#WeNeedDiverseBooks – Becky Levine

So I just signed up for the Saturday session of KidLitCon, which is going to be held in Sacramento this October. Yay! I can manage on just one hotel night and some caffeine for the late night drive home. I’ve been wanting to go to this for years, and I was waiting for it to come to our neighborhood. Thanks so much to Jen Robinson of Jen Robinson’s Book Page and Tanita Davis and Sarah Stevenson of Finding Wonderland for pulling this all together.

I thought, for a Saturday Six, I’d do six reasons that I want to attend this year.

1. You may have noticed I don’t appear at my blog all that often these days, although I’ve been trying to shift back lately. I’m feeling like I need a new burst of blog energy, and where better to get that at a conference for kidlit bloggers?

2. I am a huge fan of Jen Robinson’s Book Page and, even more, of Jen’s commitment to literacy and reading and all things kids books. Anything she’s a part of is going to be good.

3. Mitali Perkins will be Saturday’s keynote speaker. Since I got started with blogs, Mitali has been challenging us to think outside our auto-perspectives, to stretch our writing and reading, and I want to hear what she has to say. It’s going to be important.

4. I’m feeling like I want my blog to be facing out a bit more for a while, less directed–as they say–at my own navel. The theme for this year’s conference is “Blogging Diversity in Young Adult and Children’s Lit: What’s Next? I posted about #weneeddiversebooks early on in the movement, and I’ve definitely been reading more diverse books, but if I’m doing it just for me, then–really–I’m doing it too quietly. Maybe this is the “out” I want to face.

5. Kind of a corollary to #3 is that I talk a lot about writing at my blog and, often, about writing for kids. But, you know, I wouldn’t be a writer if it weren’t for the kids’ book that made me fall in deep, deep love with the whole reading thing when I was little and that keep me reading in that genre years after I’ve given up jumping rope, trying to keep a hula hoop above my ankles, and writing angsty 12-year-old thoughts into my diary. Kid Lit gives me air to breathe and passion to create. I’m pretty sure that, at the conference, I won’t be the only one who feels that way.

6. This program. And this list of attendees.

I’ve been kind of blue all day. It started with me reading all these sharp, short, and clever posts at #WeNeedDiverseBooks and knowing I wanted to jump in, but having this weird feeling that I…shouldn’t. All right, I’m risking showing off a few neuroses here, and I’m going to keep this part of the post short because this is so not about my worries, but I want to share because, well…it’s possible others are having some of these feelings, too. So, basically, my initial self-centered responses were a mix of:

I have been very lucky in terms of not having my identity attacked, ignored or dismissed–so lucky that I have no real stories to share.
As a child, I wasn’t looking for other Jews/Jewish atheists in stories; I was looking for other insecure girls who escaped the world by curling up alone with a book. And I found plenty of those. So I basically got to spend my youth recognizing myself over and over and over in books. Again, lucky.
When I went to look at my shelves, I was hit with some guilt at the small number of books I had to include in the #WeNeedDiverseBooks photo I did post. Mixed in with recognition that most of the books I save on my shelf are favorites from my childhood and that, while I still believe them to be wonderful books, we are much further along now than we were then in showing the entire, real world in stories. We still have a long way to go, yes, but we’re moving. And mixed in, also, with the happiness that I do have these particular books in my life.

A sense, obviously left over from when I was like FIFTEEN?!, that I am somehow not cool enough to join in this fight. I know…whatever THAT’s about! But I think, again, it’s tied to my feeling of luck, of privilege, of having escaped that isolation of NOT seeing myself in my chosen world. For pete’s sake, there were certainly plenty of times I didn’t see myself in the real world around me, but I did–time and time again–choose books over that world, so, you know…it worked. Because books always told me there were others like me. So how could I step up to the plate and speak “for” others who weren’t given that experience?

And then I started reading a few more of the posts. The signs. Seeing and hearing about the kids. And, honestly, the blueness turned to waves of sorrow. Because, crap, what we’re still doing to children by not representing them in stories. What we did to their parents. Worse, still, what we’re doing to all of them by representing the world as some narrow little definition of peoplehood, of reality, of cool.

So I gave myself a shake and told myself to shake off my stupid, self-centered fretting and shift my attitude. It is my fight, because I care about children and I care about stories, and if you tell me the two are not inextricably connected, I will argue with you even after I lose my voice. So here’s my commitment to myself. I will…

Actively look for books that represent the real world, the whole world. I’ll start by building a list of those everyone is mentioning/showing in their WeNeedDiverseBooks posts.
Buy more of these books.
Check out more of these books from my library.
Put in requests for my library buy more of these books.
Talk about these books on my blog and via social networking.
Talk more.
Push myself to include diversity in my own stories. This means getting past the slight laziness about doing research and getting past the bigger fear that I will say something wrong, depict someone stereotypically, offend someone or hurt their feelings. And I will do my best to find Beta readers who can help me avoid/correct all those things.

I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know if these are the right steps. But I know I’m doing something.

Join me?

And in case you can’t see the titles in the photo, they are:

Christopher Paul Curtis’ The Watsons Go To Birmingham 1963
Chris Moriarty’s The Inquisitor’s Apprentice
Margot Benary-Isbert’s The Ark (out of print and very expensive used; try hunting for it your libraries)
Doris Gates’ Blue Willow
Steve Kluger’s My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park
Kathryn Fitzmaurice’s A Diamond in the Desert
Joyce Moyer Hostetter’s Blue
Tim Federle’s Five, Six, Seven, Nate
Jeannine Atkins’ Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madame C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and their Daughters
Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family
Zizou Corder’s Lionboy

Tag: #WeNeedDiverseBooks

Saturday Six: KidLitCon

We Need Diverse Books…and What We Can Do About It