The bud, the blossom,
the petals falling like snow:
sakura’s three lives
National Poetry Month: Hanami (花見) I
Writing
National Poetry Month: Easter in Quarantine
I am never going to hold still for your Instagram pictures;
it will take me ‘til 4pm to find all the eggs you’ve hidden.
Maybe someday I will understand how this time
has shaped the world we live in.
It will always have been part of my reality.
Right now I just want to run up and down
up and down
into the bushes.
We will all get haircuts eventually.
Where you want to put a period, God and I put a comma.
This is not the end.
He is risen, indeed, and so have the hyacinths.
Up and down; world without end, amen.
Fan Art Friday: Celestial Balance
Here is a fun little elf sketch from my high school sketchbook! I drew this in conjunction with a short story I wrote around the same time, “Celestial Balance.” The elf in the story has curly hair, but there was no way I was going to be able to draw that!
Keep reading for the story!
NaNoWriMo 2019 (fanfic excerpt)
Hi guys! I’ve been working half-heartedly on National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, where participants write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I did this successfully once before, but that was before I had a toddler!
This month I’m working on a fanfiction piece, continuing one of my favorite stories from childhood, The Horse and His Boy, part of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I am not making huge progress, but who knows, maybe I’ll be able to finish it. I really want to finish it, but it’s also taking up time that could be spent writing “real” novels.
I’ll probably put it on fanfiction.net when I am done, but for now, enjoy this except from the opening. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments (this is a first draft).
This is Why Representation is Important
Last week, Slate published an essay by an 11-year-old reader that illustrates perfectly why I believe in the need for books with diverse characters. “This is Me” by Audrey Hall was a winner in the New York Public Library’s Summer Reading 2019 Essay Contest. In her essay, Audrey describes how the book Blended by Sharon Draper expanded her universe.
You can read the full essay here, which is well-written and even includes quotes from the book to support her thesis.
Audrey checked Blended out of the library and it quickly became a favorite. The book features a multiracial protagonist with divorced parents, which also describes Audrey. She describes how she related directly to the character’s experiences in the book, moving between households and debating how to describe herself. It was a revelation for her to know that there might be other kids who shared her own experiences. “This book made me feel like I belong,” she wrote.
I personally could not have written a better essay to describe why representation is important, especially in children’s and YA literature. Every child should have the same feeling that Audrey had when reading.
Of course, we will not relate to every character we read about, which also expands our minds. And of course, we can relate to characters who don’t look like us at all. For example, my pen name Mei-Mei was taken from a Chinese character in a Japanese anime. But I won’t pretend that I don’t automatically feel a sense of kinship with every redhead character that I meet. Being able to see ourselves so directly in characters is such a valuable thing that I want every child to be able to experience it as I have.
For this reason, I have been a fan of the We Need Diverse Books movement, which started as a Twitter hashtag and has become a phenomenon. I think we have seen a huge growth of diverse books in YA fantasy (my wheelhouse) over the past ten years, and I hope this trend will continue. I am personally making an effort to read more books featuring diverse characters and, just as importantly, by diverse authors to support the publishing industry following this trend.
Audrey’s prize for the essay was a trip to a NY Yankees game. I hope she has a great time! I also hope she grows up to be a writer of many more characters like herself.
Jedi by Knight 