Muse of Fire

Because I am exceptionally lucky, I have known Els Kushner for several years, via the magic of the Internet. When I heard that her first picture book was finally released, I was eager to see the final results of something I got to watch happening behind the scenes. It was as terrific as I expected. Now I’m eager to share it with you.

I asked Els to tell Lesbian Family about herself and the book. Enjoy the results below. And be sure to order a copy of The Purim Superhero in e-format, paperback or hardcover. You have just enough time before Purim, on 25 February this year.

1. Tell us about yourself. Who are you, what do you do, how did you become interested in writing for children?

Oh, I’m just another Jewish lesbian librarian/writer/parent who plays the ukulele and periodically attempts to garden. I’m a kid person and a kids’ book person, so I guess it makes sense that I became a children’s librarian. I’m from New York and New Jersey and Seattle and, now, Vancouver, where I live with my spouse and our daughter and a lot of books and musical instruments and small plastic items. I’m addicted to text in all forms, from fiction to old New Yorkers to podcasts. I stay up too late on a regular basis.

I’ve written lots of things, for years, short stories and blog posts and bits of novels and what have you. I think people tend to write about they’re interested in, what their thoughts and feelings revolve around, even if their writing isn’t directly autobiographical. And for me, the experience of childhood and adolescence is endlessly fascinating: life is so vivid when you’re a kid, so many things are new, and you’re also so powerless and subject to the whims of the adult world. I also really like stories about community, and when writing about kids there’s a sort of automatic community a lot of the time, as they’re often in school or other groups.
2. This book began as a contest. Tell us a bit about that. What were the perimeters of the competition and what was the process like?

In early 2011, Keshet sponsored a contest for an 800-to-1000-word picture book manuscript with both Jewish and GLBT content. The contest description specified that the storyline shouldn’t be primarily didactic, and that it should have “clear, clever and interesting narrative plot with universal themes and Jewish content.”

The process of writing the manuscript had in some ways started years before I saw that contest announcement, when I was a librarian at a Jewish day school, and was looking for books to read to my students for Purim. Purim is a Jewish holiday that takes place in February or March; its customs include reading the Book of Esther aloud, dressing in costume, eating cookies called Hamentaschen, and generally being silly. It’s a very kid-friendly holiday, but–maybe because, unlike Chanukah or Passover, it doesn’t correspond with any major Christian holidays that take place at the same time of year –I couldn’t find any good read-alouds at that time that told the story of a contemporary kid celebrating Purim. (There are a few more now, but there weren’t then.)

After a few years of thinking, “sheesh, someone should write a good Purim picture book,” I thought, “maybe I should write a Purim picture book.” I noodled around with that idea a little, but I couldn’t really figure out what the driving conflict would be. Then, a few years later, I saw the Keshet contest and thought that a kid with same-sex parents would be a great protagonist for a Purim story.

The final part of the equation came when I had a writing date with a couple of friends one day while I was working on the manuscript, and one of them brought her 8-year-old son along. I was grousing to my friends about how stuck I was, and how I couldn’t figure out what kind of a problem my protagonist should have, and my friend’s son got very caught up in this question and started giving me these amazing suggestions about how aliens and monkeys should come take over the “Jewish church” and have a big fight…he got really into it and was drawing pictures of the great alien-vs.-monkey battle while we were writing. I was struck by how original and quirky his imagination was, and how a kid like him, with strong and individual interests, might have a problem fitting in with his peers, but how that kind of difference, like gayness, or Judaism, could also be a source of strength. Nate’s interest in aliens is inspired by, and a tribute to, him.

After that, my biggest problem was getting the manuscript down to the requisite 1,000 words; I think I went through six or seven drafts. I’m pretty verbose normally (as you can probably tell by my answers to these questions!), so that was tough.

3. You are a lesbian parent. Does Nate’s experience with peer pressure to fit in come from your own experience as a mom in a same-sex headed family?

My experience as a mom in a same-sex-headed family has mostly been pretty undramatic. We’ve been lucky enough to live in communities where being a lesbian parent is accepted as a pretty ordinary thing 99% of the time, and the few times it hasn’t been, well, I’ve experienced that as the other person’s problem, not mine.

I’d say Nate’s experience with peer pressure comes more from my own childhood as a sort of nerdy, bookish kid who had different interests from most kids my age. I had a lot less confidence than Nate, so I dealt with that experience by being pretty shy and withdrawn. I think it takes a very solid sense of yourself to do what Nate does and maintain your individuality while acknowledging and honoring that deep desire to be part of a group.

I also wanted to explore, a little bit, the way that gender expectations for boys of Nate’s age—about 4 or 5—are in many ways so much narrower than for girls. My experience from working with preschool and elementary-school aged kids, and from being a parent, is that there’s more tolerance for girls rejecting traditionally “girly” things than for boys who aren’t deemed sufficiently interested in things that mainstream boys are supposed to like. And a lot of the time, it’s other kids who are doing the gender policing. So a story about a girl who, say, didn’t want to dress up as a princess would’ve had a very different feeling and, I think, might not have been as dramatic.

4. I loved the connection the book makes between Esther coming out of the “closet” of Jewishness and Nate’s anxiety about expressing who he really is. That’s quite a sophisticated connection and a wonderful theological point. Do you find overlaps in your own life between voicing your Jewishness and your lesbianism?
Both Jewishness and queerness are identities where you sometimes have to “come out”—they’re not so immediately apparent, in general, as race or gender, so there’s an element of choice in whether to identify publicly as part of that particular group. In my life, right now, they’re both identities where a lot of the time I’m part of a small minority: the neighborhood where I live, for example, doesn’t have either a large Jewish or GLBT community, and many of the friends and co-workers I see on a regular basis are neither queer nor Jewish. I guess, like Nate, these are aspects of my identity that in many ways aren’t the driving forces in my daily life right now—I spend a lot more time and energy actively thinking about being a parent, or a librarian, or a writer, than I do about being a lesbian. But at the same time, my lesbianism and my Jewishness are so central to who I am.

Both are also communities or groups that have been historically oppressed but that I experience as a gift—I’ve always loved being Jewish, and as an adult, I’ve found a lot of strength and creativity and just general wonderfulness in the lesbian community and in claiming a lesbian identity.

5. The illustrations for the book are just the best. Can you tell us what it’s like to work with an illustrator for your words? It seems like a relationship requiring a lot of trust.

I love the illustrations too! Mike Byrne has really captured Nate’s sweetness and individuality.  One little-known fact about picture books is that usually the author has little or nothing to do with the illustration process; generally the publisher selects the illustrator, and they and the illustrator work together to determine the visual component of the book. That was the case with The Purim Superhero: I was sent some early drafts of the drawings, but mostly I didn’t know what the art would be like until I saw the finished book. It was a little bit like meeting someone in person for the first time who you’ve only known through emails and blogging—even though I’d created these characters, I felt like I understood them on a whole other level when I saw the finished illustrations.

6. What’s next for you? Do you have any more picture books up your sleeve? What about other writing you are working on?

I’ve been working on a picture book set during another Jewish holiday, Shavuot. One of the customs of Shavuot is to stay up all through the night and study, and another is to eat dairy foods like blintzes and cheesecake, and I think the combination of staying up late and eating cheesecake could be really appealing to a kid.

And when I entered the manuscript for The Purim Superhero to the Keshet contest in 2011, I’d just finished a very rough first draft for a young adult novel that’s sort of a sequel to a short story I wrote a long time ago. The story was published in an anthology called The Essential Bordertown, which is part of a shared-world series about a city between the human world and Faerie. The story, and the novel I started, are both about a girl who runs away to Bordertown after she’s been involuntarily outed at school, and falls in love with another girl there. I was having a hard time revising the draft, and then I found out that I’d won the Keshet contest, and what with one thing and another that rough novel draft is still sitting on the side of my desk, with more and more files and books and bits of random detritus piled on top of it. I give it sort of a look every once in a while and promise the characters I’ll get back to them and work on their story and make everything better, if they’ll please, please just be patient a little longer.

Cross-posted at LesbianFamily.com

Kiersten White’s bestseller, Paranormalcy, famous for its “bleeps”

This week I stumbled (via Twitter) onto a discussion about whether books for young adults ought to carry parental warnings based on language–that is, based on the frequency of specific curse words.

Two young adult writers, Gayle Forman and Kiersten White had terrific posts at their blogs on the answer (no, and why, and what instead) that got me thinking about the question itself. It had never even occurred to me that books should carry ratings of this sort. Somehow, to me, books were in a category quite different from movies or video games or even music–other things that carry ratings.

I curse quite a bit. But I never curse in front of my children. When we discovered that my older daughter was an early reader we had to take down a piece of art containing profanity that she (whoops) read aloud one evening at the dinner table when she was three.

My general idea is that when my kids start using words I don’t want them to use, I’ll tell them those are 18-and-older words that they can use when they are grown up. I censor them for more than one reason. First and foremost, I’d just rather they learn more nuanced ways to express themselves–even inventing their own curses on occasion–than resorting to worn cliches too soon. But not a small part of my concern about their vocabulary is the fact that they don’t have the white privilege of being thought precociously, irreverently cute when they curse. They are more likely to draw a racist–even a subtle, unconsciously racist–response from middle-class white adults if they use profanity. I also don’t want my kids to be “those kids” who introduce the other kids to swearing before their parents are ready for it.

So like I said, I curse (and my characters in my books sometimes curse, depending on who they are and the context), but never in front of my kids. And I protect my kids from hearing or reading swear words.

But my kids are five and seven.

When they are twelve and fifteen? I am not sure, but while the under-eighteen speaking rule may still be in place, I seriously doubt I will censor their reading based on cursing.*

I myself never got much into “young adult” literature as a “young adult.” This was possibly because there wasn’t so much of it at the time (in the eighties), but it was also because when I was a teen, I didn’t like being put in boxes (you know, like all teens) and I resented the idea that I ought to like a book because it was aimed at my developmental level. That felt condescending, and nothing could be more offensive to a teen than condescension.

I am still a little baffled by this today, even as I write “young adult” books for the bourgeoning category. Perhaps the fact that so many young adult books are being read by adults allows teens to embrace them without feeling condescended to. (This is not to say that I think young adult books are in fact condescending to teens, only that as a teen, I would have felt the label itself to be so.)

All I can suppose is that putting parental warning labels on books (especially ones based on profanity for heaven’s sake) would really turn teens off. I mean, talk about condescending!

In my own under-eighteen reading life, I was not censored by my parents at all.

There was a lot of benign neglect in my childhood, as both of my parents worked for pay, away from home, full time, and my brother and I were what the eighties coined “latch key kids” for many years of childhood. Combine these conditions with a house whose walls were literally lined with books–many of which my parents didn’t even know the contents of (my father owned an independent bookstore and the things just arrived, often unbidden, in boxes on the doorstep with regularity) and with the fact that I have been an avid reader ever since I learned to read and you get a young Shannon reading widely and chaotically and not always–almost never, in fact–age-appropriately.

But here’s what happened. The “bad” stuff flew right over my head (as did plenty of not-so-bad, but just beyond my education level stuff). Alternately, I learned things I was ready to learn, though I might have been wary of asking my parents about it directly.

As for my own parenting, I like Kiersten’s advice to read with your kids. (and don’t get me wrong, latchkey kid or not, my parents read with me, to me and near me throughout my childhood. Some of the age-inappropriate books were gifts from my parents, who nevertheless thought I’d get something important from them or just plain enjoy them.)  And I feel this is the way to go about a lot of things when it comes to my kids–let them read or hear or watch certain things with me and discuss those things. We are beginning to hit this stage a little now that we have school peers with different experiences and levels of permissiveness in their families. (I spend a lot of time these days critiquing Batman’s problem-solving techniques with my five year-old and trying to figure out what could possess anyone to admire Justin “Beaver” when his music is so awful with my seven-year old.)

But I still think books are different from television, movies, video games–even music–in an important way. Reading stretches a person, but it stretches her slowly. The pace of reading is such that digestion can happen almost as the reading happens–unlike a video that can smack you with information before you get any time to process it. You can put down a book and look up a word in the dictionary (or ask your mom or your BFF what something means) and go right back to where you left off and read on. (Or you can let that word sail over your head and get on with the rest of the book as I so often did in childhood.)

There’s something inherently educational–and self-educational at that (which I think is the best kind of education)–about reading, even when the material is less than great, or simply beyond you.

So I guess that’s me, with a big no on the question of whether or not to rate books for teens. What do you think?

* And no, I’m not so naive as to think that my kids won’t curse behind my back, among their friends, just like I did as a tween/teen. But the Official Family Rule still molded my understanding of cursing in a way I want my children to learn as well.