Showing posts with label Uma Krishnaswami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uma Krishnaswami. Show all posts
Friday, October 4, 2013
Monday, September 30, 2013
Diversity 101: Blurring the Lines Between Familiar and Foreign
Part II—A Focus on Dialogue
Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami
My Personal Connection
The books you read as a child are as real as the places you live in or the people around you. They whisper to you of the possibilities the world can offer, like mental pathways into your own as-yet-unlived future.
In that category, Rumer Godden gave me permission to write. Kipling both enchanted and troubled me; only many years later did I understand my own need to write about the country he depicted with his strange colonial mixture of tenderness and disdain. But as a child of the late 1950s growing up in India, I cut my reading teeth on Enid Blyton.
I learned a lot from Enid about humor, family, friendships, and the pleasure of racing along a swiftly unfolding plot. Now, thinking back, I am pretty sure that I also learned how not to write dialogue.
Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami
In that category, Rumer Godden gave me permission to write. Kipling both enchanted and troubled me; only many years later did I understand my own need to write about the country he depicted with his strange colonial mixture of tenderness and disdain. But as a child of the late 1950s growing up in India, I cut my reading teeth on Enid Blyton. I learned a lot from Enid about humor, family, friendships, and the pleasure of racing along a swiftly unfolding plot. Now, thinking back, I am pretty sure that I also learned how not to write dialogue.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Diversity 101: Blurring the Lines Between Familiar and Foreign
Part I—A Focus on Narrative
Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami
Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami
My Personal Connection
Back in
the last century, when I dreamed of writing for young readers, the conventional
wisdom about weaving foreign languages into fiction written in English went like
this:
Don’t.
The
stories I longed to write spanned continents. My characters often spoke in two
languages, sometimes with varying degrees of fluidity. My narratives demanded a
mixing of languages, reflecting the hybridity I was trying to show.
I plunged
in, wanting to find my own answers. I wrote a lot of bad stories that earned
the rejections they deserved. I kept asking myself, how can I represent this linguistic
and cultural material while being truthful to the stories I’m trying to tell?
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