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. Since March 2024, Jen Breach (writer, VCFA graduate, and former student) has helped me curate and manage guest posts and Process Talk pieces on this blog.
The blog name refers to the mythical pact between the poet Vyaasa and the Hindu elephant headed god Ganesha who was his scribe during the composition of the epic narrative, 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, now part of Reading Is Fundamental, and still miraculously in print.
Posts on this site reflect personal opinion and commentary protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Process Talk: Karen Krossing on My Street Remembers
In a big-hearted treatment of place and history, akin to Australian writer Nadia Wheatley’s iconic picture book, My Place, Karen Krossing’s latest release, My Street Remembers, is grounded in conceptions of people and place that we’d all do well to reflect upon:
everyone is part of history and every place has a story worthy of telling.
story should be told in all its aspects, joyful and sad.
just as the Earth has layers, so do our histories.
if we are to grow beyond our worst instincts, those histories must be told and read and talked about.
I'm delighted to welcome Karen Krossing to Writing With a Broken Tusk.
There is No Map for This: Guest Post from Tom Birdseye
This title is a writer’s dream. Take the words “there is no map for this” and you can use them as preface for anything doubtful, anything scary, a day gone wrong, a question unanswered.
You can use them to refer to life itself.
Fertile Ground for a Dialectic
by Tom Birdseye
Jacket! Draft! Trilogy!
I wrote Book Uncle and Me without a thought about who it might be for. I wrote it because the story kept scratching at the inside of my brain and wouldn't leave me alone. It was originally published by Scholastic India. I never thought I would ever write a sequel.
Only a couple of years ago, when I was doing a zoom presentation during the Covid years, a child in the audience asked, "Is there going to be a second book?” The question stayed with me, although I didn't have a coherent answer for it at the time.
What happened when? The challenge of writing a companion book
I started writing the text of a possible companion book to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! last year, with a focus on water and with a girl as protagonist, a contrast in my mind to the earlier story about a boy and a road and a tree.
I thought I’d written a tidy picture book text, stayed true to my young character, followed more or less the shape of the previous story.
