At the recent JambaLAya conference, Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park used a fairly common activity to illustrate her point that writers should not drive their readers crazy by getting things wrong when they write outside their area of familiarity. She showed three slides of picture books, illustrated by famous and talented artists, with knitting needles held upside down. Even a beginning knitter knows that points are up and caps are down. She likened this to writing outside your culture or environment. She pointed out how crazy readers became when the author uses a stereotype, mistakes a tradition, or has an atypical activity for the group of people in their story. She asked participants to recall a time when they were made crazy by a book mistake.
That took me no time! I won’t name the book for fear of destroying someone’s pleasure, especially since it turned out to be a good book with an almost fatal flaw. The book, set in the South, primarily in Mississippi, had an early chapter scene where a lady scrubbed her black iron cornbread skillet. Now any good Southern cook knows that the real treasure in her kitchen is a seasoned iron cornbread skillet, made better with age, and only wiped clean with a paper towel. I almost quit reading the book. I did slog through and finished the enjoyable tale. But after it was over, my mind lingered on that iron skillet. I wondered why the author didn’t run her novel by some good Southern cook or why her publisher didn’t insist on it.
Linda Sue gave some hints about how to get these things right since people writing outside their culture portray mistakes far worse than knitting needles and cornbread skillets, which are inanimate objects and have no feelings to be hurt. She mentioned the one I had pondered over after the skillet fiasco with having expert readers who belonged to the culture. Another important idea came from a suggestion of inviting them to the kitchen table for lived experiences - not just polite interaction on the job or here and there but going beyond to have real relationships and getting to know each other as you do around a table – not in a formal dining room, but in the kitchen.
I think there may be an obligation for readers as well as writers to insist that stories get things right. Some ways of doing that include looking for who is telling the story. Is it a member of the group or an outsider looking in, someone who has an idea and goggled a couple of sites or someone who has lived the experience and done volumes of research and legwork to immerse themselves in the story? Clues for these can be found in google searches for the author and book and by looking at the backmatter for author’s notes and bibliography.
Maybe if we all adopt a bit more careful approach in choosing our books, we will point our knitting needles up, wipe our skillet with a paper towel, and learn to enjoy and appreciate the richness and reality of this wonderfully diverse world in which we live.