An Interview with Author - Zetta Elliott
by Veronica Henry
Zetta Elliott is a poet, playwrite, educator and author. In her latest, "A Wish After Midnight", we meet a young protagonist who discovers that dreams can in fact come true.
Fifteen-year old Genna Colon believes wishes can come true. Frustrated by the drug dealers in her building, her family's cramped apartment, and her inability to compete with the cute girls at school, Genna finds comfort in her dreams of a better future. Almost every day she visits the garden and tosses coins into the fountain, wishing for a different life, a different home, and a different body. Little does she know that her wish will soon be granted: when Genna flees into the garden late one night, she makes a fateful wish and finds herself instantly transported back in time to Civil War-era Brooklyn.
What was your inspiration for "A Wish After Midnight?
When I was a child, I read and fell in love with The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I revisited that novel every few years, and when I finally read it again after graduate school, I realized I had had to erase myself in order NOT to see the obvious imperialist undertones. Decolonizing my imagination took a long time, and the legacy of those stories is complicated. I still love gardens, and I still believe they’re magical places and sites of constant transformation. But my mission as a writer is to merge who I was then (a black child growing up in an all-white community in Toronto) with where I am now. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for over ten years; I’ve taught city kids at community centers and museums, and I’ve done research on racial violence in the US. AWAM is a combination of all of those things, and a way for me to make the girl I once was (and the girls I once taught) the hero of her own adventure.
How did you decide to write YA novels?
I was teaching creative writing to children at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, and in order to show my students how to make a picture book, I wrote and illustrated one myself. The kids loved it, and so I wrote a few more. I had one student there who burst into tears one day because kids at school had been hassling her about her mother being incarcerated. I couldn’t find any books on the subject at the library, and so I started writing a book about a girl whose mother is in jail. I realized that I preferred to tell longer, more detailed narratives, so I kept writing picture books stories (under 1500 words) but turned An Angel for Mariqua into a novel and that eventually led me to AWAM. I tend to write in waves—for 2-3 years I wrote stories for kids, then for 2-3 years I wrote plays, in between I wrote a memoir, and now I’m back to writing for kids again. It is deliberate, but I mostly just try to honor whatever story comes at any given time. .
What is your response to the self-publishing critics?
Hmmm…good question! Some of the critiques are warranted; there are some self-published books out there that are poorly written, and would rightly be rejected by a mainstream publisher. Some, but not all. What troubles me most is the implicit trust that readers and educators and librarians and booksellers place in the publishing industry. Most people truly believe that the gatekeepers at those publishing houses have combed through all the available manuscripts and published only the very best. But when you look at the statistics, you can’t deny that people of color are largely being excluded from publishing (I spent 5 years trying unsuccessfully to find a publisher and/or agent for AWAM). The Cooperative Children’s Book Center keeps statistics, and we know that less than 3% of all the books published for kids last year were written by black people. The music industry has been transformed, giving consumers greater options when it comes to finding and buying the music they want. It’s time for that to happen with publishing.
Who is your favorite writer & why?
I couldn’t pick just one! I love Gayl Jones because in Corregidora she was daring and brutally honest and innovative in her treatment of the legacy of slavery. I love Octavia Butler because she’s a master storyteller and her writing could convince me of anything. I love James Baldwin because he was ambitious and sophisticated, and his characters have a depth and complexity we don’t often get to see these days.
What are you reading now?
I just finished Song Yet Sung by James McBride and am starting a nonfiction book, Five Points by Tyler Anbinder. I’m currently working on the sequel to AWAM, Judah’s Tale, and need to immerse myself in 19th-century New York history.
Describe your writing process.
I don’t have much of a process! I have no rituals, no schedule. Writing for me is mostly about dreaming—educators call it “pre-writing.” So I do certain things to prepare myself for the actual sit-down-at-a-desk-and-write moment. I stroll through the nearby botanic garden; that always slows me down and I become attuned to sounds and smells and tiny details. I sleep a lot—daily afternoon naps! And I listen to music that will put me in a kind of dark space emotionally…I’m already an introvert and a homebody, so pre-writing is a balance of looking inward and reaching outward—going to the library for books, visiting historical sites around the city, etc. When I finally DO start to write, it tends to be quick and my ideas come out fully formed, though I write short episodes instead of long chapters. Being a writer has taught me to trust myself; what’s within will come out eventually…you just have to have faith.
Zetta Elliott earned her PhD in American Studies from NYU. Her poetry has been published in the Cave Canem anthology, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Check the Rhyme: an Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees, and Coloring Book: an Eclectic Anthology of Fiction and Poetry by Multicultural Writers. Her novella, Plastique, was excerpted in T Dot Griots: an Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers, and her essays have appeared in The Black Arts Quarterly, thirdspace, WarpLand and Rain and Thunder. She won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest, and her picture book, Bird, was published in October 2008. Her first play, Nothing but a Woman, was a finalist in the Chicago Dramatists’ Many Voices Project (2006). Her fourth full-length play, Connor’s Boy, was staged in January 2008 as part of two new play festivals: in Cleveland, OH as part of Karamu House’s R. Joyce Whitley Festival of New Plays ARENAFEST, and in New York City as part of Maieutic Theatre Works’ Newborn Festival. Her one-act play, girl/power, was staged as part of New Perspectives Theater’s NYC festival of women’s work, GIRLPOWER, in August 2008. She currently lives in Brooklyn.