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.
Three Things I Know From 30 Years of Writing
I only understand what I am ready to hear. My readiness is the contingency, always.
Here’s a list of three things I’ve learned from editors. I rediscovered them in a notebook in which I’d scribbled notes during lectures at the July 2016 residency at VCFA.
Remembering Dr. King Today and Often
Abraham Lincoln warned of “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” opting instead to create a government of the people, for the people, by the people, a phrase so ordinary for us today that it no longer seems to call for quotation marks. Yet those kings of the material world are in seats of extraordinary power today. Their presence will be writ large in the extravagant and highly politicized presidential inauguration taking place in the United States. Yet, purely by the chance arrangement of the Gregorian calendar, that event, with all the hoopla surrounding it, happens to coincide with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. That’s my focus today. Another kind of King.
India and Black America
India and Black America have often been on intersecting paths, paths that have largely been ignored in the national discourses of both countries.