Author Interviews

Interview with Anne Bustard, Author of Blue Skies!

By on March 19, 2020   /   Author Interviews  

Hello Mixed-Up Filers!

Today, I am pleased to welcome to our site, Anne Bustard, author of Blue Skies, which came out March 17th from S&S Books for Young Readers!

JR: Hi, Anne and thanks for joining us today!

AB: Thanks for having me! It’s a special treat to be on this blog!

JR: First off, I was fortunate enough to read an advanced copy, and loved it. I felt both, happy, and so, so sad. For those who don’t know about the book, can you tell us a little bit about the book and the idea for this story came from?

AB: I’m quite touched by your compliment. Thank you ever so much!

Blue Skies is a story about 5th grader Glory Bea Bennett, who has never given up hope that her daddy will return from WWII. So when the Merci Train boxcar from France is scheduled to stop in her small Texas town, she’s certain that Daddy will come too.

The idea for this book came by serendipity. I discovered the existence of the Merci Train during a summer teacher workshop over fifteen years ago, and I knew in an instant that I wanted to write a story about this magnanimous display of gratitude. The Merci Train was a French grassroots effort that thanked the U.S. for all we did for them before and after the war. So in 1949, they sent 49 boxcars filled with gifts to the U.S., one boxcar for each state, and one that was divided between Washington D.C. and the Territory of Hawaii.

 

JR: The book has some humorous parts as well. How difficult is it to summon humor when you’re writing some pretty emotional scenes?

AB: What a great question! Writing humorous scenes and conversations within this story was a welcome and necessary relief for me, and I hope for readers as well. The Gladiola Gazette columns were, dare I say, the easiest. I imagine that’s because they were written in Penny Pfluger’s voice, rather than Glory Bea’s. I was thrilled when my wonderful editor suggested I add more.

 

JR: I think your editor was right! You write a lot of historical fiction, which I love. What about that genre appeals to you?

AB: I like to think of myself as a lifetime learner and research is one of my happy places. Reading and writing historical fiction allows me remarkable access to the past, much of which is new to me. Not only do I gain insights into a particular time, I often have an aha! about my own past, as well as the now. Hopefully, readers do too.

JR: Can you tell us a little bit about your writing journey getting to this point? 

AB: I had the desire to write l-o-n-g before I ever attempted to tell a story. About a year after I finally took the plunge, I realized I needed help. Since I love school, I took a class with Kathi Appelt. When it concluded, she recommended that we form a critique group. So we did. That was over twenty years ago and I’ve been in a group almost every year since.

SCBWI, Highlights, Rice Continuing Education, VCFA, and the amazing Austin writing community have all played a major role in my writing development, success, and life. I owe them all enormous gratitude.

The earliest “polished” draft of Blue Skies is dated March 3, 2003. Back then it was a picture book. Several drafts later, an editor showed interest and wondered if it could be a middle grade. I loved that idea. At VCFA in 2009 and 2010, I completed a draft of the “train” novel. I sent it to several agents, all of who passed. In 2017, I reread it, saw ways to improve it, and dug in again. With the help of my critique group and agent, it was revised many more times. My agent found a fabulous editor and then we worked and reworked it together.

 

JR: I read a lot of fascinating things on your website,  https://annebustard.com/, such as that you grew up in Hawaii, and now live in Texas. I love both places, and have also lived in many different areas. How do you think that living in a variety of places has helped your writing?

AB: Guess what? I’ve moved! After decades in Texas, I reconnected with my college sweetheart and we married. Now I live in Canada, and travel back to Texas often.

You’ve asked a terrific question and I’m not sure I know the answer.

Did living in each new environment increase my curiosity, heighten my senses, or powers of observation? Maybe. I am certain that each move presented an opportunity to grow. Perhaps that has helped my awareness of the need for my characters to grow and change.

 

JR: Congrats on the move and the marriage! But have to ask, can you still hula well?

AB: Haha! I don’t know about well, but I did dance at my wedding reception a year and a half ago. 

JR: This is perhaps the MOST important question of this interview. I read that you used to own your own bookstore. How awesome was that?

AB: I loved the bookstore! It was a children’s-only store and we had the best staff and customers in the world! Opening up boxes of books, hand-selling them, interacting with other booksellers, and meeting authors and illustrators was the best!

 

JR: What’s your writing process like?

AB: I am not a plotter, though I do have a feeling about how I want the story to end. I dive into a first draft with joy. Somehow I’m able to turn off my critical brain because it’s a first try. I know that revisions, oh so many revisions, will follow.

I generally write in order, but at some point I leap ahead and write the last scene. After that draft, I do extensive journaling in order to delve into the characters and their motivations. Then the rewriting begins and I share the first chapters with my critique group. Eventually they’ll see a whole draft or two.

Often I’ll seek more outside readers before sending it to my agent. She’s editorial, yay! so we work on it until she thinks it’s ready to send out. (Note: everything I’ve sent her has not made the cut.) I research a lot up front, and continue in a lighter vein after the first draft through the last.

 

JR: I also have to have the last scene in mind before I write anything. What’s your favorite book from childhood?

AB: I have several, but I’ll mention two because I can’t decide: The Secret Garden and My Side of the Mountain.

JR: What’s your favorite movie?

AB: When Harry Met Sally. Besides the main storyline, the vignettes of older couples talking melt my heart every time.

 

JR: I watch When Harry Met Sally at least once a year! Something people would be surprised to learn about you?

AB: My superpower is hanging pictures on walls without measuring.

 

JR: A superpower that every little kid dreams about! 🙂 What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received and is there any advice you can give to writers looking to break in?

AB: The first lecture of my first semester at VCFA, Louise Hawes spoke about character desire. She asked us to wonder: What does your protagonist want? The answer, she said, should drive our stories. This question guides and grounds my work.

As for advice to writers looking to break in: never give up, it’s okay for a manuscript to rest for years, and a reminder that you only need one yes (from an agent or an editor)!

 

JR: What are you working on next?

AB: I’m writing a middle grade story inspired by an unconventional (and historical) public event in Texas.

  

JR: How can people follow you on social media?  

AB: I’m on Facebook, as of last fall, Twitter, and earlier this year, Pinterest. Come by anytime and say hi!

 

JR: Thanks so much for stopping by and chatting and the best of luck with Blue Skies!

AB: Thank you, mahalo, and merci beaucoup, for this interview!

 

JR: Thanks again to Anne Bustard and make sure you go out and get Blue Skies!

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American as Paneer Pie: Interview with Author Supriya Kelkar

By on March 13, 2020   /   Articles, Author Interviews  

I’m thrilled to get the chance to talk to Supriya Kelkar about her upcoming book AMERICAN AS PANEER PIE. Get your pre-orders and library requests in now because you are going to want to read this novel as soon as you possibly can. 🙂

 

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgWill you tell us a little about your upcoming book, AMERICAN AS PANEER PIE?

As the only Indian American kid in her small town, Lekha Divekar feels like she has two versions of herself: Home Lekha, who loves watching Bollywood movies and eating Indian food, and School Lekha, who pins her hair over her bindi birthmark and avoids confrontation at all costs, especially when someone teases her for being Indian.

When a girl Lekha’s age moves in across the street, Lekha is excited to hear that her name is Avantika and she’s Desi, too! Finally, there will be someone else around who gets it. But as soon as Avantika speaks, Lekha realizes she has an accent. She’s new to this country, and not at all like Lekha.

To Lekha’s surprise, Avantika does not feel the same way as Lekha about having two separate lives or about the bullying at school. Avantika doesn’t take the bullying quietly. And she proudly displays her culture no matter where she is: at home or at school.

When a racist incident rocks Lekha’s community, Lekha realizes she must make a choice: continue to remain silent or find her voice before it’s too late.

 

You tackle a lot of big issues in this novel, including racism, micro and macro aggression, and allyship, as well as dilemmas such as friendship pressures, team expectations, and discovering your own way of expressing yourself. How did you balance it all – both in the early stages and editing stages of writing this novel?

This was one of those rare writer moments for me where strangely a lot of things fell into place very neatly while drafting this book, like a puzzle I could solve, even though normally I’m really awful at puzzles! I think because I felt these issues so profoundly, and because so much of Lekha’s experience comes from my life, it somehow came together after I forced myself to really dig deep and go back to memories I had buried. During the editing stages, I was really lucky to have super smart notes from my brilliant editor at Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, Jennifer Ung, that pushed me to look even further into all of these issues and create even more connections to those themes.

 

One of the things I really loved about this book was the parents. All of them were so engaged, involved, and accessible (even when the kids would prefer them not to be). Would you talk a little about how you created the parents to be so three dimensional, believable, and key to the story and why you thought that was important?

Thank you! I am so glad you found them to be that way! I thought it was really important for the parents to be realistic, caring, flawed people because when I was a kid, I didn’t really realize my parents were individuals who had their own hopes, dreams, and fears. I wanted Lekha to come to that realization a lot earlier than I did so I made sure to try to make them as real as possible. I also thought it was important because racism affects people of all ages and we are constantly evolving and growing and challenging our own prejudices, even as adults.

 

One of the things that really stood out to me was how you managed to give the reader many entry points into the immigrant experience. As the daughter of an immigrant, I could relate to a number of Lekha’s struggles (Halloween! Sleepovers! Dress!). Are there some aspects of that experience you feel are universal? If readers could come away from this novel with one realization about the immigrant experience, what would you like it to be?

Yes! And now I’m having a flashback to a fight with my mom about a sleepover at a new friend’s house, ha! I think that struggle of wanting to carve out your own identity and independence as a middle schooler while occasionally butting heads with your parents who may want you to do things differently is definitely universal.

I also think sometimes some people overlook immigrants and the immigrant experience, discounting them and othering them, when only one type of story is told about them by nationalistic people and racist, influential people in power. I would hope readers would come away from this novel realizing nobody should be treated as less than.

 

Oh my gosh, the food! You describe so many amazing dishes in the novel. How much fun was it to write with such attention and care about food? Which of the dishes you mention in the book are your favorites?

It was so fun! I think it was the first time I had ever described so much food in a book. As someone who was teased any time I brought Indian food to school until I no longer brought it, it felt really great and almost powerful to be able to take such pride in describing the Indian dishes in great detail when decades earlier, I would have been mortified to even say their names at school. Samosas with chincha chutney, and mattar paneer are some of my favorite dishes mentioned in the book.

 

In the acknowledgements you mention that this is the “book of [your] heart. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about that?

This was the most personal book I have ever written. Like Lekha, I grew up in a small town in Michigan that didn’t value diversity. We were taught to not talk about race and to not see color, all while racist incidents were going on all around us. Like Lekha, the words used in the racist incident that rocks her small town were words that have been shouted at me. Like Lekha, I was also guilty of othering Indian-Americans who had recently immigrated here. And like Lekha, I had a deep pride and love for my culture at home and in spaces within the Indian-American community, and an overwhelming sense of shame about it when I was being bullied or othered for it at school.

Writing the book helped me fully embrace who I was as a child and who I am now. It also helped me have a really deep appreciation for everything my parents and our family friends went through when they first arrived in this country. The lines Maya’s grandfather mentions at Thanksgiving that were said to him when he arrived from India in the 1960s and knocked on someone’s door were words that were actually said to my dad when he came here for his Ph.D. in the 1960s.

It felt therapeutic to let out a lot of the microaggressions, othering, and racist incidents that had hurt me as a child but I didn’t really talk about back then because talking about it meant acknowledging I was different or less than. And it felt empowering to say what I wanted to say about these incidents as a kid through Lekha, and to help her find her voice earlier than I had found mine, to speak out against hatred and speak up for what is right.

It’s a book that comes from my heart, one that I would have loved to have had as a kid, and I hope it becomes a beacon of hope for kids who need it.

 

You write screenplays and picture books in addition to Middle Grade. Can you tell us how your writing process changes depending on the project (if it does) and how you balance so many different forms?

I actually plot novels the same way I write screenplays. I start with character journals, getting to know each character while writing a journal entry from their point of view. I then use the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet to get my important beats down. And then I work on a detailed outline using the three-act structure I was taught to use in my college screenwriting classes. For picture books, I usually just write the story, without trying to outline or do character journals. I find I get the characters’ personalities while writing the actual manuscript for picture books.

One thing I did struggle with when I first made the change from screenwriting to writing novels, (and I probably still have issues with it today), is that in screenwriting, you’re taught to not waste time describing the set or clothing or physical reactions unless they help the plot or are needed for the flow of the script because the script isn’t the final product, a movie is. And a set designer and costume designer and actors and director will be handling the way the set looks, or the clothing, or the physical reactions. So when I had to actually pause to describe all of these things in a novel, it took/(takes) me a while to get it right. I enjoy switching between the forms. It helps keep the creativity flowing. Sometimes I even write a script version of a novel I’m drafting and I’m able to get ideas for the novel from it.

 

You are also a talented visual artist. (I’m a huge fan of your mixed media/collages). Would you like to talk about how you started doing your art and how it helps or informs your writing?

Thank you so much! I’ve been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember but I started making mixed media/collage art about ten years ago. I started feeling bad about recycling the gorgeous wedding invitations from India that I had been saving over the years any time we would get one in the mail. That’s when I decided instead of getting rid of them, I’d start making mixed media and cut paper collages with them. Lately, whenever I’ve been really stuck with writer’s block, I’ve been making a collage at night. I work on them from about 9pm to midnight and then by the morning, or maybe after another day if it is a more involved collage, I’m able to come up with a solution for what I’m stuck on oftentimes. I think switching up your creative outlet can be really helpful when you feel stuck.

 

Is there a question you wished I asked, but didn’t?
Does paneer pie taste good? (The answer is a huge yes!)

 

Can you tell us what’s next for you?

Up next is STRONG AS FIRE, FIERCE AS FLAME, (Tu Books, fall 2020), historical fiction set in 1857 India that challenges who we center in stories and “classics.” In spring 2021 I have a picture book called BINDU’S BINDIS (Sterling) about a young girl who loves to match the shape of her bindis to her grandmother’s. And after that comes THAT THING ABOUT BOLLYWOOD (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster, 2021) about a Bollywood-loving girl who isn’t good at expressing herself, who suddenly gets a magical condition after her parents announce their separation, that causes her to break out into Bollywood song-and-dance numbers to express herself in the most obvious way possible.

 

Supriya Kelkar - American as Paneer PieSupriya grew up in the Midwest, where she learned Hindi as a child by watching three Hindi movies a week. Winner of the New Visions Award for her middle grade novel AHIMSA, (Tu Books, 2017), Supriya is a screenwriter who has worked on the writing teams for several Hindi films, including Lage Raho Munnabhai and Eklavya: The Royal Guard, India’s entry into the 2007 Academy Awards. She was an associate producer on the Hollywood feature, Broken Horses. Supriya’s books include AHIMSA, THE MANY COLORS OF HARPREET SINGH (Sterling, 2019), AMERICAN AS PANEER PIE (Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, 2020) STRONG AS FIRE, FIERCE AS FLAME (Tu Books, 2020), BINDU’S BINDIS (Sterling, 2021), and THAT THING ABOUT BOLLYWOOD (Aladdin/Simon and Schuster, 2021). Supriya is represented by Kathleen Rushall at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and Kim Yau at Paradigm for film/TV rights.

Follow Supriya on Twitter @supriyakelkar_, on Instagram @Supriya.Kelkar, and on Flipgrid.

You can learn more about Supriya and her work (including some of her art) at her website. AMERICAN AS PANEER PIE releases May 12, 2020 and is available for pre-order now. Just follow the link. (Shop your local indie bookstore)

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South Asian Storytelling: Author Interview with Sayantani DasGupta, and Giveaway

By on March 5, 2020   /   Author Interviews, Book Lists, Diversity, Fiction, For Kids, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers, For Writers, Giveaways, STEM, Writing, Writing  

                                                                 

 

Today, I am delighted to welcome Sayantani DasGupta to Mixed-Up Files to talk about her experience writing her third book in the middle-grade adventure fantasy Kiranmala series, THE CHAOS CURSE. Sayantani’s novels feature a powerful girl character who carries a quest on her shoulders and must overcome the conflict between good and evil.

 

  1. Tell us about “The Chaos Curse,” and how your journey has been writing three novels in the Kiranmala series?

The Chaos Curse is the third in the Bengali folktale and string theory inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series. Kiranmala, the 12-year-old protagonist of the series, thinks she’s just an ordinary immigrant daughter growing up in New Jersey, until she realizes all her parents’ seemingly outlandish stories are true, and she really is an Indian princess from another dimension. This third and final installment of the series finds Kiranmala having to once again battle the evil Serpent King, who wants to collapse all the stories of the universe together, destroying the multiplicity of the multiverse. It is varied and heterogeneous stories, after all, which make the universe keep expanding. The Chaos Curse finds Kiranmala once again teaming up with some old friends, as well as some new ones, to try and stop the Serpent King and his nefarious Anti-Chaos Committee. Will they save the stories in time to save the multiverse?

 

 

  1. Your work is about a powerful twelve-year old girl Kiranmala who is proud of her ancestral heritage, connected to her family, and has a strong desire to fight for good over evil. Can you discuss how you broke stereotypes with this series?

It took me many years to find an editor for The Serpent’s Secret, as ten years ago, there didn’t seem to be any room in the publishing industry for a funny, fast paced fantasy starring a strong brown immigrant daughter heroine. The answers were often similar: “We love your voice, but how about writing a realistic fiction story about your protagonist’s cultural conflict with her immigrant parents?” In other words, the story that was expected and wanted was one that reinforced stereotypes about South Asian immigrant parents (as oppressive, or regressive, or rigid) and allowed a certain type of expectation about South Asian parents and children to be fulfilled. Many marginalized communities face this narrative demand – to tell stories of conflict, stories of suffering, stories of pain – for others’ voyeuristic pleasure. But for that very reason, in our stories, joy is an important form of resistance. To portray a strong, funny Desi heroine with doting, loving parents is to break a stereotype that mainstream America has about our communities. Other ways this series breaks stereotypes is to challenge the notion of fixed good and evil altogether. For instance, the rakkhosh monsters who are pretty uniformly baddies in the first book get more nuanced in the second and third. Like any beings, there are good rakkhosh and bad rakkhosh, and Kiranmala must get over her prejudice against them, realizing that heroes and monsters are not based on family, or appearance or community, but rather, what someone chooses to do each and every day with their lives.

 

 

  1. In a previous interview, you shared with me that as a child, Bengali folktales were an important part of you finding your own identity. How did you personally approach storytelling in this series and make Bengali folklore accessible to young readers?

I grew up in the U.S. with very few positive ‘mirrors’ in the culture around me – not in the books I read, not in the TV shows and movies I watched. (Here, I refer of course to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishops’ important framing of books as ‘mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors.’) It was only when I would go on my long summer vacations to India that I could see heroes and heroines who looked like me – brown kids being strong and heroic, saving the day. When I thought about adapting these stories to an American audience, I was at first nervous – would I be doing these cultural stories an injustice? But then I remembered that folktales are oral stories, and as such often change in the telling. Even my grandmother would often sprinkle in her stories with little morals she wanted us grandchildren to hear on that particular day because of some naughty thing some cousin had done. So in changing and adapting the stories, I still felt like I was being true to their nature as oral folktales. Just like so many aunties and uncles and parents and grannies before me, I was simply adapting my storytelling to my audience.

 

  1. Although the story is predominantly in English, you sprinkle Bengali in the books too. Tell us about the power of weaving Bengali words into Kiranmala’s world.

I think many of us immigrant kids or Third Culture kids aren’t just multilingual, but we speak a mash-up of multiple languages at once. We speak Spanglish and Hindlish and in my case, Benglish. Sprinkling in Bengali words without apology and without italics was a way of not only honoring the language of my family and community, but reflecting the real way that so many of us communicate. I knew that non-Bengali speakers would pick up words and meaning from context, and that young Bengali readers might be seeing familiar words in an English book for the first time. That felt like a really important responsibility – and so I tried very hard to use Bengali pronunciation to guide the way I spelled these words (rakkhosh for instance instead of the more Hindi-fied “rakshas” or “rakshasa”). I also narrated the audio books myself, and tried very hard to keep to Bengali pronunciations of all these words – I wanted young listeners to hear their language pronounced correctly!

 

  1. You discussed in my previous interview that you hoped to inspire children to have radical imaginations through your stories. How has that manifested in your school visits and public readings/signings?

When I talk about radical imagination, I am usually talking about kids from marginalized communities being able to see themselves as protagonists in stories, see their own strength and heroism reflected back to them in them in books. It’s hard to be what you can’t see, right? And every kid deserves to see someone like them as a hero. But what I have found in my school visits is something else very interesting. I do meet many immigrant kids or Desi students who come up to me, hugging my books, so excited that Kiranmala is a brown kid, like them! But I also meet many non-Desi kids who are equally excited about Kiranmala’s adventures, and this feels very radical. When a gaggle of young blonde boys runs up to me telling me how much they love the series, I see something radical here too – their unquestioned ability to not just accept but cherish a strong girl as a hero, a protagonist of color. When radically representational of our todays, I truly believe that stories can help make better futures for us all by making space in all our imagings for liberatory possibilities of leadership, family and community. In other words, if you grew up reading strong brown female protagonists as a kid, it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to rally behind a strong woman of color president, right?

 

 

 

  1. What has writing this series taught you about yourself? And what advice do you have for children, young adults, and adults who want to pursue writing?

When I was in practice as a pediatrician, I used to write prescriptions for reading. This is because stories are good medicine, in all the senses of that word. This same notion brought me to Narrative Medicine, the field in which I teach. And it’s this same impulse that has pushed me to write for young people. I guess what I’ve realized is that storytelling is a critical act of healing – particularly the sort of storytelling that is filling in the narrative erasures of the past – the gaps in positive representation that so many of us suffered through. I’ve also come to realize that fantasy is an amazing way to talk about oppression, prejudice, racism, justice. But at the same time, particularly when you’re writing for young people it’s also got to be a cracking good story. Young readers are unfailingly honest. They’re not going to let you get away with lecturing them or talking down to them. They know when they’re being respected and a story is speaking with and for them.

 

My advice to people of any age who are writing is this – follow the joy, follow the passion. Tell the story YOU want to hear first and foremost. Don’t follow trends, or worry about publication at first. Tell the best story that only you can tell. As Toni Morrison says (and I always tell students), “If there’s a book you want to read and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And I truly believe each of us has the privilege and responsibility of telling our stories.

 

Enter the giveaway for a copy of THE CHAOS CURSE by leaving a comment below. You may earn extra entries by blogging/tweeting/facebooking the interview and letting us know. The winner will be determined on Monday, March 9th, 2020, and will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (US/Canada only) to receive the book.

If you’d like to know more about Sayantani and her novel, visit her website: http://www.sayantanidasgupta.com/writer/ Or follow her on twitter : https://twitter.com/Sayantani16

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