Interview with Uma Krishnaswami
Dublin Core
Title
Creator
Description
More information about Uma can be found on her website: https://www.umakrishnaswami.com/
Date
Format
Type
Language
Source
Rights
Interview Item Type Metadata
Location
Original Format
Transcription
For this interview I spoke with Uma Krishnaswami. Uma is a writer of children’s literature and has played an important role in bringing multicultural narratives into the mainstream. Having been raised in India, Uma noticed the lack of South Asian representation in books and set out to fix this. In this interview we discussed the process of writing a children’s story and special considerations when it comes to writing picturebooks. We then moved on to discuss activism in children’s books, as well as the current political climate of censorship and how picturebooks might respond to that.
Sabrina Beaton So, you've been writing for 30 years now, right?
Uma Krishnaswami
Sabrina Beaton It occurred to me, while exploring some of your picture books, that many of the stories, feature, human characters, but often the main actor in the story is the environment or the setting itself. So I'm wondering how important are settings and the environment or the space that you occupy in both inspiring and informing the stories you write.
Uma Krishnaswami I think it’s very important. To me, setting is so much more than just backdrop and context. I think it’s part of the story, and certainly it’s part of everything I write. A lot of times, books like a book like Monsoon really came out of the setting. I was on a plane, and we were landing in Delhi, and there was a thunderstorm breaking out, or you know, it was just, the rain was beginning, and I was starting to feel kind of uncomfortable. And so, I just pulled out my notebook, and I jotted down a few lines about putting the rain into context the way I remembered it as a child, and I came up with 12 lines and I didn’t really do anything very much with it for months. And then afterwards, when I went back and I showed it to my writing group, they said, It’s lovely, but you’re going to have to do a lot of expanding. So, I expanded it, and I made it longer, and I made it fit the picturebook pages. And then they said, But wait! Where are the people? And so then, of course, I had to back way and think about a character, a child character, to inhabit that that space because it wasn't gonna be a book without it. And so for me, a lot of times, not always. But a lot of times setting comes, does come first.
Sabrina Beaton You had your first work published when you were only 13. And yet, as you say, on your website, you were writing for many years before you actually saw yourself as a writer. And, you've said that as a child the majority of the books you read were either British or American, and you never really saw yourself represented in those books which led you to believe that only British and American people could be writers. And I believe you also said that a lot of writers that you read were dead by the time you read them.
Uma Krishnaswami This is true. Yeah, children have odd logic to things. But the first thing that was published wasn't a book. It was a poem, and it was published in a magazine that a philanthropist and cartoonist actually in India had started called Children's World, and he really believed in the voices of children, and I think that's where I get my sense of the importance of children's voices because of the way that my voice was lifted and elevated by giving it space in that little magazine. I'm very grateful for that, and so I think I pay a lot of attention to the aspect of empowering children in my books. But yeah. It's been a strange journey. It really took the birth of my son, and looking for children's books with – I lived in the U.S. at the time – looking for children's books with a with an Indian subcontinental context. I just didn't find them. And so, I didn’t know any better. I had no idea how difficult a process this would turn out to be, and how complicated it is, and how many forces go into play in creating a book. And I thought, Oh, I could do this! And so, I started writing, and then once I started writing, I realized that it was the writing that was really engaging me and intriguing me, and that somehow, at some level as I had as a child, I needed to express myself. And so that’s really where that realization came to me. But no, I did not feel represented as a child. I don’t know what that even felt like, as a child to be represented in a book, because I never had that experience.
Sabrina Beaton You mentioned that you were 14 when you first saw an Indian person represented in a book that was represented in a positive way, that wasn't denigrating. How did that affect your sense of self, growing up reading books where Indian characters were maybe secondary?
Uma Krishnaswami I think there was a general, you know, in many ways, India at that time, in the year I was born, India had been independent for what? Nine years? It’s a very new country. And so all through my childhood, history was still being refashioned and thought about, and I suppose in some ways that continues to this day. But, I think there was this sense in my childhood of, somehow we were all a little bit, felt that we weren't quite there yet. We looked to the West for things that were, you know, stylish or important, or ideas that that one should pay attention to, and that's it's just not a good place to be. And then, coming to the United States and finding that children like I had been, and children, certainly children like my son – they weren't there in books either, at the time. And so that's when I think it really, it made me feel as if I had to do something about it.
Sabrina Beaton What were some of the challenges you faced when you first started writing multicultural children's stories?
Uma Krishnaswami Oh, well, I have to tell you, I think I think it was too easy in the beginning. My very first book got accepted pretty quickly, and I thought, Oh, it's going to be like this. This is great. It's going to be like this from here on. And of course it wasn't, but I had very – I had a wonderful mentor and an editor who took on my second book, which was a collection of stories from the Hindu tradition. It was called The Broken Tusk, and miraculously it still remains in print. After all these years later, it was published in 1996, and she was the one who told me, who really looked at my writing on the page and gave me lots of ways to think about it. I remember writing a scene, it was a battle scene with demons and demons and gods, and you know, it was from Hindu mythology. And she said, Why are you rushing through this conflict? She said, You've got demons. You've got gods! You've got you've got people in the middle. Make the most of this, she said, wallow in demons, and I thought to myself, that's really good advice. And I've always reminded myself when I tend to skip over conflict. I tend to do that in my life, and I tend to do that in my writing and drafts, and I always have to remind myself, stop and wallow in demons. Face them for a minute.
Sabrina Beaton So, how were your books received by publishers and booksellers?
Uma Krishnaswami In general, over the years, the reviews have been positive. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to that. I try not to. Sometimes one will come across and hit you over the head. I do remember an early negative review that started, “Newcomer, Krishnaswami,” and it kind of went downhill from there. And I was so crushed. But what I have learned over the years is that I can't afford to spend my energy worrying about how people are going to receive what I write. I just have to write the best book that I can. And I must say that rewards come in unexpected ways. A novel I wrote 20 years ago Naming Maya, was just given the Phoenix award by the Children's Literature Association. So, you know, 20-year-old book. Whoever expected that anyone would pay attention to it anymore. And yet here we are. So, I tell myself that I’m writing for the long haul. I really don’t care what the reviewers say now, or what anybody says now. I care about what children reading the book think, and I care about getting the best story I can on the page.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, I think the mark of a classic is that it lasts. It may not be successful right away, or as successful as you'd like it to be, but down the road people realize the value of it. How do you start writing a story? Do you have a specific goal in mind? What does that look like?
Uma Krishnaswami It depends. Sometimes an idea will just kind of land, and I'm always very suspicious about new ideas. I think I think if you put ten people in a room, you can come up with 50 good ideas. They won't all go anywhere. Sometimes the test of a story is not how dazzled you are by the idea of it, but by how much you can bear to live with that idea of over an extended period of time. You know. And does it drive you enough, or does it have enough substance? I mean, with picturebook ideas, something might seem really interesting or engaging, but then, when you start to work it out through the page, it kind of falls apart. So, it really, it really varies a lot. Sometimes it'll be a character that will show up, and I'll you know, Book Uncle and Me started with a character. I was actually in India visiting my parents, who lived in a city very much like the one in the book, and I was walking down the road. I had gone to a shop or something, and there was this kid on the sidewalk. She was sitting on this broken-down sidewalk, the bricks were all popping up, and she was sitting in the middle with a book on her lap and reading. Just completely oblivious to the people walking by her: the people in the street, the buses going by, I mean, she was just engrossed in her book, and I thought, Oh, there’s a story there. I wonder what it is? And there was an election going on at the time. There were all these pendants hanging across the street, with the signs, symbols for all the political parties and people driving by and in vans, with loudspeakers blaring out agendas and the names of the candidates and whatnot. And I thought, Whoa! How can I put those two things together? Is that possible? So, it started out as a lark, just trying to see, you know, can I do this? Can I take this idea and put it with that idea and make something happen. And then this character arrived, and she was amazing. She just kind of took over the book. Then her friends came in. And now we have three books with one from each of the points of view of the of each of the friends.
Sabrina Beaton Oh, I love that. What kinds of stories are best told through picturebooks, as opposed to chapter books?
Uma Krishnaswami I think it has to be a story that doesn't raise more questions than it can answer in the small container of 32 pages, maybe maximum 40 pages. So, you've got a very small container to work with. It doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a simple story. Picturebooks can have incredibly complicated layers, but it does have to be a story that can be told in relatively few words, a story that leaves room for art, that has, and we talked about setting, a story where the setting of each spread needs to vary sufficiently to provide some visual interest. Right? So if everything happens in a single room, you, there has to be a way to visually vary the pace, so the illustrator isn't constantly having to deal with the same set of images, because that's really not possible. That's not going to create a story that moves. So, I think there's a lot there. With a picturebook you are really almost writing half a book. You need to leave room for images. So, if I over-describe, or if I'm too conscious of what something should look like, then that's not going to give an artist enough room to work their magic. So, I think those are the kinds of things that I think about, when I'm when I'm thinking about whether something is a picture book or not. Now. I will tell you that I'm a terrible judge of this, and there are many, many times when I have thought something is a picture book and it hasn't. It's turned out not to be so. At one point I was thinking of Book Uncle as a picturebook, but it was too complicated, and there were too many characters and too much happened. I had thought about a book that I wrote that was set in California, Step up to the Plate, Maria Singh, the girl who wants to be on a softball team, and that was also it was not a picturebook. I mean. It started out as one little scene within that family, and it felt kind of not – it felt like it was bursting out of the out of its boundaries. It couldn't stay in that one scene it had to be, it had to be longer and bigger, more context.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't really thought about the pictures need space to move. So, you need to provide that opportunity with the text.
Uma Krishnaswami Yeah.
Sabrina Beaton Most of your picture books are illustrated by different artists. How do you discover and collaborate with the illustrators?
Uma Krishnaswami No, you don't. For the most part what happens is, you submit the manuscript to a publisher, and now I have an agent who does my submissions, and then, if it's accepted, then the publisher will contract separately with an illustrator. So, the processes are really completely separate. I get to see roughs most often of the artwork in progress, and I can give feedback on that, but I can't really dictate how it should look. I'm not an art critic or a good enough judge of that to, but what I can do is point out where there are discrepancies where, if the artist is showing something that my text explicitly doesn't mean to show. Then I can point that out, or if there are cultural inconsistencies, then I can point that out. I can offer resources to an artist to say, Look, here's the image in a place like that place. Here’s some photographs. Maybe this will help. But I don’t ever talk directly to the illustrator. That always goes through the editor and art director, and people like that.
Sabrina Beaton Interesting. You do have one illustrator who shares your name. Did you reach out to her?
Uma Krishnaswami Yes, I talked to her. But here, so, I didn't even know this was a possibility, right? What are the odds? But I got an email from somebody in France who said he liked my work, and this is always lovely to hear, but then he listed some books that he'd read, and I hadn't written all of them. This was back in, way back in, I want to say early, 2000s, maybe, and it was, it was quite a surprise. But the Internet had arrived by then, so I was able to look her up and look up the books and I found her publisher was in India. And so next time I went there, I went and visited with the publisher, and then I actually met Uma. So, that was before they picked her to do the illustration for my Out of the Way! Out of the Way! But we had a funny moment, because I think it was Cricket Magazine that published, maybe? Yeah. One of the Cricket Magazine group publications picked up a poem I'd written, and they asked her to do the illustration, but they didn't tell me she was going to do it. So that was a really nice surprise. That, I think, was the first thing we did together before the book.
Sabrina Beaton That's fun! Wow!
Uma Krishnaswami I know, isn’t it? She spells it differently, like one letter, her last name end with a -y and mine with an -i. A lot of times people will ask me about illustration. I'm like, no, no, no! I don't do artwork. You don't want me to do artwork. I can't draw.
Sabrina Beaton Aw, that’s so fun! Are picture books only for children?
Uma Krishnaswami I don't think so. I don't think so. I think that picture books are works of art. They are so much more than just the text that I dream up. They're about the artwork. They're about design. They're about how the whole thing fits together, and the story itself sometimes will come together in some other space like between the images and the words. The story really happens when there's an adult reading a picturebook to a child. So, I think very much picturebooks are also for grownups. For people of all ages.
Sabrina Beaton How important is activism in children's literature?
Uma Krishnaswami I think children’s literature is fearless in very many ways. I think, that there has always been a strain of activism in children’s books. They very often push the boundaries. This has been true for years and years, whether they push literary boundaries or boundaries of what is acceptable within the norms of a children’s book, or they’re more explicitly dealing with issues in the world. They are empowering the child character. And this is certainly, I don’t think this was always true in children’s literature, but it has certainly been true for many decades now, that you put the child, that we put the child at the center of a story. And so then, by definition, we're giving the child agency and then, of course, when children encounter injustice or something goes wrong, then the child is taking action. So that in itself is telling children, there are things you can do in the world. Whatever your reasons for wanting to do them. So, I think there's that. But you know, that said, I'm under no illusions that childen’s books can't be used for other purposes as well, and certainly a book is a book, and the writer brings their life and experience and thinking to it. But in general, children's books are a space where children can feel empowered and thereby empowered to take action.
Sabrina Beaton How does one use activism in a children's book while still respecting a child's ability to think through issues on their own? So, instead of pushing them to act a certain way.
Uma Krishnaswami I think that goes to, just not being didactic. I think there's a sense, I mean, children's books have a have a long didactic history, right? I mean, in fact, they started with incredible didacticism, and this notion of shaping the child into a moral character. We have in in our time, thankfully, gotten away from that. But I think that the stories that last are the stories that don't beat readers over the head with their message. And so, by definition, then they are stories that perhaps didn't start with that message. I know for myself that if I start thinking, well, I'm gonna sit down and write a book about, you know, water or water scarcity, say, or any – pick a social issue that that I feel strongly about. I'm gonna write a book about that. Then, my feelings about that are going to get in the way of developing a character, letting that character grow. Stepping back a little bit because a book is not an item of propaganda, and it shouldn't come across like that. You know. I think my picture book Out of the Way! Out of the Way! was an example of where I actually tried to. I submitted it to a number of publishers, and they rejected it in early stages, and a lot of what they were saying at the time was, There isn't enough happening there, and the child is sort of on the fringes of the story. He's just a witness, he should take action, and so I tried to make him take action. I put him at the center of the scene. I gave the kid a name. Pretty soon people turned up to cut down the tree, and then I was stuck. I'd written myself into a corner, and it was starting to read like a leaflet or a manifesto. And that's not what I was after. So then I sent it to a publisher in India who said to me, You’ve got a tree. You've got a road. Why does it have to be either or? Why can't it be both? And that's when it occurred to me, Okay, wait a minute. You know that boy who stood on the fringes. He needs to stand on the fringes. But what if he took just one action, and then that then led to this cascading series of events, and that changed not only him, but the entire community and the road and the tree, and everybody changed, and they could all manage somehow. So, I think it worked for me to step back from, Well, I have to do this, I have to manipulate this character in this way, and instead, just let the story unfold. I had to take my finger off that and really visualize it differently.
Sabrina Beaton Was that hard to do?
Uma Krishnaswami It was. It was a learning experience for me. I mean, it really taught me a lot about how not to force a plot, and to just let it let it unfold. Let it, let me think, you know, what feeling do I need to give to a story, and follow that rather than follow a sort of a more cerebral logical way of thinking, because the story has to build its own logic, and that doesn't always happen when you're forcing it.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah. And I mean, I think that book is so powerful because it shows this one action that the boy takes and like you said, it shows the cascading effect of that on future generations, much more than if it was this intense climax.
Uma Krishnaswami Yeah, very dramatic, and I mean it was all, I was listening to the feedback, but I wasn't really understanding the feedback, I think what they were saying was, not you have to do this. But what they were asking was, What is the story really about? Like, what's the big thing at its heart?
Sabrina Beaton Right. Have you ever made changes to the content in your book to be more appropriate for your readers? Have you ever felt the need to do that?
Uma Krishnaswami Occasionally. I've mostly done that myself where something has, and mostly I've done it in the context of, how critical to the story is it, that I say this? If I pull back a little bit, is it really going to change anything else? And if it isn't, then it's gratuitous. It felt maybe important to me. There was, I think, Naming Maya had somebody swearing in one scene, and then, when I read it later, it felt as if that wasn't really necessary, and it might trip up a reader when perhaps that was not important to the story. But if it had been important, and I had felt committed to keeping it, I would have absolutely fought for it.
Sabrina Beaton In the US in the last two years, book banning has doubled. Since 2020, political groups have organized to systematically ban certain children's books in the United States, and statistics show that that's happening in Canada as well. In light of rising censorship and systematic attempts to challenge and ban diverse books, how does this growing hostility affect you as a writer?
Uma Krishnaswami It's just tragic. It's tragic because it's part of a bigger picture of wanting to take control over what people think. And I think that they’re wanting to rewrite history, I think in some ways, wanting to kind of go back to an era where things were seen, perhaps by some people, as having been simpler and better, and that was not necessarily true. Of resistance against stories coming into the light in recent times. I think it’s very dangerous.
Sabrina Beaton Could you explain what you mean by “rewrite history”?
Uma Krishnaswami Yeah, I mean, I think part of what's been so amazing over the last, I would say maybe a decade or two in publishing, definitely a decade, is the emergence of histories that really never saw the light of day before. Right? I mean my novel about Mexican Punjabi Community in Central California in the 1940s, that is not a story that very many people knew at all and that it was published and published as a children's book, I think, was remarkable in 2017. But I also think about the many, many layers of black history emerging into the light of day, stories that had to do with, you know, just everything, from reconstruction to emancipation, to reconstruction to the Civil Rights era, many views of the Civil Rights movement, many takes on the layers of meaning in all the events of that time, and I think there's now sadly a pushback to the notion that anything bad at all happened in American history, or that a nation really ought to come to terms with its past, and that it's not a zero-sum game.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah. Have you personally, have you felt any of your books being challenged, or have you felt the need to censor yourself at all in your writing?
Uma Krishnaswami I don’t feel the need to censor myself at all, and I certainly will not. Years and years ago, this was before book banning became the hot topic that it is these days, there was a challenge to one of my books. It was The Broken Tusk and it was in, I forget even the state where it was. It might have been New Hampshire, or it was one of those states up out east and it was a school system wanting to take it off their shelves because they felt as if it was elevating a non-Christian faith. Yeah, so that was that was alarming. It was alarming back in the late nineties, and it remains alarming today. But there wasn't at that time, you know, my publisher sent me a note, and she said you might be interested to see what's happened. There's been a challenge. I don't know what's going to happen. And then that's it. So, it sort of got lost. We never followed up on it, so I never knew what happened with the book, whether it was taken off. There just there wasn't the movement then, there wasn't no social media, there was no way to connect to people my publisher was concerned, and so was I don't know what happened. I assumed in the end that they must not have removed the book, because I would think I would have found out, had that happened. But it was interesting. That's the only one of my books that has ever been openly noted in any such interaction.
Sabrina Beaton So, you’ve talked about how multicultural children’s books are becoming more mainstream. There's a lot more of them now than there was when you started writing. What do you think the future looks like at this point, now that they're facing this growing hostility towards diverse literature?
Uma Krishnaswami Yeah, it's very alarming. For some time I thought, Okay, you know what we've had this fight. Why do we have to keep having this conversation over and over again? Like, why are we back in this mode, when so many of us, like, I spent my entire writing life trying to make the point that a story with a viewpoint that is different from the normative white viewpoint we've had all these years, that story does not disrupt anything. It simply adds to a conversation. Obviously, now, we seem unable to have that conversation. But I mean, I think this is part of a much, much larger fragmentation that's going on in the United States, and it just scares me. It really, really is terrifying to me. And it's not just the United States. It's creeping into every other place. India is torn apart. I think when you have a majority of people who somehow begin to cast themselves as victims, you've got a problem.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, I agree. Are there book bans or challenges in India as well right now?
Uma Krishnaswami Oh, my God, yeah. Oh, all the time, all the time. Movies! It’s just, yeah. There’s not even, I don’t think there’s really a free press anymore. Journalists are threatened all the time there, journalists have been killed. We’ve been heading that way for a long time. I think it's another issue of, you know, not wanting to face up to history. Not wanting to look at the past and think about how one can move on from it.
Sabrina Beaton What do you think people are afraid of?
Uma Krishnaswami I think we're all in our corners right now. Everybody's afraid of, we're disinclined to talk to people who disagree with us. And I mean truth be told, some of the people, their extremism has been given a place. So, when you, when you are starting to say, and this is certainly happening in the US, where you start to, say, you cast doubt on the process that allows you to go into government. Then what's left? Right? And when you when you place people in the system who are then willing to embrace falsehoods, then you've got a real problem. And then book banning just becomes part of an assault on anybody who thinks differently. Book banning becomes a part of assault on women's rights, on women's autonomy over their bodies; it just becomes part of this whole other thing that’s going on. And I think part of the problem is that over the years we didn’t see that bigger picture. Now, here we are. We're in the middle of it. And now what do we do?
Sabrina Beaton Yeah.
Uma Krishnaswami I've always said children's books are, writing children's books is a political act. Writing anything is a political act. We are all part of systems. We live within those systems. And so, whatever we say to kids is also part of that. We should just be aware of it.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, for sure. I agree. Does the political climate impact the things you write about? So, you talked about not being overtly activist with your stories, but are the things that are going on now, inspiring certain stories in your mind.
Uma Krishnaswami Very much so, very much so. I think writers reflect the spaces they live in. And so, I've got a follow up to Monsoon that has just been accepted and it will be about climate change and its impact on mangoes. So, the story will be about a child whose family grow mangoes. And the kids are worried about the tree because there's been, you know, shifts in the weather, unseasonal rain and then cold when it shouldn’t be, sudden heat and dry when it shouldn’t be. And what’s that going to do to the tree and to the mangoes? So, yeah. How can it not, right? I mean, the sequel to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! is a picturebook called Look! Look!, and it is also about water, and it’s in many ways a sort of mirror image to Out of the Way! Out of the Way! It talks about a girl finding rocks in a field and then digging down, and they uncover a historic construction, and then they clean it up, and then the rain falls. And so, it is also very much of the time. And it you can't not do that. You have to respond to what you see happening around you. I have a dystopian, I think it will be, I don't know what it's gonna be, middle grade, YA, something. And it is a dystopian verse novel, and it's kind of struggling to express itself, and I think there will be some things happening there, that it will be post a major climate crisis in a near, not-so-far future, with kids who are picking up the pieces and living in the ruins of buildings like perhaps the Library of Congress, so we'll see where that goes.
Sabrina Beaton How do you walk the line between hope and fear?
Uma Krishnaswami Oh, God! Well, I kind of bounce from one to the other. You have to, right? I mean, there are days when I think this is all, it's just all going downhill. There's no hope for anything. Why am I even bothering? But then there are days when I think well, there are children in the world, and what is to happen to them? You can't stop. You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other because there are kids, and they didn't create this. So, how can you not.
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, exactly. How much negative or fearful content are you comfortable putting in a book for children, without it being overboard?
Uma Krishnaswami Yeah. Well, you don't know until you start writing. You know my work so far has been for younger children and I have not gone towards overly scary. I tend to not write, you know, horror. It's not me. But I think I would feel interested, I’d be very interested to see what a fantasy story would turn out to be in my hands. I mean, that’s something I’m really curious about, and I’d like to play with. And then I think I might go to some scarier places with that. I think that this dystopian one certainly is heading there.
Sabrina Beaton You’ve mentioned in another interview that if you had to pick one book of yours that you would fight to keep in print, you would chose The Broken Tusk?
Uma Krishnaswami Ah, right. Sabrina Beaton I’m wondering, if you— Uma Krishnaswami [Laughs] That might have changed since then. Can I pick two books?
Sabrina Beaton Yeah, yeah! Well, I'm wondering specifically which picturebook of yours you would fight to keep in print.
Uma Krishnaswami Ahh. I think, Out of the Way. Maybe. It just feels like a very complete story for me. And it was also, I think, you know, I think I leaned for years towards thinking. Oh, The Broken Tusk was like my formative book. That was the book that taught me how to write. Well, I think in a real way Out of the Way taught me about writing a picturebook my way. Taught me to say I can, I can look past, I can ignore, I can override concerns about quietness and lack of plot, and I can do this the way I want to, and it will still be okay. So, it shaped me as a writer.
Sabrina Beaton What main message does it offer to readers?
Uma Krishnaswami I think that you can push through. You can survive. And to me, that's a very important message. It's even more important today than it was in 2012 when that book came out.
Files
