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Spotlight image: Author Uma Krishnaswami, photo by S. Shrikhande
Today we are excited to welcome Uma Krishnaswami to Cynsations. Uma was one of my semester-long mentors during my MFA journey at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. We first connected over our shared Indian heritage and immigrant lives but since then Uma has given me invaluable advice not only on the craft of writing but also on how to craft a writer’s life.
Reading her new book Birds on the Brain (Groundwood Books, 2024) was for me a lesson in learning how to create an early middle grade character with a distinctly desi yet universally appealing voice. Below Uma shares with us the process of creating this book. You can show support for your local Indie bookstore by ordering Birds on the Brain via this link.
The two covers of Birds on the Brain: North American edition (left) illustrated by Julianna Swaney and Indian edition (right) illustrated by Chetan Sharma. (Used with permission).
Birds on the Brain is the second book in the trilogy that began with Book Uncle and Me (Groundwood Books, 2016). This story about three friends wanting to make a difference in their community is both engaging and informative. How did you decide to write a sequel? And what were the challenges in penning this story from a craft perspective after the passage of nearly a decade?
Book Uncle and Me was first published in India in 2012, after it won the Scholastic Asian Book Award (from Scholastic Asia and the Singapore Book Council). Yes, I know, it was a roundabout journey.
The sequel came from a Q&A session I did during Covid with 3rd/4th graders through the North Vancouver library system. One of the kids asked if there was going to be a sequel and I said, offhandedly, “I don’t know, should there be?” They were quite animated about it. I’m not in the habit of trusting shiny new ideas so I must admit I didn’t get right to work. But that session had planted a seed and over the course of the next couple of months I found myself writing chapters.
The fun part was realizing that it couldn’t just be a sequel. There had to be three books. Because there are three friends, and book one is in first person from Yasmin’s viewpoint, it was necessary to give Reeni and Anil their own viewpoint narrative as well. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that Book 1 really did contain a kind of unstated promise that each of the kids would get to tell some part of their collective story.
I think the biggest challenge I had was that I’d forgotten lots of details from the first book so I had to keep going back and checking things—timelines, locations of buildings, things like that. I found that I remembered the characters quite clearly, but then I’d have to go back and look up some of their interactions in the first book to make sure that they felt consistent with what I was writing in the sequel.
Could you tell us about the journey of Book Uncle and Me from its first avatar as a verse novel in 2012?
Book Uncle and Me was originally written in unrhymed verse and published that way in that first Indian edition.
Why verse? A whimsical choice, really. I was experimenting with short forms and short lines and creating a story that made big leaps from scene to scene and line breaks felt in order so I put them in.
Interestingly, when Scholastic Australia published it they took out all the line breaks. So, if you read the Australian edition it feels odd, with some lines sounding truncated and others running on for too long. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea.
When Groundwood published the North American edition, we re-edited the whole thing, keeping it in prose but adding text where that was needed and particularly attending to transitions. You can make leaps in verse that don’t work quite as well in prose. Still, at points where I got bogged down in writing the second and third book, I’d rework small sections in verse, just to get the energy flowing again. Then I turned them back into prose. It proved to be an enormously helpful strategy.
Your books laced with desi cadence and characters, set in India, and full of the contradictions that exist there are a joy for me, especially since I was fed a diet of Enid Blyton and other British authors in my own childhood. Birds on the Brain is uniquely Indian yet universal in the bird counting and bird watching in urban spaces that happens across the globe. How did you decide to include the birding concept in this early middle grade? What was your initial discovery writing phase like?
I too read Enid Blyton but later I read P.G. Wodehouse. The first book I read that seemed to give me permission to write about India in English was The River by Rumer Godden (Little Brown,1946; filmed 1951).
The birding element came out of rereading Book Uncle and Me to get a clearer picture of Reeni, since she was the narrator for this story. In the first book, Yasmin describes Reeni as “wild about movies and all wild things,” so I started there.
I always start writing in a notebook in long hand, and when I did that, thinking about Reeni being in her world and not knowing what she might want from it, I found myself with a very rough draft of the opening scene. And there was a bird in it, a bird that she doesn’t quite see. Maybe it was a metaphor for what I didn’t quite see yet in the story but it worked.
Right away, I knew I needed to narrow the interests that Yasmin had noted. It wasn’t until the first round of edits that I decided I’d simply have Reeni state the evolution of her interests in her own way. Children do often leap from one deeply felt preoccupation to the next, after all—we’ve all done that in childhood. It’s part of how we develop and begin to define ourselves.
So I suppose I didn’t have to do much writing to get there, it was like a puzzle piece that fit from the start.
The North American and Indian edition of Birds on the Brain released on August 6, 2024. What was it like to work with two different editors and illustrators on the same book, for a simultaneous release date? Did you have any inputs with regards to the illustrations chosen for either edition?
It’s been really interesting especially because the edits for both editions came in very close to one another so in some ways it felt like one continuous process. I’ve written a blog post about my own big takeaway on the use of italics for Indian language words in the Indian edition, as opposed to not using them for non-English words in the North American edition.
See how I frame that? Indian language words? Non-English words? So I wrote about it, because It was an unexpected learning experience for me. In a good way. It showed me what I thought I knew already–that so-called rules are often merely conventions. Here’s more on the subject.
I did get to see roughs of illustrations for both editions and offer comments on both Julianna Swaney’s loving, lively images and Chetan Sharma’s sharply expressive ones. Here’s Julianna’s account of illustrating the book.
It’s intriguing that you have referenced a memoir about ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali in the text, a book that the protagonist Reeni turns to several times during the course of this story. What drew you to include that book in particular?
In Book Uncle and Me, I use a book with a story about a king of doves and a hunter, as an anchor for Yasmin’s relationship with reading and eventually with the wider world around her. That was an imagined book. At first, I thought I’d just make up a book to use in a similar way in Birds on the Brain. And I thought it should be a biography of Salim Ali who is such an iconic figure in Indian ornithology.
I started searching for books about him that I might use for source material. That was when I found out about Zai Whitaker’s book, Salim Mamoo and Me [illustrated by Prabha Mallya] (Tulika, 2017), written for children and with a completely delightful family perspective.
I wrote to the publisher, who kindly provided me with a PDF version and once I’d read it I knew I had to refer to it. I don’t use direct quotes, although I do clearly spell out both title and author in the text. While my story isn’t dependent on any material from this book, it was fun to use this little intertextual element, and I hope it will invite young readers to check it out.
I understand that writing about the birding enthusiast Reeni turned you into an amateur bird watcher. Could share your experience of using the eBird mobile app that you mention in the book?
I don’t name the app in the book but it’s definitely eBird, which I’d used in Canada and the U.S. before I started writing Birds on the Brain. I’ve always enjoyed spotting birds, but it was an occasional indulgence, nothing systematic.
When I was in India, while working on early edits, it occurred to me that I should use the app there as if I were Reeni. What would she look for? What would she notice?
That was a lot of fun, trying to inhabit the character while walking around, phone in hand, eyes turned to the treetops. I’d try to find spaces to do that, which can be challenging in the city but I found a park or two, and there were always the compounds of apartment buildings. It was funny as well, having to quickly bring myself back to reality when I ran into people who assumed reasonably that they were interacting with, you know, the absent-minded woman before them.
The marvel of it was that birds showed up for me. They were the ordinary, everyday birds of the region—babblers and parakeets and mynahs, with the occasional ibises and cranes flying overhead. I did hear a peacock once, in raucous stereo sound that fed right into the final scene of the book. To top it all, I received a very nice certificate from a birding group in India in appreciation of the 22 checklists I had uploaded to eBird!
I noticed that Yasmin, Reeni and Anil all three children in Birds on the Brain don’t have any siblings. They are also from three different faiths. Was this a conscious decision on your part? I wonder if their social activism is heightened because they are surrounded by adults dealing with real life issues on a daily basis?
Mitu, I’m laughing at this question because you’re the first person to point out that these three are only children. You’d think I’d have noticed this by now. I do realize that growing up as an only child, I find the whole sibling dynamic thing mystifying. A cousin of mine, also an only, once likened our mothers and tribe of aunts to the United Nations—the alliances keep shifting and they’re always renegotiating the same treaties! I guess I defaulted to a known family context here without even realizing it.
There’s a lot of my childhood self in both Reeni and Yasmin. I read constantly and I spent a lot of time up in trees. I loved visits to small towns and rural areas with green open spaces, so rare for an urban Indian child to experience. I never missed having siblings because of course, not having them, I didn’t know that there was anything that needed missing. I don’t think I had an activist streak. I did feel strongly about things that seemed unfair but I never felt empowered to do anything about them. I was, however, a reader and a writer.
I did make a conscious choice about the three children coming from families with different religious and even linguistic backgrounds. I wanted to brush in those differences with a very light touch and I was very sure that I didn’t want to make them the focus of the story. And yes, I think these kids, individually and collectively, bear witness to the day-to-day the issues their parents deal with. At the same time, I wanted to keep all of this clearly in the children’s perspective. I wanted them to be able to exercise their voices, which isn’t something that we give children room to do in real life.
In Birds on the Brain, the word iridescence stands out for me, it brings the story full circle and it is sprinkled in between when Reeni can’t find any light shining on the dire situations she finds herself in. How do you decide what vocabulary words to include in books for young readers? Is there a special significance attached to this word ‘iridescence’ for you?
Not to me but it became clear from the very first draft of the scene that it had significance for Reeni, as a marker of both her friendship with Yasmin (who shared the word with her in the first place) and her delight at glimpsing those shiny feathers. So, I knew right away that I would need to weave it in somehow, although I didn’t know I’d be returning to it at the very end of the book.
I don’t think about this choice as including vocabulary words. Because these books are all written in first person I need to keep my rhetorical choices in sync with each narrator’s voice. And I need to make sure that each voice feels distinct, with its own habits and idiosyncrasies. So at the stage when I’m making those choices, I’m not really thinking about readers, I’m thinking about characters.
In this book, you seed the idea of the next book in the trilogy, with Anil’s solar panel project. How was the creative process of crafting the third book different from Birds on the Brain?
It was harder in some ways, because I needed to nod to both previous books while still enabling the story to stand on its own. I needed to wrap up some threads from the first two books or at least bring them to a point where they could reach into a future that I wasn’t promising to write. And finally, Anil is a private, quiet character, and in the first two books he’s quite happy to express himself in karate moves. His preferred mode of handling conflict is to walk away. And he’s often okay with the girls speaking over him—the only time he protests is when they try to speak for him.
You are the calmest person in the children’s writing fraternity that I know. Do you have an inner critic who challenges your writing choices? When you are stuck, what do you do to get unstuck? Is there a favorite writer or poet who gives you inspirational strength?
I must be doing a great job of masking inner turmoil! I’m not terribly calm and I’m as prone to panic and self-doubt as anyone else—maybe even more than most. What I am is driven. And over the years I’ve grown to understand both what I know and the limits of that knowing.
I do have an active inner critic, but long ago, I learned to send her away when I’m writing drafts. I bring her back when I’m ready to revise. I allow her to be much more in charge towards the very end, many revisions into the process, when I’m about to decide if something I’ve worked on really is fit to be read.
As for being stuck, I see that more as a feeling of emptiness. As if I had a word bag to draw on and from time to time it gets empty and needs to be refilled. This isn’t new advice by any means but that sense, call it what you will, is a clue that I need to step away from the words on the page. Reading always refills my word bag. The specific book varies. For many years I would read Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses or Nancy Willard’s The Left-handed Story.
Poetry is also really good for this. These days I’m reading a lot of history books and they seem to work too, especially if they’re well written. Big tomes like Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed (Knopf, 2023) or opinionated deep dives like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland (Pantheon, 2023). I think it’s a combination of distracting me from the work that’s draining me at the moment and allowing myself the space to absorb well-crafted words.
Finally, what message would you like the young readers to take away from this book in particular?
That the world we live in is home not only to people but to other living things. That kids don’t vote but they do have voices, and they are amazingly good at finding creative ways to use those voices. That grown-ups don’t always have all the answers, and that’s okay because no one has all the answers. That if we work with others, we can find answers to difficult questions.
Fun fact about Uma: The lizard or gecko is on Uma’s letterhead. When she was a little girl in India she lived in constant fear of a creeping lizard landing on her head while munching mosquitoes. When she arrived in New Mexico, geckoes in Uma’s words, transformed into, “a symbol of fear overcome, and of the fantastic.”
Cynsations Notes
For over twenty-five years, Uma Krishnaswami has written picture books, chapter books, early readers, short stories, retold story collections, and novels for young readers. Nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2020 and 2021, she has spoken to audiences in the US, Canada, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Uma’s books have been translated into eleven languages. She is published by Atheneum, Groundwood Books, Lee & Low, Dundurn Press, Scholastic India, and Tulika Books (India).
From 2006-2020, Uma taught writing in the low-residency MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is now faculty emerita. Born in India, Uma lives and writes in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Find out more at www.umakrishnaswami.com
Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the 2021 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children. Her short story Toxins is part of ELA curriculum. In previous avatars, she was a textile and fashion designer. When she is not writing, Mitu paints, sews, and builds miniature dollhouses out of recycled materials. More on www.mitumalhotra.com. Follow her on Instagram @mituart or Bluesky @mitumalhotra.