit further to that monkey brain, but I did not succeed fully, and I regret that.

10. Coming back to the debate:  I eventually got depressed by the conversation, because nobody’s mind is changed and there is nothing, nothing, these men can agree on. (Peter Sagal pretty much nails the reasons why.) So it simply becomes two angry men who feel aggrieved, speaking forcefully past each other in the same room. And the same thing happened for me on Facebook:  I came away from the Chik-Fil-A argument more saddened than anything. In both cases, there was an opportunity for people to meet and talk as generous human beings — over a dinner table, as Facebook “friends” — about differing interpretations of a contentious and deep issue, and that respect, humility, and true conversation did not happen.

11. Perhaps it was overly optimistic even to hope for that sincere conversation on both sides:  As Mr. Sagal notes, the identity issues and principles involved are grounded too deeply within Messrs. Savage and Brown for them to be able to detach from them, even if they were genuinely open to doing so. Merriam-Webster’s defines a bigot as "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices”; and as nobody’s feelings and beliefs are ever entirely rational and proportionate, I imagine there are very few people in the world who are not bigots for something or other. (Or as they sing in Avenue Q, "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist." And yes, readers:  I just called every one of you bigots! Ha!) Mr. Brown is a bigot for fundamentalist Christianity and the Christianist doctrines that he sees as following from that; Mr. Savage is a bigot for the freedom to love and marry who he likes. I will happily proclaim I am a bigot in the obstinacy sense for the novels of Jane Austen, gender equality (often known as feminism), and civil same-sex marriage. Perhaps the best we can all do is to recognize our opinions as opinions, try to keep them anchored in objective reality. and then prevent that obstinate bigotry from extending into intolerance, by treating others with respect and kindness even when we disagree.

12. (I disagree with Peter Sagal on one thing:  I don't want my Facebook friends punished for disagreeing with me or for eating at Chik-Fil-A. I want them to recognize the humanity of gay people and the validity of their romantic relationships and to change their minds about civil marriage. They can keep objecting to it religiously and eating chicken sandwiches for all I care--they just have to accept that their interpretation of religious truth does not govern Mr. Savage's and my civil lives.)

13. But this can be so hard when the other side of whatever argument has fewer scruples and doesn't behave well as we do, and/or when the feelings run so deep. . . . The biggest argument against religion from my point of view (and really the only argument against it I'd make myself) is that it encourages its practitioners to think they know immutable and eternal truth -- to the extent that I'd wager at least one person who just read that sentence is now offended because, as a practitioner of the _________ faith, they DO know immutable and eternal truth, and I have just implied the matter is a little more fungible. And it is near impossible to see outside that particular kind of immutable and eternal truth, to remember that others might have their own immutable and eternal truths that are just as real to them as ours are to us, and just as valid when weighed against objective reality, if we can even determine such a thing.

14. I'm guilty of this too:  Last year, a lovely author and I disagreed profoundly on a manuscript, where I saw it as an X type of book and she saw it as a Z type of book. She did not want to change it in the least toward an X, and I could not make it cohere in my head as a Z. . . . The X type felt immutably right to me, just because of my own experiences as a reader and editor and my bigotry (I'll own it) toward X type of plots. But she was the author; she knew what she wanted to do with her book best; she may well have been right about the whole thing, or as right as one can declare anything when all reading is subjective; and I admired her devotion to her vision, even if I was unable to share it. We ended up mutually agreeing to part ways, with the sincerest good wishes on each side -- which nonetheless left me sad and confused about my inability to help her get where she wanted to go, even as I was relieved and glad that she could now find someone else to do that as I could not. Sometimes we just have to accept that the obstinate, not entirely reasonable opinions are what make us who we are, and live with that, with the gains and losses that follow. And then again remember the "opinions are opinions" thing.

15. I don't know if this kind of separation will work in the same-sex marriage debate, or any of the other religiously based conflicts that roil America, except that I feel sure Brian Brown will never go to Dan Savage's place ever again.

16. And sometimes the monkey brain is necessary and can be used for good. Rep. Todd Akin was simply flat-out wrong about his medical facts, and oh my goodness did he need to be called on them (and now voted out so he can't implement the thinking behind them). When we encounter something that activates the monkey brain, we need to feel and conserve the energy from that; take a deep breath; remember we are never, ever in possession of perfect knowledge or righteousness; weigh the supposed offense against our truths and our principles and our long-term ends (time spent objecting to a blog post can be better spent on supporting an election); and then fight as hard and reasonably and honorably and passionately as we can.

17. I need a conclusion here, because otherwise I can ramble all night and continue to contradict myself into oblivion. Oh, here's one:  conclusion.

The Quote File: Ideas

“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.” — Picasso

"If you want to find, you must search. Rarely does a good idea interrupt you." — Jim Rohn

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it." — Neil Gaiman

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." — Linus Pauling

"If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk." — Raymond Inman

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck

“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” — Ray Bradbury

"The question authors get asked more than any other is "Where do you get your ideas from?" And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is ‘I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.’” — Philip Pullman

“Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.” — Leo Burnett

“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.” —Bernard Malamud

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself....Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.” — Mark Twain

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.” — Henry Ward Beecher

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a mind can get both provocation and privacy.” — Edward P. Morgan

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." — Oscar Wilde

“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.” —Voltaire

“When we want to infuse new ideas, to modify or better the habits and customs of a people, to breathe new vigor into its national traits, we must use the children as our vehicle; for little can be accomplished with adults.” — Maria Montessori

“We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.” — Mary McLeod Bethune

“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.” — Susan B. Anthony

“Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards — the things we live by and teach our children — are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.” — Walt Disney

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” — John F. Kennedy

“Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!” —Andre Gide

“A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.” — Hippolyte Taine

“Apologists for a religion often point to the shift that goes on in scientific ideas and materials as evidence of the unreliability of science as a mode of knowledge. They often seem peculiarly elated by the great, almost revolutionary, change in fundamental physical conceptions that has taken place in science during the present generation. Even if the alleged unreliability were as great as they assume (or even greater), the question would remain: Have we any other recourse for knowledge? But in fact they miss the point. Science is not constituted by any particular body of subject matter. It is constituted by a method, a method of changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry.... Scientific method is adverse not only to dogma but to doctrine as well.... The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.” — John Dewey

“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind.” — Elly Roselle

“To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.” — H.L. Mencken

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.” — Chinese proverb

“We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas, and not for things themselves.” — John Locke

"Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?" — Joseph Stalin

"Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people." — Barbara Harrison

“What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.” — Ezra Pound

“The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.” — Dorothy Thompson

Worlds of Wonders: On Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy, Children's Fantasy, and Paranormal Novels

Last week, I finished World of Wonders, the third book in Robertson Davies's marvelous Deptford Trilogy. I wrote the following about it on Goodreads:
I picked up a battered mass-market paperback copy of Fifth Business off the street in May, on the simple principle that I had heard good things about it and it was free, and then I stuck it in my bag as lightweight (sizewise) reading for a trip to Arizona in June. These were both excellent spur-of-the-moment decisions -- the very kind of tiny choices that Davies writes about here as influencing our whole lives.

If Boy Staunton hadn't thrown the stone...
If Dunstan Ramsey hadn't ducked...
If Mrs. Dempster hadn't been hit, and given birth prematurely to her son Paul...

Thus do these four people's fates entwine. But while the trilogy does focus on the inner characters that impel our choices -- like Boy's native cruelty and Dunstan's natural passivity -- it also pays great honor to the unknowable in those characters and in the world around them:  the mysteries of our psychology, and of what some of these characters would call fate and others God. Everyone was fully drawn and alive on the page, and Davies's prose crackles like the Swiss mountain air in which much of The Manticore and World of Wonders are set. My favorite remains Fifth Business, which combined the focused narrator of the second book with the wide-ranging story of the third, and at less length than either; but all three were wonderfully mind-opening & refreshing to read.

A friend on Twitter told me Robertson Davies is "the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Canada," and that seems right. 
There was one passage in particular in World of Wonders that stood out to me, and I wanted to write it out here both for the sharp beauty of its prose and the wisdom of its thought:
[Oswald Spengler, an early 20th-century historian] talks a great deal about what he calls the Magian World View, which he says we have lost, but which was part of the Weltanschauung--you know, the world outlook--of the Middle Ages. It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengler called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness.

This was what [Character X in the novel] seemed to have, and what made him ready to spend his time on work that would have maddened a man of modern education and modern sensibility. We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clockmakers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system-grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.
The trilogy was written in the 1970s, and I would venture that now, as a culture, the "civilized" Western world is farther from the Magian World View than we have ever been. . . . The omnipresence of communications, and particularly of those services that encourage us to share our every thought and feeling almost before we've actually had it -- and then reward us for doing so with more attention, more stimulation -- stamp out wonder by leaving very little time to experience it for itself. At the same time, those communications make us aware of how large the world is, and often how scary, how many threats there are to our small and vulnerable selves -- and this too discourages wonder, by activating our fight and flight instincts above our imaginations and ability to stand still.

Of course my mind also turned to how this might apply to children's and YA fiction of the present day, and particularly fantasy, as that has long been the genre that most encouraged the retention of wonder in children. . . . When A. S. Byatt wrote about the Harry Potter books in 2003, before the release of Book 5, she accused the series of lacking this sense of "the numinous" -- a charge that I think Ms. Rowling disproved by the end of the series. (I would agree with Ms. Byatt that the books' strengths lie in their affirmation and celebration of domesticity, which is one of the reasons The Casual Vacancy, with its village politics focus, should be terrific.) As Ms. Byatt notes, Susan Cooper's and Ursula K. LeGuin's novels possess wonder in great quantities; so too do Kate DiCamillo's, and Erin Bow's Plain Kate. In realistic fiction, Sara Zarr's books get at the mysteries that are inside of us as human beings, and the wonders we and grace can work, while the narrators of Martine Murray's The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley and How to Make a Bird both stop to marvel at the world around them, seeing it in a true and wonderful way no one else does. Davies's description of "a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness" could well apply to many children, especially in the pre-twentieth-century world, and much of the best writing for young readers both acknowledges the reality of that darkness and encourages that fragile light.

At the same time, many YA paranormal novels are, to some extent, the anti-wonder:  They take these strange and thrilling creatures like vampires and werewolves, beings that are by definition bloodthirsty, savage, otherworldly, and turn them domestic -- creatures that are tamed, that want to be like us, that are on our side. I'm sure someone has written a paper about how this mirrors the development of young adults themselves, taking the selfish impulses of the child and hormones of the teenager and smoothing them into the outward-looking maturity of the adult. . . . And I cannot and would not say this development is a bad thing. But when the paranormal craze was at its height, with a manuscript with a new variation on these tropes landing on my desk every week, I found myself longing sometimes for paranormal that didn't make domesticity the highest value, that had a little more wildness and wonder in it -- something with the carnality (in all senses) of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves (and the brilliant, disturbing prose too). Maggie Stiefvater is perhaps the best practitioner of this kind of paranormal:  not stopping to smell the roses, but the blood.

Of course not every book has to have Ms. Byatt's cherished numinousness, fantasy or not; comfort is just as important and valuable in a reading life as this sense of the wild within us or without. But I'm grateful to Mr. Davies for making me think about this subject, and I hope to find more wonder all around.

A Common Sense Constitutional Argument for the Legality of Same-Sex Marriage in the United States

Most of this is pretty obvious (and/or was established by the Prop 8 decision in California), but I decided I wanted to write it all out for the next time I argue about it with someone from high school on Facebook. I am not a lawyer, clearly, and if someone with more expertise in civil law than I have can disprove these statements legally, please, don't spend your time leaving a comment:  The pro-Prop 8 lawyers need you, and you should get in touch with them instead.

1. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

2. Because we do not have any officially established religion, whether Christianity or Hinduism or Islam or Shintoism or Wicca, our government's laws are not and should not be dictated by any religious laws or prohibitions.

2A. We have a civil government and not a religious one.  

Opinion: This is right and good for everyone, including religious people, because it enables multiple religions the freedom and protection to flourish, and also frees people to choose not to practice any religion at all. Certainly each religion may believe it is the only right and true one; but it must win influence through speaking to the hearts and minds of individuals, not through imposing its will upon everyone.

Opinion II: Do not bust out that the "Founding Fathers were Christian" stuff. Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists at most; all of them were well aware of the corrosive influence of religious and denominational wars in Europe (because, indeed, many of their ancestors came to America to escape those religious conflicts or persecution altogether); and if they did intend the United States to be governed by Christian law, for some reason they did not write it into the Constitution, which means it's not part of our law now:  "no law respecting an establishment of religion" is.

Opinion III: As I understand it, the Judeo-Christianist opposition to homosexuality arises almost entirely out of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which declares "men lying with men as they do with women" "detestable" or "an abomination." While the exact translation of these verses is much debated, I think it's perfectly fair for Christianists and their fellow fundamentalists to use them to judge others' behavior . . . so long as they hold to that same ancient Leviticus standard in their own behavior, meaning they should not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (19:19) or cut their sidelocks or beards (19:27), and women should be considered unclean and isolate themselves during their periods (15:19-33). [Ideally in this scenario, adulterers would be put to death (20:10), but our civil law prevents that.] Otherwise, these fundamentalists are being inconsistent in their application of the law. I do not see many non-Hasidic people, and especially many Christianists, abiding by these standards. 

3. While a marriage may be conducted under or ratified by a religious body, it has civil and legal ramifications regarding rights, property, and responsibilities.

3A. Therefore it can and should be regulated by civil law (and indeed, for heterosexuals, it already is). 

4. The Fourteenth Amendment reads, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" (emphasis mine).

5.  Right now, our federal civil law grants only heterosexuals the right to marry the people they love.

6. This means that gays and lesbians are being denied that equal protection of the law, and having their privileges abridged.

N.B. Two LGBT people who wish to be married love each other with the same strong romantic feelings as two heterosexual people who wish to be married. (Opinion:  I include this because the Biblical focus on sex often means that people opposed to this appear to ignore the love; and they should consider what it might feel like to have the government prevent them from legally uniting with the person of the opposite gender whom they love, and thereby gaining all the rights that marriage grants.)

7. As this is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, same-sex civil marriage should be legal.

8. No heterosexual person's rights will be infringed or marriage will be diminished or damaged by this.

9. As per the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, the government cannot and should not force religious bodies to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies. 

That is all. 

Diversity in Children's Publishing: Some Conversations

For the past couple of years, I've had the privilege of being involved with an amazing group of editors discussing issues of diversity in children's literature. This group became an official Children's Book Council committee last fall, and this spring, we've had a series of events to mark our official debut. You can read more about the history and goals of the committee in this great Publishers Weekly article, and better still, you can hop over to the www.cbcdiversity.com website, and read the words of the committee and our guest bloggers there. This past week was an especially interesting one, with a series of posts entitled "It's Complicated!", from:
  • A writer: Cynthia Leitich Smith, offering an impassioned plea for writers to recognize the need for diversity in their books
  • An agent:  Stefanie von Borstel, who writes about her search for diverse authors to represent, with a couple of success stories
  • An editor:  Me, talking a little (and eventually at length) about parts of my acquisition processes and issues of believability
  • A reviewer:  Debbie Reese, whose posts on child_lit and her American Indians in Children's Literature blog are consistently thought-provoking.
If you hop on over there, as I hope you will, do please also check out the archives, where the members of the committee write about the paths that got them into publishing, and the conversations in the comments -- on this week's posts especially.

"The Ballad of Erica Levine" by Bob Blue

I always enjoyed singing this song at Carleton's Folk Sing (consider your snarky remark about folk singing acknowledged here), and I post it now in honor of both "Breaking Dawn" and smart young feminists like Erica Levine, and with sincere wishes for you all to have a life like the last two lines.



When Erica Levine was seven and a half
Up to her door came Jason Metcalfe
And he said, "Will you marry me, Erica Levine?"
And Erica Levine said, "What do you mean?"
  "Well my father and my mother say a fellow ought to marry
  And my father said his brother, who is my Uncle Larry
  Never married and he said Uncle Larry is a dope---
  So will you marry me?" Said Erica, "Nope."
"My piano teacher's smart, and she never had to marry
And your father may be right about your Uncle Larry,
But not being married isn't what made him a dope.
Don't ask me again, 'cause my answer's 'Nope'."

When Erica Levine was seventeen
She went to a dance with Joel Bernstein,
And they danced by the light of a sparkling bobby sock,
'Cause the theme of the prom was the history of Rock.
  And after the prom, Joel kissed her at the door,
  And he said "Do you know what that kiss was for?"
  And she said "I don't know, but you kiss just fine."
  And he said "What it means is that you are mine."
And she said "No, I'm not!", and she rushed inside
And on the way home, Joel Bernstein cried
And she cried, too, and wrote a letter to Ms.,
Saying "This much I know: I am mine, not his."

When Erica Levine was twenty-three
Her lover said "Erica, marry me.
This relationship is answering a basic need
And I'd like to have it legally guaranteed.
  For without your precious love I would surely die
  So why can't we make it legal?" Said Erica, "Why?
  Basic needs, at your age, should be met by you;
  I'm your lover, not your mother---let's be careful what we do.
If I should ever marry, I will marry to grow,
Not for tradition, or possession or protection. No!
I love you, but your needs are a very different issue."
Then he cried, and Erica handed him a tissue.

When Erica was thirty, she was talking with Lou,
Discussing and deciding what they wanted to do.
"When we marry, should we move into your place or mine?
Yours is rent-controlled, but mine is on the green line."
  And they argued and they talked, and they finally didn't care
  And they joined a small cooperative near Central Square.
  And their wedding was a simple one, they wanted it that way.
  And they thought a lot about the things that they would choose
     to say.
"I will live with you and love you, but I'll never call you mine."
Then the judge pronounced them married, and everyone had wine.
And a happy-ever-after life is not the kind they got,
But they tended to be happy more often than not.

Lyrics via http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiELEVINE;ttELEVINE.html

A Walk Up Greene Street, with a Little SoHo History and Class Warfare Thrown In

Second in a series on the fascinations of wandering New York.

We had another lovely day here in New York on Sunday, so I decided to go back to Occupy Wall Street and donate some apples -- redistribution of income at work! I arrived right at lunchtime, and was impressed by the pasta and salad the protesters were serving to anyone who wanted a bite. It was just as nice a meal as those offered by the soup kitchen that my church runs (Sundays at 2 p.m. in the church basement, should you need a bite), and all prepared without a real kitchen, as far as I could tell. I also saw the library, full of books on all subjects for all ages:


I missed seeing Screwy Decimal, but she has a picture of the children's library sign specifically. 

A block north stands the Freedom Tower, also known as One World Trade Center. It will be the tallest building in the United States when it's completed, at 1,776 feet. I don't feel particularly enthusiastic about this, nor do most New Yorkers that I know (who are not Larry Silverstein). But Mr. Silverstein must needs be satisfied, and so up it goes:

 

From there I walked north to SoHo. "SoHo" is an abbreviation for "South of Houston Street" (the street is pronounced "How-ston," not "Hew-ston," for anyone who wishes to sound like a local), and roughly covers the area between Houston Street to the north, the Bowery to the east, Canal Street to the south, and the Avenue of the Americas to the west. It has been through many, many iterations as a neighborhood, beginning in the Victorian era, when most of its famous cast-iron buildings were constructed:

 

As manufacturing moved out throughout the twentieth century, artists moved in, spreading south from Greenwich Village and taking over the light-filled lofts for studio space and cooperatives (that link is worth reading if you're interested in nutty artists or New York history):

  

Where artists go, galleries open; where galleries open, rich people come; and where rich people come, luxury shops follow. And as a result, forty years after Fluxhouse closed, Soho is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to shop for European clothes and modern furniture design -- if you're in the 1%, as the good stuff doesn't come cheap. I loved these coffee-cup sculptures, each one bigger than my head, at Adriani & Rossi (a mere $250 each):

  

Across the street was a doubled reminder of the neighborhood's origins:  a sign over the receiving door of the long-gone Baker Brush Company, presumably from when brushes were manufactured in SoHo; and a piece of fascinating street art over it -- a totem-like collage face: 

 

At the corner at 89 Grand Street stood Ingo Maurer, a lovely lighting design store. Wouldn't it be fun to have this exploding-dishes chandelier over your table at a dinner party? It would make your guests feel like anything could happen.

 

More street art on the next block:

 

And in an alcove in front of an empty storefront:  a carefully arranged pile of plastic and some sheets, meaning that this is probably someone's bed.


That someone sleeps on the sidewalk on the same street as a $250 coffee cup sculpture, or this Gaga-worthy fur coat at Isabel Marant, is the same kind of injustice that has led the Occupy Wall Street protests to exist.

 

At the same time, I confess I love the goofiness of this coat (and the chandelier, and the coffee cups) -- not as something I'd wear or need to own myself, but as a beautiful thing that gives delight. So I don't really want all these things to go away. . . . Only for that sleeper on the sidewalk, and everyone, to have proper housing, and a job, and regular meals, and medical care, before a woman actually spends over a thousand dollars on a coat that makes her resemble a yak.

How to solve this problem equitably, I do not know.

So. More haunting graffiti, on the base of a lamppost:

 

And just like Crosby Street, Greene Street is paved mostly in brick:


Right across the street from Isabel Marant is one of my favorite places to window shop:  SICIS Next Art, an Italian furniture maker that is frankly, joyously crazy -- the interior-design equivalent of Agatha Ruiz de la Prada.

 

My favorite thing I've ever seen there was a mosaic bathtub shaped like a high heel, where the bather sat in the toe and water poured down the arch.

At 107 Greene is another favorite place to browse -- the Taschen bookstore. Taschen makes gloriously nutso, beautiful, and huge art books. (Also art-porn collections, should that be your thing.) I go there to marvel at the specs of their books -- the size of the bindings, the quality of the paper, how no expense is spared in foil or glossiness or embossing. The shop functions almost like a book museum, as you can see:


Magda Sayeg likes to wrap things in knitting. You can see her work right now outside the Apple Store (currently undergoing renovation) at the corner of Prince & Greene. 


There's also a knitted bicycle at the base of Greene Street, outside the ACNE clothing store. (Yes, that's the brand's real name; it stands for Ambition to Create Novel Expression, and it's a Swedish line. Presumably they didn't know what it meant in English.)

If you look up from the tricycle, you can see another wonderful piece of art, the marvelous trompe-l'oeil ironwork at 112 Prince Street:


And here's the view back down Greene St. from Houston -- which you all know how to pronounce now, yes? Yes.


I really enjoyed doing this -- the walk, the pictures, the sheer pleasure of looking for and at beautiful and interesting things, all on a sunny, crisp autumn afternoon. Thank you for sharing my stroll!

A Visit to Occupy Wall Street (Plus a Small Ramble on Economics)

We had crazy beautiful weather in New York today, so I went into Manhattan and visited Occupy Wall Street, the protest/live-in at Zuccotti Park (at the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street). It seems to be a combination of an extremely uncomfortable but good-humored slumber party and a mass Speakers' Corner for all kinds of liberal causes, including:
  • Wall Street reform
  • Corporate reform
  • Electoral reform
  • Constitutional reform
  • Ending the Federal Reserve
  • Globalization (the link is about Steve Jobs, but it ties in)
  • Stopping fracking in upstate New York
  • Bringing an end to nuclear power
  • Freeing Leonard Peltier
  • The environmental movement in general
  • Marxism (with a table handing out The Internationalist)
  • Anarchism 
  • Fox News (a sign:  "Fox News:  I Don't Care About You Either")
  • Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.
I saw a man holding a sign that said "I'm 48 and this is my first protest," and many, many young people who could probably say the same. But the overall mood was cheerful, not angry or violent. A group sang "We Shall Not Be Moved." A drum circle inspired dancing. People shared their cookies, literally. And I came away really admiring the people who are there, bearing witness to their causes and their belief that what they're doing makes a difference. It reminded me most of the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington at more or less this time last fall -- that same sense of humor and even pleasure among the protesters, enjoying a beautiful day and the presence of like-minded people; but also with an underlying edge, not yet at but perhaps approaching desperation, in everyone's sense that the systems are broken, in the deep-seeded desire for change. . . .

The best witness to this need is perhaps the Tumblr associated with the protests, We Are the 99 Percent. If you have any measure of human sympathy in your soul, the stories there will hurt your heart -- and you perhaps have one of your own to add.

Naomi Klein gave this speech at the protests yesterday. It is powerful, and you should read it.

At the same time, I fear the movement's insistence on remaining leaderless and specific-demandless will end up undermining it in a media world that demands stories, meaning characters and plots. (Which may also just be human nature.) Nicholas Kristof's excellent column last week spelled out what the Occupy Wall Streeters should be asking for.

I work for a corporation. I believe in capitalism, because it seems like the best method yet devised to channel human beings' inherent self-interest into an economic system, and because all the communist experiments we've seen up to this point in history seem to have run aground on that self-interest, and then often crashed right over the rocks into repression and horror. I also believe in strong government regulation of capitalism and corporations; a social safety net; single-payer health care; public education; and paying taxes to support all of these programs. And globalization lets me have cheap electronics, clothes, shoes, and mangoes, and I love mangoes.

But I -- we -- have to look at the consequences of all of these things; and we also have to remember that change begins with our own desires, and to regulate those desires, as little as we like to do so. I often think about this quotation from Confucius, which appeared in a July Quote File on government:
To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
If we could all want only what we need, and not more; if we could recognize that we shouldn't have mangoes, honestly, because getting them here is pretty terrible for the environment; if corporations across the board could agree that demonstrating growth every quarter isn't the most important thing, and instead value being a good corporate citizen and supporter of its workers; if there were some way to make American manufacturing costs the same as Chinese ones, without sacrificing environmental regulations or worker rights; if I spent less time on Twitter or playing Scrabble, or even "virtuous" activities like reading or writing, and more time volunteering or working for social change; if I could be willing to do what's best for all (environmentally, economically, altruistically) instead of what's just best for me at any moment . . . In a lot of ways, if we could not be America, and I could not be an American, with our historic, almost inborn emphasis on individual liberty and free will -- our genius and our curse.

It's easy to blame the 1%, and God knows they deserve a lot of the blame for the current economic mess and should be called to account. Things can and should be more fair. But 100% of us are responsible for how we spend our money and our time. I admire the protesters on Wall Street for providing a model that runs so idealistically against the grain of our present American life, and I hope their protests continue. Because however debased our president's carrying-out of his ideals may be at the moment, these words remain true:  We are the change we have been waiting for.

The Quote File: America, Patriotism, Democracy, Government, Country

Americans are overreachers; overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses. — George F. Will

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. — Elmer Davis

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. — George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first. — Ambrose Bierce

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. — Eric Hoffer

Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is. — Sydney J. Harris

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority. — Lord Acton

It is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does. — Michael Ignatieff

Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals. — Ida Tarbell 


Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. — E. B. White

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile. — Earl Warren

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization teaches him to respect the rights of others. — William Jennings Bryan

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. — Abraham Lincoln

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally  treasonable to the American public. — Theodore Roosevelt

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. — Helen Keller

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life - the sick, the needy and the handicapped. — Hubert Horatio Humphrey

No government can love a child, and no policy can substitute for a family's care. But at the same time, government can either support or undermine families as they cope with moral, social and economic stresses of caring for children. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

You measure a government by how few people need help. — Patricia Schroeder

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? — Mohandas K. Gandhi

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion. — Samuel James Ervin Jr.

Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and the inequality of fortunes could not subsist without religion. Whenever a half-starved person is near another who is glutted, it is impossible to reconcile the difference if there is not an authority who tells him to. — Napoleon Bonaparte

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. — Thomas Sowell

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. — Thomas Jefferson

God created war so that Americans would learn geography. — Mark Twain

Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy. — Antoine de Rivarol

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. — Norman Douglas

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other alternatives. — Abba Eban

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right. — Confucius

The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. —  Thomas Paine

Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the other. — Louis Stanley Jast

"The Answer," by Robinson Jeffers

Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

+++++

A commenter posted this on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog today in response to a thread about Osama bin Laden. I was here in New York on 9/11; I watched from a terrace at Scholastic as the towers burned. And yet as satisfied as I felt to hear that Osama had died, to know that justice had come round in the world in this one small way, an eye for thousands of eyes, I felt disquieted also about raucously declaring victory when we threw away so much chasing that justice over the past decade . . . American, Iraqi, and Afghan lives; fathers and mothers and children and siblings, even when their bodies returned from the wars; the trillion dollars spent on these missions overseas, when a full quarter of American children sleep in hunger.

So this poem spoke to me in that larger sense: that we cannot know the larger answers, the ends, what is right in the long arc of history. We can know only our own small answers to the questions, and try to see clearly our own smallness, to keep ourselves and those around us whole. I think often about a quote from Rabbi Sheila Peltz, who went to Auschwitz and said, "I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place." As justice is a restoration of balance, of wholeness, again, I am glad today for that. But we should be careful about declaring any more.

Behind the Book: WORDS IN THE DUST, + An Opportunity to Help Afghan Women

Sometimes I receive manuscripts that I don’t want to love. Something in the agent’s pitch or the query letter rubs me the wrong way; I know the genre or the subject matter will make it a terrible uphill climb to and in the marketplace; it is the least commercially appealing subject ever (incest, kitten torturers). I still read these manuscripts, of course, because quality writing will trump everything else, but even more than usual, I go in thinking, Convince me.

And though I’m almost ashamed to admit it now, one of these manuscripts was Words in the Dust. When I received the agent’s pitch letter in late September 2009, it told me that it was the story of a Muslim girl in modern-day Afghanistan, which DID sound exactly right for me and the Arthur A. Levine Books imprint; given our international focus, and the fact that I’d just published Sara Lewis Holmes’s Operation Yes (about Air Force kids with parents serving in Iraq and Afghanistan), it seemed like a good fit. But the letter then went on to explain that it was written by a guy from Iowa, with the decidedly un-Central Asian name of “Trent Reedy,” who had served in the National Guard in Afghanistan. I knew this agent had good taste and knew my tastes as well, that she wouldn’t be steering me wrong; but having long watched the kidlit authenticity wars with a fascinated and wary eye, I thought, Well, that just sounds like nine kinds of trouble, as I put the manuscript in the e-reader queue.

A couple weeks later, I handed my e-reader to Christina McTighe, a lovely young woman (and occasional commenter here) then working for me as an intern, and pointed to the manuscript onscreen. (I do look at every manuscript myself, but given the volume of manuscripts and the loneness of me, smart interns are enormously helpful for triage.) I said, “Would you take a look at this? I have my doubts about it, but let me know what you think.”

And she came back a few hours later and said, “You HAVE to read this. I love it. It’s really, really, really good.”

Huh, I thought. Who’da thunk? That was the most enthusiastic recommendation Christina had given anything in the six months she’d been interning with me; like the agent, she had good taste and knew my taste, and so that was two people who swore to the quality of this book. On the subway home that evening, as I was scrolling through the manuscripts on my e-reader, I saw the title and remembered her endorsement. So I clicked on the document. . . .

And from the very first page, it was so exact about the heat and light and dust in Afghanistan, so honest about the good and bad, the dreams and frailties, in every single one of its characters, that I fell in love with the book too. Its heroine and narrator is Zulaikha, a thirteen-year-old girl with a congenital cleft lip, which makes the mean boys in her village call her “Donkeyface.” Her stepmother, Malehkah, likewise seems terminally disgusted by her, and no one, Zulaikha included, believes they'll ever be able to find her a husband--the only way most Afghan women can leave their father's house. But Zulaikha has a good attitude despite these difficulties, and her inner strength, unfailing hope, and occasional (internal) sarcastic remark instantly endeared her to me. When American soldiers arrived in her village, I shared her distrust and fear; when they offered to provide surgery to fix her cleft lip, I felt her joy and wonder—but that was a road not unmarked by trouble, and I held my breath with her through each turn in her fortunes. There was plenty of other action in the book as well: Zulaikha’s expertly rendered shifting relationships with her brothers; the wedding of her beloved older sister, Zeynab; her learning to read, thanks to a woman in her village, and her amazement at finding her feelings expressed in Afghan poems written eight centuries before she was born . . . all the way through to the heartbreaking yet optimistic ending, with its hope for the future anchored in the pain of Zulaikha’s growth in the story.

With all that, perhaps the author’s most impressive accomplishment for me was his characterization of Zulaikha’s father, who loves his family and works with the Americans on construction projects, but who also takes it absolutely for granted that his wife and daughters should obey him unquestioningly, and that he has every right to hit them if he wants. I’m a twenty-first century feminist to the core, so this should have put me off completely, and yet I loved this man, the same way Zulaikha does, because I saw and understood all of him, both his tenderness and his firmness. And I loved the author and book, as little as I knew them then, for not pulling any punches in showing us who all these characters were: revealing both the good and the bad, and thus ending up at real. I was reading the manuscript at just the time President Obama was performing his 2009 review of our Afghanistan policy, and when I heard the president’s decision on NPR, my first thought was, “But what will happen to Zulaikha?” It took me a moment to remember she was mostly fictional (see the Books page on Trent’s website or this wonderful article in the Los Angeles Times for the remarkable true story behind the book); but my heart ached still for the real-life girls and women of Afghanistan, and for that reason as well as all the others, I knew I had to publish this.

In the weeks that followed, I put the machinery in motion to accomplish that. I talked to Arthur and our publisher and sales and marketing staff. I called the agent, Ammi-Joan Paquette, who was kind enough to put me in touch with Trent himself. We had a long talk one evening, after he’d finished teaching high school English for the day; and his obvious humility and good heart, his understanding of the issues surrounding his writing this book, and his eagerness to do everything he possibly could to make the manuscript as strong and as culturally right as it could be, convinced me that this was an author and book worth fighting for. (Not to mention his passion, when I asked him what he thought we should do for Afghanistan now, and he paused and said, “Uh, how much time do you have?”) I was lucky enough to be Trent’s first choice for an editor too, and in mid-December, we concluded the deal for the book.

Given the timeliness of the Afghanistan setting, we decided we wanted to publish Words in the Dust as soon as we possibly could without sacrificing full fact-checking or quality. So I went straight from the submitted manuscript into line-editing, which I rarely do; and at the same time, Trent and I started looking for vetters and other resources to verify those aspects of the text that didn’t come from his personal experience in-country. We found two wonderful Afghan ladies now living in the U.S. who read the book for us and sent us their comments—one of them through the organization Women for Afghan Women, whose emphasis on educating and empowering Afghan women and children became an inspiration for us both. (Trent was a hero throughout this process, I want to add, working full-time as a teacher, play director, and prom sponsor, and yet still revising intensively.) Trent quoted a number of Afghan poems in the book, and rather than using the flowery, outdated Victorian translations that were in the public domain, I commissioned new versions from Roger Sedarat, a professor of creative writing and translation at Queens College, so the language would hold the same magic for modern English-language readers as it does for Zulaikha. And Katherine Paterson, who had long served as a mentor to Trent and an author idol for me, agreed to write an introduction, where she called the book a “beautiful and often heartbreaking tale.”

And now, many months later, Words in the Dust is in stores, with strong first reviews from Booklist (“deeply moving”), Publishers Weekly (“a nuanced look at family dynamics and Afghan culture”), Kirkus (“both heartwrenching and timely”), and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (“Readers will readily find themselves rooting for Zulaikha in this simply told yet thoughtful story”). Trent spoke at ALA Midwinter a couple weekends ago, and I’m told his talk about Afghanistan and the real Zulaikha moved some people to tears.

I’m going to be blunt here: For all this, and for everything else this book has going for it—its amazing quality and heart; the kind words from Katherine and Suzanne Fisher Staples; the enthusiasm of Scholastic’s sales, publicity, and marketing staff, which has truly thrown themselves behind it—it is still the kind of book that often has a hard row to hoe in the marketplace. Why? Well, an Afghan girl with a cleft lip is not an automatic sell in a book world filled with crash-bang adventure and paranormal hullabaloo. The airwaves are filled with anti-Muslim and anti-Afghanistan sentiment, which will close a certain segment of people off to Zulaikha before they even pick up the book (if they ever pick up a book); and if readers can’t absorb a few non-English words or deal with non-American or non-Christian customs, well, it would not be an easy or enjoyable read for them.

But I believe passionately that for those who do find the book and allow themselves to be open to it, Words in the Dust is a book they’ll love, and a book that can change hearts and minds in the very best way possible: forming a connection with someone different from you by hearing their story. And to get the word out about it, I’m making the following offer:

For every person who “Likes” the Words in the Dust page on Facebook, and/or retweets the link and hashtag below on Twitter, I will donate $1 of my own money to Women for Afghan Women, up to a maximum aggregate amount of $500. Trent is already donating ten percent of his proceeds from the book to the organization, up to a maximum aggregate amount of $10,000, and I’m delighted to be able to further help the cause. Also, this is money that I’m offering personally, on my own initiative; this effort hasn’t been suggested or sponsored by Trent or Scholastic in any way, and they are in no way liable for any matters related to this donation.

If you’d like to take part, please just click over to Facebook or Twitter and include the information below. (Remember, you must include the #WordsintheDust hashtag in Twitter to be counted—I don’t have any way to keep track of the mentions otherwise!)
  • The book’s Facebook page: Words in the Dust fan page (It has 20 fans at the time I'm posting this, for the record.)
  • The bit.ly link to this post: http://bit.ly/hluSgK
  • The Twitter link for retweeting: RT to donate $1 for Afghan women in honor of Trent Reedy’s WORDS IN THE DUST! http://bit.ly/hluSgK #WordsintheDust
  • Trent’s website: http://www.trentreedy.com
Thank you for your interest and participation, and I hope very much that you read and enjoy the book.

The book on IndieBound | Amazon | B&N | Borders | Powells

Video: Trent Reedy & I Discuss WORDS IN THE DUST

When I was in Boise, Idaho, in September for the Idaho SCBWI conference, author Trent Reedy drove over from Spokane to film a video for the Scholastic Librarian Preview Webcast, promoting his wonderful novel Words in the Dust.


During a break in our formal video shoot, Trent and I talked at a little more length and in a little more depth about the book, its backstory, how it was written and edited, his friendship with Katherine Paterson (who wrote a lovely introduction for the book), and sundry other topics. You can see that conversation in two parts here:



(Aren't those just the most attractive stills ever?) There will be more excitement with this book coming later this week; in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this glimpse of the most excellent Trent and the book, and our conversation.

See My Friend's Movie!

When I was a senior in college, I was selected to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium, where I met my friend Jeff Reichert. He and I both ended up in New York after graduation, and while I immersed myself in publishing and children's books, he became a fixture in the world of independent film and film criticism, working in marketing for several indie distribution companies and cofounding an excellent film journal called Reverse Shot.

Then a couple of years ago, Jeff decided to take the plunge:  He quit his job and became a full-time documentary filmmaker. His subject:  gerrymandering, the manipulation of Congressional district lines for political gain.



This process happens every ten years, after the Census numbers come in, so it was a film tailor-made for 2010, and Jeff worked terrifically hard to get the film done in time. He interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, lawmakers in Texas (the famous group of Democrats that hid out in Oklahoma for days to prevent the Republicans from redrawing district lines), and a representative from our neighborhood here in Brooklyn. He shot and edited and shot and edited and essentially went into a two-year filmmaking cave.

This week, all that hard work is paying off as Gerrymandering hits theatres. I saw its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, and it's smart, sharp, funny and passionate -- a film guaranteed to get both Democrats and Republicans talking, while offering some nonpartisan solutions to this knotty political problem. The reviews have been great, and it's even been talked up for the documentary film Oscar! Gerrymandering is showing in a series of one-night stands across the U.S. this week, and then opening in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego on Friday, before spreading wider later this fall. If you're a fan of politics, passion projects, or just really smart filmmaking, please check it out. And yay, Jeff!