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.
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.
