Navdeep Singh Dhillon

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First Lines From 54 Novels by People of Color in 2015

December 24, 2015 by Navdeep

First Lines From 54 Novels by People of Color in 2015
Kickass Diverse Novels of 2015

Kickass Diverse Novels of 2015

Short sentences, long sentences, suspenseful sentences, funny sentences, profound sentences, to-the-point sentences, meandering flowery sentences; young adult, middle grade, romance, literary, women’s fiction, science fiction, fantasy, I love them all. Nothing gives me more joy than than an electric first line of a novel or a short story collection – what Sona refers to as pure agony.

Last year I wrote two book lists over Christmas and New Year on my site: 8 Short Story Writers of Color and First Lines From 36 Novelists of Color, as well as one on travel memoirs that don’t involve middle-class white women or white boys leaving their corporate jobs and going to brown and black countries to discover themselves (and so can you!). I originally wrote the lists because it was perplexing to hear people, including my incredibly diverse and smart creative writing students, drinking the Koolaid and parroting the lie that people of color either aren’t writing novels, or the novels aren’t that “great” (because there aren’t any mediocre novels by white men populating the book lists).

This year my list includes 54 novels and these are just the books I liked. My criteria is not particularly complex and is pretty much the exact same criteria I use in deciding to spend cash money to buy all of these books in the first place (except for Tiny Pretty Things, which I got for free due to my intimate relationship with one of the writers: my wife, Sona Charaipotra).

My criteria:

  1. A gorgeous first sentence that invites you to sink into a large, fluffy chair, with a warm cup of cha, and an aromatic novel.
  2. The authors and the content of their stories have some level of diversity. People of color writing novels filled with white people is just not my thing. I’d rather read white people writing about white people.
  3. Everything was published in 2015. In rare cases where a novel was published in England or South Africa in 2015, but doesn’t come out in the U.S. until 2016 I’ve put a link to the available e-book. Aside from Toni Morrison being on the top of the list, this list is not in any particular order. They all have gorgeous first lines that drew me in.

Let 2016 be the year of more mirrors and windows. And to diverse vampires . .  .   As usual, Junot Diaz perfectly sums it all up:

“You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.” ~ Junot Díaz

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

1. “It’s not my fault.”

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Re Jane by Patricia Park

Re Jane by Patricia Park

2. “Home was this northeastern knot of Queens, in the town (if you could call it a town) of Flushing.”

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Tiny Pretty Things by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton

Tiny Pretty Things by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton

3. “It always feels like death.”

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Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya

4. “Everything Job Ogbonnaya knew about sex he learned from American pornography.”

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The Tusk That Did The Damage by Tania James

The Tusk That Did The Damage by Tania James

5. “He would come to be called the Gravedigger.”

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Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

6. “After escaping the farm, Eddie drove through the night.”

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Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

7. “Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep.”

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Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

8. “Sierra? What are you staring at?”

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The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev

The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev

9. “How do you explain losing your words to someone?”

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Ruby by Cynthia Bend

Ruby by Cynthia Bend

10. “Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high.”

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The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh

The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh

11. “It would not be a welcome dawn.”

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An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

12. “My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest.”

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Loving Day by Mat Johnson

Loving Day by Mat Johnson

13. “In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”

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Only The Strong by Jabari Asim

Only The Strong by Jabari Asim

14. “Guts Tolliver hadn’t killed a man in two years.”

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Dragonfish by Vu Tran

Dragonfish by Vu Tran

15. “Our first night at sea, you cried for your father.”

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The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-Sook Shin

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-Sook Shin

16. “I find myself here, in this place where I have never been before, contemplating myself at sixteen.”

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The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

17. “The people on the hill liked to say that God’s smile was the sun shining down on them.”


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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

18. “The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.”

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Frog by Mo Yan

Frog by Mo Yan

19. “Dear Sugitani Akhito Sensei, it has been nearly a month since we said goodbye, but I can relive virtually every moment of our time together in my hometown as if it were yesterday.”

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The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer

The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer

20. “Skanda is deep into his translation of The Birth of Kumara when his mother calls to say his father is on his deathbed”

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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

21. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”

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Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet

Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet

22. “Canals zigzag across the city I used to call home.”

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In The Language of Miracles by Rajia Hassib

In The Language of Miracles by Rajia Hassib

23. “When Khaled fell sick at age nine, his grandmother descended on his parents’ house and promised him healing.”

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Mayumi and the sea of happiness by Jennifer Tseng

Mayumi and the sea of happiness by Jennifer Tseng

24. “It began at the library.”

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Blue Sun, Yellow Sky by Jaime Jo Hoang

Blue Sun, Yellow Sky by Jaime Jo Hoang

25. “Have you ever noticed that fire hydrants are rarely alike in shape or color?”

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White Light by Vanessa Garcia

White Light by Vanessa Garcia

26. “Sometimes you wake up with a hole in your heart and you’re not sure why.”

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The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

27. “I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man.”

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More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

28. “It turns out the Leteo procedure isn’t bullshit.”

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The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

29. “The brown ant had already forgotten its home.”

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The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

30. “Felícito Yanaqué, the owner of the Narihualá Transport Company, left his house that morning, as he did every morning Monday to Saturday, at exactly seven thirty, after doing half an hour of qigong, taking a cold shower, and preparing his usual breakfast: coffee with goat’s milk and toast with butter and a few drops of raw chancaca honey.”

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Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian

Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian

31. “They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky.”

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Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

32. “Girls, everywhere.”

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The Distant Marvels by Chantel Acevedo

The Distant Marvels by Chantel Acevedo


33. “An unexpected envelope was delivered to me two months ago, on the first day of August.”

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The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

34. “When the Shah was shot, he staggered several places in the shrine and fell stone dead in the lap of an old beggar woman.”

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Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

35. “Midway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto.”

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All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

36. “Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left!”

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Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri

Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri

37. “He got up at around nine o’clock with the usual feeling of dread.”

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Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe

Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe

38. “The young woman lay on the sands, her mouth frozen in a smile, as if nothing in the whole world surpassed the sweetness death.”

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The Given World by Marian Palaia

The Given World by Marian Palaia

39. “Jasper says this is the kind of heat that makes people in Australia shoot each other.”

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A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor

A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor

40. “My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one.”

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Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

41. “When Madge arrived in Chicago, it was an unusually windless summer day, and she could not take her eyes off the bluest water she had ever seen.”

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Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

42. “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.”

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The Automobile Club of Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany

The Automobile Club of Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany

43. “My wife finally understood that I needed some time on my own.”

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Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

44. “I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus, reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair.”

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Jam on The Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

Jam on The Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

45. “Ivoe liked to carry on about all she could do.”

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Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie

Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie

46. “A green palm wine bottle rolled on the wet London Street.”

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A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin

A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin

47. “My mother used to say, ‘Lillian, as long as I’m alive, you must have nothing to do with that woman.”

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Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi

Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi

48. “He’s human, but don’t look into his eyes.”

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Diamond Head by Cecily Wong

Diamond Head by Cecily Wong


49. “Inside the car, it smells like hibiscus.”

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Sweet Medicine by Panashe Chigumadzi

Sweet Medicine by Panashe Chigumadzi

50.  “‘You cannot fight an evil disease with sweet medicine,’ says the n’anga.”

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Serpentine by Cindy Pon

Serpentine by Cindy Pon

51. “The mountain was still shrouded in mist.”

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What Will People Say by Rehana Rousouw

What Will People Say by Rehana Rousouw

52. “The South-Easter lifted the smell of pig manure spread across farms in Phiippi, crossed Lansdowne Road and dumped it like a wet poep over Hanover Park.”

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The Offering by Salah el Moncef

The Offering by Salah el Moncef

53. “There is something oddly stark and unqualified about the memory of pain visited upon others: a feelings of guilt and unworthiness that is so pervasive it becomes an integral part of everything you are; so total that it strips you of every sense of nuance and proportion, every shade of self-justification that might alleviate your feeling of culpability.”

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Don't Let Him Know by Sandip Roy

Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy

54. “‘Ma,’ said Amit, ‘I have to talk to you about something.'”

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Filed Under: Book Lists Tagged With: diverse novels, diversity in YA, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, We Need Diverse Books

On White Princesses, Disney, CAKE Literary – a Book Packaging Company, and Non-Token Diversity in Storytelling!

April 15, 2014 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon 12 Comments

On White Princesses, Disney, CAKE Literary – a Book Packaging Company, and Non-Token Diversity in Storytelling!

Growing up in England during the 1980s, where blatant racism was perfectly normal, sucked, but at least I knew where I stood. Institutionalized racism is confusing — and Kavya was all of four when she felt the isolating pain that only institutionalized racism can bring.

On New Year’s Day, we are heading out to brunch, and she’s sitting on the stairs, her head in her hands. Crying. I ask her what happened. In most cases, we verbally abuse the pain-inflicting object, followed immediately by a good stomping, and that sorts things out. But this time is different. In-between muted, heaving sobs, she says something that I hadn’t expected for at least a few more years: “I want yellow hair. Like Rapunzel.” She points to the large, manga-eyed, blonde princess with tiny toothpick-wrists, smiling on her t-shirt.

It’s one of those parenting moments where time stands still. I fight the urge to say, “Rapunzel’s hair is stupid. She can go to hell.”

My favourite Princess.

My favourite Princess.

My wife, Sona, sits on the stairs with Kavya and tries to comfort her. Sona’s parents don’t really understand the heaviness of what Kavya is saying, and view it as just a random tantrum.

Unlike some parents I know, I don’t have a problem with Disney princesses, of willful mermaids disobeying their fathers, or the uncomplicated nature of the evil stepmother, of parents disappearing from the narrative through death or being lost at sea. I’ve read the different versions of the stories Disney has adapted and am continually impressed with how they repackage these old stories for modern children and their parents. Taking stories like Snow White about a prince who sees the dead body of a beautiful young girl in a clear coffin, and his first instinct is to kiss her. Then to assume she must want to marry him without even asking her. The adaptations are wonderfully told, with lovely artwork and genuine tension. And that’s what’s important to this storytelling Papa. Morals Shmorals. Besides, I thought we’d have some time to diversify her reading and movies.

Instead of berating Rapunzel for her physical appearance, I ask Kavya if she knows who my favourite princess is. She looks up at me. “Who?”

“Princess Kavya.” I say, touching her nose. Instead of calming her down, she starts crying even louder. After a bit, she says, “Why do you like Princess Kavya?”

I hold her tightly in my arms as we make our way to the corridor of Sona’s parents’ house, which is decorated like it’s 1975: flowery wallpaper, carpets, and cabinets encased in mirrors from floor to ceiling. Those mirrors are lifesavers. It’s incredibly important, especially for little brown girls, to be able to see themselves. Not with any agenda or self-affirming message, just to see some reflection of themselves. She looks at herself nervously at first, and then with a bit more confidence. I plagiarize a line from Winnie the Pooh and tell her, “Because you’re you. And the most wonderful thing about Kavya Kaur Dhillon is that you’re the only one.”  Then I plagiarize some more from a book we recently read together and tell her I love her through and through. She mopily adds that she loves me more than a lot. I tell her that her middle name – Kaur – means princess. “You’re a real princess,” I tell her, and So is your daadi-ma, bhuee, and your bhaina.” Kavya squeals in laughter at the thought of all her female relatives, including her grandma as princesses. “And they all have black hair,” she adds.

“Yes,” I say. “But it’s not important what color hair you have.”

Kavya’s takeaway from that conversation was that after brunch, she wanted me to find her a video of Cinderella with black hair. She wasn’t really upset because of the yellow hair. Mulan has black hair, so do Pocohontas and Jasmine, but they are pretty irrelevant as their movies came out in the 1990s, and their engagement now comes in limited capacity: cameos in other people’s shows, or as part of the Disney princess franchise. Merida has bright orange hair, Snow White has black hair. She didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about what she was going through: she wanted white skin. And that’s why me and Sona immediately understood the repercussions of what our perfect little girl was upset about, and our parents did not and wanted to quickly sort this tantrum out so we could go out to eat.


A princess figurine collection I bought Kavya several weeks prior to this incident when I made the mistake of telling her she could get one thing from the bookstore. I assumed this fool would choose a book. It featured all of the princesses. I thought this would be a good thing. Turned out that all of the white princesses had large, flowing, dresses, and were able to stand properly. The two brown princesses (Princess Tiana wasn’t there) are the ones that kept falling over because their feet are skinny and glued together. It must be a cultural thing. So, obviously Kavya got bored with them and opted for the sturdier white princesses.

The real problem is that it takes a concerted effort to find books or television shows or movies about girls who look like Kavya. And then there isn’t any merchandise. Soon she will understand that white is not just a useless crayon color, but is the default for normal. Thankfully, she hasn’t had her skin color pointed out to her. Yet. And we’re not going to be the ones that mention it because let’s face it, White is not a race or a real color of someone’s skin unless they’re an albino. It’s a power structure.

Some of my students, who are in their 20s, suffer from these same feelings of internalized racism, where they muffle their own voices or those of other students because it’s in contrast with what has been presented to them as normal. In almost all of the introductory creative writing courses I teach in New York City and New Jersey, regardless of how diverse the students are, the characters for their first stories are always white. When you don’t see yourself reflected anywhere, you start believing you can’t exist in these spaces.

A white character is presented as normal, a character we can all relate to, with universal problems, and the mere presence of a character who isn’t white immediately implies that their otherness must play a major role in the characterization. Or that they’re going to die soon, which will highlight the humanity of the white protagonist.

Many extremely talented writers, who know all about complex characters, story structure, and the art of writing kickass stories, choose to create a mythical land that resembles our own, except it’s inhabited entirely by white people. Which is fine, as long as it’s not the only thing I’m being bombarded with or that I’m being told is the most powerfully moving thing ever because a white man wrote it. Or race is so incompetently handled, it’s shocking, like with John Updike’s “Terrorist,” about an angry Muslim, who hates America,  conveniently wants to be a truck driver, and (spoiler alert) plans to set off a bomb in the name of Jihad; there’s also an angry African American character, a bully from the hood, whose mother is a crack addict and names him Tylenol Jones because that’s what crack addict mothers from the hood apparently do. I shudder to think what Updike would have named the character if his mother was Asian.

Shockingly, The New York Times Review of Updike’s 22nd novel suggested he did something much more profound than what he actually did. He wrote a book fueled by his own unsubtle political agenda, lovely sentences, but ultimately a world he doesn’t know, with hollow, racist caricatures instead of complex characters, a novel which he spent too much time researching and not enough time weaving an actual narrative around.  It’s a complete departure from his other stories, which are told with very human characters. He writes white people very well. Integrating race into a story is a craft based issue, whether you’re a writer from a particular community or not.

The CAKE Literary team hard at work.

The CAKE Literary team hard at work.

It's a Pajama Book Party!

It’s a Pajama Book Party!

Enter CAKE Literary.

Sona Charaipotra (the wife), and Dhonielle Clayton (the evil librarian task master), are calling bullshit on this whole approach of excluding certain voices, with their book packaging company, Cake Literary. Whenever Dhonielle comes over to hash out concepts or work on outlines with Sona, Kavya assumes she’s come over to play with her. So that’s what usually ends up happening, which would explain why Kavya referred to Dhonielle the other day as, “Kavya’s friend and Mama’s worker.” I wouldn’t put it past Sona to say, “Worker, I’m going to put my feet up. You go and entertain my child!”

I’ve never really understood what CAKE Literary does – just the term, “book packaging,” sounds like the cloak and dagger of the publishing industry, so I’m glad Sona wrote this guest post for Latinos in Kid Lit, that not only clarified what it is they do, but more importantly why they’re doing it.

Junot Diaz (who I’m taking a workshop with at VONA this summer! ! !) interviewed Toni Morrisson at the NYPL and perfectly captured the sentiment at about the hour mark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5kytPjYjSQ):

“Shifting the narrative center of the telling, the very fact that you were sitting across from these writers as a sort of a strong kind of a north star and saying, listen you don’t have to – by default, write for a white audience, I would think that a lot of what you said really unlocked a lot of these books.”

Here is a tiny snippet of Sona’s piece on Latinos in Kid Lit that makes me momentarily sad, but also hopeful of the types of stories CAKE Literary will create, as well as the change in the literary landscape, that Kavya and millions like her, will grow up with thinking of it as “normal.”

“Growing up as a little brown girl – one of the few, back then – in small-town, suburban central New Jersey, books were my escape. I caused a ruckus alongside little Anne in Avonlea; I mourned Beth along with her sisters in the harsh winter of Maine; I honed my grand ambitions like Kristy and her babysitters’ club; I even swooned alongside Elena over the brothers Salvatore when the Vampire Diaries was originally released. (Yes, I am that old.)

But if you’ll note: in all those books and the hundreds of others I devoured, I never really saw myself, or anyone remotely like me. The majority of characters in books for kids and teens in the ’80s and ’90s were white. And according to Christopher Myers in his recent New York Times piece, “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” the majority still are today, by quite a landslide.

Why is this worth discussing? Because it hurts. A lot. It’s a hit to a kid’s self-esteem to be told – silently, but oh so clearly – that their story is not worth telling, that their voice is not important.”

Now go read the entire piece on http://latinosinkidlit.com

If you still haven’t had your fill of CAKE, find them on www.CakeLiterary.com, and connect with them on twitter @cakeliterary or Facebook. And if you just can’t wait for their novel, Dark Pointe, to come out in 2015 pre-order it here! or add it to GoodReads.  I lied: you’ll still have to wait. Add it anyway.

Shortlink: http://goo.gl/kGyn3c

Filed Under: Lit Life, Musings Tagged With: book packaging, Cake Literary, Dads, Dhonielle Clayton, disney, diversity, Jamaica and Brianna, John Updike, Junot Diaz, Latinos in Kid Lit, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, picture books, princess culture, princesses, Sona Charaipotra, Tiny Pretty Things, Toni Morrison, Young Adult

The Night of a Thousand Exclamation Marks! ! ! Sona and Dhonielle, Two Brown Girls, Bag Six Figure Book Deal and Launch Cake Literary, a Packaging Company Focusing on Diversity in YA!!!

October 21, 2013 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon 4 Comments

The Night of a Thousand Exclamation Marks! ! ! Sona and Dhonielle, Two Brown Girls, Bag Six Figure Book Deal and Launch Cake Literary, a Packaging Company Focusing on Diversity in YA!!!

It’s exclamation mark madness this morning! ! ! ! Publisher’s Weekly just announced that my lovely wife, Sona Charaipotra, along with her writing/business partner/homegirl, Dhonielle Clayton, not only have  a six figure deal for two books from Harper Collins Teen, but have launched their literary packaging company, aptly called CAKE Literary, which they started when still MFA students at the New School’s Writing for Children program. Why? Because they like cake. And they’re hella literary. Hella. And they want to bring more diversity to fiction. That’s reason enough for me to abandon my Ninja Warrior Code on exclamation marks.

pw_cakeEvery single one of Sona’s classmates in the Writing for Children MFA program at the New School (class of 2012), followed by my father, Pashaura Singh Dhillon, are coo coo for exclamation marks. My dad’s bonkers about them. He often starts emails with Hello! or the all encompassing salutation, “Sat Sri Akal ! ! !” This might explain why he gets on so well with Sona, Dhonielle, and that Kavya. In a one minute conversation, they use enough exclamation marks to be locked up for life in the premise for my multi-million dollar utopian society called the Exclamation Games, where tribes of writers compete for use of exclamation marks.

68466_436189063154_3269113_nWhen Sona first decided she wanted to do the MFA program in Writing for Children at the New School, I looked at her and immediately told her to go for it, because there’s nothing more practical for two unpublished writers, new parents, with unstable jobs, and inconsistent income, than for one of them to go for another postgraduate degree in creative writing. Since that worked out so well the first go round.

Aside from the money, there was the intense time commitment and that baby of ours: Kavya was still a tiny little thing, wobbling her little body about (now she insists she is all grown up).

She already had a Masters degree in screenwriting from N.Y.U. and she didn’t have any interest in becoming an adjunct, even though I told her all about the autonomy of being your own boss without being weighed down by things like job security, benefits, a salary. Ways the Man tries to keep you down. She opted for working at home in her pajamas while still avoiding those things.  She just wanted to write, which is probably the most impractical reason to go into an MFA program.

IMG_4086I didn’t hesitate to support her because she is the smartest person I know, with work ethic and a knack for concepting I wish I had. Through pure gumption, she and her sister, Meena, got meetings with fancy pant Hollywood folks when I first met them in Los Angeles over seven years ago. Put them together and you’ve broken ever exclamation mark punctuation rule ever conceived, combining passion with lunacy. Mainly lunacy. And if they see anything laden with sugar, they will scare the shit out of you when they start screaming words like, “CUPCAKE!” “COOKIE!” without any context or further explanation.

They had even started working with a major film production company until Bride and Prejudice came out, tanked, and the whole project abruptly came to a halt because the company felt the perceived audience couldn’t handle a completely different story and genre featuring another brown person. Both sisters are control freaks, so rather than do anything where there were so many variable factors, from whims, to racism, to trends, they smartly opted to wait.  Sona had a plan when she started her Masters in Screenwriting, rather than some vague goal. She knew all about treatments, loglines, inciting incidents, outlining, and if there weren’t so many people with such decision making ability in the process, I know she and Meena would have been screenwriters ages ago, sipping lattes at Coffee Bean and Tealeaf. I am looking forward to seeing the first CAKE project on the big screen.

The first day Sona met all of her classmates, she came home with such excitement, starting with exclamation laced texts. The group instantly clicked, something I’ve only ever experienced when I took a playwriting workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It’s extremely rare to have that. I’ve never experienced that in my MFA program, or at the CUNY Writers’ Institute I attended, as wonderful as the experiences were. And I doubt the New School consistently replicates this type of experience in subsequent years. Chemistry is unpredictable.

_MG_4069I was pretty excited for Sona. She worked like a maniac, getting her own writing done for workshops, reading everyone else’s, as well as doing a lot of freelance journalism assignments, and still managing to spend quality time with me and Kavya. I am constantly in awe. The first time I met Dhonielle, was when I knew these two were going to tear shit up.

They have such passion about their genre, the craft of writing, and I’ve had some great conversations with Dhonielle on the awesomeness of the dead narrator, and when they talk about shows like Vampire Diaries or Pretty Little Liars, things get heated, especially when I make some offhand comment like how I couldn’t tell the difference between any of the characters. Or made the suggestion a shape shifter should eat them all. “Shape shifters don’t eat vampires,” is apparently common knowledge.

They were equally as passionate about discussions about the representation of characters of color and about changing the landscape of fiction. Big talk from a librarian and a celebrity journalist. Yet, here we are. Sona had immense respect for the way Dhonielle’s writing flowed, and moved, and created frighteningly vivid scenes of whatever the hell steampunk is. And Dhonielle and Kavya got along from the get go, and she’s an excellent judge of character. Without Kavya’s approval, that would have been the end of that.

On the first day Sona returned from meeting all her classmates, they had a plan to write a group blog that would eventually serve to promote each other’s work: TeenWritersBloc.com. I was gobsmacked with the audacity of the idea. They were all entering the program with the assumption they would finish a novel and sell it by the time they were finished. Twitter. Facebook. They were all over it. Who the bollocks did these people think they were? Then the book deals started coming through.

While the news in Publisher’s Weekly was great, reluctantly I have to admit that there are some situations where the more subdued punctuation marks need to get the fuck out of the way and make room for the loud and vivacious exclamation mark! Even if that entails Sona pausing dramatically as I’m writing this post, in verbal exclamation marks to convey that we should stop by the bank later today. And my inadequate response of, “Okay.” had to be repunctuated to, “Okay!” before her supersonic hearing registered me speaking. So here’s what the announcement should look like:

This is CRAZY! ! ! !  SIX FIGURE DEAL! ! ! ! ! ! Dhonielle Clayton, A librarian in Harlem and Sona Charaipotra, an entertainment reporter, just scored a six-figure deal! ! ! ! ! Gelfman Schneider agent Victoria Marini sold Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton’s YA mystery Dark Pointe to Sarah Landis at HarperTeen! !  ! !, who preempted! ! ! ! . The book is the first project from the authors’ new packaging company, CAKE Literary! ! ! ! !  and Marini said it’s a fast-paced work “in the vein of Pretty Little Liars” that follows three students at a competitive Manhattan ballet academy ! !  ! all vying for the prima ballerina spot ! ! ! !  Landis took world English rights! ! ! , and the book has also been preempted, again for six figures ! ! ! ! in Germany ! ! ! ! !

cakephotoAt midnight this morning, Sona came downstairs and we of course celebrated the news with her favourite: waffles with warmed up syrup.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be interviewing them for my site on writing, and also for IshqInABackpack.com on their favorite dessert place on the Upper West Side, and the best deep fried chicken joint in Harlem that no ballerina from their novel would set foot in. Watch this space!

If you want to show some writerly love, find them at www.cakeliterary.com, like them on www.facebook.com/cakeliterary, or follow on twitter @cakeliterary

 

 

Filed Under: Lit Life, Musings, Post MFA Life Tagged With: book blog, book deal, Cake Literary, Dark Pointe, Dhonielle Clayton, MFA, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, New School, publisher's weekly, Sona Charaipotra, Teen Writers Bloc, Writing for Children, YA, Young Adult

Back in the Workshop at the Center for Fiction

October 5, 2013 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon Leave a Comment

Back in the Workshop at the Center for Fiction

You would think after my super-intense year of workshops and deadlines at The CUNY Writers’ Institute, I would have some sort of a system: a writing schedule of sorts. Nope.  When I had deadlines, I was a maniac, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning, clicking away at my computer. As soon as April came around and the workshops abruptly ended, I made plans to keep writing. And I did for a few weeks, until some minor event sent me back into the world of dawdling about.

I forget the details. Probably a family gathering, or some trivial drama that put a minor spanner into my routine, that resulted in me going back to that thing I dread: complete inactivity.  I’ve tried them all, libraries, coffee shops, my desk at home. They all work fine when I actually make the time to go sit down and write.

But without deadlines, other work takes over – work I’m being paid for, whether it’s grading or writing articles for Mom.me.  It’s a terrible habit and one I’ve tried many strategies to counteract, and they’ve all worked for a short time, but nothing long-term has lasted. If I were an anesthesiologist or a banker, things would be different . . . .

Towards the end of summer when it was clear I wasn’t going to get shit done with my writing, Sona sent me a link to a workshop at the Center for Fiction, called, “The Sweet Spot” by Marie-Helene Bertino, a name I hadn’t heard before. Initially, I dismissed it because it was all the way out in Midtown, my least favourite part of the City, and it was going to be a knackering commute from New Jersey City University – first a bus, then a train, then another train.

So, I googled her, ordered her short story collection, “Safe As Houses,” from Barnes and Noble, and after I read the first story, “Free Ham,” I immediately signed up. It was, in short, the greatest thing I have read in many, many years. It’s filled with dark humour, and brilliant one liners, with ridiculous Monty Python type of situations to get at a deeper truth. Like a mute Bob Dylan coming to Thanksgiving to explore a strained brother-sister relationship, and a really sad one about an Alien, who is incredibly lonely.

We’ve only had one class session so far, but the students all seem fun and passionate about writing, rather than jaded by being in too long. The technique we’re using for workshop is thankfully the only effective one that exists, where the writer needs to shut the fuck up, while their work is being discussed.

At the Writers’ Institute, it has had disastrous effects in workshops when the writer is allowed to speak, especially ones new to the workshop process, who feel the need to explain to every single commenter what you’re just not getting. The proper term for it is the glass booth, although I like my term a lot better.

For the first class session, we were emailed two short stories, including Sherman Alexie’s story, “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem” (link to the story), which we made comments on before class, and then talked about its structure and effectiveness in achieving what it set out to. Towards the end of the discussion, one of the students asked a great question about cultural representation and the blurry line between that and cultural appropriation.

Actually, she didn’t quite phrase it like that. She said something like,  if you’re not from a culture or community, can you write about it. Marie’s response was a resounding yup, which I completely agree with, because it all comes down to story and character.

I get irritated when “other” characters are dealt with as caricatures, where their race or otherness is the only real character trait they have. They can’t just go off and buy some milk at the store, without explaining themselves first. I’m sure this will come up in subsequent classes. I’m not going to talk about anyone’s specific work because that’s just not cool, but I’ll write about any interesting class discussions on craft or things like that.

We meet every 2 weeks, where 2 people submit at time for the first go, and 3 at a time for the second round. I’m ominously up on Halloween!

I already feel invigorated enough to start writing, and love that the class is pretty small: 5 students, who are all chatty and have interesting backgrounds. Marie offered some great gems of information: “I’m proud of my long list of rejections. I got rejected 35 times, but if I hadn’t sent it to 37 places I wouldn’t have been accepted into two.”

And then there’s me, who sent two stories to exactly two places. There are only a few more months left before the year is out and my birthday’s coming up in December, so I’m making it my goal to finish two short stories, have them in polished shape, and submit them to a tonne of journals.

Enough lounging about on a Saturday afternoon, I have a story to write!

Filed Under: Lit Life, Musings, Post MFA Life Tagged With: center for fiction, craft, creative writing, Marie-Helene Bertino, MFA, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, post MFA, short-story, submitting to literary magazines and journals, workshop

Theater Review: Notes On Neil Labute’s “Reasons to be Happy”

June 11, 2013 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon 2 Comments

Theater Review: Notes On Neil Labute’s “Reasons to be Happy”

Neil Labute's play, "Reasons to be Happy"Over the weekend, Sona surprised me for our anniversary by taking me to Reasons to be Happy, a new play by one of my favorite playwrights, although you may question how much I like him at the end of this post: Neil LaBute. As a special bonus, Pam (Jenna Fischer) from the office played Stephanie the angry, racist hairdresser. That’s not really her title. Or maybe it is. This is about as far as you should read if you don’t want me to reveal anything more about the play.  It’s still playing if you want to get tickets: http://www.mcctheater.org. Then come back and read my rant. I mean, review.

Ahem: Spoiler Alert.

Three years after a volatile break up, Greg and Stephanie run into each other in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s and old wounds resurface. They broke up because he had casually mentioned to a third party she had a “regular” face, and she flipped out, unveiling deeper issues of beauty, society, and the fickleness of their relationship. This play picks up where the other left off and deals with the aftermath.

A few scenes in, at Stephanie’s insistence, Greg agrees to give their relationship another go. There are just a few hurdles. Stephanie is married, and Greg is dating her former friend, Carly, a single mom, who we find out just before the intermission, is pregnant. Like a telenovela, except with a Nirvana soundtrack. Stephanie assumes that Greg agreeing to restarting their relationship means he will actually do something and promptly ends her marriage, moves back with her parents. He, on the other hand, does nothing and continues going through the motions of being in a relationship with Carly.

But he isn’t rejecting Stephanie. He wants them both, and in this world LaBute has created, Greg has the power to choose either, and in the end he magnanimously chooses to reject both of them and find himself by taking a teaching job in New York City. The ending is very hopeful and gives the impression that as unlikely as it might be, he and Stephanie have a shot as the curtains come to a draw when she is reading a NYC travel guide in the break room. The character of Kent, a seemingly minor character, acts as the foil to Greg. He is Carly’s ex-husband, an alpha male, and although he can’t properly express himself with much eloquence, there’s a poignancy and grief to his eloquence that not many playwrights could get across very well.

As I sat through Reasons to be Happy, at first it seemed as though it was quite a departure from Neil Labute’s other plays because it’s not as dark in tone and every character has some genuinely hilarious lines, but mainly it ends on a happy note. Initially, I also thought the female characters were written well, given their circumstances, which is of course a situation created by LaBute. But when we left the theater and I thought more about it, I was surprised at how similar it was to Fat Pig. which is brutal in the way he assaults the comfort of the audience from the get go. Things that I glossed over and forgave the main character for was one line Carly says. “I took care of it,” referring to the abortion she had and her lack of emotion, letting Greg off the hook. Stephanie has ended her marriage because she thought there was something real here, and these are all things Greg set into motion, and he doesn’t seem bothered that his child has been aborted.

LaBute skillfully creates a plot that is not any different from his other plays. It is pretty dark, laden with meanness, even though it is unintentional, and there are the usual characters he tends to explore: straight, white people in dysfunctional relationships, with a straight, white male in a position of power. Like Tom from Fat Pig, Greg controls the fate of the story and the lives of the women involved. The other male character is a foil to show that under the façade of politeness and nicety, he is an asshole. Except in this play, the foil is as nice a guy as you’re going to find in a Neil LaBute play.

Unlike his other plays, where the tension and meanness is unrelentless, in this play we’re put at ease with unrelenting zingers that serve to wrap this story up as comedy. He successfully manipulates the audience into not feeling angst when it’s all over and the tension does not feel suffocating. Through the humor, we discover a lot about the characters, and although there are some major implausibility issues with some of the scenes (to start: why the fuck would both girls agree to meet him in the break room? Why are they so desperate to be with him that they give him the power to choose one of them like this a 1970s porn? And he just magically gets a full time teaching job in NYC. Just like that. That happens). Greg is that non-committal, wishy washy, heterosexual, white male, unwilling to make a life decision that LaBute likes to use to put a lens on larger issues.

He writes dialogue extremely well, but I did find the stereotypes a little grating once I left the theater. And Greg, the substitute teacher, who is at a much higher intellectual and cultural level than anybody else in the play because he reads, is being fought over by two working class women, and Kent, also working class, can’t express himself because that requires going to college, and can only do things that involve physical prowess.

Stephanie is a hairdresser, so obviously she’s not very clever or educated, and LaBute uses that to channel casual racism as part of her character.

“You and your fucking words,” Stephanie says. She confuses Holland Tunnel with Hellen Keller, who she knows nothing about. Established early on that she’s not very bright.

Somehow they get on the topic of Rhode Island, which she has no clue about its location or anything about it. She’s a hairdresser. They don’t know about these things. Greg mentions Brown University being there. “Brown? The color of dogshit,” she says, making her a potentially racist hairdresser.

When he refuses to make a decision, she calls him, “Gandhi or that black one.” Of course he’s the only one who knows the answer.
“oh fuck em, theyre Asian. They can wait.”

Carly, a single mom, is outwardly strong, and while she doesn’t give Greg power over her decision to have an abortion, she is ultimately a vulnerable girl with the same track record in relationships as Stephanie. So it makes sense for her to want a deadbeat, lying, substitute teacher in her life.

Carly feels rejected when Greg rejects her sexual advances. Shows her vulnerability. “I feel safe.”
“It’s not 1845 anymore. I have options.”
“If there is no us, there is only me.”

“I feel like I could love you”
“I dont need a dog. I need a man.”

Kent, makes equally poor choices in relationships and realizes how badly he fucked up the best relationship he had with Carly, but he’s doing alright in the sexy lady department, even if he isn’t happy. He has an incredibly beautiful girlfriend, or so he claims, but laments to Greg that men are always checking her out. Because she’s so hot. On the bright side, he talks about his major sexual conquests he’s been her first for, because these things are important.

Picks up book on table. “White fang. Sounds gay.”
“She’s really cute, Jennifer,” Greg says about Kent’s daughter.

“Dont be gay”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone says she looks like me”

“You’re so diplomatic. You should work in an embassy. Is that the right word?”

“I just think reading is kinda useless. Even if youre doing something stupid, at least youre doing something.
“Reading is selfish. Instead of reading, you could be out doing something useful. Like building a church.”
“Has reading made you any happier?”

As much as it seems like I didn’t enjoy the play, the contrary is true. I think he’s a fantastic dramatist and writes dialogue better than many writers I’ve read. For a longer rant on the issue, read my review of Fat Pig.

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Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Best play, broadway play review, Fred Weller, Jenna Fischer, Josh Hamilton, Leslie Bibb, MCC Theater, misogny, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, Neil Labute, Pam from the Office on NBC, playwright, race and representation in fiction

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I Got This

about I write fiction. I am a Papa. That pretty much sums up what I blog about here. I am a contributing writer for Mom.me and was featured on The Stir's 2013 list of 10 Best Dad Bloggers. I have an MFA in creative writing and teach fiction and literature in NYC. I read. You should too. Read more about me.

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