Cynsations is excited to welcome Dr. Linda Weste to share the process behind her recent book, DiVERSE: Conversations with YA and Children’s Verse Novelists (Bloomsbury, 2025). Dr. Weste’s book featuring authors from the U.K., Australia and the United States is a wonderful reference text that expands our understanding of the verse-novel genre.
DiVERSE is an intriguing title. It signals the global stories and authors featured in this book as well as the prefix ‘di’, common in chemistry, points to the dual components of verse novels: the narrative and the poetic elements. Titles are an important part of verse novels, both for the book as well as individual poems. How did you decide on this title for your anthology? Any striking novel or poem titles that have stayed with you over the years?
Titles matter to me. It’s not uncommon for me to fill a page with titles, until one ‘fits.’ DiVERSE was fitting for the reasons you state, but also because I wanted to draw attention to what is defining about the genre, that novels in verse are in verse. The choice was in part, a provocation: no more shrinking away from that word.
Bloomsbury proposed the title Diverse Conversations with YA and Children’s Verse Novelists. ‘Conversations’ conveys a two-way communication, something shared, and that the interviews are accessible. I agreed immediately…on the proviso that we retain the typography DiVERSE at the fore.
As a verse novelist, I am also attentive to titles of poems. I admire writers’ efforts to title individual poems in such a way as to complement the poem or convey another layer of meaning. Effective poem titles enhance the reading experience for me, though I tend not to remember them afterwards, perhaps because there can be so many in verse novels.
DiVerse is a great resource not only for aspiring verse novelists but also educators and librarians who nurture the love of reading in our children. What inspired you to center your current book on this unique genre gaining ground for young readers?
Literature, love of reading; both inspire much that I do—but the decision to compile DiVERSE was also driven by wanting to contribute to the verse-novel genre.
I had studied children’s and young adult literature while completing teaching and education courses and shared the joy of poetry with many younger readers. I was first drawn to verse novels by hearing Dorothy Porter, an Australian poet (1954-2008) read at poetry events; she had trained as an actor and read from her verse novels with such dramatic intensity that it was thrilling.
This interest gained a formal dimension when, for my PhD, I chose to research verse novels. At that time there were few resources, scholarly or otherwise, on contemporary verse novels, and the attitude to them was usually—oh I thought you said ‘first novel’ … what’s a verse novel?
Over several years, I read one hundred or so verse novels across the categories of intended audiences (adult, YA, children’s) and from around the world. I combined critical research (‘Productive Interplay: Poetic and Narrative Strategies in the late-Twentieth and early-Twenty-first-Century Verse Novel) with creative work, a novel in verse, which gave me insights as both practitioner and scholar.
With the PhD complete, I started writing reviews of verse novels for literary journals, presenting papers on verse novels at conferences, and publishing articles on verse novel research. Then, at the end of 2018, after a five-year-stint editing book reviews for TEXT Journal, I had the idea to publish three books of interviews with verse novelists, specifically focused on verse novel poetics. Initially I had in mind single category, global volumes: the first would feature verse novels for adults; the second, verse novels for children; and the third, for young adults.
The first edited book, Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020), comprised twenty-two interviews with verse novelists in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada or Australia writing for the adult fiction market. Many of the verse novelists—including Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D’Aguiar, Philip Schultz, Brad Leithauser, and Ros Barber—are academics or graduates of English Departments or Creative Writing Programs.
When the pandemic hit, writers in the U.K. and U.S.A. were among the first to find themselves in increasingly difficult circumstances. By contrast, writers in Australia—who were working from home during our lockdowns—were quick to respond to invitations, so for the second edited book, I decided instead to do a cross-category, regional collection of interviews. The decision would bring verse novelists for adults, YA, and children together, and improve understandings about verse novels across the genre. The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand was published late in 2021 by Australian Scholarly Publishing and released early in 2022.
The current book, DiVERSE Conversations with YA and Children’s Verse Novelists, continues my exploration of the genre, with global stories and authors, and reflects an editorial commitment to promoting diverse and equitable representation within publishing.
The represented verse novelists are resident in the U.K., Australia, the United States of America or United States Island nations, or Europe, and are esteemed, prominent, and prize-winning—in receipt of some of the most recognized prizes and awards, including the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Writing, the John Newbery Medal, the Randolph Caldecott Medal, the Mildred L. Batchelder Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the Stonewall YA Award, and the Jane Addams Peace Award—a contribution that the book serves to amplify and champion.
Fifty verse novels published from the early 2000s to the present day, by writers including Margarita Engle, Carole Boston Weatherford, Rajani LaRocca, Jasmine Warga, Aida Salazar, and Thanhhà Lai are discussed in the interviews. The collection focuses on the genre’s embrace of diverse voices, identities, and lived experiences, and in particular, how dimensions including racial identity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, health, and migratory status are negotiated in interplay with the verse novel’s poetic and narrative elements.
Posing pertinent questions is integral to deepening our craft understanding and appreciation of storytellers. What was your process for creating a core set of questions for these interviews of verse novelists?
Toward the end of my PhD, I’d held a few informal interviews with local verse novelists, to ask about their writing methods. Those interviews were personalized, so their questions were not suitable for an edited book series. It required a suite of standardized interview questions able to elicit focused responses about the ‘interplay’ of poetic and narrative elements—since that is the specific angle of my research. The questions also needed to be applicable to a range of verse novels across the publishing categories.
I revised and extended the number of questions, and a preliminary interview for the young adult category led to a few minor changes for clarity. The updated interview proved suitable for an international verse novelist writing for children. I then tested the questions by undertaking the interview myself, as a published verse novelist for adults. It was appropriate to experience what was being asked of the participants. It was helpful too, to reflect further on poetic and narrative interplay in my own verse novel.
The nine set questions remained consistent across the three edited books, and to my mind, enable the responses to be considered as a corpus, or body, of comparative interview material.
Did you face any specific challenges while collecting data from twenty-eight authors living and working in diverse time zones and places?
Initiating the interviews felt audacious to be honest. I was unknown to the verse novelists, geographically at distance, and my invitations arrived by email, and without introduction, ‘cold call.’
I was excited about bringing together another collection of interviews—and that drove the process—but interviewing is not just about outcomes, it’s an ethical process that comes with responsibility and a duty of care to interviewees, so whatever challenges arose, I knew they were mine to problem-solve.
I felt a strong connection to this extended, global community of verse novelists—and sought to maintain a sense of integrity in the interview process. I only approached verse novelists whose works I’d read and (with few exceptions), purchased myself. I knew I’d have to earn and maintain the verse novelists’ trust, be transparent in my communication, and accountable in my decisions.
My previous experience as an editor of book reviews informed how I dealt with documentation and data collection. I tracked each stage: invitation, acceptance, submission, copyediting and formatting, for instance, and tabled dates and responses which varied— from ‘no answer,’ ‘too busy,’ ‘try again in June,’ to acceptance-with-provisos, and so on. I devised proformas for communicating but also tailored these to context. I was flexible with deadline extensions, considerate of the writers’ other publishing commitments. I endeavoured to be culturally literate, and mindful of the tenor of my communication. My invitations were sometimes handled by personal assistants and agents; this was more of a challenge for me than direct contact with authors, being kept at arm’s length.
Any writer is familiar with the challenge of time, and knows to be patient, to persist. The interviews in DiVERSE were collected over four and a half years. The publishing proposal process overlapped the final year, then after contracts and final submission, the manuscript took a further year through the stages of production to publication.
Were you drawn in particular to any book/books that you highlighted in DiVERSE? And why?
I gravitate toward works which contribute to a fuller expression of human experience, and all of the verse novels highlighted in DiVERSE broaden representation in some way. The fifty verse novels discussed in DiVERSE offer hopeful and empowering stories of girls and women, the global LGBTIQA+ community with which I identify, First Nations, Black, People of Color, Asian, or from underrepresented ethnicities and religions. There are stories of resilience: of characters between countries, cultures, identities, and languages, and which offer body- and size-positivity messaging or which affirm the experience of being differently abled or living with a chronic medical condition.
The verse novel is a perfect container for transmitting traumatic histories, both personal and political, to the next generation, yet many of these exemplary stories are under attack in the current book banning environment. What are your thoughts on this?
I wonder, rather, whether the verse novel is as imperfect as any other means to transmit traumatic histories? But to take up your point, what the verse novel does offer, I think, is white space for contemplation—and perhaps because it favors revelation in increments, and gives voice to trauma in episodic lyric moments, readers are afforded breath, even as they register the depth charges of that trauma.
I have been closely following what’s happening in the United States, though I have not visited since the change of Administration. The former Executive Director of the American Libraries Association, Tracie D. Hall, spoke to a crowded gallery at the State Library of Victoria here in Melbourne at the end of 2023—about books being banned, challenged, or preemptively removed from public libraries and school libraries, and how these actions compound existing disparities in representation, impact on culture, education, students’ rights, and freedom of expression. Tickets sold out for Halls presentation ‘Dangerous Ideas: The Right to Read Freely.’ I made note of specific impacts of book bans upon verse novels and verse novelists in my introduction to DiVERSE.
You mention the Australian Verse Novels Resource for Younger Readers and Young Adult Readers, a repository of bibliographies set up by NCACL, National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature in your book. How can resources like this help both verse novelists and young readers?
Resources like this contribute to improving the reception of YA and children’s verse novels. The repository is a practical, verse novel ‘go-to’ site for teachers, young readers and librarians, researchers and academic scholars, for the creative and literary industries, and for publishing and marketing sector personnel including booksellers and publishers.
For verse novelists, the resource is invaluable —whether they seek inspiration, or to read for their own pleasure, or want to compare verse novels with particular themes, or are wondering which awards and prizes a verse novel has won, or wish to identify receptive publishers—it’s a site for information sharing, as well as validation.
Your verse novel for adults, Nothing Sacred won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize in 2016. What were the joys and challenges of bringing this story to life? What influenced your choice of point of view from a craft perspective for this narrative set in Republican Rome?
Nothing Sacred is set in late Republican Rome, 66 to 42 BCE. This particular period of history, usually associated with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, has long fascinated writers. I too find it fascinating. I’m drawn to history. I enjoy combing archives for historical records. I find joy in unexpected discoveries. My archival searches often lead me beyond dominant representations of history as I’m curious to know what the records don’t tell me. I’m curious about that gap—between the past I’m able to know and the past I wish to know. I like to situate my historical fiction in that gap, and I enjoy coming up with imaginative ways to re-enliven history.
Writing about antiquity was a challenge. I gave a great deal of thought to many difficult questions linked to narrative structure, story, and writing style. How would I differentiate my story from other historical novels set in this time, so as not to be about the triumvirate leadership of Crassus, Caesar and Pompey? What approach would shape my representation of late Republican Rome? If I chose an historicist approach – to honour historical actuality, authenticity and factuality – I could risk making my representation of the times inflexible, unresponsive to fiction’s needs. If I chose a presentist approach – imposing present-day attitudes on the past – that could stifle the ‘otherness’ of antiquity. It didn’t work to impose either approach on the entire verse novel, so I had to resolve these questions in and through writing, for each individual poem.
Writing historical fiction in verse was a challenge. The classic means of writing about the ancient world is first person prose memoir—which privileges an individual’s point of view. A range of perspectives, however, was better for historical fiction. Present tense was better for immersion and dramatic intensity, and multiple first-person characters were better for sub-plots or complications. Furthermore, I needed a style of poetry that would enable the narrative. I devised present tense, free verse ‘vignettes,’ scenes in which characters could advance the events through their speech and actions. Free verse offered flexibility for line length, rhythm, and for differentiating speech on the page for my ‘feature cast’ of first-person speakers.
You mention a plethora of research from Latin and Greek etymology, architecture and nomenclature to numismatics, which ran parallel to the writing of Nothing Sacred. What tools did you use to collate this information as well as track the timeline in your book? Any key takeaways from this experience that you can share with writers of historical fiction for children?
The research and the writing was a process of synergy for me. As I accessed digitised material in online repositories and archives, or as I read scholarly books on the period borrowed from the university library, I’d jot down information into artists’ sketch journals. Sometimes I’d take screenshots or photographs of objects, then print and paste the images into the journals, too. I wrote while listening to hippopotamus vocalizations on YouTube, and while looking at wildlife videos to help with poems about the Roman munera, or animal games. I like the sound of the pen scratching here and there on the blank pages, and creative ideas would come to me, there and then, so the research was interspersed with imagery, descriptions, similes and metaphors, lines of dialogue, and sometimes whole poems. This synergy is the reason why I say Nothing Sacred draws its stimulus and direction from historical sources about late Republican Rome; the research is there, but it’s absorbed into the creative response.
I used a number of tools to track the timeline of Nothing Sacred with events in the late Roman Republic. I was working with dates before the common era and needed to be attentive. I devised a timeline to align the narrative with events in the late Roman Republic. I also had to align characters with event dates. I created a spreadsheet and entered the birth dates of the main characters, so I could work out the characters’ respective ages at the time of any given event.
From my experience the key takeaways are to immerse yourself in the period, be thorough in noting your sources, have a good reason for whatever choices you make, and expand your word knowledge … as soon as you place characters in an historical story world you’ll be needing new vocabulary.
As a teacher of poetics, do you have a favorite exercise to shake off the blues when a poet is stuck for inspiration? Any mentor texts you can recommend to emerging writers to help develop their poetic muscles?
When I teach undergraduate poetry, the best advice I can give students is to read, and to listen to poetry read aloud. If they face blocks, I suggest they return to poems that give them joy, poems that remind them why they wanted to write poems in the first place.
If the block is not inspiration, but rather, fear of not being good enough, of other people’s judgement, of what their poems might teach them about themselves, the best I can do is encourage them to push on through fear, and to have courage.
“Pare down.” The penultimate line by James Cummins from Inside the Verse Novel is great advice for all writers. In your conversations with the forty-nine author-poets you interviewed for the two anthologies, what was the most innovative way of approaching the writing or revising of a verse novel that you encountered?
I gained many insights about how verse novelists approach their writing—and having also read their verse novels, the outcomes of their labor, I remain impressed by the variation and uniqueness of each. I have come to regard innovation as inherent in the verse novel’s endeavor—not the intention behind a verse novel, but how the interplay of the verse novel’s poetic and narrative elements realizes that intention. It follows that I appraise verse novelists’ approaches to writing on the effectiveness of their choices.
The process of revising verse novels is likely as variable. By the time a verse novel has reached the stage where a complete read through, start to end, becomes possible, each of its poems will have gone through multiple revisions. The ninety-six poems in Nothing Sacred went through twenty to fifty revisions. Words are nuanced, tense is changed then changed back again, lines are lengthened or shortened, stanzas shaped and reshaped, rhythm is adjusted. Verse novelists go through many drafts for each poem, finessing, paring down—as James Cummins advises.
What advice would you give beginning writers attempting the verse novel for children, especially a story with a bilingual protagonist for whom English may be interspersed with another tongue in their daily existence? Any standout examples of linguistic inclusion that you can recommend?
It may be encouraging for them to know that in Anglophone literary markets, verse novels for children are becoming more linguistically inclusive. Increasing numbers of verse novels are being published that convey spoken dialects, or contain speech or dialogue that reflects writers’ lived experience of bilingualism or multilingualism. Some exemplary verse novels that reflect this publishing shift are featured in DiVERSE.
The process of writing a character’s thought and speech draws on cultural knowledge, and entails an understanding of language production and function, and the cognitive processes behind language use—but any linguistic considerations still need to work in interplay with the poetic and narrative elements of a verse novel. Linguistic varieties alter aspects of grammar in the verse novel including the structure of language, pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, as well as creative expression.
It is also worth mentioning that publishers have chosen to translate a number of recent verse novels for children or young adults that were first published in English. The languages of translation, to date, include German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, simple Chinese, complex Chinese, and Hebrew.
Finally, would you consider writing a verse novel for younger readers? Can you tell us about any forthcoming books or current writing projects?
Writing a verse novel for younger readers has been on my mind for a number of years. One current project is a young adult historical verse novel set in Melbourne during World War Two. I have certainly considered writing for middle grade readers too. Another project in progress—an academic work, is not surprisingly, about verse novels.
Cynsational Notes
Dr Linda Weste is a writer, researcher, teacher and editor who lives in Naarm–Melbourne, Australia. A former book reviews editor for TEXT Journal of Writing & Writing Programs, she has edited the interview collections Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing, The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand, and the recent release, DiVERSE: Conversations with YA and Children’s Verse Novelists. Nothing Sacred, her adult category verse novel set in late Republican Rome, won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Weste completed a PhD on verse novel poetics in the Creative Writing Program of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne.
Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The 2021 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children, Mitu has also won scholarships from the Highlights Foundation, Tin House, and a writing residency at the Djerassi Program. Her short story “Toxins” is part of ELA curriculum. Her writing has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Thin Air Magazine and elsewhere. In previous avatars, Mitu was a textile and fashion designer, and has taught in India, the Middle East and the US. Mitu is an active member of CBIG: Children’s Book Illustrators Group, NYC. More on www.mitumalhotra.com. Follow her on Instagram @mituart or Bluesky @mitumalhotra.