Yesterday, I spoke to the librarian technicians of the Toronto Catholic District School Board about the power of story as part of their professional development day. I spoke about the importance of the imagination for healing, building resilience, and becoming independent. After I presented, Elly joined me to talk about her art process. Some of the librarians even helped her build a miniature-paper-theatre right then and there!
What’s a book birth-day without a book party? To celebrate the release of Maya, I’ve paired up with author-illustrator Thao Lam, who also just released her a debut picture book, Skunk on a String. We’re going to celebrate in style on June 4, 2016, at the Toronto Public Library’s Lillian H. Smith branch!
Today is Maya‘s official birth-day! Working on this book has been such a fantastic journey, from writing the story without knowing where it would go, to working with an illustrator who connected deeply with the story and infused it with her own beautiful vision. Speaking of Elly, to celebrate our release date, she wrote up a wonderful post about the making of Maya. It’s a very cool, very rare behind-the-scenes look at how a picture book gets illustrated.
I placed second in Humber Literary Review‘s inaugural Emerging Writers Fiction Contest! I am so delighted. The judge this year is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, and she said some nice things about my story: This story—about the traumatic dismay of immigrating—is most notable for the lucidity of the child’s perspective as it blossoms so naturally. The sentence tension and the scattered, sometimes familiar, sometimes disruptive, images in this piece add a layer of delicious strangeness to what we have come to anticipate from immigration narratives. I especially loved the weirdness of this story’s fractured, matter-of-fact memories and how gracefully Jain articulates her protagonist’s growth.
…for the Writers’ Reserve grants. I am still working away on the novel, and the grant will really help with reclusing myself to get a lot of work done.
I am overjoyed! Kirkus, a leading American book review magazine, just gave Maya the coveted star. Here’s what they had to say: A young girl and her mother soothe themselves to sleep during a power outage in modern urban India, despite how sorely they both miss Maya’s dead Papa. Slim as this plot is, the evocative text and illustrations conspire to tell and show a story that is more than the sum of its parts. The deep purples, blues, and greens and the rich blacks of MacKay’s constructed “paper theater” art convey both the scariness and the magic of nighttime. These moody darks are perfectly contrasted and illuminated by the glow of candlelight, oil lamps, and the lights of distant neighborhoods. Though he’s gone, Papa’s presence is palpable in the tenderness between Maya and Mumma. The book contrasts dark and light, the modern Indian city and the mythical banyan tree jungle of the bedtime story Mumma tells, the sadness of Papa’s absence and the closeness between Maya and her mother. Maya’s willing imagination conjures the beautiful visual and aural image of a “growling” autorickshaw that becomes a tiger. Following her mother’s lead, Maya understands that the tiger is but scratching an itch and that the snake is just rustling leaves as it moves. When she embraces the nighttime animals of her imagination as friends, she can at last hear the tune of her father’s familiar, lulling whistle. Jain and MacKay’s story and art work seamlessly to convey an important and subtle story of love, […]