TEDx The Benjamin School
complete transcript:
The other day I stumbled onto a Twitter feed of another writer, an author of books for young readers, as I am. And it sent me through a cycle of emotions— first angry, then sad, then worried, and finally afraid. For myself— but also for art and for artists* , and the power and freedom of creative expression.
She was describing her choice NOT to write, NOT to try and publish a book she cared passionately about, because she didn’t belong to the marginalized group depicted in her story.
To be honest I don’t remember what the story was — just that, within moments, numerous tweets chimed in with praise for her bravery. One using the phrase: It’s time to cede the floor.
Without question, marginalized voices, have not had the opportunities to write and publish their own stories in their own voices. As a result, their stories have often been littered with dangerous and pervasive stereotypes, their lives and histories misrepresented, or erased all together.
This IS a huge issue, one that we ALL need to work to change. So what was bothering me? I couldn’t figure it out until I began to look back to my own journey of becoming an artist.
I was published, after nine years of rejections, by Little, Brown. At the time I was writing stories based exclusively on my own life. And I felt like I was cheating, using myself as a main character, not having to stretch my imagination any further than my own memories.** Six years— and five books— later, I was still publishing, but secretly I didn’t believe I could call myself writer.
I told myself it was the proverbial journey of the artist—That an artist’s first work is always autobiographical. Except that my second, and my third, my fourth, my fifth, and my sixth novels were also pretty much autobiographical.
To be fair I did have a lot of material.
I was writing about my mother’s suicide when I was three and a half years old, and how it felt growing up without a mother’s love or protection.
About how, a few years later, I was left to live with my step mother and her boyfriend, how he occasionally punched and kicked me, and what it felt like to live in fear.
I wrote about being dumped back with my father at the start of middle school, angry, silenced and alone— how I was acting out— shoplifting smoking cigarettes, getting suspended, until my 6th grade language arts teacher read one of my stories out loud in class and declared it to be the best.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, but it was exactly what I needed to hear.
When I felt I had exorcised enough of those demons, I decided it was time to take a risk, to see if I could be a real writer, a real artist.
It was two thousand and seven and, if you remember at that time, autism was all over the news— causes and cures, being discussed and dissected.
I related to, or rather I rebelled against the idea, that what you were, or really what the world decided you were, was something to be labeled, something to be fixed. And so for my next project I chose a 12-year-old boy, diagnosed with high functioning autism, and I named him Jason Blake.
I plunged into research, fiction and non-fiction, I immersed myself in movies, internet searches, personal blogs, and interviews. I searched for the right voice, the right entry point into a perspective that on the surface seemed so different than mine. I’m not 12, I’m not a boy and I’ve never been diagnosed as being on the spectrum. But the more I wrote, the closer I got to my character. The more we became one.
I wasn’t trying to speak for autistic people or write a book about autism. I wasn’t trying to be a doctor, a teacher, policy maker, or social worker. I was writing about one boy, one fictional character, one possible human being who I had brought into existence, with the hope that his single, small story would speak to a larger universal truth: ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM.
That novel, ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL, won The American Library Association Schneider Family Book Award in 2010, an award given to books that embody “the artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.”
And I thought THEN, I might be a real writer, a real artist. I had finally written in a way that wasn’t me talking, in my own voice. I was finally doing what real artists do— looking at themselves and at the world around them, and maybe, reflecting something meaningful about humanity.
So jump ahead to 2013 and I am working on an new idea for a novel that will become Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story. I want to represent the ways in which 9/11 affected everyone, across the country — as it certainly did me— so I deliberately choose four characters, spanning from California to New York, rural to urban, black to white, boy to girl, Jewish to Muslim to Christian. I want to make them as different as I can so I can reveal how similar they actually are.
I am many things other than a Jewish, white, middle-aged female. But what I am not is a Muslim girl from an Iranian heritage with two physicians for parents. But during my research into Shi’a head-covering and hand-washing practices, I had the wonderful moment of realization that some Islamic and Jewish traditions are so similar I could enter Naheed’s life as seamlessly and as lovingly as I would set my own table for Passover.
I am not Aimee, the white, Jewish girl from California, with two married parents, and a close, loving, connected relationship with her mom. I am not Will, who comes, not only from a functional, loving family but lives in a tight knit, supportive community. Nothing I was familiar with growing up.
I am also not a twelve year old, African-American boy and yet, Sergio’s emotional truth, the way he walks the earth, his anger and distrust of authority, his experience with loss and abandonment, are all very real to me.
At the same time, I ALWAYS knew it was important to have my work vetted by those whose personal experiences more closely resembled the characters I was writing about. I had Anything But Typical read by an autistic artist in Canada.
I had Ruby on the Outside read by a group of kids from an organization that helps incarcerated women and their children.
And I had Nine, Ten read by an Iranian friend, Dr. Homa Sadeghian and her husband.
I did it because I cared about what I wrote and I wanted to ensure, or at least try as hard as I possibly could, that I wasn’t being tone-deaf. That I hadn’t inserted any mistakes. Of course, I still have work to do and large part of that work is knowing what I don’t know.
But now I ask myself: Would I be brave enough today, in this heated, angry, bifurcated, social media call-out culture*** to have written any of those books that were not concretely about my life? Would I be afraid to write a character that was not of my culture, not my background, not my particular disability? Not my religion, not my gender not my sexual preference?
The answer is…I don’t know.
What I do know is that bad writing, lazy writing should always be called out. Stories that propagate stereotypes that have flat, one-dimensional characters, stories that depict an inaccurate historical record, should be critiqued and reviewed as such****. And this IS especially important in stories written for children — the readers we consider most vulnerable and easily influenced– regardless of who writes them.
This is not to say that who gets to tell a story doesn’t matter— because it does. It matters, because when there are more authentic voices in print, the accepted narratives will begin to shift and repair. Having more diverse authors, —more diverse faces, behind those voices —will give young people NEW role models, ones of all shapes, colors, and walks of life.
Because after all, that may be THE most important part of this whole discussion. As Chad Everett, a literacy specialist told me, he wants his students to see themselves, not only between the pages, but on the back cover.
Publishers need to start buying more books from minority authors in order to engender this inclusivity. And if that comes at the expense of my work being published, then that’s how it needs to be. But the decision of what gets published and what does not, what is bought and what sells, never belonged to the writer.
That power belongs to the industry— to the publishers, to the editors, to the agents, to the sales and marketing departments. To the big chain booksellers. The gatekeepers. Money and economic factors dictates that market and it is going to take a UNITED effort to combat those much larger, deeply rooted, and complicated issues.
But when voices on the internet become so loud, so angry, and so vitriolic, that artists become afraid to experiment, to make mistakes, to be creative, to push boundaries, to do what writers do, to WRITE what they feel passionately about, then we should ALL be afraid.
Afraid of a world where writers are considered brave for NOT writing. And angry at a society where artists are berated and at times punished for trying to tell a story that speaks to them from a very deep place that few of us can define. And saddened by the message that there is a limited number of spaces at the table and the only way for one story to be told is for another to be silenced.
One of the most powerful and meaningful things I discovered when I wrote my book about a boy diagnosed with autism was completely unexpected. When I thought I had successfully created a character that wasn’t me, when I thought I had finally become an artist, I took a step back— and I saw how much of me is in Jason, how much of Jason is in me.
We both know what it feels like to be unseen and unheard. We have both dissociated when the world around us becomes too scary. We both struggle to fit into this world, even if we don’t really wants to. We are both human beings, and what I learned, so profoundly, writing this novel, is that we are ALL uniformly human in many uniquely human ways.
Of course, I can’t fully know what it is to be diagnosed autistic, or to be African American, or to be a white teenager from Shanksville, PA. I am still trying to figure out what it means to be me. But what I do know, and what I can write about, is a universal desire for identity and belonging, and I need to be free to use as many paint brushes as possible to try and create that picture, with the hope that one day, I can get closer to the truth. To a truth, in one particular moment in time.
Artists cannot cede the floor —because they do not STAND on a floor. They look at themselves and the world in which they live and they speak in many voices.
Writers stare out the window, they push open the door, they look up at a ceiling, poked so full of holes, you cannot tell where the earth ends and the sky begins.
And when it’s done well— when it’s honest and true—and done WITHOUT fear —
What we are forced to see is OURSELVES, and we may see something we like, or better yet, something we don’t.
Thank you.
*It has been publicly suggested -as click bait- that I was speaking for WHITE writers in this talk. Nothing could be further from the truth, I am speaking for the freedom of ALL writers, all artists. (Since I am the one who wrote the words I am the only one qualified to know the answer to this.) However it seems important to make clear that original impetus for this talk grew from the pain I felt when two of my good friends and colleagues, were cyber-bullied with violent, agressive, unrelenting memes, tweets, emails, blogs, and messages, BOTH of whom are “women of color.” The vitriol I reference, does not discriminate. And creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear.
** “. . .felt like I was cheating” is not the same as I WAS cheating. The take-away from this talk is that when I “thought” I was finally a “real” writer because I had written a character not based on me and my own experiences, I discovered, that in fact, I was writing simply another version of my own humanity. If it needs explaining: Irony is a tool writers often use to reveal nuanced meaning.
*** note the differentiation between the term calling-out when referring to literary critique which reveals or responds to misrepresentations in texts, and “social media call-out” as qualified in this talk as “heated, angry and bifurcated” – often aggressive, demeaning, mocking, sarcastic, incendiary, divisive,and gleeful. I am speaking to the latter.
****At no any point in this talk do I suggest, in any fashion, that “white writers don’t like criticism” which is why I make that point clearly, several times. Art and criticism belong hand in hand as a measure of aesthetic. BOTH must be held to the highest standard.