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.
Since March 2024, Jen Breach (writer, VCFA graduate, and former student) has helped me manage guest posts and Process Talk pieces on this blog. They have lined up and conducted author/illustrator interviews and invited and coordinated guest posts. That support has helped me get through weeks when I’ve been in edit-copyedit-proofing mode, and it’s also introduced me to writers and books I might not have found otherwise. Our overlapping interests have led to posts for which I might not have had the time or attention-span. It’s the beauty of shared circles.
The Sill of the World: Where is the Writer in the Text?
As another year begins I find myself thinking of the passage of time, of generations, and of story.
And because I too, have a fond relationship with an ancient Remington Rand typewriter that sits on my shelf (keeping company with Hobson Jobson, a rhyming dictionary, the Monier Williams Sanskrit to English, and Volumes XVI to XX of the OED) such thoughts lead quite naturally to Richard Wilbur’s poem, “The Writer.”
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I love to think of the many ways there are for us to position ourselves in the stories we write. Here is the poet, moving from the sound of clacking keys to this reflection:
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
And from there to the memory of a starling finding its way into the house, thrashing around while trying desperately to escape, and finally making it, “clearing the sill of the world.” It’s one of those poems that thickens with each reading, or maybe it’s just that I read it every few years so that I am the one who has managed to slow down sufficiently to see beneath the poem’s surface.
Landscape and Language in Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?
In Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane wrote about the land in ways that made me feel as if I could touch the moss, hear the water flow. His prose enchanted, prompting me to read out loud. But I have only ever been a tourist in England, so while I was dazzled by the intricate connections of land and language, Landmarks, on the whole, spoke to me intellectually rather than emotionally. This book is different. Is a River Alive? flows through three distinct waterscapes and links them inescapably with our own human water bodies.
A Half-visible Map: Reading Projects Itself into Writing
How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran is rooted in the author’s experience in Turkey, but the picture it draws is of the rising neo-fascist right, not just in one country but around the world.
When I’m thinking of a work in progress, I tend to use everything I read as a filter for the undeveloped work. So I read Ece Temelkuran’s nonfiction work of politics, history, and memoir while simultaneously reflecting on entry points into a verse novel that is still a drafty patchwork of intentions and plot and half-formed characters. The world of the novel is a dystopian North America. Like a few other early drafts, it was dashed off in a great fury and then put away for a year or two, or five, to marinate in its own juices, depleted of the urgency that sent it spiralling up in the first place. My process, be warned, is messy, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. You go find your own way to mess up.
The Opposite of More is Not Less: Together by Ece Temelkuran
Together by political thinker and poet Ece Temelkuran traces upon the imagination the contours of a better world, a fairer world, a world where the toxic power play of a few need not create unrelenting misery for many. Her vision aligns remarkably with a vision of a fictional worldview that I’ve been chasing for decades without knowing it.
The book appears to have been published with a shifting, changing flow of subtitles: 10 Choices for a Better Now (Fourth Estate UK, 2021); A Manifesto Against the Heartless World (Fourth Estate UK, 2022); and Changes for a Better Now (Scribner Canada, 2025)
The e-book version I read uses the milder “changes” in its subtitle, but there’s plenty of heartlessness described on the inside. The writer pulls no punches:
Erroneously Informed, Unnecessarily Dead
On Freedom is Timothy Snyder’s (On Tyranny) meditation on the nature of people, especially Americans, and the meaning of freedom. Historian Snyder argues that freedom is a concept in need of rescuing from “overuse and abuse.” Americans, he says, have erroneously come to imagine that freedom means no more than a lack of barriers. It ought to mean more, and he sets out to tell us how.
Quirky Tense Employed to Tell a Heartrending Story
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Egyptian Canadian journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad, was selected for discussion in the Ink Book Club earlier this summer.
A title that begins like a story (One Day…) contains a promise about the narrative to come. The comma, with its implied pause, suggests that this will be a complex book and I ought to pick it up and expect to spend some time trying to come to terms with it.
And how could I not find irresistible the use of the future perfect tense, “will have been…?”
Voice and Empathy in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Paul Lynch thought his novel would never be published. He thought the book would destroy his career. It won the 2023 Booker. He also sees it as a personal rather than a political book. Well, okay.
Prophet Song is the story of Eilish, a biologist and mother of four whose life in a suburb of Dublin is upended by the secret police showing up at her home looking for her husband Larry, who is a teacher’s union leader. Larry disappears and never returns. The backdrop is a country sliding into totalitarianism and civil war, a setting that feels uneasily like the present time in the United States.
The beauty of this book lies in how its story unfolds in the small frame of one woman’s experience, told by a narrator who is at once painfully close to her and yet aware of dangers she cannot yet sense.
Alone Together: The Magic of Shared Reading—Part 2
The Ink Book Club calls itself Democracy in Action. From their web site:
Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”
We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.
Eclectic as my reading fare tends to be, I probably would not have picked up, of my own accord, the book they selected for discussion. It’s Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an argument for a politics of abundance as opposed to one of scarcity. But since Anand Giridharadas was suggesting it, I figured I’d give it a try. I’d really enjoyed his India Calling, part family memoir, part travelogue, and I like the posts on The Ink! Substack, so I picked up a copy and got to work.
Alone Together: The Magic of Shared Reading—Part 1
I joined a book discussion last month through the Democratic Party’s Global Women’s Caucus. The book we all read is an iconic text—Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which I’ve focused on earlier in this blog. The first of the trilogy, it was published in 1993, and behold! The years that it’s set in have become our present.
“The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me.”
Fire dreams feel like the reality of our time. (For more on a fictional depiction of fire in our pyrocene age, see Caroline Starr Rose’s reflections on her novel, The Burning Season.) But fire is just one of the elements that make Butler’s work feel astonishingly prescient.
One thread we discussed was the struggle between the comforts and costs of living in the modern industrial world. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, dreams of the stars:
“The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,” I said. “That's the ultimate Earthseed aim, and the ultimate human change short of death. It's a destiny we’d better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs—here today, gone tomorrow, our bones mixed with the bones and ashes of our cities, and so what?”
In reality, look how that dream, which feels so boldly innocent in Butler’s telling, has now been coopted by shamelessly rich men toward their own selfish ends.
Shepherd: Best Books of 2023
Thanks to Ben Fox and his team for their tireless zeal to get books into the hands of readers. When they asked me to pick three favourite books for last year, I demurred at first—what? Only three?
Chapter endings in This America by Jill Lepore
I didn’t pick up Jill Lepore’s This America to study its chapter endings. But there it was on a nonfiction display shelf in my local library, looking invitingly slender. I loved These Truths, and I was in complaining mode about the state of the world, so I reached for it.
A Magic Spark: Ben Fox on Serendipity, Joy, and Books
I usually feature writers and occasionally illustrators on this blog, so this is a little different. Some time ago, I was invited by a new website to recommend a themed list of books related in some way to my middle grade novel, The Problem With Being Slightly Heroic. It was so much fun to choose and think about the books on that list that I grew interested in how the site works. It provides a vast array of book recommendations across various genres, catering to diverse reading preferences by offering curated lists that help readers discover new and exciting titles.
The website is shepherd.com. I asked Ben Fox, the founder, if he’d write a post for Writing With a Broken Tusk on this very interesting project, which seeks to mimic the browsing experience virtually by creating webs of recommendations from authors.
Is Storification Always Necessary?
“We are all storytellers.” It was some time in the 1980s I began hearing this at workshops and conferences and in books for writers. I bought it entirely. It gave me hope that I too could do what I badly wanted to do—write books for children.
In a way, I’d been working at storytelling my whole life. I fabricated whoppers when I was a child, often just for fun. I wrote on walls. I scribbled made-up narratives almost as soon as I had the basic skills of manipulating pencil and paper.
When I finally dared to think of myself as a writer, it was vastly reassuring to be told that I came by the yearning naturally. Hadn’t stories been told from the beginning of time? In rock art and body art? About constellations and shorelines and mountains? Around fire circles in dimly imagined pasts? It didn't seem so audacious to be reaching for a skillset that I’d apparently acquired by birthright.
Reading the Future in Situ
Not for the first time, I’m wondering if it was a good idea to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future while visiting India. In the book, the temperature hits 42° C in Delhi (that’s over 107° F). The protagonist, working for an NGO, persuades the locals to go dip in a lake, which turns out to be hellishly warm and dreadfully polluted.
Looking the Tiger in the Eye
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable was Amitav Ghosh’s first book of nonfiction after his marvellous travel memoir and quest to unpack history, In an Antique Land (1992).
The opening chapter contains this passage on the Sundarbans, that mangrove forest region where three rivers run into the Bay of Bengal:
The Sundarbans are nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature. The greenery is dense, tangled, and low; canopy is not above but around you, constantly clawing at your skin and your clothes. No breeze can enter the thickets of this forest; when the air stirs at all it is because of the buzzing of flies and other insects. Underfoot, instead of a carpet of softly decaying foliage, there is a bank of slippery, knee-deep mud, perforated by the sharp points that protrude from mangroves roots. Nor do any vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels that wind through the landscape—and even then it is the water alone that opens itself; the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing.
That description transports me there, forces me to care when it would be so much easier to back away from the book’s big questions.
“Words are the Only Victors”
“Words are the only victors,” writes Pampa Kampana, at the end of Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City. It’s his twenty-first book and it is, among many other things, a celebration of words.
Prose and Possibility in The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
In the manner of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Anders, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novella, The Last White Man, wakes up to find himself transformed. He’s not a bug, however. As you might expect from the title, Anders has turned brown. We’re never quite sure why—there is some speculation that there was something in the water—but brown he is, “a deep and undeniable brown.” Soon others begin turning brown as well.
Rereading Earthseed in a Time of Planetary Change
Whatever I happen to be working on, I usually find myself needing an antidote in my reading, something that works against the grain of the writing.
Being in the depths of nonfiction at the moment, I needed to read fiction. But I wanted to read fiction that was capable of speaking to reality in the way that Richard Power’s Overstory did for me.
That is why I find myself rereading Octavia Butler’s iconic Earthseed novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.