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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Beginning a New Year as I Mean to Continue – with the Alchemy of the Word

January 5, 2019 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I wanted to write this review in December, but I was busy stealing moments to make writing from the inspiration I found in Alchemy of the Word.

I wanted to write this review over the Christmas holiday, but I was practicing balance.

I wanted to write this review on New Year’s and fill it with links to all the posts I’ve previously written about inspiration, but I had just found out that my grandmother died.

So here I am beginning the new year as I mean to end it, practicing balance, experiencing the fullness of life, and giving myself a little grace for the fact that I am trying my best. (If you need to give yourself a little grace, let Icess guide you).

Practice, Practice, Practice

alchemy of the wordI used the word “practice” very deliberately above, because I am not good at balance but it is a skill I’m trying to polish, just as writing is a skill that requires practice. The writers whose essays make up Alchemy of the Word are all very practiced writers and, as members of the faculty of Goddard College (my alma mater), are also tasked with helping new writers get into the habit (practice) of writing. The essays in this collection come from the speeches our teachers use to inspire us at residencies and to (lovingly) warn us about the writing life to come at commencements. They are about subjects as myriad as craft elements, literary activism, and failure. This last one is especially important (and frequent) because failure looms when you don’t practice. More so, failure plagues when you “fail” to see the success that is simply continuing to practice.

Rebecca Brown on failure

As I read this book, I found myself looking for essays I might have originally heard delivered aloud but ultimately found that didn’t matter. The know-how of practicing is something I’ve already absorbed. Instead each of the essays in Alchemy of the Word served as a much-needed reminder to practice.

Balance is Tricky, Balance is Necessary

As a working writer/mom/wife, the breadth of life in these essays reminded me that writing is part of my balance, not something I can add on after. Deborah Brevoort contextualized the anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our politics (and chinking away at my soul), Elena Georgiou encouraged me to search for my own personhood and to fill myself, Keenan Norris reminded me that I actually love the humility that comes with writing, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom exhorted me (again) to “Do [my] work.”

But to do my work (well), first I must fill up again. And I must develop a plan to keep myself filled during all the things that are to come. Here’s the advice from Alchemy of the Word that I’ll be carrying close to my heart as I navigate finding my balance:

“As a writer, I think of my body as a well that is mostly filled through reading.” – Elena Georgiou

“Remember to be absent, Writer. Be in the habit of being absent more often.” – Kyle Bass

Keenan Norris on humility in writing

Life Happens. And Then You Write about It

The sympathy that might have jumped into your heart when you read “my grandmother died” is not really earned. I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since 2012 when she called on my birthday to yell at me for not inviting her to my wedding. I didn’t invite her to my (tiny) wedding because I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her because she’d never taken the time to get to know me. Are there things to mourn in my history with my grandmother, yes, but they are probably not what you expected at the outset.

“Inherent in the creative process is a perpetual tension between love and loathing that gives art its life.” – Aimee Liu

I wish that my grandmother’s tension between love and loathing of the female line she created had tipped more toward love, but the tension is something that gives life to my own work. In Alchemy of the Word, I was reminded to write deeply:

“You have to go to the scariest places, the absence, where nothing has been said so there is no protection at all.” – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

“It is our duty as artists to enter into those places that are kept most secret in ourselves, and bring them to light not so much that we may be healed, but so that others might.” – Paul Selig

Today is the first time I’m explicitly writing about my relationship with my
grandmother, so I don’t pretend my thoughts are profound. I do hope that at the very least I can offer someone the comfort of solidarity in the complexities that are family relationships.

For myself, I’m taking solace in the birthday call I received from my other grandmother (my Baba) in 2011—a call I took on the beach at Port Townsend— the very same beach I so often walked while at Goddard. It was the last time I talked with Baba and I was sad that day in knowing that was probably true. But I am filled with joy at the thought that Baba saw me and loved me enough for two grandmothers.

How I Plan to Move Forward

This year I will write. I will try new things and fail. I will try new things and succeed. I will practice. I will read and take time to be absent. I will be kind to myself. Most of all I will play, because these two quotes resonated with me more than any of the others in Alchemy of the Word and helped me find the joy and purpose in this writing life:

“Being a writer is to be a student without end, and it is to be at play without end. The two are tied, study and play. Both commit us to risk and remediation, that is to learning, always to learning.” – Keenan Norris

“The artists I know have the capacity for wonder and surprise coursing through their veins. And they are all riotously free—whether they have, the way my mentor had, summers off or not.” – Michael Klein

I’m off to play now—to read, to soak in a tub, to watch my son create Playmobil orchestras, to joke around with my husband and to think. All of this is practice. All of it is life. And I am lucky.

To freedom.

To reinvigorate your writing practice pick up a copy of Alchemy of the Word from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: aimee liu, elena georgiou, goddard college, keenan norris, kyle bass, micheline aharonian marcom, paul selig, writing

Reading in the Aftermath of the Kavanaugh Confirmation

October 15, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Depression robs me of feeling and enjoyment. It can also be a strong wake-up call to get back in touch with the things I value quick quick. Listening to the Kavanaugh hearings and all the blather afterwards I felt all the emotions—from the hope that a woman’s voice would be heard against the establishment to the devastation of having my worst expectations confirmed. I tried in those first few days to engage with my family and to touch the thing that always brings me back to myself—books—instead I found myself changed. I don’t know yet if for the better or the worse, or even if this change is permanent, but it’s big enough to explore, here, with you.

Silencing the Cacophony of Mansplaining

a feast in the garden - george konradThe first thing I noticed about how my reading was changing was that I suddenly wanted to throw A Feast in the Garden by George (Gyorgy) Konrád against the wall. I’ve had this reaction before when reading Roberto Bolaño—I loathed his narrator’s didacticism and the way it put me directly in touch with the (male) narrator’s thoughts about the story while distancing me completely from the (female) protagonist’s actual experience. Yes, this could have been done for effect, blah blah blah, but as a woman in this society I’ve had my fill of men explicating something I could or have experienced. I actually loathe the phrase “mansplaining,” but even more so I loathe the male voices that seem to find their only personal fulfillment in explaining—especially when they’re explaining my own experience (or something I know more about than they do) to me. This is not all men, but it’s too many. And I think it’s part of my on-again, off-again beef with Hemingway. Something I did not realize until this week.

So for one moment I feared I was off male narrators forever. Thankfully, Konrád is a brilliant artist and I came to see the effect of what he was doing in this book (which I am still reading, slowly, as his writing demands and deserves). I do, however, feel a lot more comfortable chucking narrators who don’t earn their keep right out my damned window…

Do I sound angry? I am. And embracing my actual feelings instead of trying to make them palatable was something that led me to this next book…

Getting Intimate with Women’s Darkness with Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories

toddler-hunting - kono taekoI felt a little dumb when Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories arrived and I realized it was not by Yōko Ogawa (whose dark short stories in Revenge I adored) but instead by Kōno Taeko, a completely different female Japanese author who is also not afraid of taking readers to dark places. But Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories was fantastic, so much so that I wish I could give proper credit to whomever recommended it to me.

What made this the exactly right book for me exactly right now is that listening to Dr. Ford’s honest, gentle, people pleasing ways in that hearing I honestly believed someone might hear her. But that too-common female approach to power got bowled the fuck over and I needed to experience a completely different approach to female power. Do Kōno’s protagonists feel even a little bit guilty about how damned bad they are as they do things like stalk other women’s children? Maybe. They don’t feel at all bad about asking for whatever they want in bed, though, and I loved them for that (even though I wish at least one was the dominant rather than the submissive in the recurring BDSM scenes in this book). I loved being inside the experience of women who felt real to me in their myriadness.

By far my favorite story in this collection is “Snow,” a tale whose psychological underpinnings are so on point I gasped and felt physical pain when I figured out what was going on. It delved deep and unashamedly into the ugly that can be relationships between women—something I fear will prevent the kind of voting backlash I hope for in November. Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories is fantastic. Read it.

Embracing Allegory in Playthings

playthings - alex phebyI’m not going to presume that Alex Pheby’s Playthings is a tightly scripted allegory of our present day (partially because it was originally published in 2015 and also because it’s actually about one of the most famous cases of paranoid schizophrenia in history), but let’s pretend for a moment it is. At first I was not sure that I could delve deeply into Schreber’s all-consuming self-centeredness (for example, he so completely can’t deal with the fact that his wife has a stroke that the action in that scene then has to completely center around him), but I went with it long enough to get immersed in this superb example of what it feels like to be gaslit by everyone around you. Pheby does a wonderful job of draining the life (at least from Schreber’s point of view) from all the characters around the protagonist and of portraying this man’s madness. I guess that’s the secret sauce of gaslighting, isn’t it? We all have some secret weakness that can be turned against us and drive us to madness. The fact that Schreber is in fact mad makes it just that much easier.

The old-timey feel of this book belies its modern effectiveness. I loved the way Pheby played with chapter introductions—using the length of 18th century-like chapter titles and the feeling of interludes—to transition us through this strange story. The historical setting also contributes to this effect. I was glad we never quite get Schreber’s diagnosis because experiencing the symptoms (and getting to wonder how much the people around him were exacerbating them) was much more powerful than having a concrete, rote, dead name applied to that experience (maybe because I don’t like things being explained to me). Telling myself that this book was an allegory made getting through the day a lot easier and I was enthralled enough by the middle of Playthings that I stopped taking notes. That’s a good sign. Check it out if you want a fictional look at what it feels like to feel completely insane.

I have not recovered from the depression or the related dashing of my hopeful illusions (over and over and over), but I’m no longer letting the current political crazytown keep me from my favorite coping mechanism, either. What are you reading to put light in these dark days?

If you need a good literary escape, pick up a copy of A Feast in the Garden, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, Revenge, or Playthings from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: alex pheby, George Konrád, kono taeko, playthings, toddler hunting

Nobody Told Me | After Birth | Like a Mother

September 15, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

How often do three titles coalesce into a relatively coherent expression of the experience of reading them? I was going to call this review “Revisiting Pregnancy Narratives After Three Years of Motherhood” because something made me delve back into this topic almost exactly three years after the birth of my son, but somehow Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother was just perfect. Even (especially?) in its semi-coherence.

I feel blessed to live in an age where such a wealth of literature (fiction and non-) is being produced to counter some of the crap that our culture has converged around as our vision of motherhood. There are precursors, yes, and I’ve written about some of my favorite pregnancy books for writers previously, but Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother spoke hard to my mother self, writer or not, and I wanted to share why.

Nobody Told Me

nobody told me - hollie mcnishI’ll admit that when my husband gave Nobody Told Me by Hollie McNish for Mother’s Day “because it was on your to-read list” I had absolutely no memory of having ever heard of this book. While people did tell me I’d experience “pregnancy brain,” no one told me (that I remember anyway) my ability to retain information would be permanently altered (or at least that’s my experience so far).

There were so many thing no one told me (and which I cannot remember) that reading McNish’s contemporaneous journal of her pregnancy and first three years of motherhood made me feel wonderfully immersed in that world again. Her voice is gently honest, and whether she’s recounting the everyday indignities (like having no one offer you a seat on the bus when you’re ginormous) or sweetnesses (“When no one is watching, I feel amazing. Like that gigantic, ripe, juicy magic peach”) you’re endeared to her (and, if you’ve been pregnant, to your own memories both good and bad). She’s also deeply generous to the people around her—taking the necessary moments to look at why her grandmother tries to spare her the “embarrassment” of walking around her village pregnant and unwed or when McNish takes pity on her father who is helpless around her child and examines why his generation of men is that way and all the things they’re missing as a result.

I loved that she included her (basically unedited I think) poems in this text, even though I did not always love the poems, because they made me love even more this huge body of work I created while pregnant that I’ve been somewhat embarrassed by (both because I’ve been adding a derogatory “mommy poetry” label to it and because I was new to poetry so a lot of it really isn’t good).

Whether credit goes to me for finding this book (which will be issued in the US this November) or to my husband for having the memory to get it into my hands, I don’t care. I’m just glad I read it and that I read it right now.

Like a Mother

like a mother - angela garbesHow strange and wonderful it felt to find Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy in a newsletter for a local bookstore because Angela Garbes is a local author and though our worlds have not overlapped, I feel like our experiences have. There was not as much revolutionary science as I hoped in this book (partially because I did get to read Penny Simkin and some others who are trying to give pregnant women actual information while I was pregnant), but I still loved the book and I learned a lot of things. Most importantly I learned to trust my own experience.

Garbes is witty and straightforward as she recounts the kinds of stories I have only ever shared with closely trusted family members (maybe I should be better about breaking the “nobody told me” cycle but I might let Garbes do it for me). From breastfeeding to sex to the importance of being cared for during pregnancy and birth, this book touched so many memories (and nerves) for me.

Through the gory (fascinating) details of the function of the placenta to the beauty of the ways that life and death coexist in a woman’s body as she carries with her forever the cells of motherhood, I felt grief while reading this book and I felt empowered. Most of all I felt normal, a sensation that is far too uncommon in these somewhat lonely days of parenting.

After Birth

after birth - elisa albertThough it was Garbes who wrote about how parents “lean into the utter obliteration of their previous selves,” it’s Elisa Albert who dives all the way into exploring that experience in her novel, After Birth. The thing I love most about this book (among many) is how deeply angry new mother Ari is. It’s something I’ve seen lambasted in reviews, which I understand because it’s directly in opposition to the sweet, loving acceptance we all want to think our mothers immediately felt when we were born, but it’s fucking real. Especially in a world where too many of us are too alone in this event that changes our lives completely.

Ari grapples with a birth that did not go how she wanted it to (this is a euphemism because no one except other mothers really wants to even hear about shitty birth experiences), a body that’s irrevocably changed (torn apart), and a community that either does not or cannot meet her needs (in many cases because they aren’t even there). In short, it’s an all-too-familiar tale, but one that many women suffer in silence. I loved how angry Ari was because anger is the last thing we want moms to express and yet it’s a very real emotion (and one that doesn’t get better if we don’t feel entitled to even feel it).

After Birth can be as uncomfortable to read as the title is to imagine. It’s also funny and dark and real and I want all of my friends to read it and then I want us to say, collectively, all the taboo things about parenting REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

If you want to get real about pregnancy and early parenting, pick up a copy of Nobody Told Me, Like a Mother, and After Birth from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: after birth, angela garbes, elisa albert, hollie mcnish, like a mother, motherhood, nobody told me, parenting, pregnancy

Why I No Longer Make Visual Art (A Love Letter to Ursula von Rydingsvard)

August 4, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’d already given up on being a writer when I entered the University of Washington as an undergrad. There was something about deconstructing a text (which is all I thought English majors could do) that made me worry I’d learn to hate reading (the one thing that sustained me always) forever. But I was still a maker. And I needed to put that energy somewhere, so I became a sculpture major. I fucking loved it. Until I stopped.

Asking the Important Questions

I don’t think about drawing, painting, and sculpting much these days, but while wandering the Seattle Art Fair yesterday my artist husband gently nudged open the wound I didn’t want to acknowledge was there. It started with him mentioning that I never draw anymore, talking about how much he liked my drawing, then hinting that some people make work for the very sake of making (a revolutionary concept amidst what felt like the den of art as commerce), and as I shared with him how much I loved just the process of playing with materials, I could feel my hands making the gestures I used to make when sculpting things from clay. I showed him the part of his hip that I had shaped over and over again in object after object and we talked about how much I like textures and which ones.

Why I Stopped

Eventually we got around to talking about what made me stop. See I never cared about the end result. I could shape clay and plaster all day long. I could run a brush or my hands through thick, goopy paint. I could build furnaces and melt metal. I could do anything except finish a project. Because I didn’t care about finishing a project. I cared about the process of making it and the more I worked with the materials, the more I wanted to stay inside that world forever.

This is the photo I post of myself when I want to impress people. Because it is one of the times in my life I was most impressed with myself.

I organized other artists as the “cupola captain” as we melted iron in 100+ degree weather, and one of them got burned with molten metal because I wasn’t good enough, but it was okay because none of us knew what we were doing and we loved it. I gave constructive feedback and thrived off of the ideas and creative energy of those around me.

But we got to the end of the semester and I had no work to present. I had melted it all back down. And my professor suggested I go back up on the hill and try painting for a while. Which I understood, but which also broke my heart. So when scheduling art classes got hard the next quarter (and the university gently suggested I had more than enough credits to graduate already) I switched back to the sociology and political science degrees I’d nearly completed and got ‘er done.

I never made sculpture again.

The First Time I Quit

This wasn’t the first time my love for visual art had been thwarted. In the eighth grade I’d made a scratchboard picture of a KKK rally that was really good. A fellow student pulled it down off the board and tore it up. In the ensuing school meetings, he stressed that he’d been offended by the work (understandable) but (as much as I believe good art has every right to offend) offense had never been my point. I thought the image of white-clad men around a huge bonfire in the dark was beautiful. I knew the KKK was abhorrent and I never intended to celebrate them, but by making the work I felt like I was coming to understand something about humanity that I could not explain. I didn’t have the words then to explain any of my artistic intentions either or the ways art can and should be myriad, but I could walk away. And I did. In high school I tried art again and made some work that was meaningful to me, but nothing that pushed me (or anyone else for that matter).

About Ursula von Rydingsvard

One of the first things we saw at the Seattle Art Fair that I really connected with was a sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard. Better yet, Galerie Lelong also had some of her drawings—charcoal works on paper that she’d woven maroon textiles through and sewn roughly with black thread. I’ve seen (and loved) Ursula’s pieces all over the US, but this work on paper was new to me and spoke to a project that I’d been working on when my grandmother died so many years ago.

I’d read that some number of thousands of people had died in Africa from a preventable disease and I wanted to know what that many lives felt like in my body, so I made a painting and crisscrossed it with monofilament onto which I began tying French knots in red string. Because I lied earlier—I do still think about drawing, painting, and sculpting, and this was the first thing that had compelled me back to work. Each time I pierced the canvas to start a new knot it felt violent (and caused me physical pain because I’m not always careful about how I work). I never finished the piece (I’d rushed the underlying painting and it was bad) but I did feel what I’d needed to feel.

Through all the times my husband and I wandered in and out of the booths in the fair, he had been trying to tell me that more artists than I knew (if they could admit it) were really making their work for that feeling they had while creating. And that Ursula was unabashed in celebrating and focusing on her love for the materials.

When he said that, I felt the kind of opening in my body that you should always pay attention to—weepy grateful and like my limbs were limbering to work again.

ursula von rydingsvard in san francisco
(This is how much I love Ursula… I stalk her sculptures wherever I go.)

Will I Ever be a Famous Sculptor?

Unlikely. I love writing and I’ve gone far enough down this path of specialization that my visual art muscles are desperately rusty. I might polish them off again someday, but right now I’m lucky to have a few hours a week to work creatively. Still I can see now how important visual art is to my creative self and that I’ve been missing it. I never really stopped making (because I use that same generative energy in writing, gardening, baking, and making and raising a child), but I better understand the ache I’ve felt in the early mornings when I try to capture the shape of my son’s cheek in crayon on newsprint before he moves… again.

And though I’ll forever be 30 credits short of a degree in sculpture, the ways I learned to think about form, negative space, and the importance of the marks makers leave on their work inform everything I create for myself and for others. I’ve also learned to be myriad and expressive, to be comfortable provoking (at least sometimes).

I can’t promise that I won’t stop making visual art again. But I can say that I won’t be so quick to forget its importance to the writing I do and the person I am. Thank you, Ursula, for being you, and Clayton, for keeping art in my life and yours.

If art is important to your process, I recommend visiting the Seattle Art Fair this weekend. There’s a lot of commerce, a lot of pretense, and also a lot of art. You might just find what you need, too.

Filed Under: Art, USA & Canada Tagged With: making, Ursula von Rydingsvard

Auditing the Diversity of My Son’s Bookshelves – VIDA-style

July 29, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

child and bookshelvesEvery night my son gets to choose a bedtime book from his vast library—a library I’ve very carefully built to represent a world larger than he’s been exposed to so far. He’s a beautiful, bright, curious little white boy who spends a significant amount of his time in a class that’s 95% other white boys and I want him to know there’s more to the world. I can’t change the makeup of his class, but I can bring a wide variety of colors and cultures into our home and introduce him to some awesome female figures along the way. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job, but the other night he confused Love Is for Come on Rain (the only two stories on his shelves that star African American girls) and I realized I might have fallen into the trap of tokenism.

So I decided to count his books, VIDA-style.

ask me - bernard waber and suzy leeI looked at the gender and race of main characters and also the gender and race of each book’s author and illustrator. It wasn’t an exact science—I found myself making some assumptions about both race and gender (some of which I was later able to clarify) and the counts are a little iffy (you try wresting a little boy’s books from his grasp) but the patterns are clear and I’m so glad I went through this exercise, because I learned a lot.

The Characters

Looking strictly at the race of main characters, I found a better mix than I worried I might have. There’s still a lot of white kids in there, but we also read a lot of classic books (read: books from a time when whiteness was presumed). I could certainly be doing better in the Black and Brown (a poor catchall I know) categories, particularly as I begin to teach my son Spanish. And the Asian characters come too heavily from a handful of favorite Asian author/illustrators to be truly representative of a larger world (more on that later).

The Humans
White Black Brown Asian Many
29 5 4 8 3

blueberry girl - gaiman and vessMy favorite thing about this table is the “Many” category which I had to scrawl into a margin because of three books: Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess (where the main character shifts race and appearance throughout the book), Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long (where technically “love” could be the main character but the rest of the book is so representative of so many lived experiences, it deserves massive credit) and Peace Begins with You by Katherine Scholes that follows a similar pattern.

Why can’t more books transcend race this way? It’s not the answer for all books, because getting inside specific experiences is important, but I believe it’s important to balance specificity with universality and the three books I just mentioned do a great job at universality (even if my husband does find my reading of Peace Begins with You to be a fantastic sedative).

I’m going to try harder here. Representing a variety of cultures is important to me because my own experiences living abroad taught me so much about being human. Representing a variety of races is also important to me because my little kiddo needs to see that people are people, and although I live in a city that is more diverse than the town where I grew up, it is largely a segregated city.

Non-Human Characters
Animal Vehicle
51 9

choo choo - virginia lee burtonI was surprised to discover just how many books we read that feature non-human characters. Unfortunately, the default gender for animal and vehicle characters seems to be male. Some of this is due to the English reversion to “he” as a generic pronoun (read: patriarchy) but some of it is just laziness.

Here I give massive kudos to Virginia Lee Burton, author and illustrator of both Maybelle the Cable Car and Choo Choo two stories about female vehicles. They’re fantastic stories and I’m happy to report my son loves them as much as he loves another classic Burton story, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (which also features a female vehicle). Another book we love that features a female character is Octopus Alone by Divya Srinivasan.

Does it matter that these characters are female? Maybe not specifically in these books, but it does matter that my little boy is exposed to the idea that females are also functional members of society in all the ways that men are.

Speaking of gender, the table below combines the human and non-human characters.

Gender of All Characters
Male Female Both Indiscriminate
76 25 3 7

There’s no excuse for the results of my gender count. Even including the number of classic books we read. Yes, a lot of this is also due to the male animals and vehicles, but clearly I need to do better in selecting books. The “both” category comprises books like The Look Book by Chris Sickels where there are two main characters, one of each gender. And “indiscriminate” accounts for books like Love where there are many main characters, the main character is an animal that doesn’t have a gendered pronoun like Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise by Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien, or I simply can’t tell from the text if the character is male or female as in What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom.

The takeaways here are that authors and illustrators can and should think about the gender of the character of their main characters. They can even get around gender if they want to. And I can do a lot better in diversifying the characters my son reads about. In terms of race, culture and gender. Likely sexuality, too, but we really aren’t there yet.

The Authors

Do the race and gender of authors matter? I believe they do. While I champion authors like Jonathan Evison who truly attempt to get inside the head of a character with a different life experience than theirs and to convey that experience with deep empathy, I also strongly believe that readers benefit from having access to a variety of voices (in this case in text and visually).

Author’s Race
White Black Brown Asian
84 1 4 10

boy who didnt believe in spring - cliftonSo the fact that almost all of the authors my son has been exposed to are white is a fail on my part. I can name the one Black author—Lucille Clifton—and the excellence of The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring is argument enough for actively seeking out more diverse voices. It’s a gorgeous book that gets to the heart of male friendship better than anything else I’ve read.

Another fail is that (because I counted an author each time they appeared) I know that Dan Santat and Suzy Lee account for most of the Asian category. Shaun Tan and Kobi Yamada are nearly all of the rest. As amazing as these authors are, that’s only four voices to represent a wide variety of cultures.

Author’s Gender
Male Female
68 33

I’m doing a little better on the gender front when it comes to authors, but clearly there’s work to be done.

The Illustrators

Illustrator’s Race
White Black Brown Asian
87 0 3 13

beekle - santatCan I admit yet that I’m starting to feel a little demoralized? How can I not have one single book in my son’s collection that’s illustrated by an African American? And that this category is looking very white overall. The same note from above about Suzy Lee, Dan Santat and Shaun Tan still applies—fantastic illustrators that I might have overemphasized in my son’s collection.

Illustrator’s Gender
Male Female
75 28

Where have all the ladies gone? Enough said. That’s especially disappointing because I’ve found that the books we have that are written and/or illustrated by women are much more likely to present characters that are not white and/or female.

What I’m Going to Do Next

Let’s be real, I’m still going to run out and buy Suzy Lee’s next book because I love her work. And I’ll probably buy all the Richard Scarry and Dr. Seuss my son can dream of (though we have more than enough Thomas the Tank Engine for a lifetime). But I’m also going to actively seek out books with more diverse main characters and those that are written and/or illustrated by women and people of color.

If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments. He’s nearly three, but he’s willing to sit for stories that are at least at a four- or five-year-old level.

My Recommendations

If you’re trying to diversify your little kiddo’s shelves, here are some of our favorites:

The Adventures of Beekle, the Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat
Ask Me by Bernard Waber and Suzy Lee
Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken
The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring by Lucille Clifton and Brinton Turkle
Choo Choo by Virginia Lee Burton
Come on Rain by Karen Hesse and Jon J. Muth
A Different Pond by Bao Phi and Thu Bui
Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise by Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien
Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long
Love Is by Diane Adams and Claire Keane
Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood by F. Isabel Campoy,
Theresa Howell, and Rafael López
Natsumi! by Susan Lendroth and Priscilla Burris
Now by Antoinette Portis
Octopus Alone by Divya Srinavasan
Old Turtle and the Broken Truth by Douglas Wood and Jon J. Muth
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
This Beautiful Day by Richard Jackson and Suzy Lee
Wave by Suzy Lee

Those are affiliate links, so if you buy from Powell’s you’ll be supporting a great bookstore (and also my book-buying habit).

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: gender, kids lit, race

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My Books

Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

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