Read an interview with J.L. Powers at Through the Tollbooth!
Q: What about this novel makes you most proud?
There is absolutely nothing on the market like it! It is young adult magical realism, set in a poverty-stricken township of South Africa. It is a love story but it also deals with the clash between science and traditional medicine in Africa, and it highlights and focuses on the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the part of the world with the highest rate of HIV infections—the heart of the epidemic.
Announcing the launch of The Pirate Tree, a blog with 5 award-winning children’s and young adult writers–Ann Angel, Nancy Bo Flood, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, Peter Marino, and J.L. Powers. We’ll be discussing social justice issues and children’s literature on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come join us!
Because I am a new mother working at home with limited childcare, I have been thinking lately how I have no models for how to do this in a healthy and productive manner—healthy for my relationship with my 5-month-old son, productive for my work and my career.
Growing up in the church, I knew very few married women who worked, period. Those who did were usually not professionals, and there was this vague sense that floated from and towards them that they had to work because their husbands didn’t make enough money. I might add that their children were not the best behaved on the block, which added to the sense that their situation was less than ideal. Among the professional women I knew, one was a physical therapist whose husband had lupus; I had the impression that, once again, she was in a situation where she needed to be the breadwinner because her husband could not and this is what made it acceptable.
My mother is a writer, and she did write a weekly parenting column while I was growing up. But we didn’t rely on her income (I think it paid the princely sum of something like $25 a week), she was able to write her column on Thursday afternoons so she wasn’t trying to put in more than two or three hours of work a week, and her stay-at-home mom-ness contributed 100% to her ability to write the column.
I grew up feeling rebellious—like I was a bad Christian girl—because I knew I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom. I wanted a career, as a writer, and I wanted it to be a successful career—with multiple books published and magazine articles and long essays and lots of short stories. For a long time, I thought I wouldn’t have children because I wasn’t sure how I would manage both.
Though I think there are more professional and non-professional women in the church who work these days than there were when I was growing up (it is hard, sometimes impossible, to make it on one income these days), I know some of those women feel judged. My sister-in-law, for example, mentioned a melt-down she had in church one day when a man pompously informed her that God expected her to stay at home with her children. I’ve known since I was a little girl that I was supposed to be a nurse, she told him. I feel called by God to be a nurse. And I am a very good mother. So just shut up.
But among all the women I know, I personally know exactly one other woman doing what I’m doing: work at home with limited childcare. (I have someone come in six hours a week to babysit. This lets me make business phone calls without interruption.) The limited childcare is due to two things: one, I don’t really want to put my baby in childcare; two, we can’t afford it anyway. The working is due to two things: one, I love my job(s) as writer, teacher, and editor/publicist; two, we need my income anyway.
I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday and she mentioned that the feminist revolution betrayed us. “It told us that we could have it all,” she said. “But what that really means is that you have to have a career, and you have to put your children in daycare. There are very few jobs that allow you to work and have your children with you.”
That is so true. I had the fortune to jump on the online teaching bandwagon early, which means I have more experience teaching online than just about any professor I ever meet. And it allowed me flexibility for my writing career long before my baby was born. Now that I’m a mother, my dean, thankfully, doesn’t care that I have a child at home while I work—as long as I am still an excellent teacher and do what I’m supposed to do in a timely fashion.
I am lucky, too, that my publisher welcomes both me and my baby when I go to publicity events and book signings. I had Nesta lying in a stroller or I was holding him throughout the American Library Association’s mid-winter conference. As I talked to librarians outside of Cinco Puntos Press’s booth, I gently rocked him to keep him happy. And guess what? Those librarians love babies. He is my best marketing tool, hands down. But I know I’m lucky. Not all publishers would be so welcoming or so understanding.
But it’s hard. I need to be putting in more hours than I currently am, especially writing. It is easy to be interrupted from grading papers or writing a press release. It is not so easy to revise my current novel when I’m interrupted so often.
Still, I would like a few models of women who manage successfully to work at home and keep their child out of daycare. I know you guys are out there. Please share your stories, your tips, your best practices! And especially for those mother writers out there—I need to hear how you’ve done it, and how you’ve balanced the appropriate time with your children and the appropriate time doing work, and how you’ve learned to write while being interrupted.
I read to Nesta (4 ½ months old) most days. We have a ton of picture books & board books, which I’ve been accumulating over the years—for my own pleasure, mostly, but in the back of my mind, always the thought, When I have a child of my own…
Nesta doesn’t pay attention too much right now. He likes brightly colored picture books, and I’m glad that he’s a big fan of some of Cinco Puntos’s picture books. Abcedarios, Opuestos/Opposites, and The King of Things always seem to elicit his attention–he loves the bright drawings inspired by Mexican culture.
(Abecedarios: a book Nesta likes)
But there is one picture book by a big New York publishing company that Nesta simply HATES. And I cannot figure out why. I’m not going to name the book because I don’t want to give it negative press. I, personally, am fond of the book—and the series. But every single time I open that book and try to read it to Nesta, he starts crying on the first page. Chris tells me that he’s tried to read that book to Nesta—same thing. And my mother is visiting this week, and she told me she was happily reading to him, and he was enjoying each book, and as soon as she opened that one, he started to fuss and fidget and cry.
Clearly, he doesn’t like this book. At 4 ½ months of age, he knows what he likes!
But I can’t figure it out.
Advance review copies of This Thing Called the Future went out today and my publisher sent me a link to a YouTube video of Urban Dance Squad singing “Prayer for my Demo” at a 1990 concert….
Here it is: Urban Dance Squad-\”Prayer for my Demo\”
On Thursdays, I teach a creative writing class to elementary-school kids. Lately, all the kids–most of them guys–have been showing up at my house wearing these crazy bracelets, animal shaped bracelets of different colors. 
One of the kids told me that he has classmates who have so many bracelets, they stretch from the wrist to the elbow.
It reminded me of friendship pins, a craze I participated in during 3rd grade. Friendship pins were nothing more than safety pins with a few beads strung on them, in different patterns. We wore them on our shoes, where the laces cross over, and I remember that my shoes were entirely covered by friendship pins. Not that I had that many friends, mind you. I made most of them myself. I just fell in love with the idea and the rest is history.
But I haven’t gotten invested in any other crazes. In high school, I was pretty much a dork, with zero fashion sense. I actually believed it was cool to be myself, but that meant I didn’t have a lot of friends because being myself in high school was actually really hard to do. I do remember one fashion craze at the time was wearing two different colored socks, for example, blue on top and red on bottom. I mixed it up a little. On one side, I wore blue on top and red on bottom, and on the other side, I wore red on top and blue on bottom. A girl in my youth group ridiculed me for it, which meant I had to keep doing it because I couldn’t possibly pretend that I cared enough to conform.
The adult world has plenty of fashionistas, and we didn’t seem to leave those crazes behind. Still, I don’t see as many of them, and we don’t participate in quite the same way. A few years ago, a friend gave me a Stephen Colbert Wriststrong bracelet, but his eyes were snapping with humor when he did it. 
Sure, I’ve worn it. But always with a sense of irony.
In the coming months, readers of my blog will be treated to a lot of thoughts on children and war, since I’m editing a collection of essays on the topic. You’ll also be treated to a lot more thoughts on South Africa, since my second novel, THIS THING CALLED THE FUTURE, a coming of age novel based in South Africa, is being released in April 2011.
For those who want to read my thoughts on the new book by scholar R. Charli Carpenter Forgetting Children Born of War, the review was published on Feminist Review, August 1.
My essay, “The Red Coat,” appears in Rough Copy today. Here’s a teaser:
When I was eight, my family moved from Albuquerque to El Paso.
An adventure! my mother said. Why, if you want to go to Mexico, you just walk across a bridge, and there you are!
We learned how to count in Spanish, celebrated Christmas, packed the U-Haul, and moved south during the worst snow-storm the area had seen in decades. My parents rented a house with aqua blue and pink shag rugs in a Mexican-American neighborhood and, just after the New Year, I entered third grade at my new school.
As the classroom door clanged on my mother’s departing back, I glanced shyly at my classmates, an ache in my chest, the kind of ache you have when you haven’t slept long enough. I shrugged my red coat closer and tried to sort through the excited chatter, Spanish and English mixing into one glorious smattering of unintelligible sound as the classroom absorbed the presence of this white girl, the only one in the class.
When I was ten, we visited De Smet, South Dakota, one of the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up. I visited recently, and they’ve created a really cheesy visitor’s center there with all kinds of activities and farm equipment that are not historically accurate. But in the 1980s, during my first visit, all you could see was the Surveyor’s House from By the Shores of Silver Lake, the property with the 5 trees that Pa planted, and the house Pa built in town many years later. There was lots of “scope for imagination” (as Anne of Green Gables fame always used to say) and I came back from that trip and told my mother, “I’m going to be a writer when I grow up.” I didn’t have much money to buy a souvenir; all I could afford was a short slip of paper that included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s signature. I treasured that photocopied signature for many, many years, as a tangible connection to this writer I admired so much and whose life I envied. (Her life seemed so much more interesting than the tumbleweeds, dirt, dust, and broken-down trucks littering front yards in El Paso, Texas.)
A few years ago, I took a trip to Prince Edward Island to visit Anne’s land. Boy, was I ever disappointed. Maybe I expected to be transported back a century, to the time when L.M. Montgomery wrote about. But mostly, I was bored by the flat farmland; I was shocked that it took about an hour to traverse the island by car and then what was left to do?; and, most of all, I was disappointed by the clap-trap tourist stuff that has invaded that island and turned it into a mecca of cheap souvenirs and crappy Anne-related paraphernalia.
And, by the way, L.M. Montgomery never once mentioned the ginormous mosquitoes everywhere, not in any of her books, all of which I have read.
The mystery is sort of gone once you visit a place and realize it’s nothing like what you read about in the books.
And yet….I still want to go to those places. The magic of the places I read about as a kid filled me with such longing.
What are the children’s books I’d love to be able to go back and read for the very first time again, to feel that mysterious urgent heartbeat against my ridge cage as I read, devouring buttered Saltines, licking the butter and salt off my fingers and losing myself in another time and place?
There are too many to name but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts. Here are a few on my list:
Stuart Little by E.B. White
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
Here’s an intriguing article about the almost complete lack of female characters in Dr. Seuss books. You know, I never really noticed that before….
