Recent interviews

July 19, 2011July 18, 2011 - Stacy

Ever wonder how an editor might edit cross-culturally, or how an editor works with a cultural consultant? Not sick of hearing the story of how Tu started? Check out these interviews of me—and then go check out the rest of Doret’s and Uma’s blogs, because they’re both important voices in children’s literature right now.

Interview with Stacy Whitman (2011 SBBT, Day 5) at TheHappyNappyBookseller, Doret’s blog

Interview Wednesday: Stacy Whitman of Tu Books, a Lee and Low Imprint at Writing with a Broken Tusk, Uma Krishnaswami’s blog

On query letters and “requested” material

July 18, 2011July 18, 2011 - Stacy 1 Comment

Writers often ask me about query letters—how to write them, what to put in them, what will hook me.

The problem is that I hate query letters. I much prefer a simple cover letter with the first three chapters (NOT three chapters randomly sampled from the book). This is why my submission guidelines explicitly say, “Please include a synopsis and first three chapters of the novel. Do not send the complete manuscript.” The cover letter just needs to let me know the basics about your manuscript: genre, plot synopsis/hook, intended audience (middle grade or YA), and perhaps your writing credentials. Usually I don’t even bother reading the cover letter until I’ve read a page or two of the partial—until I’m hooked on the actual writing, it just doesn’t matter to me.

Occasionally I’ll get an emailed query from someone who has obviously been to our website, where they could have easily found the submission guidelines (which are prominently linked), because they’re using our Contact Us email address to query. When I email back with the link to our submission guidelines and telling them they’re welcome to send the first three chapters and a synopsis per the guidelines, often what happens is that a few days later I’ll get a package in the mail with “REQUESTED MATERIAL” written on it.

So, as I’ve said before, asking you to follow the directions does not mean I have requested your manuscript. It just means that I’ve asked you to follow the directions so I can receive your material in a way that will allow me to give it all due consideration. Once I have read the partial, I may request to read the full manuscript. But until then, writing “requested material” on the envelope for something I know I haven’t requested just makes me believe you aren’t listening, and that makes me think that working with you might not be an enjoyable experience.

Most agents, however, prefer query letters. As do some editors. Their work preferences are different than mine. This is why it’s SO important to read submission guidelines.

So if you are working on a query letter because someone you want to send it to prefers them, I can’t offer much advice. But there are plenty of people who can. For example, this recent episode of Writing Excuses features Dan and Robison Wells’s agent, Sara Crowe, giving her take on query letters and what hooks her.

Submissions update

July 5, 2011July 5, 2011 - Stacy

For those of you who submitted PARTIAL manuscripts, I am nearly up to date on everything that has come in up through June 1. I’ll post when I am, so that you’ll know that if you haven’t heard from me, the answer is no. But I’m still working my way through a few.

For those of you from whom I asked for FULL manuscripts, I’m working my way through that reading, getting back to people with editorial letters, feedback, or (sadly, yes) declines as necessary. I respond to full manuscripts; it just takes me a while. If it’s been more than four months since I got your manuscript, a reply to you might have slipped through the cracks. Feel free to follow up to see where your manuscript is in such a case. If it’s been less than four months, I should be getting back to you sometime this month.

Also, if you are a member of a writing community, listserv, message board, or other group for which this might be interesting—to which I haven’t already posted a call for submissions—you are welcome to share this around:

Call for submissions

TU BOOKS, an imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS, publishes speculative fiction for children and young adults featuring diverse characters and settings. Our focus is on well-told, exciting, adventurous fantasy, science fiction, and mystery novels featuring people of color set in worlds inspired by non-Western folklore or culture. We welcome Western settings if the main character is a person of color.

We are looking specifically for stories for both middle grade (ages 8-12) and young adult (ages 12-18) readers. (We are not looking for picture books, chapter books, or short stories. Please do not send submissions in these formats.)

For more information on how to submit, please see our submission guidelines at http://www.leeandlow.com/p/tu_submissions.mhtml. We are not accepting unagented email submissions at this time.

What I’m particularly interested in seeing lately: Asian steampunk, any African culture, Latino/a stories, First Nations/Native American/Aboriginal fantasy or science fiction written by tribal members, original postapocalyptic worlds, historical fantasy or mystery set in a non-Western setting.

Stacy Whitman
Editorial Director
Tu Books

Exclusive submissions vs. simultaneous

June 27, 2011June 27, 2011 - Stacy 2 Comments

Just a little reminder of my personal editorial policy and Lee & Low’s company guidelines when it comes to submissions:

I am a bit slow in processing submissions. Sorry, I just have a lot on my plate that I’m juggling. I’m working on catching up on a LOT of submissions, and will be getting back to several authors soon with editorial letters to further the process, and to others with requests for more.

However, Lee & Low’s policy is to not respond to submissions for which the answer is no.

It’s a tough market out there and I can understand the frustration with policies like this from the point of view of a writer, but it is what it is. There’s only so much time in the day and we’re already kind of swamped.

So combine those two things, and I can understand why a writer might get a little testy if they haven’t heard from me after submitting their book to Tu. This is why my personal (not company) editorial policy is that for initial submissions, I don’t require exclusive submissions. I understand how long the process can be and if each writer has to wait months for each editor or agent to respond, it might take years to get through the process.

Well… it does take years anyway for some writers, and that’s just how it is, but to ease the pain, you are welcome to submit your work to other publishers or agents at the same time (who also are open to simultaneous submissions—you’ll want to watch out for those who require exclusives so as not to send it to an exclusive and a simultaneous at once; these days most writers just note in their cover letters that their submission is a simultaneous submission). But nowadays most people understand that you simply can’t wait months and months to hear back from an editor.

So that should resolve the need for anyone to tell me in their cover letter that they’re “giving” me an exclusive. It’s okay. You don’t have to. Really. It won’t hurry me up any—when I have copyedits to go over or printer proofs in to approve or whatever that is happening with books that are already in the pipeline, I’m afraid those books will usually if not always take precedence over submissions.

Here’s the reason for the need for this policy: other than an intern to be the first pair of eyes on submissions, I am the only person reading submissions for Tu Books at this time. That means I’m the only one editing all the books, the only one working with the designers and production on books about to go to press, the only one going through copyedits when we get them back from the copyeditor, the only one negotiating contracts, and pretty much anything to do with Tu Books on the editorial side of things other than people who come in for short parts of the process like acquisition committee members, copyeditors, and proofreaders (we of course have marketing and sales staff working on those things). So once the intern screens the obviously-not-right-for-us submissions (picture books, realistic books, adult books, main characters who aren’t POC, etc.), she gives me a reader’s report on the books she liked. But I still have to go through that pile of not-completely-wrong-for-us submissions and decide which to pursue, while also doing all the things an editor does in a day. And when I do have the time, I’ll usually spend that time working to further develop manuscripts that already looked promising from my last foray into the submission pile, reading full manuscripts and getting feedback to the authors and/or their agents, getting the manuscripts that are ready out to the acquisitions committee—and I’m backed up on that right now as well (catching up now!).

So I just wanted to gently remind writers that they are welcome to continue to submit widely at the initial stage, which for me is the “partial” stage because I hate queries (some editors who are open to unagented submissions ask for queries; my personal feeling is that I’d rather just see the writing and a synopsis).

New Tu acquisition

June 16, 2011June 16, 2011 - Stacy 4 Comments

The announcement came out in Publisher’s Marketplace today, so I can share it here, too!

Kimberly Pauley’s CAT GIRL’S DAY OFF, when a girl’s celebrity-addicted friends make her watch a viral Internet video, her secret “talent” to understand the language of cats catapults them into a celebrity kidnapping mystery with ties to Hollywood and Ferris Bueller’s Chicago, to Stacy Whitman at Tu Books, in a nice deal, for publication in Spring 2012, by Larry Kirshbaum at LJK Literary Management (World).

You might know Kim for her hilarious first novel SUCKS TO BE ME or her hilarious second novel STILL SUCKS TO BE ME. This one’s even funnier, and throws in a nice homage to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as well. We’re well into the revision process, and this one is slated come come out spring 2012. The listing doesn’t say here, but it’s a YA.

Go congratulate Kim, either at her blog or on Twitter.

Oh hey, look what I found

May 24, 2011 - Stacy 1 Comment

Pictures from a recent visit to NYC by Cynthia Leitich Smith! These were taken in Feb. 2011, but I completely forgot to post them.

What’s that? You don’t know Cyn? How could you miss this unyielding advocate for children’s literature? In fact, I’m surprised you somehow managed to make it to MY site if you haven’t been to Cyn’s first. But just in case you don’t know all the cool things she’s doing, from her blog—where she interviews and champions other authors more than herself—to her main website, where she keeps a bunch of annotated bibliographies of multicultural literature broken down by communities and a whole part dedicated to children’s/YA lit resources, not to mention a whole bunch of other stuff, well, now’s your chance to check it out.

And while you’re at it, go read her books.

Beyond Orcs and Elves, part 3

May 21, 2011March 22, 2012 - Stacy 4 Comments

And finally, part 3. Read parts 1 and 2 here and here.

So now let’s talk about writing cross-culturally!

Writing Cross-culturally

A few months ago, I answered a reader’s question on my website, in which she asked, basically, “Is my character ‘black enough’?” which prompted a wide variety of responses, some voices expressing why the question itself hurt the readers, most particularly that the question comes with baggage that implies there’s only one way to be black. But much as it might be a painful process, with perhaps many mistakes made along the way, I think it’s important for us to be talking about writing cross-culturally. White writers have started to examine their privilege, have started to critically think about why they don’t include more diversity in their writing. So they start out with some incorrect ideas and a LOT of questions—and the way they ask the questions might not always be the best way to phrase something. Not to mention—getting back to that Le Guin quote that everyone has someone who is Other to themselves—that maybe black writers might be interested in Japanese culture, and East Asians might be interested in Indian culture, and all those intercultural interests that are so healthy for everyone to have.

It’s not the responsibility of your average POC on the street to explain Racism 101 to anyone who asks, and sometimes those responding have heard it ALL before. But there are ways for people who want to include a wider variety of people/cultures/ethnicities/races in their writing to figure out how to do so. In fantasy, sometimes it’s especially easy, because often our worldbuilding involves MAKING STUFF UP! If it’s not set in the real world nor directly influenced by it, why would everyone need to be white?

But then what about setting stuff in the real world, or in a world inspired by a specific culture, say, ancient China? That’s where research comes in. And as any writer knows, research means a number of different sources of information.

Read! Get educated!

I know I’m going out of order here, but this really is one of the most important things someone who’s just starting out thinking about writing cross-culturally can do. And I don’t mean just walking up to a person on the street or a random work acquaintance and saying “so, tell me about you people.” If you don’t already know and trust someone from the culture you want to write about, ask yourself why that is—both that you want to write about it, and that you don’t know anyone. Then figure out how to fix the second part of that sentence. Find museums and cultural centers if you don’t know someone from that culture and ask them to point you in the right direction. It’s their job, at least, to field such questions, and it’s a better solution than asking the only black/Native American/Asian person you know. And besides, you can’t assume that if someone’s Asian, for example, that they’re from the culture you want to write about (BIG difference between Chinese/Japanese/Korean/other Asian cultures) or that they’d have any more experience than you do with it if they’ve lived here in the US their whole lives. They might. But they might not.

So USE YOUR LIBRARY. (Aside: Our libraries are under constant threat of budget cuts right now because of the economy. If you want to be able to keep using it as a resource—and you really should—make sure to also think about advocating for it in your communities/counties/states.)

Examine your privilege before you walk this road

Normally at this point, I read parts of “Things I don’t have to think about today” by John Scalzi, an SFF author and the current president of SFWA. Rather than reproduce his blog post, I’d rather you go read it here in its entirety. It’s one author’s musings on his privilege, which I think will be a nice springboard thought exercise for anyone thinking about their own privilege—and most of us have privilege of some form, even if we’re from a poor background, even if we have health challenges, and so forth.

Get to know people outside your own “community”

This one’s fairly self-explanatory. Reaching beyond our everyday patterns to befriend people who are different than us helps us to see a bigger picture and understand others’ perspectives, even if we don’t share them.

Learn the line between “respect” and “appropriation”

Note to especially examine appropriation of Native American and other First Nations/Aboriginal cultures, whose voice has been suppressed/oppressed ever since Columbus over 500 years ago. I hear from a lot of people who want to use Native American beliefs (or often, what they believe are Native American beliefs, from a 70s-media-influenced point of view, conflating all Native American people into one spiritual-close-to-nature pot). But most Native Americans would probably rather see fantasy from other Native Americans because of their sensitivity to cultural appropriation from outsiders.

How do you know, then, whether you’re using a culture of inspiration appropriately? Nisi Shawl has a lot of great thoughts on cultural appropriation in her articles Appropriate Cultural Appropriation and Transracial Writing for the Sincere. I think the most important one from Appropriate Cultural Appropriation is the idea of the difference between Invaders, Tourists, and Guests. She says:

During the same panel which inspired Goto’s poem, audience member Diantha Day Sprouse categorized those who borrow others’ cultural tropes as “Invaders,” “Tourists,” and “Guests.” Invaders arrive without warning, take whatever they want for use in whatever way they see fit. They destroy without thinking anything that appears to them to be valueless. They stay as long as they like, leave at their own convenience. Theirs is a position of entitlement without allegiance.

Tourists are expected. They’re generally a nuisance, but at least they pay their way. They can be accommodated. Tourists may be ignorant, but they can be intelligent as well, and are therefore educable.

Guests are invited. Their relationships with their hosts can become long-term commitments and are often reciprocal.

I think those are important distinctions. You may start as a Tourist, but learn enough and you might be invited as a Guest. But it’s an invitation that comes from the host—you can’t demand an invitation. But I think the occasional outsider writing as Tourist, as long as you’re learning, is an important part of this step of the process we’re in, working to build awareness and bring out more SFF books for young readers that feature POC.

But go read BOTH articles! Both have more to say than I can express here without just repeating what she already said so well.

And I really don’t have much more to say on how to write cross-culturally. Really, what I’d like you to take away from this for your writing is to consider who the readers are, where they come from, the issues involved in reaching all readers and potential readers, and then for you to become advocates for diversity in whatever way is appropriate for your writing. But let me leave you with this thought on appropriation from Ursula K. Le Guin from that same book, The Language of the Night:

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate or deify it; but in either case, you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.”

And for those wanting more reading, check out these links:

Resources For Writers: Writing About Another Culture

Nisi Shawl’s Writing the Other—both a workshop and a book. More info at http://www.sfwa.org/members/shawl/other/

“Appropriate Cultural Appropriation” by Nisi Shawl http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10087

“Transracial Writing for the Sincere” by Nisi Shawl http://www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/

Le Guin, Ursula K. “American SF and the Other,” The Language of the Night. New York: HarperCollins, 1979/1989.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” The Language of the Night. New York: HarperCollins, 1979/1989.

“Being Poor” by John Scalzi http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf

“Things I Don’t Have to Think about Today” by John Scalzi http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/18/things-i-dont-have-to-think-about-today/ paired with his next post on narrative usurpation, covering why he wrote the previous post, at http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/18/narrative-usurpation-quick-thoughts-on-the-previous-post

Teen blogger Ari’s Reading in Color blog, which reviews only books by and about people of color: http://blackteensread2.blogspot.com/ She’ll give you plenty of places to start reading if you’re just starting out—and really anytime you might be stuck and wanting more to read.

Color Online focuses on women POC writers and books for POC teen girls, including a local library one of the bloggers runs for teens in her area. They often run reading challenges to get their fellow bloggers reading and thinking about POC in children’s/YA books, though they don’t limit themselves to children’s books. http://coloronline.blogspot.com/

Doret runs The Happy Nappy Bookseller, where she reviews books about POC and raises awareness, sometimes doing features on particular themes. http://thehappynappybookseller.blogspot.com/

And the obligatory last slide for more info about me—which of course you already know if you’re here!

Beyond Orcs and Elves, part 2

May 19, 2011May 21, 2011 - Stacy 9 Comments

See here for part 1.

Many authors have broken that mold & followed Ursula K. Le Guin’s admonition to write more of the “other.” But there’s still a strong British tradition—among the biggest touchstones for kids from the 70s and 80s era are arguably Susan Cooper, Roald Dahl, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.

All touchstones for a reason—they’re REALLY GOOD books. But told from a particular cultural perspective, and there is a danger to just one single story—and if you haven’t seen that TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie, I highly recommend you googling “the danger of a single story” and watching all twenty minutes of the talk, because she has a lot of really great things to say about how important it is for ALL children to see themselves mirrored in the books they read.

Yet despite our gains in diversity in fantasy and all of children’s books, we still have a long way to go. Just in the last few years, I’m sure you’ve heard of the problems with intentional or unintentional whitewashing that goes back as far as Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. You probably know that the main character of Earthsea, Ged, has copper skin, and that all the characters in the book except for the invaders are people of color. The myth was that “black books” don’t sell, so many versions of Earthsea didn’t feature people on the cover to avoid that “problem”—even to the point of featuring dragons. There are no dragons in Earthsea. EDIT: Wait, there were dragons in Earthsea? I honestly don’t remember them! But my point is that whether dragons are important or not, Ged is not white. Whoops!

And when people were featured on the cover, what does Ged look like?

It’s easy to say that’s all in the past, but as we all know, we’re still dealing with the problem now.

There’s the question of whether “black books” sell to a “mainstream” audience (I hate this term, because “mainstream” here implies “white,” without the nuance of all the other people in the audience—74% isn’t 100%!), not to mention it assumes that white people wouldn’t be interested in reading a story that features a black (or Asian, or Native American, etc etc) character.

In a world in which Will Smith and Denzel Washington are doing just fine, why is this a problem in our books??

Several months ago I attended a panel that featured several NY publishing house editors, a School Library Journal blogger, and an NYPL librarian (sorry, it’s been so long I can’t remember who was on the panel, but someone who was there might pipe up). One thing that was brought up by someone (sorry! can’t remember who!) on the panel is that part of the problem is that we’re defining books by “black book”/“white book,” rather than “awesome mystery,” “exciting historical adventure,” “thriller,” “space adventure.” That’s what we’re working on at Tu—exciting books for young readers that are all about the story first and foremost and just happen to feature a person of color as the main character. How silly is it to assume that the hero always has to be white?

A lot of my colleagues in editorial are looking for books featuring a wide variety of characters. It’s a change that we all need to implement as writers, readers, parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, marketing, and anyone else involved in bringing books to young readers.

Let’s look at the readers themselves for a minute.

Note that this is from 2008 or 2009 estimates from the US Census Bureau & that we’ll have a more accurate view once the 2010 data is available. I’ve heard that soon, if not now, about 50% of kids in schools across the nation are people of color, including Latinos. Right now, if you add up those sides of the pie, even in 2008 people of color were 32% of the population overall.

You might want to run by those again. I think just seeing how the green part of the pie just grows… and grows… and grows…

Why is that?

Okay, then I just wanted to show you this last thing. NOW REMEMBER—not all people of color live in poverty, and not all people in poverty are people of color. But when thinking about how kids access books—who buys them, where kids find books to read, etc.—it’s important to remember that a large percentage of those in poverty are kids of color, and that affects how they’re able to access print materials.

Note that because of the demographic breakdown, a lot of the kids who only have 1 book to share with 354 other kids will be kids of color.

And you get a pretty good picture that the majority of the book-buying public being white has a lot to do with who’s in poverty as much as any other reason. Of course, correlation isn’t causation—I’m just saying there’s a link here for us to consider, and that there’s a lot of work to do in making sure that kids in poverty also see themselves mirrored in books. There’s a privilege situation that means that most of the demographic writing books aren’t necessarily the same demographic as the kids looking for books in our schools and libraries. (I first heard of this data when Andrea Davis Pinkney shared it at the A is for Anansi conference; later I found a study that confirmed the numbers, but I don’t have the link here on my home computer.)

We often talk in multicultural book circles about the idea of mirrors and windows—mirrors to see your own experience reflected back, windows to see into another world. Author Zetta Elliott recently added a dimension to that which I like, the idea of “sliding glass doors” to walk in and experience someone else’s world. That’s what reading is, isn’t it? That’s where true interculturalism begins.

In 2009 when I was starting Tu Publishing as a small press in Utah—before we were acquired by Lee & Low—I talked to a few neighborhood kids about their reading habits. This is by no means a scientific study, and I want to warn you that often, kids at this age don’t have the vocabulary to express their feelings about reading, so it might seem like I’m leading them, but the questions I’m asking in the video are questions that use information their parents supplied to me. Let’s watch them first, then I’ll discuss.

(Ignore the links to the Kickstarter campaign—that’s from way back when we were starting up.)

The last four kids were all siblings in a multiracial family. Note how the older sister had a lot more vocabulary to explain why she likes the books she likes! I’m sure that the boys and the youngest girl will eventually find the words to explain what they mean. But I want to talk about Austin in particular. He’s actually younger than his brother by two years—he was 8 and his brother was 10 at the time of filming. So his answers do reflect his developmental place in life—he just doesn’t have the vocabulary to express his frustration. In a family of readers, he hates to read, his mom says, not only because of his ADD but also because he can’t ever find any books that he feels he relates to. He would love to read a mystery, but when he picks up the mysteries his older brother is into, he flips through them and says in disgust, “Why can’t there be any black people who solve mysteries? Aren’t there any black people in this book at all??”

Anecdotally, that is one of the many factors that might affect why some kids of color don’t read as much genre fiction: not as many mirrors in as windows, which means it’s a bigger stretch for them to go out of their comfort zone every day. And they often do that so often, that in reading for pleasure, why would they want to yet again read about someone other than themselves?

Not every kid will have a need for mirrors. But shouldn’t we be providing them for the ones that do, and windows into their world for other kids?

Business-wise, it’s easier to sell windows than mirrors. Hence, when you look at the numbers of who buys books, of course the largest number of books currently sold will be to white people picking up books in which they see themselves mirrored, right? They’re the people who buy books by a large margin, both because whites are just a larger percentage of the population but also because a greater percentage of them are in a higher socioeconomic bracket. But then, we discount that low-income neighborhoods need public libraries and school libraries and all those other places where kids should have access to books and other reading materials, too. And we definitely discount the minorities who have money and are looking for great mirror books for their kids or themselves.

But hey, we’re publishing people. We can’t change the world, but we can do something. We can get involved in our communities and do what we can in our own spheres of influence. We can hope and work toward making sure that those opportunities are available through a lot of ways, like helping local libraries retain their funding, getting involved in mentoring, donating books, or donating money to book programs like RIF (which, if you noticed recently, lost all its federal funding due to severe budget cuts). There are so many opportunities to get involved like that.

But as that side of things improve, we also have to make sure that the actual books continue to grow toward reflecting the world that kids see in their daily lives, inasmuch as that is possible in a fantasy world, right?

As Andrea Davis Pinkney said at that same conference I mentioned above, “We’re doing okay, but we have a lot of work to do.”

Next time: Writing cross-culturally. What should writers take into consideration when thinking about writing from a perspective not their own? Should they even attempt writing cross-culturally/cross-racially?

Beyond Orcs and Elves: Diversity in Science Fiction and Fantasy for Young Readers, part 1

May 18, 2011May 19, 2011 - Stacy 9 Comments

Here you go! The first installment. Note that this was written to be spoken, so sometimes the diction might seem a little weird for a blog post. But I’m just going to leave it as-is, because you’ll get the idea.

Beyond Orcs and Elves: Diversity in Science Fiction and Fantasy for Young Readers

Ursula Le Guin, way back in 1975 said:

The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF [science fiction, but let’s include fantasy too] has either totally ignored women or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters—or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs—or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes. Male elitism has run rampant in SF. But is it only male elitism? Isn’t the “subjection of women” in SF merely a symptom of a whole which is authoritarian, power-worshiping, and intensely parochial?

The question involved here is the question of The Other—the being who is different from yourself. This being can be different from you in its sex; or in its annual income; or in its way of speaking and dressing and doing things; or in the color of its skin, or the number of its legs and heads.

That was 35 years ago. (I know. I can’t believe it myself.) How are we doing today? I want to talk about the inclusion in speculative fiction for children and young adults of what 74% of the book-buying public might consider the Other in terms of mostly racial but also cultural differences. Perhaps this will help you in writing fantastic creatures or aliens, as well, this idea of writing the Other, but I want to focus on the human element today.

Old-school epic fantasy

Campbellian monomyth (guys who start off their adventures in inns)
¨The British tradition”: Victorian fantasists to Tolkien & Lewis
¨My elves are better than yours”
Dragonlance: The New Adventures

You may or may not know that fantasy as a genre started long before Tolkien was born. In fact, people have been telling fantasy stories for as long as there have been people. After all, the first fairy tales weren’t just what we now refer to as “myths,” creation stories and just-so stories. They were also fantastical tales told to pass the time or to warn children not to wander in the woods alone.

But let’s just start with the Victorian era, which had its own set of rules, morals and mores, body of literature, and cultural influences. We start with writers like George MacDonald, one of the primary influences on both Tolkien and Lewis, who wrote such tales as The Princess and the Goblin, The Light Princess, and The Princess and Curdie. His books drew upon fairy tales in their use of goblins, and they were fun, adventurous, and even allowed girls to have some adventure, which is kind of rare for the Victorian era!

There were also morality tales in the guise of fantasy—same as it ever was—such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, and the touchstone of fantasy touchstones, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

So even back then there was a wide variety of fantastical tales for children, but as often happens, when one book gets popular, a lot of imitations abound, trying to replicate the formula for success. The “British tradition” of fantasy was born not only in the UK, but also in the US.

Then we move through time, hitting upon authors like

I’m just going to let those slide on by, because I want to particularly focus in on the British—particularly Tolkienesque tradition of fantasy, which is popular not only amidst adult fantasy books—the majority of readers of which is teen boys—but also some high fantasy for children. The whole list is on my blog, which is stacylwhitman.com, if you’re interested in looking it up. I just wanted to post this to give us a better idea of where we’ve come from. [NOTE: I posted these in a text version somewhere, but I’m not sure where at the moment. I’ll have to come back and edit it with a link. Or you can just go to the tags on the side of the main page and click “booklists,” which should get you there eventually.]

So, focusing in on high fantasy—books like these:

Now, these are some books I worked on. I’ll get to them in a moment. But they arose out of a long tradition of high fantasy in both children’s and adult books.

My first job as a trade children’s book editor was at Wizards of the Coast, which some of you may know is known for its Dungeons and Dragons game. Or you might know it for Magic: The Gathering. Both games have popular tie-in fiction, and that’s what I first edited at this job: Dragonlance: The New Adventures. The original Dragonlance series by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss was published in the 1980s in conjunction with a D&D game by the same name, Dragonlance. The original books haven’t gone out of print in the 25 years since, and have spawned hundreds of books in the shared-world series, including the New Adventures, a series for middle grade readers that I edited.

Dragonlance was part of the larger body of epic fantasy work of the late 70s through the 80s—pre-Robert Jordan—that was eaten up by teens, mostly teenage boys (a trend that continues today). It’s great stuff! Kids and teens love it. Lots of adventure and dragons and elves and just a lot of fun.

One of the hallmarks of this kind of epic fantasy are worlds populated by what has become the standard fantasy races: any combination of elves, orcs, goblins, hobbit-like halflings—called “kender” in Dragonlance, halflings elsewhere—ogres, giants, and dragons (though usually the hero is a white human or light-skinned elf or half-elf, and most often that hero is also a man/boy). I think one of the reasons Drizzt is so popular is because he breaks this stereotype, though at the same time he reinforces others (he is the only “good” Dark Elf in an entire race of people). Mind you, it makes for good game mechanics (f0r this particular game) to make it easier to play characters. But it’s when individual characters have to fit a mold racially that it becomes problematic, especially now that we’re more than 25 years on from the publication of the original books, which were groundbreaking in their own right at the time.

There are some major tropes in high fantasy that we see a lot especially in older epic high fantasy titles:

Elves are beautiful, mysterious, and always good. Except dark elves, who are brooding and evil.
Kender can’t do magic.
Ogres are all evil. Half-ogres can sometimes be good.
Dwarves love to mine and live underground.
All hobbits (sometimes called halflings or kender) love to eat.
Gnomes are all engineers who blow stuff up, sometimes killing themselves in wild ways in the process.
Chromatic dragons are evil. Metallic dragons are good. They cannot change this fact by choosing to be good or evil, either.

Diversity issues have often been tackled in these books, though usually along strict “racial” lines which are really species lines. But each species was a kind of “people,” a sentient race of beings who could sometimes intermarry. All were humanoid. But it was a huge step in the right direction.

But how do we go beyond that?

Those involved with the adult book side of things are aware of these issues and many are working to address them in a variety of ways, but that’s not the focus of what we’re talking about here today. We’re going to talk about how it affects fantasy in children’s literature. So let’s look at a specific example. In Dragonlance: The New Adventures, we broke the mold a little bit. In original Dragonlance, the hobbit-like kender had a racial trait that they couldn’t do magic. Yes, an entire race of people, according to the rules of this world, were not genetically capable of doing magic.

An entire race of people were genetically incompetent in a skill which this world pretty much required for survival.

Well, not every human or elf was a magic-wielder, either, but the fact that humans and elves had the ability to choose whether or not to try to practice magic (or had the ability to find out if they were capable of it on an individual level, at least) makes it an interesting study in diversity to see that kender couldn’t do magic.

We broke that in the New Adventures, though—and some people weren’t terribly happy with us for doing it—and played with the rules of the world so that this one particular kender could do magic. There was an in-world way we explained it (he was given an older kind of dragon magic by a dragon spirit), but there you go. He wasn’t the only misfit in the group, either—the elf wasn’t all righteous and good, he was a thief. What matters is that each individual in a given group, including even minor characters, should be treated as an individual.

Part of this pattern is that much of high fantasy, at least until recent years, follows the British tradition I was just alluding to earlier—or rather, I should say, the Tolkien tradition. Tolkien did it this way and it worked so well, we should do it again and again!

Tolkien isn’t the only writer to be imitated in this way. We’ve seen it happen with every recent blockbuster, from Harry Potter to Twilight to Gossip Girls to whatever today’s new big thing is. How many boys-off-to-wizard-school books cropped up when Harry Potter first got big? But it is important to look at this tradition and realize how it’s stifled HUMAN diversity in fantasy and science fiction for young readers, and the ways in which writers are breaking that mold.

We don’t have enough time to really delve into a full analysis of each book that follows this tradition or breaks its molds, so I hope that what I say today will be just a jumping-off point for further thoughts and discussion, the end result being more writers of speculative fiction for children thinking consciously about diversity as they write.

How do we get past this old fantasy-world-trope diversity? Not in chucking elves and dragons altogether, in my opinion—it’s fun to play with made-up people and creatures!—but by examining issues of privilege and looking at how we treat individuals within groups, whether human or elf or orc. R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt broke those old boundaries—he’s a misfit. He decided to be good among a people who are dedicated to evil. That appeals to teen readers on a number of levels, but the one that stands out to me is that the character is an individual, who goes beyond the template that drow—dark elves—are expected to have in this fantasy world.

Next time: Let’s talk about whitewashing and demographics.

Chimamanda Adichie: The Dangers of a Single Story

May 17, 2011 - Stacy 1 Comment

To hold you over until I can get my own talk up, here’s an even better talk by author Chimamanda Adichie, which I told everyone to go google, “The Dangers of a Single Story.” In it, she talks of how, when she was growing up in Nigeria (it was Nigeria, right? I need to go back and watch it again myself), the books she read most often (always?) featured white kids who ate apples. So when she started to write, she wrote stories about white people who ate apples, even though she had never seen an apple. A powerful talk about the importance of finding your own voice as a writer and how important to our body of literature a wide variety of voices is.

Stacy Whitman's Grimoire

Thoughts on writing, editing, and publishing books for children and young adults

Category: publishing