As a picture book writer who is not also an illustrator, I only have my mind to work with, so when people ask me how my process works, it’s easy to freeze, to default to not knowing. Not knowing makes me inclined to wonder if the art and craft of it all might be purely instinctive. Or worse, perhaps a fluke. So while I was looking at my own book, Look! Look! in this context, I thought I’d ask a couple of writers in my critique group (affectionately dubbed The Autodidacts) to weigh in: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and Caroline Starr Rose.

I asked each of them to think about one of her picture books to find something that changed between the early draft and the final book.

Vaunda wrote about Almost to Freedom (2004 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book):

I was working on the final phase of Almost to Freedom.  The story is historical — about a family trying to escape slavery — and I am always concerned about getting the history correct. 

I’ve always been fascinated by writing picture book text, which is in effect, the work of writing what feels like half a book. Only the words, but we know the book won’t be complete until pictures arrive to fill in most of the spread that our words get sprinkled over. So I thought it might be fun and maybe informative as well, to take a look at how I did this, exactly, with one of my picture books. What did I put in? What did I leave out?

To start with, here’s the final draft of the first manuscript page of Look! Look! that I submitted to Groundwood Books in 2023.

Post curated by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk

When I began teaching at Vermont College in 2006, my hope was to show my students the gaps between their intentions and the words on the page. I wanted to offer a range of different ways to bridge those gaps, to point out where the draft words were pointing. Then the writer would find her way, would happen upon his own path, would craft the work they wanted to write. Whatever my students might have learned from all this, I’m convinced that reading their work and thinking about it taught me to hold my own work to standards at once generous and critical.

Mima Tipper was my student early in my teaching career. She was among those students who taught me how to teach. So I’m delighted to welcome Mima to Writing With a Broken Tusk to discuss her young YA novel, Kat’s Greek Summer

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.

Jen Storm is an Ojibwe writer from Couchiching First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. In her graphic novel, Little Moons, illustrated by Ryan Howe, young Reanna mourns the loss of her sister, who goes missing on her way home from school. On the surface this slender volume is a deeply felt tribute to shared grief and healing. But it’s more that that, because the sources of the strength Reanna comes to feel as she navigates this impossibly difficult journey, are—everywhere!

The Andaman Islands lie in an expanse of water in the northeastern Indian Ocean 80 miles away from the coast of Myanmar. I’ve never been, although I grew up knowing they were out there—a far-flung Indian territory. A notorious penal colony was initially established there by the British. It held exiled Indian soldiers who took part in the 1857 rebellion, the same event that resulted in the British Crown taking the governance of India out of the hands of one of the world’s first multinational companies.

What I didn't know then was that among the people of the subcontinent who wanted to throw the British out were the indigenous Jarawa people of the Andamans, a tribe who still call the islands home, and have deep knowledge of the forests they have lived in for over 50,000 years.

In all the conversations I’ve heard about the present events playing out in the United States — A constitutional crisis? An autocoup?A hijacking of executive powers? — one set of voices has seemed conspicuously absent: those of Native American people. So when I heard that my Writing Project friend and colleague in New Mexico, Michael Thompson, was interested in disseminating a piece he felt compelled to write, I invited him to post it here on Writing With a Broken Tusk. Welcome, Michael.

I read Ride the Wind by Nicola Davies in an e-galley, which isn’t the ideal way to read a picture book. Still, even with the limitations of the format, there was something moving and engaging about this book. I enjoyed its depth and scope, and loved how Davies uses the boy’s story to access the albatross’s plight. She also doesn’t shy away from the complexity of human relationships—a representation that’s difficult to pull off in the small container of a picture book. Finally I loved that the child secures his place in his world and finds healing through bearing witness to something larger than himself. So I invited Nicola to tell me more. Here’s the result of our exchange of emails.

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.

My friend and writer colleague Caroline Starr Rose suggested I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (reflections on stories he’s lovingly taught for two decades at Syracuse). Also Saunders is the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a storytelling feat in its own right.

Caroline sent along a snippet of text from A Swim…:

The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.