"Writing Multicultural Books For All Ages" with Pegi Deitz Shea

Mel: is Mel Boring, moderator of this chat with Pegi Deitz Shea, and editor of the ICL Web Site.

Pegi: is Pegi Deitz Shea, an instructor for the Institute of Children’s Literature, whose extra-speciality is writing multicultural books for children. Pegi is the winner of many awards, and now has three new books out: her first novel, Tangled Threads, and the picture books, Ten Mice For Tet and The Carpet Boy’s Gift. Pegi Deitz Shea also writes for adults, and has published some 250 poems, essays and articles, ranging from a report about an American producer of Turkish game shows to a satire op-ed piece, "Give Kindergartners the Vote." Pegi is the author of The Whispering Cloth, published by Boyds Mills Press in 1995, which was selected as a Notable Book by the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Council for the Social Studies. Pegi’s first book was Bungalow Fungalow, from Clarion in 1991. Boyds Mills Press published her New Moon in 1996.

Mel: When we had the chance to have Pegi Deitz Shea for a chat here, I jumped at it. Pegi is an ICL Instructor that some of you may be working with in an ICL Course. She is also a multi-published author, from picture books to novels to adult publications. More than any of those roles, however, Pegi Deitz Shea is simply a very warm and approachable person, one who knows the writing craft well, and is well able to pass on lessons about writing for children that she has learned. Through her appearing in our chat room, I have gotten to know Pegi, and count her as a great new friend. Pegi, WELCOME to the chat room, friend!

Pegi: Hello everybody! This is my first time in a chat room at all, and they've thrown me in the front of it! But it's great to be here to promote my new movie with Ben Affleck--they've called us "Benapeg." I'd love to hear how you have bought 1000 copies of all my books. J

Mel: Pegi, you are such a PROLIFIC writer, I imagine you've been writing all of your life since girlhood--have you?

Pegi: Yes, I have been writing since I could--graffiti on the living room wall (unfortunately, my daughter has taken after me). When I was 8, a crazy aunt read my palm and predicted I would be a writer. I said, "I DO like to write," and she said, "Yes, I see, we've had a writer in every generation and you are it!" I ran to my mom and told her what that blue-haired lady had said, and my mom said she was loony, don't pay any attention to her! So much for family support. Actually, they've supported me very well. My parents always kept my homemade greeting card poems on the mantle longer than my brothers' "roses are red" cards.

Mel: So, your parents were not writers?

Pegi: No, my parents were not writers, but they were big readers. My mom was a legal secretary and my dad was a high school history teacher. I got my historic interest from him, I suppose.

Mel: How did you survive childhood, Pegi, with four brothers and no sisters?

Pegi: I grew up very tough. I beat girls up until I was 13! I even wrote "Confessions of a Girl Bully," and not one magazine has accepted it over the past seven years. Another good thing about brothers is that they get their emotions out right away, get it over with, then move on. That's what I do, but most of the girls I know don't do that. Someone tell me I'm wrong! I want to meet that person!

Mel: I would LOVE to read that "Confessions of a Girl Bully!"

Pegi: Hiya, Chris! You're very welcome! I hope you're still writing and sending stuff to editors. I've gotten more than 300 rejections in my 14-year career in kidlit. So don't get down or ever give up!

Mel: Pegi, were there influences on you in your childhood that led to your writing MULTICULTURAL books?

Pegi: Yes, I think so. My dad, a Korean War vet, followed the news religiously--in the days before CNN, that is--and I was a very impressionable eight years old in 1968, a very tumultuous year for our country. I was always interested in people on the other side of the world. Also, in a military family, I was the only pacifist, too.

Pegi: My contacts in my writers group led to my first published book. One of the members, a published illustrator, told the group that Dorothy Briley and Dinah Stevenson had just left Lothrop Lee for Clarion Books. Of course, editors can't bring their prized authors and illustrators with them, so my friend said Dorothy and Dinah were wide open now. I submitted, and got a call magically three months later. Listen, it never happens that easily. But keeping on top of editor movements really helps. My first book was Bungalow Fungalow, edited by Dinah Stevenson. She rejected my next 20 or so manuscripts, but she is the editor of my first novel, Tangled Threads. By the way, she rejected that three times before accepting it!

Mel: For WHAT reason could ANY editor ever reject 20 manuscripts, after accepting the first one?

Pegi: I was very young and inexperienced in writing children's books. I'd only written one or two manuscripts before that. Some of the manuscripts I subsequently submitted to Dinah were HORRIBLE! Then, a few others she rejected ended up getting published at another house. So some rejections simply have to do with the editor's taste or the direction the publisher wants to go in. That's happened to quite a few of my stories. One manuscript, which turned out to be a book titled I See Me, was rejected at one house by an editor, but when she moved to a new house, she accepted it years later. She didn't even remember that she'd seen it six years earlier. So never give up on manuscripts you really love and that are worthy of publication in the most professional way.

Pegi: I think editors would prefer authors and/or illustrators of that particular ethnicity to come through with a great book. That's certainly the case at Lee & Low. But many editors have a good nose for authenticity and breadth/depth of research and involvement of, say me, a white woman educated about the Hmong. In some of my books, The Whispering Cloth, Ten Mice For Tet, I came to the publisher with authentic ethnic illustrators. That certainly helped.

Mel: People are intrigued by that title, Bungalow Fungalow, Pegi. What does it mean?

Pegi: It’s a beach book, Dr. Seuss inspired me with his play and power with words. A funny word like "bungalow" would certainly inspire a kid to play with those sounds.

Mel: You seem to be publishing all over the spectrum. You write nonfiction and poetry for adults; fiction, nonfiction and poetry for all ages of children. Which came first? Do you have a favorite age group or genre?

Pegi: I began writing poetry as a child--wrote almost every cheer our squads ever used--I cheered for 12 years, maybe that's why I can weather rejection so well! I always did well in school papers, but kept my focus on poetry throughout college and my early professional life. I wrote public relations and adveritising in New York for several years and had my own public relations company for ten. That really helped me market myself, and to try innovative ways to get published. I didn't start writing for kids until 1988 or 89 or so, when I fell into a writers group where we moved to in Connecticut.

An example of how my marketing background helped me is when a few years ago--1999 or 2000, I planned on attending the first NY-SCBWI conference. I faxed ten editors in New York, most of whom I had never met but had received nice rejections from. I said, "I'm coming into the city. Can I buy you breakfast, lunch, tea, a drink, or dinner. And could you please look at the ‘menu’ of stories I have available (a one-page sheet of about fifteen projects) and let me know if you would like to see any of them?" Well, I heard from nine of the ten with requests for manuscripts. I got appointments to meet five of them (and no one made me pay for anything), and the other few got back to me with requests, even though I didn't get to see them. So that is the kind of brazen hussy I became between my four brothers and my public relations/advertising experience. P.S.: In the following year, I got five manuscripts accepted!

Mel: Have your daughter and family been encouraging to your writing? Given you ideas?

Pegi: My daughter and son give me lots of ideas just by being themselves. In particular, Deirdre inspired my books New Moon and I See Me. I've written some for Tommy, but they didn't get accepted yet.

Pegi: A first rejection? Congratulations, you are now a professional writer! Good for you, sending it right back out.

Pegi: Friends and family are very beloved people. Are any of these people professionals in the publishing business? As long as you've done your homework--research, perhaps some travel--you have all the right in the world to write about the world. Hey, Shakespeare wasn't a girl, but he did girl roles pretty well, huh?

Pegi: Inspiration is everywhere! Funny scenes on a playground, a compelling story about a child in the newspaper, funny twists of language you read or hear. Multicultural stories often come to me via newspapers. I read three a day. That's how I learned about Iqbal Masih and the child slavery in the Pakistani rug industry.

My book on that is called The Carpet Boy’s Gift. It was just named a Notable Book by the National Council of Social Studies. To touch on the ethnic question we discussed before, I don't think there are many Pakistani writers who want to write a children's book about that. I wanted to, so I did the research over five years and got it right.

Pegi: Good question! All of the above, I believe. For instance, my picture book, The Whispering Cloth, takes place in a refugee camp in Thailand, and the refugees are Hmong people. My new novel is about a Hmong teenager trying to assimilate in America. It's sad to say that Europeans aren't really considered multicultural enough. I think they've spent too much time in the "melting pot". My best advice is to set a story in a foreign country--just a simple, universal story. But steep the story in the culture. Avoid stories about American kids in other cultures, with a father who's a university English professor, I know that those stories are called "colonial." They take an American (or Western) attitude into another country.

Pegi: Good question about perseverance. Think of a professional baseball player, who gets paid millions to bat and field. An excellent batting average in the major baseball leagues is .333---one out of three times, the player gets a hit. Of course, I would love to have one out of three manuscripts get published. I ain't there yet, but you get my meaning. Why try again? Why not? Why continue to let other people define your success? Make your success happen. There are a lot of new opportunities on-line for publishing, and for self-publishing too. These work best with nonfiction topics that have audiences which are clearly defined and reachable.

I was in a publishing rut a few years back, and I decided I had to do more to make my succcess happen. I signed up to chair an SCBWI conference, and got the opportunity to correspond and get to know editors when I had a different "hat" on. I also tried new age groups, and tried new genres like nonfiction--biography and history. Ways to make your success happen are #1.

Pegi: Could you be more specific? Have you written a manuscript in a different language? I don't have much experience with translation, except for The Whispering Cloth. I hired a well-educated Hmong man to translate that in a script form. It's not a book, it's a kind of read-along in Hmong version.

Pegi: My research methods have happily improved in recent years with the Internet. I DON'T use the Internet for reputable sources, however. I use the Net for leads to scholarly articles I can read in full. I use the Net to find organizations that have further resources. Very good resources in most libraries include the New York Times abstracts, various specific encyclopedias, and compendiums. Books and the printed word--in hand, not just on a screen from some unseen source--remain the best sources for research. Of course, nothing beats primary research such as interviews. But there, too, you need to balance that person's opinion and experience with an opposite one or a different point of view. I am facing that right now in my novel–in the works--about a Liberian boy soldier adopted by a doctor who had helped in Liberia. I'd befriended a family of refugees fromLiberia, but I also knew that the family were of the most highly educated class there. So I dug deeper to find opinions from more tribal-related peoples, people who were discriminated against. There are always more sides to a story than the one right in front of your nose, and it actually is those other sides of the story that can help you create multi-dimensional characters.

Pegi: Poetry for children does not always have to have a standard rhyme scheme and rhythm. However, poetry for children--and for adults--must have rhythm and rhyme and there are many ways to do that, such as internal rhyme, near rhyme, and assonance. I think narrative poetry is being explored in children's literature. Look at Karen Hesse's beautiful novels. Shoot, there's a great basketball book of narrative poems that culminates in a championship game--I can’t think of the title, but it might be by Walter Dean Myers. I've had children's poetry published in many forms. My first book, Bungalow Fungalow, is a narrative made up of narrative poems. There's a beginning, middle and end, there's a story. New Moon is one narrative poem with lots of internal rhyme, and I See Me is a rhyming verse.

The thing about verse is that if you're going to do it, be meticulous. The reader should not have to do any work to make a line or couplet of poetry sound right. I wrote an article about poetry in the Institute's yearbook a few years ago, and said editors insist it has to be perfect or don't do it. Right now I'm completing a collection of YA poems about teen jobs. Some poems are rhymed, most are not, but they still are full of poetic elements. The goal is to delight and surprise the reader with imagery and sound they can't get anywhere else. Oh, let me recommend some writers who are excellent poets, some in rhyme, some not--Joyce Sidman, Joan Horton, Bill Grossman. Of course, Shel Silverstein and Valerie Worth are my heros, R.I.P.

Mel: You're more than right about that, Pegi, and that's why Seuss and Silverstein were so successful. They both had rhymes that readers didn't have to "finish."

Pegi: Dinah Stevenson rejected my novel three times--two being with thoughtful, copious suggestions. The third was just "I don't know anymore, I don't know what would make it work at this point." That was a hard letter to take. However, I did keep working on the novel, using other editors' feedback, too. Then finally, I tried something. I switched the narration from third person to first person. Most of the feedback virtually said the novel sounded like a regurgitation of all the research I’d done on the Hmong. The novel, editors said, didn't seem about one girl's story.

On the other hand, it's ironic that I first wrote The Whispering Cloth in first person, but it seemed too cumbersome to burden a seven-year-old girl with the Hmong predicament. However, I changed it to third person and it worked! Narration could handle the burden of information. But in the case of Tangled Threads, it was just the opposite. Readers needed to HEAR Mai, to hear so many thoughts she could not put into English words, or even in Hmong words sometimes, such as her feelings toward her cousins and her grandmother. Dinah Stevenson is a fabulous, excruciatingly precise, editor, and I hope all of you have the chance to work with her--with Clarion in general. Clarion really cares about literature, which brings me to an important point.

There are so many funny and delightful books out there for entertaining kids and, yes, if kids are picking up a book instead of flipping TV channels, they will get a positive response. I have tried to write simply entertaining stories, and nobody wants them! Sometimes I feel pigeon-holed with this "serious" subject matter I tackle. I definitely want to publish my serious books, because I feel they're necessary to balance a lot of the stuff kids get fed. But I do write funny things, I do , I do! Somebody out there tell me I'm funny, okay?

Mel: You're FUNNY, Pegi! J

Pegi: The question is what interests me about writing. I can create. anything! My daughter has really blossomed in drama--musicals, to be exact. And to watch her on stage reminds me of how I feel when I'm writing. We're creating, we're giving to the world.

Pegi: My favorite genre would have to be historical fiction. It's a real challenge, from the research through the writing and editing. Writing poetry is probably second place. It's more fun. You can be whimsical, brutal, teasing, and my poems don't run that long. I've always been a sprinter, packing energy into the smallest vessel. That's why I like picture books--Big Bang for your buck!

Pegi: Oh, I have so many. In college, in my Romantic Period class, we read Samuel Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." Now that sounds pretty depressing, right? Well, it's really a poem about breaking out of writers' block. I don't want to give the whole thing away, but suffice it to say that it led to my writing New Moon, and was a

reason why my book was a narrative poem, because his was. Plus, Coleridge alluded to a poem another hundred years old, "The Ballad of Sir Patrik Spens."

I kept those two poems in my head for 12 years, vowing to use them somehow. Then Deirdre's fascination with the moon at 18 months of age finally gave me the fire to write my book. What a long journey for a 600-word manuscript, huh? You never know what will inspire you, so you must keep open to the world.

Pegi: Can you give me more information about your Thai student story? Such as, does the story take place in Thailand? Here in America? How old is the student?

Multicultural or not, stories that please editors have a very strong main character that the reader can completely mind-meld with (thanx, Spock!). If your setting is foreign but your character and theme aren't compelling, no editor will accept it just because it involves someone of a different culture. In terms of marketing savvy, Charlesbridge publishes nonfiction picture books primarily, though they may have a fictitious feel; Lee & Low is the strictest about using authors and illustrators of color or ethnic background. Believe me, I've tried a few of my pieces there, and Irish/German just doesn't cut it.

Pegi: I have a few nonfiction projects circulating which have my own photography proposed as illustration. If you are not the photographer, a photo or two may help the editor visualize the project. I'm sending photos of the colonial homes and interiors of two patriots I'm pitching for biography picture books right now. Yes, I do feel that sometimes some casual visual images can help. Hmmmmm, interiors of two patriots--disclaimer--I am not a CSI!

Pegi: Hmmm, transcended...I think every book, multicultural or not, should succeed across the world. It so happens, however, that American children's literature is largely about American lifestyle. I have a few truly American manuscripts. In fact, I haven't been able to sell any of them! What does that imply?

Pegi: I think a story set in a school for the disabled would be fascinating. Readers would be curious to see what it is like, but also interested in the matters that pertained to any kid their age, disabled or not. So the theme of the story should be universal, but the particulars--the details and ambience--would be fresh to most

readers.

Pegi: I cannot overestimate the importance of a solid writing group. I have been in one since I was 18--a poetry one. There are many benefits of belonging to a thriving group. And it might take time to build or find the right group for you. Okay, benefit #1: Regular expectations and feedback. My group meets weekly on Wednesdays, and I get more writing done on Tuesday than any other day. It's like homework is due, and you don't want to displease the nun. The second benefit is marketing information. In our case, all of us are published, so we're in weekly contact with editors on what they're looking for, what's not working in the market. For instance, I know that Holt isn't big on poetry right now. Our members share contacts--members must--it's reciprocal. For every bit of info you share, you get back five- or ten-fold. A third benefit is the support. Writing is a difficult and solitary calling. You really need to share your rejections and joys with people who understand what you're going through. Spouses may not. Parents may not. But writers do. Fourth benefit is simply getting feedback from objective people whose opinion you trust.

Pegi: YESYESYES!!! did I make myself clear??? There's a fabulous poet, Monica Gunning. You must read her. Tomorrow, okay? There's also Jamaica Kinkaid, who writes for adults. You know, reading authors of different cultures who write for adults is an excellent way to immerse yourself in another culture. Salman Rushdie, Isabelle Alellende, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Naguib Mafouz (an Egyptian). Broaden your horizons, and contemplate that we have more in common with humankind around the world, than we do have disagreement.

Pegi: It can work both ways--story first, or culture. I have a writing workshop called "Fiction from Artifact." It uses artifacts from various exotic cultures to introduce people to that culture. Getting your eyes, better yet your hands, on a different culture is one of the best ways to understand it. So next time your museum is having a show from Ethiopia, GO!

Pegi: Get inside the family, and turn it inside-out. Family dynamics and details will differ. But readers will see flashes of themselves in this other culture. Create, first, a main character who they will love. Did you see the film "Bend It Like Beckham"? Now, I don't know enough about the Indian culture to say if it was totally accurate. But the family scenes were so compelling. That's because we identify with the girl soccer player--we're rooting for her--to transcend her family's expectations and to do what she desires most! That is what I meant earlier as a universal theme.

Pegi: It initially took me about six months to write my first serious draft of Carpet Boy. I did a lot of research, and I wrote several first drafts. I'll call my first draft, my "emotional draft." It's not only an outpouring of my passion into the book, it is my initial attempt to convey the main character's emotional journey through the book. Subsequent years are filled with thought-provoking rejections and revisions.

I feel especially proud of Carpet Boy. So many editors said it shouldn't be done for a picture book audience, but I persevered. Since children as young as four are enslaved, I believed children of those ages should know the plight of others their age.

Mel: Pegi, we've found out that you are expert not only at writing multicultural books for children, but at writing in many genres, and for adults as well as for children. Your expertise at our craft, plus your ease at answering questions, has

made the time FLY BY. I am eager, and I know our chatsters are as well, to have you return for another visit someday. Would you please return to our chat room in the future?

Pegi: I can't believe it's over! Are you sure you didn't slip me some laughing gas? Seriously, I would love to come back--I have two books in press, so there will be lots more to talk about. Just a last word--pursue your passion, writers, and make it happen. Don't wait around for it to happen. Get out there, go to conferences, meet the people who share your passion! G'Night!

MANY thanks to you again, Pegi Deitz Shea, for the warm and easy way you've shared with us the secrets of writing multicultural books for children. You've made us want to try our writing hand at it. Your own multicultural books will be an inspiration to us as we try. We will post the transcript of this chat tomorrow, and I believe it will be a MOST-visited chat transcript, thanks to your excellent chatting!

Mel: Goodnight, everyone!