CBC Diversity

Contributed by Pleasant DeSpain, Author

Fundamentally, diversity means difference. Fundamentally, folktales invite inclusion.

Sitting on a litter-strewn beach in Negombo, Sri Lanka during the fall of 2000, a 17-year old Sinhalese lad named Nehan approached me and asked if he could practice speaking English. He told me about his life and his family, the difficulties of the ongoing war with the Tamil, and how he hoped to succeed in life. Nehan also asked many questions about my life and my travels. We shared a wealth of words. An hour later I stood up and put on my shirt. At that point, the young man surprised me with a pantomime: removing his eyes and placing them in my shirt pocket. Then he said, “Take my eyes with you and show me the rest of the world.”

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I am a white, forty-something-year-old woman who has grown up surrounded by books with characters who look like I do. The main character of my forthcoming middle grade novel, A Long Pitch Home, is a ten-year-old Pakistani boy who moves to America and has a grand total of zero books with middle grade characters who share his background.

When I set out to write A Long Pitch Home, I knew I had hours and hours of research ahead of me. I started with one of my former colleagues, Sughra, who is from Karachi. She is also kind and funny and can wrangle any bibliophobic fifth-grader into a reader. I reached out to other experts on Pakistani and Pakistani-American culture, including a young lawyer who had moved from Karachi to the US when he was a boy. His wife, who was raised in Karachi, offered to read my manuscript, all while raising a newborn and working on her PhD. Not only did they catch things in the story that were incorrect, but they answered questions I didn’t even realize that I had. And then there is Hena Khan, a children’s author whose gorgeous books I had in my school library. A mutual friend put us in touch with one another, and now, two years later, I am fortunate to count her as a friend.

I asked Hena if I could interview her about what it was like to lend her expertise to A Long Pitch Home, and she graciously agreed.

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Contributed by Sharon Mentyka, Writer

I belong to the most privileged group in our culture: white, heterosexual, and able-bodied. And although my female gender brings me down a notch or two, my race membership alone gives me a winning lottery ticket in life.

So when I began to write books for children in earnest, one piece of advice from an instructor in my MFA program seemed to suit me. “People will tell you to only write about what you know,” she said. “Don’t listen to them. Instead, write about the things you want to learn.” There was so much I wanted to learn. And the stories I yearned to write begged for research, listening, and learning.

Then I made a mistake. One that would have perpetuated a racist stereotype had I not been saved by a sensitivity reader.

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Contributed by Ned Rust, Author

They want me to try to write for what?

They want a graduate of the 99%, non-minority, public schools of last-century Briarcliff Manor (the B.M. we call it, much like residents of the O.C., only without a validating TV show) to write for a diversity blog?

Roaring Brook has just published a book I’ve written called Patrick Griffin’s Last Breakfast on Earth,about a kid who undertakes a kitchen-sink chemistry experiment and ends up in a parallel world dominated by a hyper-modern efficiency state that finds human cultural heritages to be inconvenient and even anathema.

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Last month I joined seven other children’s book editors on a week-long trip across Germany, sponsored by the German Book Office of New York. The program nurtures Germany’s relationships with publishers around the globe, as Deutschland imports roughly 50% of its children’s books from other countries.

Everyone involved learned a ridiculous amount about what we all do similarly and differently, and I was constantly inspired to think more globally and critically about my own lists.

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