Writing With a Broken Tusk
Writing With a Broken Tusk began in 2006 as a blog about overlapping geographies, personal and real-world, and writing books for children. The blog name refers to the mythical pact made between the poet Vyaasa and the Hindu elephant headed god Ganesha who was his scribe during the composition of the Mahabharata. It also refers to my second published book, edited by the generous and brilliant Diantha Thorpe of Linnet Books/The Shoe String Press, published in 1996, acquired and republished by August House and still miraculously in print.
Process Talk: Heather Camlot on The Prisoner and the Writer
I don’t remember where or when I first heard of The Dreyfus Affair—the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer attached to the French General Staff, on charges of military espionage and selling secrets to the Germans. It might have been included in one of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books that I devoured, reading scaled-down versions of dozens of titles that I’d never have found otherwise in my childhood years in India.
I can’t remember, but at any rate, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. For more than a decade, a small group of human rights activists worked to clear his name, among them author Emile Zola. The real culprit was identified and Dreyfus was eventually pardoned.
Decades after I first heard that story, I’m talking to Heather Camlot, author of The Prisoner and the Writer, about the exchanges between Zola and Captain Dreyfus that led to Dreyfus’s eventual release.