Month: April 2014
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Jean Craighead George’s Children Collaborate On Their Mother’s Last Book
“In their acknowledgments at the end of the novel, Craig and Twig thank their mother ‘for leaving us with this ‘homework assignment,’ which pulled us together after she died.’ What …
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Children’s Book Author/Illustrator Todd Parr to Receive 2014 Mills Tannenbaum Award for Children’s Literacy
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 28, 2014 (New York, NY) The 2014 Mills Tannenbaum Award for Children’s Literacy will be …
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CBC Diversity: White with Envy
I grew up jealous of white children.
Though hardly fluent in English herself, my mother had tried very hard to read me English fairy tales when I was young. As a child, I was familiar with Anderson, Grimm and many stories written by Enid Blyton. I remember thinking then, questions like: Where was my snow? Why aren’t there fairies living in our garden? What does a Christmas pie taste like? And especially hated it whenever my mother would say, “We don’t have any of those things here, my dear; they are all in English places overseas.”
Last year, I had tried to recapture that feeling in a poem I wrote for a poetry class at Manhattanville College inspired by Enid Blyton’s famous series The Wishing-Chair:
THE WISHING CHAIR
Dear Wishing Chair,
please fly me out of Malaysia–
the most boring place on Earth.Won’t you take me on an adventure
to magical places,
where there are elves, and pixies
and toadstool fairies.
where children are read bedtime stories,
where there is snow on Christmas Day,
where the weather changes four times a year–
and not stay the same all through the year.
Boring, boring, boring!Dear Wishing Chair,
please fly me out of Malaysia–
and take me to places,
like England and America.Even as a child, I knew the children in the books I read were different from me and everyone around me. To me, these stories probably read more like high fantasy – the characters lived in a world that resembled next to nothing in mine! So consumed was I with this desire to live their lives, that I don’t remember ever wanting to read something with a main character of my own skin color. To my parents and many around me, I lived in my own world – a world inhabited by people with very fair skin.
Enid Blyton influenced my earliest writing, and I finished writing my first book the year I turned 17; it was a story of 71,000 words set in New York City – a place I’ve only ever read about. Understandably, the manuscript has stayed hidden in my drawer ever since its completion.
The major turning point in my writing came 2 years ago during my study under Prof. Phyllis Shalant at the Manhattanville College. The class was encouraged to draw inspiration from our own culture and heritage, which was when I realized exactly how much I have been taking mine for granted; why, we have fox demons, dragons, monkey gods and most of all, kung fu!! *yelled with the same vigor as Po the Dragon Warrior* If I could fall in love with fairies and elves and wishing chairs, other children could very well fall in love with the wonders of Asian stories, too. And from that moment, I truly wanted to become one of those who could bring magic like that to children.
Although, admittedly, I still dream of publishing a book with a white protagonist, my main goal in my writing is to give young readers this gift that I had received from authors like Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl long ago– the awareness of many exciting worlds that exist beyond where we live– this awareness that had led me on all the amazing adventures away from home that I never would’ve had if I had never been an extremely jealous child.
A Chinese born and raised in Malaysia, Celeste is currently a graduate student completing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and Manhattanville College. Celeste writes mainly middle-grade and young adult fiction and is represented by Rosemary Stimola of Stimola Literary Studio.
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‘Paper Towns’ Movie Adaptation with Executive Producer John Green
Nat Wolff, who plays Isaac in the TFiOS movie, will star as Q in the adaptation of Paper Towns. As of yet, there is no word on who will play …
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Macmillan Celebrates 15th Anniversary of ‘Speak’ with RAINN Donation Campaign
Macmillan to Match Up to $15,000 in Donations to RAINN In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the publication of Laurie Halse Anderson’s groundbreaking Speak, Macmillan will be matching donations …
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Jarrett J. Krosoczka to Host BEA Children’s Art Auction
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New York, NY, April 2, 2014—The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship, announced today that the Annual Children’s …
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Daniel Handler On Developing His Writing Style
One participant asked: “How exactly in the name of all sanity did you develop your writing style?” Handler replied: “One does not develop a writing style in the name of …
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CBC Diversity: Keeping it Real in Bologna
If you read the recent PW wrap-up of the 2014 Bologna Book Fair, you’ll notice its buoyant tone, at least for those of us who occasionally publish realistic YA fiction. I have no shame in admitting that I love everything John Green has published. If the current industry narrative mandates thanking the “John Green Effect” for changing the heart of The Market, so be it. And if The Market—that all-powerful “villain with the ferret” (awesome metaphor care of Christopher Myers in The New York Times), that Dark Force upon which we Publishers project our inertia, insecurity, excuses for failure, and self-congratulation in the wake of success—will now welcome brilliant coming-of-age books about, say, a girl who writes fan fiction about a fictional series…I’m in.
So, my takeaway from Bologna was this: Yes! It’s true. Overseas, The Market welcomes realistic YA fiction, as well. There is one caveat: As long as that reality is pretty much confined to white people.
As a white person, and for purposes of this blog post, I am quite comfortable with writing “white people.” To ratchet up any potential insult, I am not too concerned with offending any fellow white people in the Publishing Industry, here or abroad. I will also happily cop to hypocrisy on this front. I had success selling rights at Bologna with a contemporary realistic YA about a white girl: The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, by Adele Griffin (also white). PW does not exaggerate: I was bouncing around the fair, even weighted down with pasta and ham. Adele’s book is amazing and deserves to be read by as many people as possible.
That said, the reception I got for some other books I love just as much as Adele’s or any other on the Soho Teen list wasn’t as effusive. If you mention, for instance, the words “gay” or “Latino,” you might lose interest. Maybe I should have changed my pitches? I had them at “realistic” and “contemporary,” I swear. It doesn’t matter if a book touches upon issues of identity and denial in a way I’ve never seen. Or that at its heart there’s a unique, epic, mythic journey worthy of citation by Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell (both of whom were also white). Or awesome blurbs fifteen months in advance of publication… Or a secret as delicious as E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, another YA smash of the fair. (Which I also love. Which I won’t spoil. But which is also about a white girl and her white family.) Nope. An extraordinary novel whose protagonist isn’t a straight white girl might not satisfy The Market.
So why am I writing this post? If there was anything that I missed at Bologna, I’d love to be proven wrong. If any of you rights representatives or agents or editors or authors (or anyone else) know of great new forthcoming YAs featuring protagonists who aren’t straight white girls—and whose rights are selling abroad—please write in and tell me that I am an ignoramus, and that the world is heeding the term “realistic.”
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Rock ’n’ Roll Legend and Bestselling Author Keith Richards to Publish Picture Book for Children in Collaboration with Artist Daughter Theodora Richards
Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar; National Publication Date for Print and Digital is September 9, 2014 Megan Tingley, Executive Vice President and Publisher, …
