Today's guest is Maria Dismondy, of Cardinal Rule Press. Maria is dedicated to having her publishing company produce picture books that empower children with timeless messages of hope, courage and the Golden Rule. She works diligently to have Cardinal Rule Press release children’s literature that represents today’s diversity while remaining dedicated to messages that make a difference.
Tara Sullivan On The Emotional Process of Writing About Human Rights
Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Tara Sullivan, critically acclaimed middle grade and YA author whose novel TREASURE OF THE WORLD (Putnam; on sale February 23) is about child labor in an impoverished Bolivian silver mining community, inspired by current-day conditions at Potosí, Bolivia's mountain Cerro Rico, also known as The Mountain that Eats Men.
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
I grew up in Bolivia—all my childhood memories are there—and I’ve always been fascinated by the history around the silver mines of Potosí. Once I was a published author, I knew I wanted to tell the story of the kids who worked those mines… but finding the right story to tell, and the right way to tell it, took me over five years!
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
I wrote a first draft of Treasure of the World and then took a research trip to Bolivia. There, I interviewed the mothers and children who worked on the mountain as well as the lawyers, teachers, school counselors, and aid workers who tried to help them. I stared into the maw of the mine mouths, sat through a school day, and walked the streets of the city at its base. I was devastated to realize that the story I had written didn’t accurately reflect the realities that existed on the mountain: I had assumed that certain basic opportunities would be available on The Mountain That Eats Men. They weren’t.
So I returned home and tried again. I wrote drafts with different endings, different supporting characters, different plot inflection points. I rewrote it in 2017, 2018, and 2019: again, and again, and again. None of them were the right way to tell the story. I ended up having to put the manuscript aside for over a year while I grappled with how to do better.
I kept running up against the rock-hard wall of reality: there were few to no options on the mountain. The women and girls I had spoken to didn’t have a hope for a better future: the government didn’t prioritize the region, foreign aid had been kicked out, and even the organizations I had interviewed were shutting down. Mining operations had been “privatized” into cooperatives, each their own fiefdom with no liability or protections for their workers.
The story kept tugging at me, needing to be told. But, for the longest time, I honestly could not imagine a world in which the Mountain didn’t win. In the end, this was the crux of the problem: I had to find a way to stay true to the realities I’d learned, but I also had to find a way to make the fiction work. This wasn’t a documentary; it was a novel. To put it in craft terms, in addition to all the normal things that needed to be fixed in the manuscript, it needed a tone re-write.
Tone is a funny thing. Everyone knows it when they hear it, but it is so, so hard to define. For the record, it is even harder to fix. My own hopelessness, faced with the reality of life on the mountain, had percolated through the entire book: it had seeped into the sentence level in word choice and phrasing. I found, in my tone edit, that I couldn’t even cut and paste paragraphs of scenery description. I needed to start again from page one and re-write the entire book through a lens of hope and the support of family. So I did: I aged my protagonist down from sixteen to twelve (because, by sixteen, all the girls I’d interviewed had given up hope in a different future for themselves and I needed to stay true to that). I made her brother younger rather than older than her so that he couldn’t dominate her choices. I leaned into my female characters—Ana’s mother, grandmother, and friends—to give Ana a more supportive supporting cast and rewrote conversations to really dig into the beauty and history of Bolivia.
With the addition of this hard-won hope, the Treasure of the World that is finally hitting shelves this month is so different from the draft I wrote in 2015 it’s almost unrecognizable. But it is how the story needed to be told, no matter how long it took me to get there.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Oh my gosh, yes! This is such a thing for me. I usually start out with a vague idea of where I want the story to go, but I’m a “headlights” writer: I only ever know the bit of the story directly in front of me. I have to write that bit before I can figure out the next bit and I’m constantly surprised by characters taking my stories where I wasn’t expecting them to go!
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by? How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
I always struggle to choose what to write next. It’s not like there’s a lack of material—unfortunately, there are many human rights crises ongoing in the world today—but there has to be a story resonance to it, and I have to feel that I have a place in telling the story.
What I mean by resonance is that there has to be something to build the story around. As an author, my “brand” is telling stories based around contemporary human rights issues. My debut, Golden Boy, dealt with the mutilation and murder of people with albinism in Tanzania due to a belief that their body parts are good luck. The core injustice in that story is that someone might be hunted and killed because of an accident of recessive genetics, even today. My second book, The Bitter Side of Sweet, asks how we can accept a world where children in one place must work, unpaid and unfree, to produce a sweet treat (chocolate) for children in another place. My newest book, Treasure of the World wonders at how it’s possible that the biggest silver mine in the world can be the setting for abject generational poverty.
Needless to say, these aren’t the easiest books to write. The only way I make it through the long, emotional process of researching, drafting, and editing, is if I feel deeply about the core injustice behind the book: writing is a form of taking action. But even that is only half the question: even if there IS a core injustice around which to build a compelling fictional story, is it my place to tell that story?
It's a hard question to answer. I choose to write books about human rights issues where people’s voices are going unheard and where those with direct lived experience of the specific trauma has not yet found access to the agents and publishers that serve an American readership. I hope, one day, that these books won’t need to be written because these injustices have ceased to exist, or because enough attention has been drawn to these human rights issues that the coverage is exhaustive. Until that day, my goal as a writer is to raise awareness for issues of global injustice, do the best I can to portray the reality of those living with these injustices, and encourage readers to deeply investigate our world.
I have 5 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
For all of my previous novels I have had a writing buddy: my old Aussie mix, Liam. He is a great writing buddy as—unless a squirrel, the mailman, or some other ferocious invader approaches the house—he tends to flop at my feet and let me work. However, we just recently added a puppy to our family, Luna, who always wants to play. I have a feeling no writing will get done at all around her until she is older and has settled down a bit!
Luna, definitely not sleeping. Liam, sleeping while I worked.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James On Being Rejected... By Pretty Much Everyone
If there's one thing that many aspiring writers have few clues about, it's the submission process. There are good reasons for that; authors aren't exactly encouraged to talk in detail about our own submission experiences, and - just like agent hunting - everyone's story is different. I managed to cobble together a few non-specific questions that some debut authors have agreed to answer (bless them). And so I bring you the submission interview series - Submission Hell - It's True. Yes, it's the SHIT.
Today’s guest for the SHIT is Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of Mona At Sea. Before becoming a writer Elizabeth was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her short story, Cosmic Blues, was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2016 Short Story Award for New Writers, and her stories and essays have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She’s an alum of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. She is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog. Her first novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, June 2021, from Santa Fe Writers Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.
How much did you know about the submission process before you were out on subs yourself?
I should give a little bit of background info first: I went on submission with my novel in 2015 and it was turned down everywhere – something like 40 editors. We got close at a few places but, for one reason or another, things fell through. In 2016 my agent emailed to say that she had run out of places to submit the manuscript, and I was obviously crushed. I put the manuscript in a drawer, occasionally sending it out here and there to small presses. In 2019 I submitted it on a whim to the SFWP Literary Awards, thinking I might get an honorable mention or something. To my utter shock I was named a finalist, and was offered a publishing contract. So my period of submission was 4 years and my path to publication was anything but easy or straight.
Before I went on submission I’d read a few blogs on what to expect, and they all said that I would need to be patient and that I should start working on the next book right away, so I did just that. What I did not know was how common it is for books to fail to find a publisher. And I had no idea my book would take so long to find a publisher. Probably a good thing or I might have quit!
Did anything about the process surprise you?
Mona at Sea is a dark comedy about an acerbic and troubled young woman. A lot of the feedback my agent and I got from editors back in 2015 was that they didn’t know how to market the book. I was surprised by that, both because I felt like there should be space in literature for a character like Mona, but also because I didn’t realize how much hinged on a book’s marketability. I had wanted to believe that a great story was enough, and perhaps it still is sometimes, but publishing is a business and publishers have to understand how to sell your book. Since 2015 however, I think a lot has changed. Fleabag, which features a similar character to mine, was enormously popular, and I think the public is more receptive now to stories about fierce, funny young women.
Did you research the editors you knew had your ms? Do you recommend doing that?
Yeah I did some Googling. I don’t think it particularly helped, though. I think all it did was allow me to have the illusion that I was doing something productive and somehow helping further my book’s chances in the world.
What was the average amount of time it took to hear back from editors?
It was all over the place. Some editors got back in a few weeks while others held onto the MS for months, being noncommittal. Small press editors were all over the map, too. There were some presses that got back to me in a few months and others that never got back to me ever.
What do you think is the best way for an author out on submission to deal with the anxiety?
It’s hard because of course all you want to do is obsess about it. The only thing you can do, though, is try to keep yourself occupied. Start your next book. Write short stories. Mentor someone. Volunteer. Try to keep your wine and Cheeto consumption to the bare minimum. I started writing essays and short stories and submitting them, and that was great because I was learning how to do different kinds of writing while also feeling out the market for submitting shorter pieces, which is a whole other kind of submissions hell!
If you had any rejections, how did you deal with that emotionally? How did this kind of rejection compare to query rejections?
Oy vey, all I had were rejections! Fortunately my agent didn’t tell me about every single one, so I only heard about them in batches, or when an editor had complimentary feedback. I definitely cried, and I felt really bad about myself and my writing. When my agent said we’d come to the end of the road I went out to a bar with my husband and got drunk and ate a bunch of candy and threw myself a big pity party. But you know what? Never at any point did I consider giving up. I told myself that I’d gotten so close with my first book, my very first try, and that it would be foolish not to try again. So I wrote a second book, and meanwhile I kept sending out Mona at Sea. Eventually I got to a place where the rejections didn’t hurt as much. Your biggest fear when you’re on submission is that no one will pick up your book. Well, that happened to me. I fell flat on my face. And I didn’t die. The sun still came up the next morning. And I’m actually thankful for the experience because I now know that I can handle rejection. I’m strong enough to handle anything.
If you got feedback on a rejection, how did you process it? How do you compare processing an editor’s feedback as compared to a beta reader’s?
I did get feedback from one editor who we thought was going to make an offer on the MS. She wanted some things changed and so I went back and made all the changes she wanted, and then her publishing house re-orged and no longer offered literary fiction. The stakes are higher when an editor gives you feedback, because all day long they’re sitting at their desk making manuscripts better. The criticisms cut deeper and the praise lifts you up higher.
When you got your YES! how did that feel? How did you find out – email, telephone, smoke signal?
I got an email from my publisher, just a couple of lines, that he loved my book, and was it still available. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a scam. I thought no way did this guy want to publish my book. At that point I’d talked myself into rewriting the entire novel from scratch, and so I actually put him off for a few months and had to slowly, slowly talk myself into signing a contract with him. So the YES! wasn’t like a fist pump in the air, but more like a room slowly filling with beautiful perfume.
Did you have to wait a period of time before sharing your big news, because of details being ironed out? Was that difficult?
Yes, I had to wait a while to publicly announce it, though I was grateful to have a little time. I was filled with utter terror after signing my contract, and so I wasn’t chomping at the bit to blast it on social media. I came around eventually though and the response I got from my writing friends on social media was very sweet and welcoming. I’m very grateful for all the kinship I‘ve found online.