Truth-tellers & Troublemakers: a Conversation about Publishing in Canada
Neesha and I met online in 2009. We were part of a vibrant community of feminist bloggers who reviewed books for young readers and advocated for greater diversity and equity in the US children’s publishing industry. We soon realized just how much we had in common: we had both migrated to the US from Canada, and we both opted to self-publish when our stories about Black and South Asian girls were rejected by White women editors. We weren’t afraid to rock the boat, and we accepted the price women of color often pay for daring to tell the truth. I reconnected with Neesha on a recent trip to Toronto and asked her to reflect on how rage fuels her writing and how self-publishing can be an act of resistance.
ZE: In 2011 we were on an indie authors panel at Toronto Women’s Bookstore with Vivek Shraya. You and I had come up from the US but now you’re back in Toronto. What has changed for you in the past decade, personally and professionally? In the era of #metoo, Trump, and We Need Diverse Books, where do we now stand as feminist writers of color?
NM: So much has changed for me in those years, both personally and professionally. I went through a divorce, lost my children’s childhood home, and lost a dear friend in New York. I stayed in the U.S. through all of these changes because I thought it was best for my girls to be near their father, and to be where they were born and, seemingly, rooted. But after the 2016 election, several court battles, and the loss of our home, I decided it was time to read the writing on the wall. I had no family in New York (my husband had been my only family there), I was working full-time and raising my girls full-time on my own, and I had no support, security, or social/financial networks. Within two months of the election, I packed everything I’d accumulated in 25 years into a truck heading for Toronto, and made the drive north on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2017.
I’m not under any illusions. Canada has the same extreme elements as the US, and those elements have been active forever. And right now, they are as emboldened as in the US. I moved back not to avoid what’s happening in the US, but because I wanted to be with my family if/when everything goes to shit.
I stopped writing when my marriage fell apart. I could not write a thing because my primary focus at that point was survival. I needed to find a job and make sure my girls and I did not end up homeless and in shelters. I ended up getting a high-responsibility leadership position at a college in the Bronx; a position that eventually led me to Chairperson of the English Department. I was so incredibly grateful for that job, that I did whatever was necessary to keep it and excel in it. That job saved me and my girls.
I did not start writing again until I was back in Canada, with my family around me, with court dates behind me, and less to worry about in terms of my children’s health, safety, and education. Back on Canadian soil, I was able to start moving my writing muscles again. But this time, it was different because I was different. The experiences I went through changed me on such a fundamental level that I actually feel like my DNA was rearranged. I was not the same person who wrote Shine, Coconut Moon (Simon & Schuster, 2009), or the same woman who wrote her first indie title, Jazz in Love (2011).
What Girls Know is an entirely different kind of book. It was fueled by a kind of rage that I really want to talk a bit more about with you, Zetta. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of essays and books about Women of Color and rage, and listening to podcasts specifically by Black women, around rage. I went through such a dark time (here, I mean dark as in the hermit walking through the night with a small flame to guide her steps) where my very survival, and the survival of my children was at stake, and it led me to this burning ember of rage. Not a destructive rage, but the kind of rage that burns everything down so something more sane, healthy, and true can be born. A rage that lights up the truth.
I started to see, with startling clarity, how desperate so many of us are to be seen. How desperate I was to be seen and validated and recognized. And how natural it is to want to be recognized for our value and worth. How, as BIPOC women, we are devalued from the moment of birth, how we fight to be seen and acknowledged at every turn from that first moment. How we are thrust and embedded into systems that were never designed for us, were never meant to exalt our gifts or contributions.
And yet, we go through our entire lives seeking some sort of validation or approval from these very systems. When I say “systems,” I’m referring to our families-of-origin in addition to our communities, schools, and social and economic structures.
That rage also showed me how, as women and girls, we are never taught to take financial ownership over our creative output and productivity. We are taught to give our gifts away for free. We are taught to share, feed others, care for others, offer free emotional labor, and smile and be sweet through it all. We are usually dissuaded from expressing or showing any kind of anger, and often punished for it — whether outright, or through being passed over for promotions, not getting publishing contracts, or being cast out of social networks and cliques. Women who speak the truth and express anger/outrage/rage are not welcome in circles of folks seeking social acceptance. Because social acceptance is usually confined to patriarchal dictates, and women who speak truth and challenge those dictates are not obediently acquiescing.
When I started making connections between what I experienced in my marriage, and what I was seeing in my career, I felt an ancient rage spiraling up through me, and that’s where What Girls Know came from. I knew I was going to write this story — the truth of my experience, without protecting my abusers or my community, as I’d been taught to do all my life. My silence was definitely not protecting me, and I had lots to share that could empower others who might be in a similar situation, or who may have had similar experiences. I also was not going to hand this precious book over to a corporate entity that would commodify it, set its release for 2–3 years from now, and ultimately value it far less than I do. The rage that led me to writing this story was the rage that led me to knowing my worth. And once I knew that worth, I was not about to hand it over. To anyone.
ZE: I definitely have projects that I wouldn’t entrust to a traditional publisher, yet it’s challenging to get indie titles into the hands of readers. In the US I’ve had to self-publish twenty of my thirty books for young readers, but I have no regrets about leaving the Great White North. Even with the limited success I’ve had in the US, I’ve never been able to get a book published in Canada. Last year my agent sent out two picture book stories I wrote about my uncle’s experience learning to play hockey as a Black boy in Toronto in the 1960s; considering the ongoing racism in Canada’s favorite sport, it seems like a timely narrative yet no editors expressed any interest. When I left Toronto at age 21, I couldn’t see a future for myself as a writer in Canada. My 2011 research showed that gatekeepers only allow 2–3 Black authors per year to publish books for young readers, and it’s hard to tell if any progress has been made since no one in Canada gathers and publishes data on racial disparities in publishing as they do in the US and UK.
I’ll be 50 soon and my recent trip to the GTA was the first time I felt recognized as a Canadian author; but my participation in the Festival of Literary Diversity and opportunities to speak to the media were secured by my White male publicist at Penguin Random House Canada. It was exciting but also frustrating to see how some authors have doors opened for them, while equally talented writers struggle in relative obscurity. I do think about what it might be like to return but wonder how I could earn a living when Canadian editors, reviewers, librarians, and educators don’t seem to value the stories I tell. How do you think your latest book will reach — and resonate with — Canadian readers?
NM: This is a tough question. I was not able to get my books published in Canada. I had interest from one small publisher, early on (an offer of a $500 advance), and I’d had smaller pieces published by feminist journals, but beyond that, getting published as a Woman of Color was next to impossible in the Canadian literary landscape.
But Canadian readers have always embraced me. It’s the story of my life — challenging power and aligning with the powerless. Some of my sweetest letters and emails have been from Canadian readers who’ve connected with my work. Since What Girls Know is part memoir, my experiences are deeply rooted in Canadian history and socio-economic policy. My adolescence and young womanhood (the time frame for this book) were profoundly shaped by the Canadian experience, both political and otherwise.
I grew up with working class parents who went from one factory job to another. This is not a common South Asian experience in the U.S., but it is a common South Asian experience in Canada. Canada also has lots of British influence, so colonization runs deep through my bones and my parents’ bones, and there was familiarity with Canadian attitudes and racism as a result. When the temple we lived next door to was fire-bombed in our first year in Canada, my family was not shocked — we just began looking for the next place to live; somewhere with more brown people, somewhere that might offer a bit more safety in a place that would never be entirely safe.
I’m thinking some of those factors will connect with Canadian readers, but I’m hoping that anyone who has been sexually abused as a child, particularly within an institutional context, will find something useful in the book.
ZE: I’ve attended several kid lit conferences and book festivals this spring. I appreciate being included since plenty of folks would rather not welcome a self-publishing troublemaker like me, but I’m worried about the overwhelming focus on — and investment in — the traditional/corporate model of publishing. You and I know all too well how indie authors are shamed, dismissed, and/or penalized for operating outside the traditional industry even though most of us have no other way to make our voices heard. Why do you think BIPOC are so committed to a system that isn’t meritocratic and has excluded and/or misrepresented them for decades?
NM: This is a great question, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the past few years. There’s a certain sense of freedom that comes when all forms of social acceptability fall away. I have never been embraced by my family or community for a variety of reasons. I have never gotten that stamp of approval that I’ve spent the bulk of a lifetime chasing (all the while knowing that my truth-telling gene would never allow it).
I think part of it is what I said above, in my response to your first question — it’s normal and natural to want your unique beauty and contributions to be acknowledged and recognized. We all deserve this. But only a few are actually awarded it. The society we live in is set up to value and reward the contributions of certain individuals and to ignore, or downplay, the contributions, gifts, and very existence of others.
So many of us spend entire lifetimes trying to squeeze into definitions that don’t fit with our own sense of ourselves. We keep knocking on doors that are there to keep us out. And, because one or two of us manage to squeeze in, we are led to believe those doors are wide open, and it’s up to us to simply walk through. If we don’t it’s because there is something wrong with us, or because our work is inferior. So many of us believe that.
It’s a lie. It’s trickery, and I explore some of that in my book. How, in a dysfunctional society (because that is what we are living in), we are constantly being misinformed and having the wool pulled over our eyes; how we believe the lie that we don’t have power, unless power vets and approves of us. The same power that, at its core, believes we are without value or worth because it has set up all its laws and policies to exclude us. Have we made gains in changes to policy and laws? Sure. But one need only to take a quick glance at what’s going on with Roe v. Wade in the U.S. right now to see how quickly those changes can be overturned when the foundation is based on exclusion.
I’ve found that challenging abuses of power with those who are closest to us — our families, our loved ones — begins to untangle some of those lies. When you begin to question people who were closest to you who abused power, you begin to see the tiny gears of how power works. How it protects itself, how it lies to maintain its narrative, how it uses deception, trickery, and gaslighting to maintain its position. And you start to see, too, how these are the very same mechanisms that are in place at the very top levels of power. Power works the same, whether it’s in your bedroom, the boardroom, the Church, or the White House. Once you understand it in your closest, most intimate interactions, you can see it very clearly in the larger, more macro systems around us, and you are better able to address it and navigate it.
I’m hoping more and more people begin to discover their value and their gifts, and stop waiting for permission to put their contribution into the world. That permission is usually from entities that have historically been more inclined to dismiss our very humanity than to uplift us; entities more interested in maintaining an exclusive hold on power, than allowing any one of us to be held up as an example of what it is to be empowered, independent, and free. Every other industry has an independent arm; music and film have always had successful indie artists. There are a variety of ways readers can vet writing for themselves to see if they want to read a writer’s work. Sample chapters are available online, there are multiple review sources, and most authors have an online presence that readers can check out. Small presses are an option, of course, but small press publishers still have to function within the same framework as the rest of the publishing industry. They still have to compete and they are still bound by the same general rules of the overall industry.
I am not waiting for approval anymore. My survival is not dependent upon a corporate entity that deems what I have to say worthy, or valuable. Technology has now allowed me a path that takes me straight to my readers. I’m not interested in awards, recognition, or being rich. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you like me or think I’m valuable. I have something more important to do, and this is my way of doing it. Unbought and unsold, as it were.
Zetta Elliott is the award-winning author of over thirty books for young readers. Her essays have appeared in The Huffington Post, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Dragons in a Bag, a middle grade fantasy novel, was published by Random House in 2018; Say Her Name, a young adult poetry collection, will be published by Jump at the Sun in 2020. Her own imprint, Rosetta Press, generates culturally relevant stories that center children who have been marginalized, misrepresented, and/or rendered invisible in traditional children’s literature. She currently lives in Philadelphia.
Neesha Meminger writes novels for Young Adults about things that matter. Her books have garnered critical acclaim and commercial success, and her independent films have screened internationally. She currently teaches for colleges in the Bronx and Toronto. For more information about Neesha and her work, visit her website at neeshameminger.com.
