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.
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: