Florence Fortescue is an aspiring journalist. She’s also ten years old, that marvellous age of awareness when a kid lands at last in the double digits and the world is opening up but there are those pesky adults trying to hold you back in your bid to make a trail, strike a note, make a mark all your own. She’s also wonderfully bossy, with a dizzying faith in her own competence combined with solid reliance on plain old good luck.

Florence’s parents have insisted on moving her to the country and her best friend has been left behind and if that isn’t bad enough, there are ghosts.

Adi Rule is a VCFA graduate from the program where I taught for sixteen years and this is her new middle grade we’re talking about, Ghosts Chickens: Omelet From the Other Side. It’s peopled with eccentrics of all ages and species. Songwriter Dad collects glass owls. Mom designs submarines. The ghost chickens appear after Florence eats a weirdly glowing green egg.

But I get ahead of myself. Back up a minute. The book starts here:

WARNING

If you ever find a mysterious, glowing egg

beneath the rotten floorboards

of an abandoned chicken coop

in the dead of night,

do not touch it.

I asked Adi to write about an element of this joyfully weird little book that helped bring the story to life for her.

Riding the Trail: Cherokees Remember the Removal by Traci Sorell and Will Chavez is a tribute to history and the present, at once honoring ancestral tragedy and present-day community. When a Cherokee Nation biking team gathers to replicate a ride that took place in 1984, retracing one of the routes of the Cherokee forced removal of 1838-39, it’s a journey that unlocks the past in body and soul and spirit.

Traci Sorell, I’m so delighted to e-chat with you about this vibrant book, packed with information and illustrated with maps, original documents, art, and photographs.

Yamile Saied Mendez is an American writer, a VCFA alum, and the author of The Beautiful Game, Furia and the powerful, moving ode to the power of music, Hear Ye Mortals. But I have long wanted to talk to her about another way of writing, in another set of books she has worked to bring into the world—the small, vibrant form of the picture book. Here’s our conversation, that has emerged from a series of emails traded, dates set and reset, and complicated travel schedules navigated. Welcome, Yamile!

1984 and Animal Farm may be the most obvious Orwell picks these days. Me, I’m reading Why I Write, a little Penguin compilation of four essays:

The titular “Why I Write” begins:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about 17 and 24 I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

A writing group is more than the sum of everyone in it. You share manuscripts at various stages of progress. Some fall by the wayside, others make it to completion. You celebrate successes and commiserate over the inevitable disappointments. You get to know one another and develop shorthands of communication that no one else understands. And every once in a while, you get to witness a story idea that the writer knows has arrived as a gift in her life and you are lucky that you are going to run alongside as she develops it.

Here’s one of those projects: Books Up the Mountain, a picture book by my friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard. And here’s Caroline, e-chatting with me about the book.

An attempted murder at a large, noisy, unwieldy Indian American family reunion in New Jersey forms the inciting incident in Dinesh Thiru’s YA comedy-mystery, or maybe it’s a mystery-comedy—My Killer Family Reunion. When a rich and cantankerous woman like Grand Mom gets knocked down by a car, what’s not to be suspicious about? Because wasn’t she really knocked down by her nephew in order to get her out of the way of said speeding car, and if that’s the case, why did he have to push her down so hard that she suffered a severe concussion?

I thought I’d made peace with the writing demons of insecurity by acknowledging them and expecting to encounter them in the process of writing every single book. Then a recent review knocked me off my wise-woman pedestal.

Towards the end of last year, a time that seems now like an eon ago, I wrote about the oddities of a 1996 children’s book from GM, no less, that aimed to push—really!—an American electric car.

With little fanfare, electric cars had begun to appear on California’s roads. They were tested on select groups nationwide. They were quiet. They emitted no fumes. Their drivers loved them. Yet ten years later they were all gone. It would take another two decades for the EV to reappear as a viable, if partial and imperfect, way to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. A 2006 documentary asks, why should we be haunted by the ghost of the electric car? Why, indeed?

In similar vein, The White House Effect (2024), directed by Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk, and Bonni Cohen, is a thoughtful, often unsettling look at a moment when political leadership had an opportunity to change the trajectory of global warming. Policy windows were open. Scientific consensus that global warming was real and human-caused was solidifying. And yet, here we are today.

I’ve always been fascinated by doors. I’m even trying to use one as a portal in a novel that is, I’m sad to say, currently refusing to bend to my will.

This door. with its brass crossbar latch and its loop for a dangling padlock, used to hang in my grandparents’ house in south India. When the house was sold, my parents moved the door to a new house they were building in a different city. As a result, I have this sense of doors being more than stationary objects that let people in and out. Also who can forget the doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? (The humble one remains my favourite.)

Electric Birds of Pothakudi is a picture book based on the true story of a villager in south India who took extraordinary action to protect a pair of nesting birds. It’s a strikingly illustrated book, in a bold mix of manual and digital work, with a palette that ranges from brooding to brilliant. I’m continuing my conversation with author Karthika Naïr, and also, I’m happy to add, looping in illustrator Joëlle Jolivet. Karthika kindly sent me several page scans scans from the French edition of the book, which I’m happy to include here as well. It’s always wonderful when a book finds expression in more than one language.