Writing Outside your Culture: thoughts on The Madman of Piney Woods

I read The Madman of Piney Woods, the latest book by Christopher Paul Curtis, this fall because I am working on a novel with two protagonists and I wanted to study how a real master of the craft handled the inherent difficulties in dual narration. But I become distracted from my initial goal by the story of Alvin “Red” Stockard. If you are looking for a more traditional review, this book got starred reviews at both the Hornbook and Kirkus. I’m going to take a look at the story from the perspective of cultural authenticity.

I’m a person of Irish descent who’s read a lot of Irish history. I read Irish writers regularly, play Irish music, and have a long involvement with the Irish music and dance community in the Pacific Northwest. I’m making an assumption that Mr. Curtis is not Irish, although many black people in North America do have some Irish heritage. Mr. Curtis didn’t mention his ethnic heritage in his bio or author’s note so I’m going to assume that he’s chosen to write outside of his personal cultural experience for the character Red.

The first thing I noticed in reading Red’s section of the book was that his voice sounded unlike any Irish person I know. Accent and turn of phrase is tricky, even when you know it well. Most readers would not be taken aback by Red’s word choices or turn of phrase, but I found them outside of my experience of the Irish. I also found a couple of idioms that sounded off to me. The phrase to twirl the cat, is unfamiliar but a similar phrase not room enough to swing a cat is one I’ve heard in several places and has a completely different connotation than the one Mr. Curtis refers to in the book. It would be easy to conclude that he’s guilty of lazy writing; HOWEVER, an idiom is a slippery thing, prone to multiple and regional meanings and inclined to change over time. In a story set a hundred years ago, it’s quite likely that the idiom I’m familiar with did not exist in its present form or had several meanings right from the start. Likewise the accent Mr. Curtis is portraying may well be one with which I’m unfamiliar. I speak regularly with people from Donegal, Clare, and Cork. I’ve recently been to Dublin. Accents differ in all four places and I’m sure there are accents I’m unfamiliar with. Even my extensive reading of Irish authors does not make me an expert of every Irish dialect. Other aspects of the book are well researched so I’m going to assume this accent was also based on appropriate readings and recordings.

Characterization and cliche are another area of concern in the book. Though it is not in vogue to remember, racism has often be directed at white people. Try searching on the term “Irish” in an image directory and see what you get. Here are four things that turned up amid a sea of shamrocks on Google Image.

As you can see we get the unflattering sports mascot, the depiction of drunkenness, the quaint and pastoral people wearing green, and a display of domestic violence. These were among the top twenty-five images containing people. I decided to leave out the lewd Halloween costumes, the magical druids, the leprechauns, and the beer. For comparison take a look at what a google image search gives you for French or British or even African American. It’s a pretty striking difference. I don’t want to get into a debate about who has it worse in terms of mainstream depiction of their ethnicity. There are no winners in that game. Just making an observation.

The Madman of Piney Woods contains some cliches and overly broad characterizations of the Irish. None so egregious as the images above, but cliches none the less. The most obvious ones are Alvin’s red hair, domestic violence, the grandmother’s anger and bitterness, and the father’s too-good-to-be-true sagacity. So what to make of all that.

Red hair is rare, occurring in only about 4% of North Americans. Even in Ireland, only 10% of the population have red hair. It’s an easy way to telegraph Irish-ness without giving a more thoughtful and nuanced description–red hair is the feathered headdress of the Irish. On the other hand, further description would get into skin tone and comparative coloring to the black characters in the story and that’s a linguistic minefield. I’d probably make the same choice myself.

Domestic violence is a crime long associated with the Irish and I was sad to see that characterization repeated in this story. On the other hand, in 1901 the beating of children was more common among all races and classes of people, and not on anyone’s radar in the way it is today. And Mr. Curtis did not equate the violence with Irish-ness but clearly laid the blame on the ravanges of alcoholism or PTSD from a traumatic migration experience. It’s not “nice” but it’s fair and authentic to the period.

The dynamic between the saintly dad and evil grandmother was a bit over the top for my taste. Red’s father was very Atticus Finch-like in his goodness, and he was even in the legal profession. The grandmother’s bitterness also seemed a bit one-note to me. I’d have like to see a more developed version of this character. For example a woman in her position would have attended Mass as assiduously as she avoided the racist grocer. I found it odd to find so little mention of church. Most Irish of the era whether Catholic or Protestant had a lot of cultural identity and social support wrapped up in church-going. A view into that part of the Stockard family’s life might have made them all seem more rounded and realistic. That said, in many families with an abusive member, the other adult in the situation compensates for it with heroic kindness and a hard won wisdom about human nature.

And here are some things I found completely realistic and true to the Irish-American experience.

The connection between Irish and African music is longstanding, and in my opinion, a great benefit to the cannon of North American music. When I hear Reggae, I hear a slow and soulful version of the traditional hornpipe. In Gospel music I find much in common with Irish ballads. Contemporary Irish music is full of influences that echo it’s development alongside African-American music That connection was beautifully portrayed in the climactic scene where Red sings to the Madman of Piney Woods. I found it the most moving portion of the book.

The racism towards Black Canadians by Grandmother O’Toole was also true to what I’ve heard and read about the Irish immigrant experience. Black freedmen and Irish immigrants were often scrambling for purchase on the lowest rung of the economic ladder which tended to put them in conflict. I wish the history were otherwise but it isn’t. I think the discomfort that the prejudice is likely to generate is ultimately helpful in terms of the conversations it might inspire about how fear and hatred arise.

And finally what I really loved about the story was its willingness to show in careful (but not overwhelming for a young reader) detail the horrors that many migrating Irish experienced. Our current experiences with Ebola provide a very striking parallel to the Irish who were quarantined on ships carrying Typhus. (What a terrific book discussion that could be!) The Irish immigration experience is not a story that comes into the school curriculum very often or very accurately. It’s seldom the subject of a kid’s book. I was very grateful to see it portrayed so sensitively here.

Ethnic diversity in children’s books matters and I’m thrilled that someone outside of the Irish writing community was willing to take on this topic and bring it to light with compassion. I’m happy to see that the book has been well-received by critics who might have quibbled over details of authenticity or who has the “right” to tell an Irish story. Details matter but intention matters too. I want lots more books with ethnically diverse characters, not just the few that can pass the narrow gate of some critic’s opinion of their authenticity. Because here is the most uncomfortable truth of all. Even though I’m of Irish heritage, it’s no guarantee that I would write a more “authentic” story. My experience of being Irish is specific and narrow. I have biases about my own history, and any writer working from their own heritage faces risks of censure from within their own community.

Sometimes the view of an outsider who is willing to do solid research and the hard work of empathy is just as valid and maybe even a bit more objective. Thank you Mr. Curtis for a thoughtful and bravely told tale.

What can one person do?

I have been mulling over the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri this past August and the thing that has really struck a chord with me is this all to common response: what can one person do? It’s a frustrating response in so many ways. It’s a coward’s choice, and must be a very painful thing to hear for people in the throes of ongoing unjust treatment. Unfortunately many people would rather do nothing than risk doing a wrong or offensive thing, and many simply don’t see the small steps that could be taken to advance the cause of justice. I don’t think I have any answers but I do have a story.

The one person who has mentored me more than anyone in my professional life is my cousin Kathleen Delaney. She has spent her entire teaching career in some of the lowest income schools in the Chicago area. She has told me stories about her students my entire life–stories about the ones that have inspired her, worried her, made her laugh, made her cry, and sharpened her understanding of the injustices so many face every single day. This August as she was preparing for the school year she stepped across the hall to introduce herself to a new teacher in her building. She was met with a shout of joy and a warm embrace from this new teacher.

The woman had been an 8th grader in my cousin’s school decades ago. Kathy taught 6th grade and after school she coached the girl for the district speech competition. They chose the address of Chief Seattle from 1854 and worked on it together after school for several weeks. Before the competition my cousin gave her the picture book version of Seattle’s speech written by Susan Jeffers. What she didn’t realize at the time was that the girl’s family had come to this country illegally. The mother was struggling to raise five of kids on minimum wage. That book was the first one the girl had ever owned. The first book anyone in her family had owned. They read it until it fell apart. This girl decided to become a teacher, in part because of my cousin’s example. Her younger brothers and sisters who had Miss Delaney in 6th grade reported that she was the “hardest” teacher in the school, the one who assigned the most homework. She was the one who believed that they could do all that work, even though they were new speakers of English.

This former student took her college classes one at a time over many years because her immigration status made her ineligible for financial aid. But she stuck to her goal year after year and now after all this time, she and my cousin will be teaching side by side. I’ve done author visits for my cousin in recent years and her students are quick to tell me that she is still the hardest teacher in their school. They feign agony in reporting all the writing assignments she’s given but it’s easy enough to see their pride underneath all that complaint. Some of them come voluntarily to school an hour early every day to work in her room before school starts.

I mention all this at the start of the school year because my cousin cheerfully points out that there is nothing unusual about her. Most teachers mentor students before and after school. Many have very high expectations for even their most impoverished students, and almost all of them give away hundreds of books over a teaching career. So this is my thank you to all of you for all you do to change lives, to raise up one literate generation after another, and encourage those who enter school powerless to leave it with something to contribute to the world. It’s easy to get discouraged and in the minutia of daily work and lose sight of your power.

You make history every day. When a child learns to read, you change that entire family’s economic fortunes forever. Our economy cannot function without you. I’m grateful–to my own teachers, my children’s teachers and all of you everywhere who work with students wisely and generously every day. Thank you!

What I did this summer

Today is my kid’s first day of school and I thought I’d celebrate by tackling my least favorite essay topic from school. I hated it simply because if something exciting happened it felt like bragging to write about it, and if nothing much happened, well, it’s a little depressing to call that to mind at the beginning of a school year.

The truth is I’ve had, by most standards, a very ordinary summer. We took a little trip to the mountains and a day trip to the beach. We did yard work. We made jam. But four things have stood out for me as making a difference in my writing. So I thought I’d say a little bit about all four.

1. A change of setting tends to lead to new work or at least new ideas.

It was my great pleasure to participate in the Outpost Workshop of the Fishtrap Summer Gathering. I spent a week tenting out on the Zumwalt Prairie in northeastern Oregon. It was an astonishing landscape–outwardly empty, yet on closer inspection teeming with wildlife from bull elk to least weasel to all manner of song birds. The days got into the 100s with barely a scrap of shade and the nights dipped down into the 30s. The altitude was a challenging 5000 feet or so. Not the most conducive environment to productive writing, and yet I found myself flooded with story ideas, thinking for example, of what it would be like to homestead such a place with it’s punishing climate but rich resources.

2. New company tends to lead to new perspectives

I met a woman named Janet at the Outpost workshop who has worked on the Zumwalt and in the near by Wallowa Mountains and Snake River canyons for most of her life. She knew an incredible amount about the natural and human history of the area. She shared some of the history of the Joseph band of the Nez Perce who lived near Wallowa Lake up until the famous surrender of Chief Joseph in 1877. You probably remember ‘From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ Its one of the most quoted bits of Native American writing ever. Janet gave the fuller version of his surrender and cast the story of Chief Joseph into an entirely different and far more interesting light. Whether the things I’ve learned become a story I write or not, it’s good to periodically revisit what I’ve learned as historical truth, and consider what that truth might look like from a different perspective.

3. World news is less distant than it seems

Along with the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri and the ebola outbreak in Africa, one of the world events that has dominated the news this summer is the solo migration of children from Central America. It would be easy to think of these events as comfortably distant and unrelated to me personally. However, I’ve been researching the famine-era migration of Irish children to the US and a shocking number of them came to this country alone at very young ages. It’s easy to mentally scold parents that would send their children into such danger and hardship and yet, just like Central America of the present day, the children of mid-1800s Ireland faced near certain death in their home country. I find it much easier to think through the issues about what to do with these migrant children knowing my own ancestors were in exactly the same position a mere 150 years ago. I read a great book from a migrant’s point of view called Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. It was so thoughtfully done and not at all the pedagogic thing I’d be tempted to write if I took on this topic directly myself. The topic of migrant children is a rich one but I think if I took it on I’d write about the famine-era Irish. I’ve been thinking about what books might help children process the information from the ebola epidemic and from the human rights demonstrations in Ferguson, but that is a post for another day.

4. Changing genres is good for the brain

I’ve been working on the same two novels for quite a long time and as much as I love both of the stories I was feeling a bit uninspired at the beginning of the summer. But I spent a little time being a workshop participant rather than a leader and I learned a bunch new things which lead me to try a non-fiction picture book and a screenplay. I managed to get through a whole draft of the non-fiction and part way through a screenplay, and I’m feeling more energized than I have in ages. Not a vacation exactly but definitely a change that did me good.

And all this changing up and refreshing has been perfect timing because one of those two novels I’ve been working on for such a long time is going to be published by Random House in 2016. I’ll do the final edits this fall and now after my summer break I’m 100% ready to dive into the revisions whole-heartedly. The new book will be called The Turn of the Tide. It’s a contemporary middle grade adventure story set in Astoria, Oregon and told in two voices. I’ll have lots more news about that in later posts.

How about you? Did you change things up in your summer routine? Gain an insight from a summer trip? How do you refresh yourself when you’re feeling stale?

Reading Like a Writer: Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain

The thing I really hope for my work, more than a particular recognition or financial return, is longevity. It’s one thing to craft a really great story that hits the imagination of the moment and becomes a blockbuster, but it’s an entirely different sort of success to have a book stand the test of time. This Reading Like a Writer post will be one in an occasional series which looks in depth at the text of children’s classics.

One of the things I did this summer was think about books I read to my own children when they were little, the ones they loved and wanted to hear over and over. A big favorite of theirs and mine was Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Beatriz Vidal. Though I love the pictures it’s the text that I really admire. Its been more than a decade since I’ve read that book aloud to one of my children but I can still recite it word for word. I decided to analyze for myself what made the story so effective. The obvious first thing is the rhyme scene which is perfect. Every rhyme is a true rhyme. The rhymed words are not forced by using archaic grammar They are all easy to read and well within a child’s working vocabulary.

Rain–plain

dead–overhead

feather–weather

cloud–loud

The second fairly obvious observation is that the format of the story, the cumulative or House-that-Jack-Built format, works well for this tale in which each thing is directly related to the next. There is not a heap of tension in the story. It’s dry. Cows are hungry. The herdsman shoots an arrow at a cloud. It rains. Not inherently gripping, but the cumulative structure and rhythm of the text makes the simple chain of events far more compelling than they would be otherwise. However, the cumulative structure is not launched into willy-nilly at the start of the book. It begins with a 10 line introduction to set the scene and ends with a 4 line conclusion which brings the story to rest.

The third thing I looked at was how the lines scanned. How many syllables per line and where do the stressed words fall within the line. I found that all the lines fell between 8 and 12 syllables, and that the pattern of stresses tended to be anapestic, two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. However, there was plenty of variation in the meter. So the verses were less structured than, say a sonnet, but still they were quite consistent in their rhythms. I think a perfectly consistent rhythm would have veered in the direction of boring and singsongy text, so it’s good to see the “rules” judiciously broken.

The last thing I noticed was that almost the entire story relied on lines with a stressed ending.

This is the great Kapitit Plain

All fresh and green from the African rain.

Plain and rain are both stressed syllables and most of the book has these strong endings. But the story begins with a 10 line introduction and the middle 6 lines of the introduction have unstressed endings.

With acacia trees for giraffes to browse on

And grass for the herdsman to pasture the cows on.

The stressed syllables there are browse and cows, so the introduction is set apart from the story with this very subtle variation in the meter as well as being set apart from the structure of the main story.

So why do all this work? I love poetry. I think picture books in verse, when done well, have the best staying power of all. I hope to write one some day. But I want to make sure that when I do I put at least as much effort and attention to detail into the text as the writers like Verna Aardema and Margaret Wise Brown have.

Middle Grade Monday Book Review: This One Summer by Julian Tamaki

This One Summer is by a writer-illustrator team of cousins! Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki.

Here’s what it’s about:

Every summer, Rose goes with her mom and dad to a lake house in Awago Beach. It’s their getaway, their refuge. Rosie’s friend Windy is always there, too, like the little sister she never had. But this summer is different. Rose’s mom and dad won’t stop fighting, and when Rose and Windy seek a distraction from the drama, they find themselves with a whole new set of problems. One of the local teens – just a couple of years older than Rose and Windy – is caught up in something bad… Something life threatening.

It’s a summer of secrets, and sorrow, and growing up, and it’s a good thing Rose and Windy have each other.

This One Summer is a tremendously exciting new teen graphic novel from two creators with true literary clout. Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, the team behind Skim, have collaborated on this gorgeous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful story about a girl on the cusp of childhood – a story of renewal and revelation

Three things for a kid to like:

1. Honesty. This is a sometimes brutally honest look at the confusing world of girls on the cusp of their teenage years. It’s about two girls who have a summer vacation home friendship, a taste for horrifically violent movies, a crush on the young man who works at the video shop, and healthy amount of confusion about their own changing bodies and changing desires. Because of the swearing and the pregnancy of an older teen in the story this is a book that will probably be shelved with YA. A reasonable choice. I don’t think I’d want a 3rd or 4th grader to wander into this story unaware, but I do think it has lots of food for thought for the older 12-14 range of the middle grade audience.

2. The graphic novel world is often a very boy-oriented place but this was a great story about two girls sharing a summer. The relationship was not sentimentalized. The art was true to the real bodies of real people. None of the exaggerated and sexualized body types so common in comics.

3. The other thread in this story is the mother of one of the girls grief over her miscarriage. So the story addresses a child’s perception of a parent’s grief–the mother hadn’t yet told her daughter about the pregnancy so she didn’t tell her about the loss either. All the girl can see is that her parents were trying for another baby and then they stopped trying and started fighting. It’s not such a common topic in a children’s book but it might be a good springboard for conversation about grief and specifically how parents and kids grieve differently.

Something for the writer to think about:

Grief is hard to write about and I thought the author and illustrator did a great job of balancing the work of talking/telling about the grief and showing it with images and actions. It got me thinking about those character conversations in my own stories that could be perhaps better left unsaid but expressed through an action.

How I came to review this book:

I found this book in my library when I was looking for something else. I picked it up because it looked like a nice summer “girl story”. The cover is a bit deceptive but I’m glad I picked it up.