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.
Guest Post: Caroline Starr Rose on The Burning Season
Stephen Pyne’s article in Scientific American compels and informs but it’s also surprisingly lyrical.
“Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know of. Earth has fire because it has life.”
Fire, Pyne says, is like a virus—not truly living but needing the living world to spread by contagion. We humans provided the one thing that naturally occurring fire does not have—ignition. And so it happens, he suggests, that we have created a new kind of earth, a planet on fire in a time he dubs the Pyrocene.
One thing writers do is bear witness. My very dear friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose has done just that, with her middle grade novel, The Burning Season.
Guest Post: Terry Nichols on Real-life Setting in The Dreaded Cliff
From my friend of many years and one-time park ranger at Aztec Ruins National Monument, Terry Nichols, here’s a delightful middle grade that Kirkus called “linguistically rich and frequently humorous.”