BIRD flies across the pond…
So it’s 5am and I can’t sleep b/c my body clock’s off…got back from London around 5pm yesterday, and haven’t yet processed all my experiences, but it was a really great trip. I went over to attend the annual NCRCL conference organized by my good friend, Laura Atkins. Laura was the first person to recognize my writing for children; she was working as an editor at Lee & Low at the time, but sadly left before we had a chance to work together. Nonetheless, when I was just sending stories out to presses in random fashion in 2001, Laura called me, invited me to lunch, and talked to me about the picture book format and the way to structure narratives for younger readers. She basically told me I had a distinctive voice, and encouraged me to keep writing. So I did…and eventually BIRD wound up winning the New Voices Honor Award at Lee and Low. So going to London this past weekend was a chance to see Laura (who now lives in Brighton), and also a chance to present on BIRD for the first time…I’m always looking for ways to merge my two worlds: academia and art. It’s not easy, or always successful, but I do feel I have to try if I want to feel whole and not torn in two all the time. On Friday night I met with Mary, a friend who teaches black women’s literature at Queen Mary, University of London; we made a plan to submit proposals dealing with black women for the upcoming James Baldwin conference in Boston. Then on Sunday I met Yinka Sunmonu who’s a novelist and journalist living just outside of London. Yinka very kindly came into the city and guided me around to sites I hadn’t seen before, including the Victoria & Albert museum (pictured above). As we walked, we talked about race relations in London (what does Obama’s win really mean to Europeans?) and the possibility of working together on a multicultural book fair in the spring. The conference on Saturday was really good, but it was also mighty white…there’s got to be a way of bringing more people of color into the publishing world and the academic study of children’s lit. I think I counted 3 other people of color in attendance besides me, and there were easily well over a hundred people there. That’s not to say there was no diversity–my co-presenter, Ragnhild Morch, was from Norway (though she lives in London) and used a Nordic myth to talk about outdoor storytelling as a tool to help immigrant children in Berlin learn to speak German. Once you tell a story to a child in a park or public place, the child connects to that site and can claim it as their own…I met a librarian who once studied the Nation of Islam…a bookseller who loves the HBO series, The Wire...a woman from Yorkshire boldly stood up and asked whether the panelists were considering urban children or only middle-class white children with access to backyards. There’s no point selling a book about how to plant a garden if children are surrounded by concrete…one panelist was talking about her collection of environmental stories from around the world–mostly tales taken from indigenous people. And an Indian woman stood up and asked how those stories were being selected–the speaker dodged the question, but there needed to be some conversation around cultural difference and appropriation. You can’t say, “Let’s recycle and respect the earth NOW,” without talking about what Western civilization has done to wipe out indigenous people AND the environment in the quest for power and wealth…that story isn’t necessarily for children, but it certainly needs to be talked about among adults. Nevertheless, I met some really interesting people and talked US politics with the fabulous Roni Natov and Laura after the conference was over. Being in London feels easy to me–not like Paris or any other European city I’ve traveled to. I guess it’s b/c I’ve been there often enough, and I grew up in a former British colony…I understand the British way of doing things. Plus they have fluorescent-vested aides everywhere on the Tube if you need to ask a question (I didn’t get on any wrong trains this time!). So I’ll put my paper in here, if anyone wants to take a look. And maybe I’ll try to go back to bed and see if I can actually fall asleep…
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