If your writing self-concept's as shaky as mine, seeing yourself as any kind of author is hard enough, some days!  A writer? Fine. I'll be one of those, a frantic scribbler driven by a need to make sense of the world.  But a multicultural author?  What's that? 

I think I know what she meant, though.  That question included a host of others--would you ever write of subjects and people that have nothing to do with India?  Would they let you do that? Fluffy bunnies?  Dinosaurs?  What's your focus?  Do you have one?  Questions guaranteed to make that writing self-concept unravel fast!

Being a word person, I see the term "multicultural" as awkward and incomplete.  When I write a book set in India, like Monsoon, or Naming Maya, is it multicultural?  Well, that depends on your point of view.  India of course is a mix of cultures, languages, world views, all changing much faster than I can ever hope to keep up with.  Really, neither book can claim to represent India.  Each is set in a specific part of the country, and attempts to convey the nuances of that place and that place alone.  But from the American perspective, both books are about a single place and therefore a single culture.  They fill an "India" or even a "South Asia" slot in a multicultural tally.  How about Chachaji's Cup, set in the U.S., the story of an Indian-American family?  Again, depends.  You could view the kid in the book as having to cross cultural borders daily.  You could say this is a "monocultural" book--it's about Indian-American immigrants.  Or you could view Neel as crafting a new cultural paradigm altogether, a perfectly comfortable amalgam of basketball and stories from mythology.  If he were to travel to the north Indian city depicted in Monsoon, Neel would be seen as the visiting American kid.  He would add the "multi" to the cultural mix.

There was a time when I was gathering rejection letters the way kids build rock collections.  I shopped The Broken Tusk around for months before Diantha Thorpe at Linnet Books picked it up.  I got great feedback on it from many fine editors who took the time to write personal rejections.  "Lyrical prose," they said.  "Wonderful, fluid storytelling voice."  But underneath the praise was an uneasiness.  It wasn't that the manuscript wasn't publishable.  But would anyone want to read this?  I am forever grateful that Diantha took a chance on it, and on me. Niche or not, that book is still in print, selling steadily, which must mean something.

And that is the reason that multicultural publishing came into being in the first place.  Writers of color were not being published by large houses in the U.S, because their work was judged as too niche, even though work by white writers about those same cultures was being published. Hence the emergence of houses like Lee & Low, and Children's Book Press, with specific missions to recognize, publish, and promote the work of writers and illustrators of color.  These presses and the authors and illustrators they work with do push the envelope. Every time one of their books wins an award the larger houses are made to sit up and take notice. If it weren't for this movement the definitive description of India would still be considered to be The Jungle Book (and given the influence of pop culture, that would be Disney rather than Kipling)!

The shrinking world of fast and easy communications is another reason that old perceptions are changing fast. Even though the market in translations is still small, American publishers are looking to foreign publishing houses for worthy reprints.  Farrar Straus & Giroux recently published Tiger on a Tree, originally published by Tara Press, in India.  Kids of any culture will relate to the scaredy-cat tiger.  The art work is both very Indian and completely universal.  This is a book very much grounded in a place and world view. Yet it doesn't hit you over the head with any agenda other than flipping the pages and having fun.

Despite all this, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora still remain "underrepresented" in American children's literature. A graduate student wrote to me saying that in her Multicultural Children's Literature class, India hadn't even been mentioned! She was thrilled to discover my web site, and to find that there are contemporary writers who are writing for children from a South Asian perspective.  I spoke to Navajo bilingual education teachers once, and some of them told me they have stories they'd like to write, but they're not sure that publishers will be interested.  I told them to start writing, and to work on getting good enough that their words will sell themselves.  Getting published is only a step on the journey that begins with writing and rewriting.

Come to think of it, I have managed to write a couple of short stories that have nothing Indian about them.  Higlights magazine published both of them, one about a woman who owns a cat shop (you know, she sells cat toys and pillows and art and...) and the other about a kid who helps save a killdeer nest and gives up a chance to go follow a hot-air balloon.  So all right, if I ever feel driven to write a fluffy bunny book, I suppose I should just go for it. Probably not this year, though.

So where does that leave me and my writing self-concept? Primarily, I'm a writer.  Authorship happens, and I'll take it when it's bestowed on me, but it's my writing that defines me.  As for "multicultural?"  It's a klutzy word, but it works, for now, in an imperfect sort of way.  We're going to need it, until we've created the new paradigm that makes it unnecessary.

*Children's Book Press, 2002-03 catalog