Writing for the Children of the Borderlands: Understanding the Rhetorical Practices of Parent-Authors Creating Multicultural and Multilingual Children’S Literature

Writing for the Children of the Borderlands: Understanding the Rhetorical Practices of Parent-Authors Creating Multicultural and Multilingual Children’s Literature

Milena E. Velez

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Findlay’s College of Liberal Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF RHETORIC AND WRITING

June 2020

Committee:

Christine M. Denecker, PhD Chair, Thesis Committee

Elkie Burnside, PhD Committee Member

Megan E. Adams, PhD Committee Member

Christine E. Tulley, PhD Director, Masters of Rhetoric and Writing Program

ABSTRACT

According to reports released by the U.S. Census Bureau, by the year 2042 majority of the U.S. population will be non-white, and as of 2008 almost half of the children under five claimed at least one non-white identity. Yet, the American literature market notably continues to underrepresent people of color in children’s books for all ages, leaving a gap in providing much needed mirrors and windows of identity for all children. This gap has attracted the attention of parents and guardians of multicultural children, who have taken it upon themselves to create and distribute the literature they wish they saw in bookstores. This project reviews data collected through open format interviews with three published parent-authors, and reveals the rhetorical strategies the participants utilized throughout all stages of the writing process, as well as challenges they have faced as newcomers to the writing and publishing spaces. Through the lens of feminist methodology, the project aims to answer the question of what drives three very different individuals to pursue storytelling with no prior experience, and to assume the role of an author, even when they might hesitate to claim authorship as an identity. Over the past few years, an increasing number of parent-authors have inserted themselves into the writing, producing, and publishing spaces in order to provide voices for the children existing in the land between identities, the space named La Frontera, or the Borderlands, by scholar and activist Gloria

Anzaldua. Through this rhetorical act the parent-authors, like the three participants, have extended their own identities into the Borderlands, engaging in pursuit of rhetorical activism that remains largely unrecognized, but will undoubtedly continue to grow in scope and influence.

DEDICATIONS

To my dad, Evtim, who taught me how to read when I was four, but continued to read bedtime

stories to me well beyond that age because I kept asking;

To my mom, Tsvetanka, who gave me my first favorite book, her old copy of Greek Myths and

Legends, and who taught me, out of desperation, how to read silently to myself “in my head;”

To my grandmother, Elena, who held my hands in hers while I learned cursive, and who taught

me how beautiful writing can be;

To my aunt, Rubina, the librarian, for patiently putting away her copy of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn after I left her apartment, every single time;

To my godmother, Miglena, for making me believe I can and should tell stories;

To my best friend, husband, and partner in everything, Joel, for being my rock and always

listening to all of my stories;

And to our daughter, Stella Elena, for inspiring those stories, and this one.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the support of many individuals. First of all, a thank you to Dr. Christine Tulley for being so convincing when representing the rhetoric and writing community to someone who just needed the right push to join. Sincere gratitude goes out to my instructors in the University of Findlay’s MA in Rhetoric and Writing program, who propped up and built upon my underutilized love for writing—Dr. Erin Laverick, Dr. Dave

Essinger, and Dr. Harley Ferris who also taught me it’s ok to be overly excited about sentence diagrams and that, sometimes, the most important lesson is one in kindness. Thank you to Joy

Brown, Dr. Lauren Salisbury, and Bailey Poland for making me feel less alone and less of an imposter. Thank you to Dr. Darlene Johnston for all the support through late night memes and texts, and for showing me by example that motherhood and a full-time job can be assets in and not detrimental to scholarly endeavors. Thank you to my program buddy, the person who pushed me to take my work out of hiding, and without whom I would not be the writer and person I am today—Emily Walling, we’ll always have pudding cups!

Oodles of gratitude and appreciation go to my incredible thesis committee members: to

Dr. Megan Adams, for her passion for storytelling and for telling people’s stories; to Dr. Elkie

Burnside, a friend and a mentor who always knew how to help direct my meandering ideas; and to Dr. Christine Denecker, the guardian and sage who patiently guided me through the journey of this project, and whose gentle, confident, affirmative ways I hope to learn one day.

And of course, to the participants and co-creators of this project—Raquel, Pascha, and

Jerry: without you, your passion, and your willingness to share your experiences, there would have been no story to tell. Thank you!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER I: WELCOME TO THE BORDERLANDS ...... 8

Once Upon a Time ...... 8

Terminology ...... 12

Write Me a Story ...... 19

CHAPTER II. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS ...... 22

Into the Literature ...... 22

The Power of Bedtime Rhetoric ...... 25

Multicultural and Multilingual Children’s Literature and Identity ...... 33

Rhetorical Process and the Writing Community ...... 44

Feminist Methodology ...... 50

Summary ...... 57

CHAPTER III. METHODOLOGY ...... 59

Assumptions and Research Questions ...... 59

Methods of Data Gathering ...... 61

The Participants ...... 62

Raquel M. Ortiz ...... 63

Pascha Adamo ...... 64

Jerry Zhang ...... 66

The Interviews ...... 67

Data Collection and Coding ...... 68

Findings ...... 69

Limitations ...... 70

CHAPTER IV. ONCE THERE WERE THREE PARENT-AUTHORS ...... 72

Critical Imagination: Inspiration and Motivation, Writing Process, and Authorship as

Identity ...... 73

Strategic Contemplation: Who Are The Stories For? ...... 83

Social Circulation: Community Reactions, Support, and Resources ...... 94

Summary and Conclusions ...... 104

CHAPTER V. TOWARDS A HAPPILY EVER AFTER? ...... 106

Summary of Findings ...... 107

Recommendations ...... 110

Outcomes and Looking Forward ...... 113

WORKS CITED ...... 118

APPENDIX A. Interview Prompts ...... 122

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1 Cover of Обичам те цялата/I Love All of You (2017) ...... 10

2 Data from CCBC, U.S. Publishers only, 2015-2018 ...... 37

3 Covers of books by Raquel M. Ortiz ...... 63

4 Covers of books by Pascha Adamo ...... 65

5 Cover of book by Jerry Zhang ...... 66

6 Page from Pepper Zhang, Artist Extraordinaire! (2017) by Jerry Zhang ...... 88

7 Page from CeCe and Roxy: A Day in the Life of Roxy (2018) by Pascha Adamo .... 89

CHAPTER I. WELCOME TO THE BORDERLANDS

1. Once Upon a Time

One morning in early 2015 I was engaged in an activity many new parents are painfully familiar with—trying to keep a wiggling infant occupied, while changing her in the early hours of what had felt like a never-ending night. I was too exhausted to think or be able to react quickly to her movements, and she was interested in absolutely everything around her, making the diaper- change exercise altogether much more challenging. So, I resorted to reciting in a soothing voice the first words that came to mind, making up some nursery rhymes: “Обичам ти ръчичките,

обичам ти крачетата, обичам ти ушичките, обичам ти очетата” (translation from Bulgarian:

“I love your little hands, I love your little feet, I love your little ears, I love your little eyes.”)

Speaking Bulgarian to her was nothing new—as a bilingual parent I was determined to raise our daughter with access to all of the languages representing her mixed cultural background:

American English for her country of birth and citizenship, Bulgarian—the language of my home country, and Spanish for her Puerto Rican father. So, whenever speaking to her, even as an infant, I most often spoke in Bulgarian. That night, as the words flowed out of my mouth and she quieted down in attention, an idea swirled into my head. After tucking her back in her crib, I rushed to the nearest pen and paper to write down the words I had just recited. See, she had been born months ago, and I had not been able to find an infant-appropriate board book in

Bulgarian—one with hard cardboard pages, bright images, and few, if any, words. I had wanted to buy a book to read to our baby daughter, a book that would keep her engaged with the same words and bright illustrations, night after night, while introducing her to her mother’s tongue.

That night, I decided to write one instead.

The story of a parent being unable to find the appropriate reading material for her multicultural child is not unique at all. Currently, in the United States there is an ever-increasing number of children growing up in bilingual and/or multicultural homes and communities.

According to the 2006 U.S. Census Report, forty-five percent of the children five and under were classified as minorities, which was a significant demographic shift over the decade prior (Cohn and Bahrampour 2012). By the time the results from the next scheduled U.S. Census in 2020 come out, what are now considered racial and ethnic minorities, essentially everyone but non-

Hispanic single-race white people, will no longer be minorities. These same minority populations are predicted to, in fact, become the combined majority by the year 2042, growing to represent

54% of the population (Johnson 2010). In other words, in the coming decades there will be an increasing number of parents, guardians, and family members of multiracial and multilingual children, attempting to navigate the formative years between ages 0-12, seeking stories that are representative of the diversity around them to introduce to their little ones. My experience of endeavoring to write a children’s book out of the blue, as unusual as it felt, was not unique in the slightest, as I was about to find out.

Over the next two years, my little writing adventure grew into a beautifully-illustrated self-published board book—Обичам Те Цялата/I Love All of You, originally printed in

December 2017 through a self-printing site, Pint Size Productions, that specialized in personalized children’s board books—anything from photo books to picture books with minimal texts (www.pintsizeproductions.com).

Fig. 1. Cover of Обичам те цялата/I Love All of You, author Milena Velez, 2017.

The illustrations for my book were done by Jessica Meek, an artist from Hawaii who was pursuing her bachelor’s degree in children’s book illustrations at the university at which I was employed at the time. We had met each other while she was working on transferring in to our university, and one day during her senior year we started chatting about projects when I happened to mention writing a children’s book and thinking about having it illustrated. It just so happened that Jessica had to work with a client for a final project for her program, so we decided to give it a try. We met a few times to talk about the vision I had for the book, to discuss the text which was entirely in Bulgarian thus inaccessible for her, and for her to show me some initial sketches of the main characters she had put together. Shortly before finalizing it and sending it to print, the book unexpectedly became bilingual, published in both Bulgarian and English. This decision occurred after a brief conversation I had with Raquel M. Ortiz, a bilingual children’s author, in the summer of 2017.

For Raquel, writing picture books in English and Spanish was also a side project to her daytime career as a research faculty at a department of anthropology in New York City. Meeting

her through a friend, I shared with Raquel my experience conceiving and working on Обичам Те

Цялата/I Love All of You and hoping for some advice, when she asked me if I planned to translate the book from Bulgarian to English and publish it in both languages. I had only planned on the book being in Bulgarian, because that was the language, and by extension the cultural heritage, that I had wanted our daughter introduced to. Yet, once Raquel pointed out that our little girl will one day be speaking both languages, and, besides, there would be a very niche market for Bulgarian-English bilingual children’s literature, she had my attention. Audience and publishing market were things I had never not even considered for my literary project. These were decisions that suggested much larger implications for what I had started almost on a whim.

I was beginning to grasp that even the creation of a simple bilingual board picture book could be a rhetorical act far more extensive and impactful than putting words on pages.

Around the same time I was working on the board book project and coordinating with the illustrator, I started a master’s degree in rhetoric and writing in 2016. The program I pursued combined rhetorical theory and practice in a very specific real-world way, and soon the intensive class discussions allowed me to reexamine everyday activities in my personal and professional life through various rhetorical lens. I was beginning to question rhetorical situations I had never perceived before. During a rhetorical theory class I was introduced to a pantheon of classic and contemporary rhetors, including, serendipitously, the Mexican-American scholar Gloria

Anzaldua through a portion of her seminal work La Frontera/Borderlands (1987).

While reading a segment from her essay “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” (1987) I was drawn into the connections Anzaldua described between the language of one’s ancestors and one’s identity, and the importance of seeing one’s culture represented in small ways in everything around them. The concept of linguistic cultural identity hidden in everyday acts, such

as reading a bedtime story, felt familiar, very similar to what had driven me to speak Bulgarian to my daughter and to compose a simple text I could read to her, over and over again. Knowing that my daughter’s journey to identity discovery will certainly be very different from mine, with her growing up as the child of not one, but three cultures and languages, I was nonetheless attempting to define her and myself in this newfound space between cultures, existing in a No

Man’s Land of sorts. Anzaldua had already given a name to that space, the place-in-between, the one where she herself felt her identity and work existed as well— the name was “La Frontera” or

“The Borderlands.” As I was writing for my private audience of one, nonetheless representing multiple cultures and speaking multiple languages, I realized that multicultural and multilingual children’s literature is, in many ways, for and about the in-between families and children, the children of the Borderlands.

2. Terminology

There are a number of words and phrases specific in their use to this project that I need to define here. These words and phrases have either been borrowed, repurposed, or put together specifically for and as a result of my research.

Borderlands/Children and Parents of the Borderlands

In her works, but especially in La Frontera, Anzaldua speaks of herself as a person of the

Borderlands, the land in-between, both literally, as she grew up on the Mexican-American border, where she and her family felt like strangers in either country, and metaphorically through her experiences as a Latinx scholar, a queer scholar, and as someone whose identity was tied to her language and culture. As Anzaldua defined it, La Frontera or The Borderlands is that land in-

between that encapsulates not just the physical, but also the mental and emotional state of belonging to more than one race, culture, language, sexual or gender identity, while having a home at both and at neither at the same time. In a 1996 interview with Andrea Lunsford,

Anzaldua explained the creation of the concept of La Frontera/The Borderlands term itself as a sort of mestizo/mestiza, or a combination of European and Indigenous American origin. “It’s a hybridity, a mixture, because I live in this liminal state between worlds, between realities, between systems of knowledge, between symbology systems” (268). In other words, the

Borderlands it not only a space where Anzaldua exists through her personal identity, but also as a writer and a scholar. This notion bore a striking similarity with my own experience as I was beginning to write children’s literature with no prior experience but with some experience, as a bilingual parent of a multicultural child, responding to an anticipated need for my daughter’s own visibility. Just like our daughter may claim three different cultures and languages as her own, her identity would one day be defined by not belonging to any one of them as much as it will defined by belonging to any one of them. As her parent and guardian, I saw it as my role to ensure that she sees and hears all stories of her identities in the picture books we read together from a very young age. In the coming years and decades, more and more children and parents will navigate this emotional space, negotiating the multiplicity of belonging to a multitude of places yet to none of them entirely.

The children of the Borderlands would experience an almost constant longing for the idea of home, of belonging to a place or a community, of concrete familiarity. Yet, they are not the only ones living in Anzaldua’s Borderlands. In this conceptual space, we also find their parents and guardians who daily negotiate the reality of being pulled apart by the different cultural identities they represent. Sometimes they face this identity struggle within their own private

spaces like work and home, but often within the public spaces where they are recognized either as Other or as Different from their own child, as the case might be with a family where one parent is not of the same ethnic or racial background as the other, and the child’s physical appearance favors different characteristics than their parents. The Land-In-Between, and all who exist there, are characterized by multiplicity of cultural and lingual identities, as well as by a desire to belong anywhere but there, for children and their guardians alike. The parents and guardians of multiracial and multilingual children, who use children’s literature as identity building blocks for the children of the Borderlands, have themselves become the parents of the

Borderlands.

Multicultural/Multiracial

Recent scholarship sometimes refers to multicultural or multiracial children as Third

Culture Kids, a term coined in the 1950s by American sociologists Ruth Hill Useem and John

Useem (Pogosyan). Third Culture Kids, according to Useem and Useem, are the children growing up in a cultural environment different from their parents’, whether in a country different from their parents’ home country or a different community. While this concept of Third Culture encompasses the complexity of multiracial experiences for the children, it does not directly address the experiences of their parents. Instead, since this project needs a more general categorizing system, I will utilize the terminology Amina Chaudhri uses in her work.

In her book Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature (2019) (more of which will be introduced further in Chapter II), assistant professor of teacher education and scholar Amina

Chaudhri dives into the difficulties of defining terms such as “biracial” or “multiracial” without reworking the entire history of discourse surrounding race and identity in the United States.

Chaudhri raises questions about what defines race and how race and culture are different from one another (11), especially when it comes to identity, both questions that are beyond the scope of this project. Yet, the notions of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are important when identifying the specific audience for diverse and inclusive children’s literature, so their definitions are required for clarification and consistency’s sake. For simplicity, in the project I have decided to follow

Chaudhri’s approach to the terms, and will use “biracial,” “multicultural,” or “multiracial” interchangeably to refer to an identity that consists of two or more racial or cultural heritages, whether a combination of white and non-white or non-white and non-white. As Chaudhri points out, “using [many] terms instead of one lends itself to the pragmatics of writing and calls attention to the arbitrary nature of racial categories” (8). Also following Chaudhri’s methodology, when referring to specific texts I will be adhering to the language used by the author of the text.

Multilingual

Similar to the definitions of “multicultural/multiracial” above, for this research project I use the terms “bilingual” and “multilingual” interchangeably to refer to communities, individuals, and texts that speak with more than one unique language, for instance English and

Bulgarian, Chinese and English, English and Spanish, etc., and for whom each language is a direct reflection of a cultural or racial identity. For example, a child growing up in a Chinese-

American household might speak Mandarin at home, but when attending school or participating in any social activity outside the home, they will be expected to speak English, thus growing up bilingual at minimum. A child who grows up speaking English at home, on the other hand, but learns Spanish or French in school, while bilingual to a point, has no immediate need to know

and speak the second language, apart from broadening their educational knowledge. In other words, when talking about multilingual children, I am not discussing children who simply speak many languages, but for whom more than one language is considered a part of their identity.

There is a significant amount of research tied to the ways in which linguistic identity relates directly to cultural and ethnic identity. “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language,” Anzaldua stated, in no uncertain terms, in Borderlands/La Frontera. “Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (81). Even the way in which she composed—not wrote, but intentionally composed—Borderlands/La Frontera is representative of her Borderlands identity. She readily switches back and forth between English and Chicano

Spanish, between poetry and prose, without providing the reader with a translation because, as readers entering her world, we are expected to subscribe to this linguistic duality and embrace it.

In the same way, children’s literature written in two or more languages celebrates and invites children who have grown up in multilingual households, but can ostracize a reader not willing to be open minded and prepared to enter a linguistic challenge.

Parent-author

The pursuit of belonging and becoming can occur in different ways, and for a few of the parents and guardians of the Borderlands, like me, this pursuit has precipitated in the rhetorical act of creation. Since these authors and their actions are the primary focus of this research project, I have taken to calling them parent-authors in order to adequately reflect the duality of their identity. On one hand these authors are parents, the decision-makers and audience of the literature they select and perform for their children, while on the other hand they have made a conscious decision to be the writers and the storytellers as well. While it may be difficult to track

down every exasperated parent of a multiracial or multicultural child who reached out for a pen and paper or the keyboard in an effort to create what they could not find, it is sufficient to do a quick internet search to find similar examples of rhetorical empowerment have existed for years.

It is easy to find the ordinary people who have turned authors in the blink of desperation, or inspiration, and whom I will introduce later in this project: the Chinese-American father who writes a book about an Asian girl for his daughter, after she informed him that she did not want to be Chinese anymore; or the mother of Eastern European origin who pens one of the first board book series with a mixed character for her daughter, a biracial child. The existence of parent- authors is not a new phenomenon. In fact, over the past few years many celebrities from different industries have utilized the platform their recognition has granted them to advocate for their children and “different” families. Some examples include actor Taye Diggs, who recently published his third picture book, Chocolate Me (2019), inspired by his multiracial daughters with fellow Broadway star Idina Menzel; and fellow actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the author of twelve picture books, among them Tell Me Again About the Might I Was Born (1996), a story inspired by the adoption of her two children. Country music star and devoted advocate for children’s literacy, Dolly Parton created the bilingual picture book Coat of Many Colors/El Abrigo De

Muchos Colores (2016) based on the lyrics of a song she wrote back in 1969, and released it as a part of the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program. Starting in 1996, this program has provided one book a month for free from birth until age 5 for any child who signs up from a participating area, with many of the books in its 60-volume library representing multicultural experiences through books such as an English-Spanish version of The Snowy Day (1962) by Ezra

Jack Keats, Abuella (1991) by Arthur Dorros, and The First Strawberries: A Cherokee Story

(1993) by Joseph Bruchac.

Not a parent herself, however, Dolly Parton’s example shows that parent-authors may not always be parents themselves, but can still driven by desire to write for children with the specific goal of filling a gap they have identified in the need for multicultural and multilingual literature.

Anzaldua herself is another example of a parent-author who did not, in fact, have any children.

Anzaldua wrote three bilingual children’s books—Prietita Has a Friend/Prietita tiene un amigo

(1991), Friends from the other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado (1993), and Preitita and the Ghost

Woman/Prietita y la Llorona (1995)—all of them dealing with multicultural and multilingual identity and life in the physical manifestation of the Borderlands. For Anzaldua and the authors listed above, as well as many others, writing children’s books is an act of rhetorical empowerment, of taking charge in creating and validating cultural identity. Anzaldua explained her motivation best in another interview, this time with Maria Henriquez Betancor, from 1995: “I wanted to reach the Chicano kid, the mexicano kid, the immigrant kids straddling these borders.

But I also wanted to reach kids of color: blacks, Natives. And I wanted to reach their parents”

(245). Parent-authors, whether parents themselves or not, write with the intent to close the gap in multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, and write to and for the children and the parents of the Borderlands, their own dual roles represented equally through their rhetorical identities.

Children’s literature

Children’s literature as a whole is a wildly encompassing genre, but for the purposes of this project I focus specifically on the type of literature intended for pre-readers or early readers, board books and picture books intended for children 0-8 years of age. These are the books chosen for the child by their parent, guardian, relative or teacher, and the narratives are passed to

the child through the performance and voice of the reader, adding an additional rhetorical element to the meaning making of the story. These works are inherently multimodal, as Chaudhri points out, since their readers experience the text through the modes of both language and image

(22), but also through the voice and the performance of the reader. Since this project focuses specifically on the parents or guardians’ dual roles in the creation and performance of these books for a specific audience, I only considered the authors of juvenile children’s literature that includes illustrations as well as text.

3. Write Me A Story

Over the past few years, as I was going through the writing my own children’s book and the self-publishing process, I began comprehending the magnitude of the small literary publishing adventure of mine. While I thought I was simply providing a narrative for our daughter, I was in fact stumbling my way through the rhetorical process of writing a bilingual book for a multicultural audience. When I began translating the original Bulgarian text to

English, I paid attention to the meaning instead of providing a word-by-word translation, thus ensuring that the story was understandable and relatable in both languages. I worked to preserve the message of the book while at the same time negotiating the notions of audience and linguistic differences in rhyming schemes, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. I wanted the story to flow in English like it did in Bulgarian, with musicality and rhyming patterns appropriate for a book written for a young child in the Bulgarian tradition. But primarily, I had wanted our daughter to see herself in the picture book, first and foremost. This desire resulted in including illustrations which, masterfully done by Jessica, were based on my daughter’s look at the time of the writing of the book—the slightly darker skin, short and thin hay-colored hair, round face and

large eyes. We even added a friendly dog as a friend to the girl in the pictures, since one of our daughter’s first words had been ‘puppy’ and she was showing great love for dogs in general. As much as I had wanted her to see herself in the story, however, I also wanted for the book to be appropriate and interesting for other children of parents who spoke Bulgarian and English, other children and parents of the Borderlands. I wanted to give these parents something to read to their little ones at night that would expose the kids to the Bulgarian language, but also would enable them to understand the story and relate to it. My first book did not make any profit, but from the about thirty copies I paid to print, quite a few travelled to the homes of Bulgarian friends, and friends of friends, living across the globe—from Japan and England, and from coast to coast within the United States. Without knowing, I had taken a journey with no guides and no guidelines through the rhetorical processes involved in the creation of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, which was now in the hands of a number of Third Culture

Children and their parents. And yet, I had wondered if I was alone on that journey, until I met other parent-authors who had undergone similar challenges. Thus, this thesis project was born and slowly developed in scope over a period of close to two years.

In the coming pages I explore the rhetorical strategies of parent-authors who enter the publishing world in order to provide the representation and inclusivity in picture books that is still missing in sufficient numbers across the U.S. children’s literature market. The case I hope to advance here is that parent-authors of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature are in many ways rhetorical activists in their own right, and that their voices are a valuable and needed addition to scholarship on children’s literature in all fields of study. Through conducting interviews with three published first-time children’s authors, all of them parents, I try to answer the questions of their motivation and drive—why did they choose to endeavor into a community

and world so far outside of their realm? How did the idea of writing a children’s book come about? How did they begin and conduct the writing process without prior writing and publishing experience? How did they negotiate their dual roles as a parent and caregiver on one hand and a writer on the other? What kind and how much support have they received from their communities and from the rhetoric and composition community in general? What rhetorical strategies did they implement in the writing process? And how did their own identity factor into the writing and publishing process? In this project, I investigate the rhetorical moves necessary for the creation of truly representative multicultural and multilingual children’s literature by the authors who understand the needs of this specific audience best—the parents. In order to gain a full understanding of all aspects of this project, however, first I dove into the available literature addressing all aspects of the project’s focus.

In the following pages, I present the scholarly research available on the rhetorical power of children’s literature in general, the need for and value of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature in specific, and the writing practices of children’s authors, including ones who do not have background of writing children’s literature, all the while identifying the gap in intersecting research that covers all of the above.

CHAPTER II: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

1. Into the Literature

This project was born by my interest in the connections between young children’s literature and the growing need for representation in all media presented to children; between the rhetorical power of children’s literature to create and depict identity, and the process of writing picture books for children; between the role of parents and guardians as secondary audience on the one hand, and the rhetorical shift to authorship that some, like me, have chosen to undertake.

Ultimately, I was asking myself how did other parent-authors negotiate the rhetorical challenges from start (writing process) to finish (delivery) associated with the creation of young children’s literature for multicultural children? What pushed parents like me to begin writing with no prior proficiency in the genre? Through this research I sought to unearth some common experiences in parent-authorship that allowed me as a student and a member of the rhetoric and composition community to understand this new genre that is becoming increasingly more popular as the demographics in the United States are changing.

As I was seeking literature to guide me through the scholarship that may contain answer to the questions laid out above, I was beginning to see the many misconceptions surrounding the way I conceptualized the rhetorical process of writing a children’s book as I had experienced it.

First of all, author’s identity was a fluid concept—I had written and published a book, yet I didn’t consider myself a children’s author, rather someone who wrote a children’s book out of necessity. Similarly, it was difficult to identify children’s authors by occupation, since not all of them held the title of authors. When I spoke with Raquel Ortiz, for example, I assumed that for her publishing bilingual picture books on the side had been a move entirely unrelated to her primary occupation, more of a whim, like mine, or an alternative way to explore her creative

talents. Yet, as I later came to find, she had published not just one, but four books and was actively working on a few more, surely deserving the label of “children’s author.” I also knew that when I tried to find children’s books that featured multicultural or multilingual characters, I had faced a difficult time. I was certain that I must have missed them, hadn’t looked in the right places. I had been convinced that while not many mainstream children’s authors seemed to have written for the rapidly growing population of multilingual and multiracial children in the United

States, scholars in the areas of education, literature, and, certainly, rhetoric and composition must have already been talking about the importance of representation and the ways in which we write for multicultural children’s audiences. I was also already considering pursuing another writing project, another picture book, yet I still didn’t feel like I belonged to the children’s book industry or dared call myself a “children’s author.” I was an outsider, and as such, I wanted to investigate the rhetoric of creation of a children’s book. As Donald Murray brilliantly summarizes in the beginning of his article “Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product,” I was looking for the process that can be “put to work to produce a product which may be worth your reading” (4).

Yet, when I began researching the rhetorical process of writing for children, specifically with a focus on multiracial and multilingual identities and their expression in picture books, I ran into a gaping lack of scholarship.

The scholarly resources I continuously encountered when researching multicultural children’s literature can be catalogued in a few different fields. From the rhetorical field, the research focused on the subversive power of children’s literature (Lurie, Saunders, Rose,

Bainbridge, Noda), its ability to persuade, instruct, construct identity, and serve as a tool in the hands of adults used to mold children into predetermined roles as members of a given community. In the social studies, such as education, sociology, and linguistics (Norton,

Chaudhri, Larrick, Sims Bishop), the scholarship concentrated on the necessity for well- researched and well-written children’s literature with multiracial and multilingual characters.

Yet, some scholars addressed both the ability of children’s literature to influence and shape, and the urgency with which we should regard the creation of quality ethnic and multiethnic works for young children (Capshaw-Smith, Larrick, Sims Bishop). On the other hand, a few sources delved into the authorship of children’s literature, specifically by writers not traditionally associated with the genre, approaching it both from rhetorical perspective (Butler, Kucirkova, Anzaldua) and purely pragmatic one (Bine-Stock). However, with the exception of Natalia Kucirkova’s article “Parents As Authors of Children’s Digital Books,” no scholarship provided insight into the intersection of writing practices and the involvement of parents or guardians into the writing process for children’s literature.

This project balanced itself somewhere on the borders of all of the above fields. While I investigated the development of children’s literature as a powerful vehicle for national, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identity formation on one hand, and considered the scholarship surrounding the rapidly rising need for quality multicultural and multilingual representation in juvenile children’s literature on the other hand, I mainly focused on the creative process as means of rhetorical empowerment for the parent-authors and the necessity for their involvement in the writing process. Like I had done a few years ago, it seemed that parents, guardians, and educators were entering the children’s literature and publishing industry with no prior experience, joining the writing community because they saw the need for the type of stories only they could provide—tangible, rich with cultural and linguistic heritage narratives, first whispered into existence in front of very small audiences in the quiet hours of bedtime.

2. The Power of Bedtime Rhetoric

In the collection The Rhetorical Power of Children’s Literature (2017), edited by John H.

Saunders, a group of rhetoric and communications scholars made the argument that their two fields should be considering the works of children’s literature as a rich reservoir for scholarly inquiry. Saunders and company claimed that children’s literature serves an important function in an individual’s intellectual and psychological development. In the introductory chapter, Saunders claims the collection to be the first book to examine various children’s narratives from rhetorical and communicative perspective as “sites of rhetorical discourse” (5), and the collection was only published in 2017. Yet, even as he makes that claim, Saunders builds on the work of Alison

Lurie, whose 1990 book Don’t Tell The Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s

Literature provides an engaging look at the power of this genre to shape and influence its readers.

Both Saunders and Lurie point out the significance and wide reach of children’s literature, while at the same time acknowledging the unique characteristics of the genre’s audience—it is all encompassing, including all current and former children. “There exists in our world an unusual, partly savage tribe, ancient and widely distributed, yet until recently little studied,” (ix) Lurie begins her book, and almost thirty years later Saunders quotes the same eloquent mock-anthropological description of childhood directly in his introductory chapter. And it is a pretty accurate description, including the fact that, as Lurie continues, we have all at one point been a part of that unusual tribe and shared in its customs, manners, rituals, and, most importantly, sacred texts. What Saunders calls “bedtime rhetoric” (2) is the process of propagation and continuation of familiar texts across a body of work as vast and as cyclical as the accumulation of human experience. The rhetorical power of children’s literature resides

partially at least in the all-encompassing audience for the genre—not just the children, but their parents, grandparents, guardians, family relations, and educators, all involved in the meaning- making derived from the simple texts before them.

Apart from pointing out the spanning-generations and ever-growing audience, scholars like Saunders and Lurie also argue that children’s literature can perform a specific function in the development of the child as a member of their community. Lurie observes that children’s literature is uniquely equipped to enable young readers or listeners to build a worldview in accordance with the, or often in conflict with, the values and morals of their time. She identifies two kinds of children’s literature—the first kind, the majority according to Lurie, are the stories that tell children what they need to know or believe about the world; the practical ones, teaching morals or manners or both. These are the stories that include “bunny rabbits or little engines who had problems or faults and got into difficult situations” (ix). But Lurie focuses her work on the other kind, the literature that in her mind has had the most staying power because it provides children with a view different from the one of the conventional adult world. These books “mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form,” (xi) she argues, and it is interesting to see how Saunders echoes her sentiment in his own exploration of the genre’s rhetorical power. In his research,

Saunders notices that he tends to gravitate towards children’s books familiar to him from his own childhood. Returning to them from the perspective of an adult and a scholar, he observes new subtexts and commentaries, historical and cultural references that had escaped him before. While

Saunders concludes that it was he, the reader, who had changed thus changing his reading and interpretation of the text, it is easy to make the connection to Lurie’s argument about the staying power some children’s literature works possess. It could be that those books shaped adult

Saunders so successfully, that they drew him back to them all those years later when their subversive messages can be better assimilated by him as a reader and a narrator, just like Lurie claims some books are able to do generation after generation.

The staying power of certain works of literature was evident not just through the generations, but also as I considered the works that both Lurie and Saunders and company reviewed in their books. The stories and books included were all published in English, and originated either on the British or American book market, and they could all be qualified as classics, or having passed the test of time. The Hobbit, Peter Pan, Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss’s works, Alice in Wonderland, Beatrix Potter’s combined works, etc.—I was familiar with all of these texts and acknowledged them as generational classics. They were all books that I had read, or had been read to me, as a child and which my parents and grandparents had also read or had read to them, along with classics of Bulgarian children’s literature. The fact that many of us, regardless of place of birth, recognize staple works of British and American children’s literature as the stories we grew up with, is for a very good reason—according to many sources, children’s literature as a publishing genre emerged and developed primarily in these two markets.

In her work The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), author Jacqueline Rose provides a brief history of the genre, which is a comparative newcomer on the world literary stage. Children’s literature originally emerged as a genre with its own specifications and texts in

England in mid- to late-eighteenth century, mainly as a result of the work of philosophers and rhetors John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rose 8). Both Locke and Rousseau were among the first scholars to assert that childhood is a stage of human development separate from adulthood, thus requiring its own specialized texts, focused on instruction and world-building alike. According to Rose, the emergence of children’s fiction as separate from the didactic texts

most common until then, came from the concept that both the child and the world around them can be seen and grasped. This notion in turn led to a “conception which places the innocence of the child and a primary state of language and/or culture in a close and mutually dependent relation” (9). In other words, the function of children’s literature is to introduce the child to the language and culture of the world around them, and to help them build their identity in relation to both. Since then, the genre has expanded all around the world, yet in many ways the roots that tie children’s literature to national and cultural identity have remained.

Other sources investigated the relationships between communal identity creation and children’s literature as well. Two studies, in particular, discuss the connection between children’s literature and national identity formation. The first study was conducted by a graduate student,

Joseph Sebastian Passaro, as a part of his thesis work towards a Master of Arts degree in history from Miami University in Miami, Ohio. Passaro’s thesis, “Raising Italy: National Character and

Republic Education During the Liberal Era (1876-88),” reviews Guisseppe Garibaldi’s plan to unify Italy by writing a children’s book. In late 19th century, Italy was in an identity crisis,

Passaro writes—on one hand feeling the pressure of acting in accordance to the role of descendants of the Great Roman honor and virtue, while on the other hand dealing with the perception that the “moral misguidance of the church has made them weak and cowardly” (4).

Italian leader at the time, Garibaldi chose to address this national crisis in no other way but by writing a children’s book, one through which the Italian identity would be clearly defined. In many ways taking the approach adopted by today’s parents of multicultural children, Garibaldi clearly understood the power a work of literature for children could contain and unleash by reaching both younger and older members of Italian society as its audience. It is interesting to note, that in time of national turbulence, and about a century after Locke and Russeau helped

define children’s literature as a separate genre, a politician turned to the subversive rhetoric of children’s literature and used it in his goal to unify and uplift a nation in crisis. The texts of children’s literature, and the function they perform when it comes to national identity, can also go beyond identity formation and realization and take on the role of solidifying and preserving that identity, as illustrated both by Passaro’s example of 19th century Italy and the one presented by Joyce Bainbridge in her study of similarities in commonplaces between Canadian and

Australian children’s literature.

Bainbridge’s paper, “Children’s Literature: Vehicle for the Transmission of National

Culture and Identity or the Victim of Massmarket Globalisation?” (2010) reviews the shared history of Canadian and Australian children’s literature in respect to the commonplaces of national identity that appear in both. Bainbridge focuses her research on the idea that a nation’s literature reflects the values, tensions, myths, and psychology that combined create the character of a nation (3). For young readers, specifically, books are the first introduction to their national identity, to the ways they should behave as members of the society they are a part of, introducing them to the moral values and beliefs inherent to their community. What Garibaldi attempted to provide in Italy in 19th century, Bainbridge argues is evident in 20th and 21st century literature for young readers in Canada and Australia, two countries that share many similarities yet are thousands of miles apart. She is able to identify a number of commonplaces—common themes that appear across a variety of works of children’s literature in these two countries, not all at once but frequently enough to be significant. Among these commonplaces are the ones of “wilderness nation,” of countries composed of diverse and distinctive regions, of possessing a strong sense of social welfare and strong indigenous/aboriginal heritage, and of continued equity struggles

(Bainbridge 4-6). What this means is that children growing up in either Canada or Australia will

likely adopt the above notions, molding their own identity around them and internalizing the characteristics associated with belonging to their community—presumably love of nature, open- mindedness, and appreciation of cultural heritage and differences. They would do so in the same way that an American child might strongly identify with American literature commonplaces or a

British child might do with British commonplaces. Bainbridge observes that for “young readers, national literatures play a crucial role in developing a sense of identity, a sense of belonging, of knowing who they are” (3). More than that, as Garibaldi understood in the 1800s and Linda

Wason-Ellam and Peter Purdue confirm in their study “Illustrations in Children’s Literature:

Commonplaces of Culture and Identity,” a children’s literature of a nation is a “reflection of that country’s literary socio-cultural values, beliefs, themes, and images” (269). The stories told to young children perform not just a developmental and educational role, and not only provide critical communal identity building blocks, but they also serve to establish in the child a sense of moral and ethical compass.

Children’s literature possesses a strong rhetorical power for cultural and ethical identity formation, but it also allows the child to begin identifying their sense of belonging by understanding the notion of not belonging, of Otherness. In their article “Reconstructing the

Wilderness: Finding Identity, Culture, and Values in Filipino Children’s Literature,” author

Apple Audrey L. Noda asserted that childhood is an exploratory platform where children learn to define and experience the world beyond their home as Outside, and anyone outside of their immediate family as Other (1). Often, this understanding begins through introduction to children’s literature for the youngest, read to them by a caregiver in their life. As such, children’s literature acts as a pedagogical tool, helping the child develop social and cultural awareness and mentality, but also drawing for them a roadmap for the world ahead and beyond, an instructional

on how to perceive the duality of “us” vs. “them.” In many ways children’s literature, especially young children’s literature, carries a much heavier didactic weight than adult literature.

Defining children’s literature as a map or a tool intentionally devised for pedagogical use exclusively, however, can seem a bit one-sided, according to some sources. A number of scholars, including Rose, Lurie, and Oldenburg, argue that there is more to the genre than a purely didactic purpose. In fact, Lurie goes as far as to separate children’s books into two types—the first type, the great majority according to her, intending to teach something practical, like how an automobile works or who George Washington was, or trying to instill manners or morals in the young audience, or simultaneously serving both purposes (ix). The second type,

Lurie presents, are the books that “mock current assumptions,” and “appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change” (xi). This second kind of literature are the books with the most significant staying power, the subversive works that speak to children and adults alike, the Tom Sawyers, the Little

Women, the Peter Pans, the Cats in the Hats, and the Alices of the world. Other scholars take

Lurie’s argument even further, making a case that children’s literature should be purely for entertainment purposes. One of these scholars is Christopher Oldenburg. In his chapter “TSZ,

TSZ, TSZ to Industrial ‘Cap’italism: A Marxist Analysis of Caps for Sale” in The Rhetorical

Power, Oldenburg presents a Marxists and Burkian reading of Caps for Sale, a 1940 popular picture book by Russian-American author Esphyr Slobodkina. Concluding his analysis,

Oldenrbug implores that children’s literature should “promote the formosity of the imaginary and foment an ebullient escapism from demands of reality,” and not “psychologically and ideologically prepare kids for the workforce” (21). Lurie would agree with him, adding that this kind of literature understands the children’s way of thinking, which is why the works

representing the child’s perspective, and not the adult vision for the child, become favorites and are passed down from generation to generation.

Here, once again, we have to consider the communal identity of each generation, combined with their political, social, and ethical characteristics, as a factor in the books’ popularity, especially when it comes to when and where the stories are first published. As Lurie points out, much of the subversive power of Little Women, for example, has been muted as time and social change have altered the book’s revolutionary message into one more relatable and not as radical (13). Rose, on the other hand, advises that sometimes children’s literature assumes a certain uniform childhood innocence along with a lack of knowledge or experience in both language and culture, but this assumption fails to recognize that a single child might have the experience or the knowledge of a certain situation, even if the child themselves lacks the ability to verbalize that experience (9). In other words, not all children are the same and we cannot consider stories universal when it comes to children’s audience. Just like an adult audience, children are not a homogenous mass with identical backgrounds, emotions, needs, and wants.

This was true back when most of today’s children’s classics were written and is even truer today.

As a group and an audience, children are a racially, ethnically, linguistically, and experientially diverse and unique amalgam of young minds, developing in a world that is as unfamiliar to them as it might be to their parents and guardians, changing and evolving every day. The response to the vastly multicultural children’s audience should be progressively multicultural children’s literature that allows each child and parent to find their own story, as well as to understand the stories of others around them. As Saunders, Lurie, Rose, and Bainbridge illustrate, children form an audience capable of understanding difficult subjects such as race and ethnicity or the concept of otherness. Ignoring this fact would be erroneous and would constrict an author of children’s

literature to overused produce picture books as educational tools only, instead of continuing to compose powerful vehicles for identity creation and reassurance. The disconnect between audiences of multicultural children and families and the children’s book market persists because the market has yet to catch up to the rapidly increasing need for multicultural and multilingual young children’s literature. This disconnect is forcing parents and guardians to pursue an alternative by contributing to the market themselves.

3. Multicultural and Multilingual Children’s Literature and Identity

In the previous section, I presented the literature, which reflected the reasons why children’s literature, especially literature for young children like board and picture books, is extremely important in the development of the sense of self and community during a crucial formative stage of the child’s pre-teen years. In the following pages, I turn the discussion specifically to scholarship and research discussing ethnic and multicultural children’s literature. While examples of children’s literature inclusive of racially and ethnically diverse characters date back to the 1960s, only more recent sources have turned their attention to the true representation of diversity in children’s books, investigating the importance of not just diverse and inclusive literature, but specifically the importance of representation of multicultural and multilingual representation as well as defining the criteria for what constitutes truly representative literature.

Scholar and educator Amina Chaudhri, who was introduced earlier in Chapter 1, illustrates the significance of children’s literature as a “key factor in identity construction,” and claims that, as such, the genre is often analyzed for the ways in which is represents marginalized groups and individuals, whether in a positive or negative, simplistic of complex scenarios (4).

And a key factor for the success of children’s literature that strives to provide an honest and

genuine portrayal of diverse characters and communities is an author who understands the rhetorical structure of such literature: from their audience and message, to the ways in which the act of creating their work will affect the changing perception of the culture or cultures their works represent. Chaudhri argues that the authors’ intentional choices and the characters created by them may resonate with their audiences in profound and unexpected ways, but the significance of the creation of a piece of multicultural children’s writing is closely tied with the affirmation of a child’s or a group of children’s identities. Chaudhri explains that when a child sees themselves represented in the books they have access to in their homes, classrooms, libraries, and bookstores, and find children like them represented in positive ways, the child understands that who they are “matters enough to be in a book” (4). If we consider the U.S.

Census demographic information cited in the previous chapter, there will be an even more significant shift in racial and ethnic diversity among children over the next decade, especially those five and younger. In her 2011 article “Numbers of Children of Whites Falling Fast” for the

New York Times, author Sabrina Tavernese cites the Census Bureau data that had originally forecast that 2023 would be the tipping point for the U.S. population under 18. However,

Tavernese changes gears, the rapid growth amount the Latinx and Asian and multiracial populations has pushed the demographic shift along much faster. By 2019, she continues, the U.

S. might be facing for the first time a year in which white children are the minority (Taversnese).

In other words, we are already behind when it comes to providing the much-needed adequate racial and cultural representation in children’s literature. Having available multicultural and multilingual children’s works is not simply a matter of access or diversity, it is about understanding and collaboration, and about shifting the paradigm, and scholars in the fields of

education and sociology have been talking about the dangers of lacking such literature for decades.

In 1965, the then-former president of the International Reading Association Nancy

Larrick published an article titled “The All-White World of Children’s Literature” in Saturday

Review Journal, for the first time voicing concern about the lack of diversity and inclusion in children’s literature and what that could mean to a society. Since then, Larrick’s article is almost inevitably quoted during any discussion of racial and ethnic representation in children’s literature. And no wonder—over fifty years ago Larrick laid out the exact same issues with lack of or inadequate representation in the genre that are still prevalent today. “Across the country,”

Larrick stressed, “6,340,000 nonwhite children are learning to read and understand the American way of life in books which omit them entirely or scarcely mention them” (63). Investigating further, Larrick conducts her own sampling survey, reviewing over 5000 trade books, or books published by a commercial publisher and intended for general audiences, that came out for children in 1962, 1963, and 1964. Out of the 5206 books by 63 publishers, only 349 included one or more black character, a mere 6.7% representation. Even more surprising to her was the fact that among the top four publishers by publishing volume the books featuring black characters comprised 1/3 less books than the 6.7% average (64), presumably because larger publishing houses either did not see the value in representing children of color in their books, or actively avoided doing so for fear of losing market share. The topics of the books that did represent black characters were also very narrow, Larrick pointed out. Of the 6.7% of books, almost 60% placed the narrative outside of the U.S. or in a far-distant past (64), effectively continuing the Othering of black characters and placing the stories entirely outside of a present and relatable framework for most children. Over the three-year period Larrick surveyed, only 4/5 of one percent of the

books told the story of contemporary black characters, and twelve of these books were picture books, including Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day (1962), a Caldecott winner often credited as one of the first picture books in the U.S. to show a black child as a main character in a narrative that does not focus on the color of their skin. In Keats’ story, Peter is just a boy like any other boy, excited about the piles of crisp fresh snow outside and everything it brings along. The representation many parents and educators seek for their children of color even now, representation separate from the children’s racial, ethnic, or linguistic identity, was scarce back then and continues to be.

In the fifty years since Nancy Larrick’s article came out, scholars have not seen a significant progress when it comes to trade books providing diverse representation of characters.

Finding narratives that comfortably and successfully represent multicultural and multilingual children in a written and illustrated form is still surprisingly difficult in a literature market that generates billions in revenue annually. In her book, Chaudhri discusses the work of the

Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) with the School of Education at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, whose mission is to provide “data on books by and about people of color and from First/Native Nations published for children and teens” (ccbc.education.wisc.edu). The

CCBC has issued an annual report summarizing data trends since 1994. The CCBC’s data primarily focuses on the U.S. publishing market, but they also indicate on their website that they receive some works from Canadian publishers who distribute in the U.S., or books from outside the U.S. that are published by U.S. publishers. The Center has been keeping track of the U.S. literary market since 1985, when they started by tracking specifically books by black authors and illustrators. The most recent data from 2018 (see table below) shows that in 2018 the Center received over 3300 children’s books from U.S. publishers, and out of them less than a thousand

(946) were about a character of color, 28.5% of the books. This was a marginal improvement over 2017 (24.8% of books represented a person of color), 2016 (21.3%), and especially over

2015, the year I first began working on my bilingual board book, when only 14.3% of children’s books published in the U.S. featured a non-white character.

Fig. 2. Breakdown of children’s books by and about people of color, U.S. Publishers only, 2015-

2018. (CCBC 2019)

In other words, as the population of the United States is becoming increasingly more and more diverse, the literature on which the next generations are being raised continues to not adequately represent them, their peers, or the changing face of the country. As many sources already cited have pointed out, diverse and inclusive children’s literature, where multicultural and multilingual voices are represented, is crucial for the children of color, but it is also crucial for white children. Larrick continued her argument in her article, going as far as to say that the impact of all-white books might be even worse on the white children than on the children of color. Although their light skin makes them a world’s minority even in 1965, as Larrick pointed

out, “the white child learns from his books that he is kingfish,” she asserted. “There seems little chance of developing the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as our children are brought up on gentle doses of racism through their books”

(63). Multicultural and multilingual children’s literature is intended not only for the children it represents, but maybe even more so for the white children who, glancing through the windows of the pages before them, can become more aware of the world around them. Twenty five years after Larrick’s article was published, her call to action is echoed in 1990 at the 14th Annual

Reading Conference at California State University at San Bernadino, in the opening address delivered by Rudine Sims Bishop.

An Ohio State University professor of education, Sims Bishop presents one of the most staying metaphors in the scholarship studying children’s literature—that of children’s books as windows, mirrors, and doors. “A book can sometimes be a window,” she begins, pointing out that the view from the window can be new or familiar, real or imagined. “Usually the window is also a door, and a reader has only to walk through in imagination to become a part of whatever world has been created,” (3) she continues, a little later pointing out that “when lightning conditions are just right, a window can also be a mirror, reflecting back for us,” so we can, through the mirror of literature, see or own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience (3). As she continues her speech, however, Sims Bishop narrows down her focus specifically to the role her metaphor plays when it comes to multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, or, as she puts it, literature that represents all of the parallel cultures that exist in the United States. Sims Bishop chooses not to talk about dominant white culture and

Other cultures, instead placing all cultures on the same level, as equal, before calling for their equal representation in the genre. Much like Larrick before her and Chaudhri after her, Sims

Bishop points out that the importance of truly representative children’s literature is both in its role as a mirror for nonwhite children, for whom books are a representation of their language, history and traditions, and values and attitudes, providing them with subtle messages about who they are in a society and what that society values (5), but also for the nonwhite children. Students from dominant social groups, she says, need to be able to look through the windows of books to get to know people whose cultures and histories are different from their own. Otherwise, she appeals, “they will grow up with an exaggerated view of their importance and value in the world—a dangerous ethnocentrism” (7). And that, Sims Bishop concludes, makes children’s books one of the few places that can provide understanding and experience in a society where racism is still a major unresolved social problem. To illustrate her argument for the transformative power of children’s literature, Sims Bishops gives the example of a young boy,

Walter, whose life has been altered by the stories he found in books. She describes him as “a poor Black, inner-city child with a monumental speech problem, a trouble maker in school, a child diagnosed as having emotional problems, a high school dropout” (9). The child she refers to is actually Walter Dean Myers, now a renowned children’s book author and a Newberry

Honor and ALA’s Coretta Scott King Award recipient, whose son, Christopher Myers, also becomes a popular children’s author. In 2014, both father and son Myers responded to the numbers published by the CCBC, indicating that out of the 3200 children’s books published in

2013, a total of only 93 were about black people.

In two separate articles published in The New York Times on March 15, 2014, Walter

Dean Myers and Christopher Myers address the disparity of multiracial children’s literature through the eyes of two black authors. Both explore the role children’s literature representing people of color plays in their humanization, in providing them with the role models and the

narratives that can lift them up as opposed to tear them down. This is why, Walter Dean Myers explains, he writes about poor inner-city children. “I need to make them feel as if they are part of

America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country” (W. Myers NYT). Providing the mirror that shows young black or Latinx or Asian-

American children as successful in their own right can open their doors to social and professional opportunities. Yet, both father and son Myers argue that there is a reason why the representation of people of color in children’s literature is still lagging, and that reason is, as Christopher Myers puts it, the Market. “The Market, I am told, just doesn’t demand this kind of a book, doesn’t want book covers to look this or that way,” he states, rephrasing answers he has previously received from industry folks and booksellers. He continues by pointing out the duality of standards from industry to industry: “the representative from (insert major bookselling company here) has asked that we have only text on the book cover because white kids won’t buy a book with a black kid on the cover—or so the Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way” (C. Myers NYT). This issue with market availability and hesitation to invest in racially and ethnically representative children’s literature is also why some grass-roots movements and organizations have taken the proliferation of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature into their own hands, instead of waiting on the publishing industry to catch up or continuously trying to change it.

The We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) non-profit organization is one such agent of change. Their website (diversebooks.org) and social media channels exist with the sole purpose of highlighting authors who introduce diversity of characters and storylines in their books. The organization’s mission statement is “putting more books featuring diverse characters into the hands of all children” (diversebooks.org), and for them diversity expands beyond racial and

ethnic and into representation including also, but not limited to, LGBTQIA, gender diversity, and people with disabilities. Additionally, the WNDB website strives to provide resources for newcomers into the genre, and it was the very first resources that I could find that specifically acknowledged the phenomenon of non-authors and parent-authors entering the writing and publishing space. The website offers a variety of resources for new authors—from ways to get involved with the organization, to resources for writers who are looking to complete and market their brand new writing projects. Yet, there seemed to be a heavy focus on promoting and assisting in the composition and publishing process for Young Adult (YA) literature. Picture books are often the works introduced to younger children at a time in their lives when it is important to highlight their own identity, or to educate them about the diversity that surrounds them through a multimodal format. However, as much as looked around the WNDB website, there were not many, if any, resources with explicit focus on the picture books or literature intended for the youngest. Even so, the WNDB website, ran primarily by current published authors and educators, was the first example of a community that had come together with the purpose of collaborating on a mission to diversify children’s literature.

While educators, authors, and librarians are turning their attention to diversifying the literary offerings available to the kids they work with, scholars are searching for ways to ensure that the literature featuring people of color is actually representative of their cultures. Donna E.

Norton’s textbook Multicultural Children’s Literature: Through the Eyes of Many Children (3rd. ed, 2009) develops a framework for analyzing multicultural children’s literature for accuracy and authenticity.

An educator herself, Norton has written multiple textbooks and scholarly articles on the subject of children’s literature. In Through the Eyes of Many Children, she lays out the

groundwork for developing a study of multicultural literature through an educator’s perspective.

Driven, as she explains, by the desire to ensure authenticity of the stories represented as examples of their cultures in children’s literature (6), she spends a few years designing an undergraduate and graduate course for her students of education, which allows them to have a step-by-step approach to creating instructional units for their own students in the classrooms.

The approach Norton cultivates consists of five phases. In phase one she introduces the future teachers to the oral tradition of storytelling in general, the transmitting of culture philosophy and language through myths and legends. Phase two has her students diving in specifically into the folklore or mythology of a given area or region—for example, Native

American mythology of the Great Plains or tracing West African stories to southern plantations of the United States (8). Phase three then introduces the study of non-fiction sources that lend deeper understanding of the specific culture or community—sources such as biographies, autobiographies, informational literature, etc. These primary and secondary sources allow the future educators to build a framework for the historical background of the stories they investigate. Then, moving on to phase four, Norton has the students analyze the historical fiction for authenticity through the lens of the sources used in phase three. Finally, in phase five, Norton brings the analysis a full circle by looking at current trends and continuity through contemporary examples of literature representing the featured culture (10). A work that passes through all five phases should provide an accurate representation of the racial or ethnic culture, which the stories represent.

Norton’s phase-by-phase analysis is intended to assist aspiring educators in the task of engaging students through literature, while at the same time invoking them to be critical of the literature available to them. Norton promises that following her approach will allow anyone

dedicated to the study of children’s literature to authenticate various examples of multicultural literature. She goes as far as to claim that the application of her five-phase approach has been a favorite assignment for her students, and that it might, like it did for many of her students, allow anyone who follows it to create their own multicultural stories that accurately depict a culture or a diverse group (11). Along with the WNDB website, Norton’s guidelines were the only other tangentially writing resource for prospective children’s authors with no prior experience that I encountered. Norton’s assumed audience could be anyone with a love for children’s literature and the desire to do right by multicultural storytelling, a genre as different from the rest of children’s literature as diverse the children audiences themselves can be.

Scholarly approaches towards children’s books, and specifically multicultural children’s literature, vary depending on the field of study. While Saunders, Lurie, Rose, and Chaudhri all consider the power of children’s literature from a rhetorical perspective, they focus on the effect of a finished product on its audience, and not so much on the creative process. On the other hand, the most emphasis in research focused on children’s literature is from a didactic standpoint—

Passaro, Norton, Bainbridge, and Noda take this approach. Even when providing insight specifically into multicultural and multilingual literature (Norton, Chaudhri, Sims Bishop), the scholarship does not focus on the rhetorical process of creating the literature, of who the authors are and what drives them. The next section borrows from the field of rhetoric and composition in order to determine the place of authorship of parent-authors within the larger rhetoric and writing community, as well as within the writing process itself.

4. Rhetorical Process and the Writing Community

The fields of rhetoric and composition, which can provide a driving force behind the creation of texts that can fill the gap of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature on the book market, have generated very limited scholarship dealing with the genre of children’s literature as a whole. Additionally, even research cited in the previous section, shows that the multicultural authors’ ability to collaborate and learn from each other in the genre, both for experienced and new authors, is a very recent phenomenon. Yet, writing as a rhetorical activity is often communal, and cannot exist in a vacuum.

Writing is inherently a rhetorical act, but also a deeply social one. When we write, when we create stories, we step on the building blocks of those who have shaped these stories before us, and those who have shaped us as individuals and writers. In his essay “Writing is a social and rhetorical activity,” published in the collection Naming What We Know, author Kevin Rozen argues that writers are inevitably connected to other people, never composing alone but always

“doing the rhetorical work of addressing the needs and interests of a particular audience, even if unconsciously” (17). Consequently, an author sitting down to conceive and compose a children’s book is connected with all others who came before her, to all the writers who sat in front of the white sheet of paper or typed that first letter on the keyboard. Not only that, but her connection extends to everyone who sat by her and read stories to her as she was growing up. In any genre, in any industry, we are connected to the works of others. When it comes to multicultural identity in children’s books, however, the works currently on the market often feel isolated, like floating lifesavers of diversity inside oceans of literature. The connections between authors feel somehow absent, needed. As a result, it would take a lot more effort for a new author to not feel as if the task ahead of her is creating/recreating an entire genre, but rather that she is a part of a tradition,

a community of writers seeking a common goal. Writing is a social activity, Rozen points out, and, I would argue, so is the editorial process, especially for parent-authors who have no prior experience and no support from the traditional publishing structures. The writing process for them does not begin and end with the composition, it extends all the way into the publishing of their works, which is not a new notion in the rhetorical community either.

In his 1972 article “Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product,” Donald Murray identifies five individual writing stages: brainstorming, drafting, writing, editing, and publishing. Murray’s writing process structure is especially appropriate to discuss when it comes to parent-authors of children’s multicultural and multilingual literature. According to Murray, in order to focus on writing as a process and allow it to organically develop, the largest amount of time should be spent in the pre-writing stages, which, according to him, takes up about 85% of the writer’s time

(15). If we compare this back to Norton’s five phases, Murray would firmly place them all in the pre-writing stage, advising any newcomer children’s authors to begin their “research and daydreaming” well before they put pen to paper. Yet, both Murray and Norton address a primary audience of educators in their writing, not the actual final consumers of their advice—the author- hopeful parents who might be struggling identifying with their new identity as writers and, in many cases, probably attempting it entirely on their own.

When it comes to some of the rhetorical aspects of writing for children, and specifically for and about multicultural children, sources tend to disagree on whether the genre is a communal or a solitary one, just as much as they disagree on whether the genre is a serious one or superficial at best. In his article “Holiday Work: On Writing for Children and for the

Academy,” Charles Butler argues that children’s literature is a genre that should be taken seriously and that it can be, in a way, supplementary to scholarly writing. It can provide, he

argues, a certain reprieve from the academe, yet at the same time allowing for an outlet that could put more fire under the creative engine for both genres. Butler reviews the works of the inimitable J. R. R. Tolkien, who was himself a scholar and an academic way before he became a globally-recognized and beloved children’s author. “There can be little doubt,” Butler states,

“that the concomitant work Tolkien did in such subjects as elvish philology both involved and enhanced the skills he used in his academic studies” (165). Butler, a Young Adult fiction author himself, admits that his own scholarly work informs and sometimes inspires his published children’s works. Academic research and fiction writing, Butler claims, not only use the same set of skills, but can and do support and inform one another. Yet, he argues, the academic world largely neglects creative writing (166), which could explain the lack of scholarly literature on children’s writing beyond the purely pedagogical approach.

The concept of “holiday work,” as Butler labels the creative endeavors of academics, borrowing the phrase from yet another scholar-turned-children’s-author C. S. Lewis, presents creative writing in general, and children’s literature writing in specific, as simplistic and almost casual literature that performs a function but does not carry a rhetorical weight of meaning- making. In a way, the concept of “holiday work” echoes the academic criticism that Jonathan

Saunders and company had encountered during the writing of their collection—that kids’ books are just for kids, nothing more than a tool to get the little ones to sleep or help them learn how to read (Saunders 5). What Saunders dubs “bedtime rhetoric,” the process of communicating a narrative not only from the author to the reader (usually a parent or a guardian), but also to the child, is more extensive in reach than it seems at a first glance. Saunders notices, that as he examines the nature of children’s literature, he is often drawn to the same books he was read to as a child. Yet, he sees the same texts through the perspective of experience, as if reading them

anew, and understands the multiple narrative layers in completely different ways—he now sees the political commentary in Dr. Seuss’s books, the cultural critiques in Maurice Sendak’s works, and the historical and literary references children’s books are often rich with. In other words, he argues that children’s literature is not only meant for children, but for the adults these children will one day be, as they return to their own sacred texts, understanding them in a different light.

From this perspective, children’s literature is the genre with the widest possible audience. Yet, the misunderstanding of the rhetorical power of children’s literature certainly explains the large genre-shaped gap in the scholarly work done by the rhetorical community when it comes to the creation of multicultural and bilingual books.

This is why the example of Anzaldua’s work is so striking. As a member of the rhetorical community, and as someone who identifies as multicultural, or mestiza, herself, Anzaldua recognizes the rhetorical power of children’s literature to reclaim or validate cultural and linguistic identity, two of the focal points of her entire body of work. In her essays and books,

Anzaldua often writes about her own experience with language and community, and of the idea that writing in itself can be an act of rebellion. In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World

Women Writers,” published in the collection The Bridge Called My Back (2015), Anzaldua investigates her own complicated relationships with the act of writing as a woman of color.

“Why am I compelled to write,” she asks in the first part of the piece, dated “21 mayo 80.”

“Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive.

Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me”

(167). Thirteen years after writing this, Anzaldua publishes her first two picture books, Amigos del Otro Lado and Prietita y la Llorona. Her children’s books are a direct result of Anzaldua’s desire to tell not only her story, but the story of her culture, her community, and the stories she

didn’t get to read as a child, and to tell them to the children out there who are like her. Anzaldua becomes a parent-authors herself without having biological children, because she writes for her entire community.

In 1998 Anzaldua gives an interview to Andrea Lunsford for a special issue of

Postcolonial and Composition Studies, dedicated to her book La Frontera/Borderlands. In the interview, Anzaldua explains the significance of her children’s books—their stories allow young

Chicano women to see themselves represented, she says, but also the very act of telling these stories is in itself a work of empowerment, a revolution. “There is this little kid—six, seven, eight, nine, ten—who never sees himself represented, so unearthing and nurturing that voice is a part of the activism work” (25). Anzaldua expands on that statement by making a claim Butler will himself make years later—that creative endeavors like writing a children’s book or creating a work of art or a film, can be more than just a creative act. While Butler compared it to scholarly work, Anzaldua equates it to a rhetorical act, and even further than that, an act of activism, of creating a culture. “Writers have something in common with all of these people doing grass roots organizing and acting in the community,” (25) she argues. Writing for children can be about rewriting culture. I cannot help but think that she would have been a part of the

WNDB’s team, if given the chance. Anzaldua’s notion of community, whether cultural or creative, or both, is in some cases what drives many parent-authors on their own journey of rhetorical empowerment, as illustrated by author and scholar Natalia Kucirkova.

Like Anzaldua above, Kucirkova also addresses the need for creation as a part of a community in her book How and Why to Read and Create Children’s Digital Books (2018). In fact, she dedicates an entire chapter to parents as authors of children’s digital books. In that chapter she makes an argument for parental involvement in the children’s literary lives, not only

through reading, but also through story-creating and storytelling, particularly through a digital multimodal platform. While Kucirkova does not directly address parents writing print children’s books, her observations about parents as authors are equally important and valid as a case study, especially when it comes to the creation of multicultural and multilingual texts. In fact,

Kucirkova reasons that parents creating their own children’s texts could be a possible solution to the substantial need for diverse story content in diverse communities.

Pointing out the increased migration and transnational movements in the 21st century, which have led to an increased concentration of diverse languages in small geographic areas,

Kucirkova argues that one way to address the shortage of diverse stories is to encourage and train the parents to create them, and to create them in their own language (127). Not only would this approach provide more inclusive stories, she says, but it will also allow the children to have access to content that is meaningful to them and celebrates their heritage. “A digital book made by parents,” she continues, “can help to preserve the minority language in both written and spoken form. Moreover, if [the parents] narrate stories of local communities, they preserve and propagate local cultural heritage” (127). Kucirkova bases her research on a couple of case studies, one of which is focused on a family literacy program that was successfully used in schools in British Columbia, Canada. The Parents as Literacy Supporters (PALS) program placed emphasis on the unique cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the participating families, and one of the sessions specifically focused on the parents making their own books in their own languages (129). In other words, parents entering the writing world might be a recent, but definitely not isolated phenomenon, and multicultural and multilingual storytelling has come a long way since Anzaldua published her children’s books in the early 1990s.

While Norton, Kucirkova, and the WNDB project, and to some extent Murray, provide resources for prospective new authors, and Anzaldua and Butler articulate the need for non- authors to enter the children’s literature genre, no resources provided a first-hand look through the eyes of parent-authors, or someone who had undergone this work of empowerment themselves. In this project, I focus my research on parents as new members of the writing and composition community, as the activists who are taking the rhetorical steps to reclaim their ability to tell their own stories and the stories their children need to see and hear. I explore the challenges parent-authors encounter as well as strategies they implement to succeed, but I do it through their own voices. To do that, I utilize feminist methodology and research methods that allow for extensive collaboration between the researcher and the research participants. This methodology is appropriate for a research topic so personal and so greatly influenced by individual’s own rhetorical motivation to participate in the writing process. Feminist methodology has customarily served to uncover and uplift the voices of female rhetors that have been lost in the male-dominated rhetorical tradition. In the following pages, I employ this methodology in the same way to amplify the voices of parent-authors that have so far been drowned in the much louder cacophony of the children’s literature publishing industry as a whole.

5. Feminist Methodology

Feminist methodology is an overarching umbrella for research practice in scholarship that exhibits commonalities consistent with feminist research, regardless of whether the research topic focuses on feminist issues or not. Overall, feminist methodology can be defined by three interconnected principles: the promotion of diversity and inclusion in the conducted research as

well as during the scholarly process; the focus on representing the research participants in a truthful, diligent, and diligent manner; and the self-reflective nature of the feminist rhetorical inquiry, which challenges the researcher to examine their own biases and connection to the scholarly topic and participants.

One of the preeminent feminist rhetorical scholars, Dr. Cheryl Glenn, focused her 2008

Chair speech at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) on the ways in which the rhetorical and composition community can and should promote the principles of feminist research in all areas of scholarly work. In fact, in her speech as a chair,

Glenn outlined a new direction for feminist rhetorical studies. Citing the accomplishments of other feminist scholars such as Jaqueline Royster, Wendy Bishop, Shirley Logan, Adrienne Rich,

Cynthia Selfe, and many others, Glenn saw the feminist project moving beyond its initial sustained focus on women, and into a position of securing and creating collaborations

“constructed across acknowledged differences of class, culture, nationality, religion, race, sexual orientation, and, of course, gender” (421). She called out to the CCCC audience to pay attention to the issues of diversity not only within the research field, but also among the students the rhetoric and composition field serves (422). Glenn closed her speech by declaring that “now and together, we must orchestrate our future so that it is shared; we must metabolize our experience into something that is useful, lasting, effective” (431). Scholarship that gives voice to marginalized groups has always been a progressive force within the rhetorical community, and this is where children’s literature, specifically multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, fits in.

Glenn and Jessica Enoch also argue in their 2009 work “Drama in The Archives:

Rereading Methods, Rewriting History” that feminist theory has allowed us to expand our

definition of rhetoric and its practice, as well as the requirements for being a rhetor. Feminist methodology, on the other hand, has allowed us to expand on research methods used for decades, and to see them applied as lens through which we can establish research grounded in the principles of feminist rhetorical theory, even when the research is not exclusively focused on women’s rhetoric and writing. One of the cornerstones of feminist methodology, as explored by editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald in their anthology of women’s rhetoric(s) Available Means

(2001), is the concept of gathering, collecting pieces of rhetoric, sometimes simple “acts of rhetoric,” to build up and demonstrate the existence of a body of rhetoric that has largely gone unrecognized before (xxvii). Much in the same way, in which this project strives to collect and present the works of parent-authors in a unique collection of rhetorical acts. Additionally, when looking at the rhetorical practices of parent-authors of multilingual and multicultural books, rhetorical theory as a whole has not yet caught up, and therein lies the opportunity for expanding the field. According to Ritchie and Ronald, “rhetorical theory begins as a description of practice, then it becomes a prescription of practice,” and is often separated from the context in which the rhetorical acts or rhetorical practice take place (xxvii). Approaching this project through feminist methodology lens allows for the context, in which the parent-authors work, to be considered alongside the rhetorical texts and acts themselves. In fact, it demands that context is considered, because we can recognize that rhetoric occurs within and because of circumstances, not separated from them.

Ritchie and Ronald also bring in the concepts of the homeplace and self-representation that are very much applicable to this project. In feminist rhetoric, the act or the practice often began at the home, from the “material reality of women’s lives” (xxix), and with parent-authors we see similar beginnings. Their rhetorical work begins at home, with their own families and

oftentimes for their own children. Their work is prompted by the reality of the world as a whole, but also by its reflection in their intimate reality within their homestead. Parent-authors endeavor to create representation for themselves and their families by essentially establishing a new genre in the same way that women rhetors of the past and present have had to create their own rhetorical means to “re-present themselves as persons who can speak, who are not invisible”

(Ritchie and Ronald xxix). In the very act of using any means available to them—from

Kickstarter campaigns to social media-driven and word-of-mouth advertising—these parent- authors are following in the footsteps of women rhetors and feminist rhetoric.

Following feminist methodology and rhetorical practices for this project also allows for a more direct contact between the study participants and the researcher, which in turn leads to more interconnected research. In their chapter “Exceeding the Bounds of the Interview:

Feminism, Mediation, Narrative, and Conversations About Digital Literacy” in the collection

Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies (2012), Selfe and Gail

Hawisher review the benefits of feminist understanding of the interview process, as well as utilizing the practice of open interviews in order to develop a more thorough and complex research model. In their research on the development of digital literacies, Selfe and Hawisher argue in favor of the open interview, or semi-structured interview, as a research method driven by feminist principles. In this method, the format allows for some guiding or starter questions or prompts, but the interview largely develops organically by itself, like a conversation led as much by the interviewee/participant as by the researcher. This open format allows for more intimacy and co-creation, and leads to conversations in which all participants, researchers and interviewees, understand that they are “engaged in mutually shaped meaning and that such meaning necessarily is local, fragmented, and contingent” (Selfe and Hawisher 36). In other

words, while the semi-structured interview format affords the researcher the creation of an intimate bond with the research participants, and might lead to shared and reciprocal shaping of the information provided, it is also a format that would make the verification of collected data and reproduction of results nearly impossible.

Yet this method, above all else, allows for the researcher and participants to enter into co- authorship of the research project, a far more humanistic, and feminist, approach. Through implementing a semi-structured approach to their interview, Selfe and Hawisher realized that the project was no longer only their own, but that it also belonged to the people interviewed and surveyed as it told their stories through their own perspectives (41). The researchers continued by stating that they had become “less interested in the God stories that yield coherent narratives of complex phenomena, and more interested in the coyote knowledge of individuals, which provides small but potent glimpses of the meaning people attach to the everyday practices of their literate lives” (42). Once again, the idea of small acts of literacy and rhetoric (like creating children’s books with no prior experience), achieved through any available means, echoes the principles of feminist rhetoric. Furthermore, the interconnectedness of researcher and participants comes back around in the notion of the positionality of the researcher, as discussed by Glenn and Enoch, or how distanced the researcher themself is from the subject of their study, and what is their role in it.

When it comes to positionality, Glenn and Enoch base some of their statements on the work of Jacqueline Royster, who along with Gisa Kirsch established the feminist rhetorical practices method, first presented in an article published in the College Composition and

Communication journal in 2010, and later in their book Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New

Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (2012). In their work, Royster and

Kirsch present four critical terms of engagement, through which the researcher can interact with and interrogate the rhetorical act: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization. In this project, the research methodology will follow the first three critical terms of engagement only. The reasoning for omitting the fourth term of engagement, globalization, is explained in Chapter 3: Methodology.

Royster and Kirsch’s critical terms of engagement have created a completely new framework for engaging with texts and acts of rhetoric when scholarship or background information are limited or nonexistent. Researching the phenomenon of parents who become authors of multilingual and multicultural children’s books has proven to be one such act of rhetoric, which is why Royster and Kirsch’s methods seem particularly appropriate for this project. In addition, Royster and Kirsch specifically indicate that their approach has a focus on a segment of the community of scholars, specifically working in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and literacy (RCL) studies (3), another reason for their methodology to be an appropriate tool for this project. In Available Means, Ronald and Ritchie conclude that in feminist rhetorical tradition, as opposed to the masculinist rhetorical tradition of dominance, rhetorical acts often cannot be neatly separated from rhetorical theory (xxvii). In other words, the study of rhetorical acts performed by necessity, their immediacy in the face of need, like the one for inclusive and diverse children’s literature, in itself can provide foundation for rhetorical theory. Thus, through utilizing three of Royster and Kirsch’s four terms of engagement, this project seeks to position the work done by parent-authors as both rhetorical work and rhetorical research within the RCL community.

A. Critical Imagination

Royster and Kirsch’s first critical term of engagement pushes the researcher to go beyond the collected data or evidence, and “speculate methodically about probabilities” by interrogating the circumstances surrounding the creation of the rhetorical text or act (71). Utilization of this term of engagement can be done through expanding the boundaries of the research project, or, as

Kirsch gives an example, encouraging the researcher to explore unlikely sources and be open to chance discoveries (79). In the case of this project, both unlikely sources and chance discoveries have contributed greatly to the collection and understanding of evidence, as the field of multilingual and multicultural children’s literature is one still developing within the world of social media and crowdsourcing. In many ways, this project shifted and mutated as it developed through the use of critical imagination, and the exploration of the possible scenarios that surrounded the creation of the limited works of parent-authored multicultural and multilingual children’s picture books.

B. Strategic Contemplation

The second critical term of engagement, according to Royster and Kirsch’s feminist rhetorical practices, seeks to reclaim the practice of introspection and reflection, allowing the researcher time to sit with and within their research in a way that is reminiscent of a meditative process. This method of scholarly inquiry calls the researcher to pay close attention to two separate journeys their research undertakes—the outward journey of carefully and intentionally collecting the evidence or data and observing the circumstances around all details, and the inward journey the researcher themself goes on through the process, imagination, and the experience of working with the materials (85).

C. Social Circulation

The third Royster and Kirsch rhetorical term of engagement utilized in this project is the concept of social circulation, especially in terms of the interconnectedness of rhetoric as a process of social interactions through space and time. In their research, Royster and Kirsch touch upon the public vs. private domains of rhetorical expression. This approach provides an interesting perspective on the creation of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, which may sometimes begin as a private act, intended for a very limited audience within the home, and then turn into a public one through the process of publication. Additionally, however, considering the social circulation of children’s literature for multicultural audiences sits firmly within the idea of a rhetorical community that exists on a local and global level. Royster and

Kirsch observe that traditions of authorship and publication are “carried on, changed, reinvented, and reused when they pass from one generation to the next” (101). From the parent-authors turning to their social media spaces for free and cost-effective advertising, to them self-funding their book publications through crowdsourcing, the notion of power and empowerment for these new authors is as fluid as Royster and Kirsch describe it.

6. Summary

Researching the scholarly and popular work investigating children’s literature was a challenging endeavor for sure. Children’s books have been utilized as pedagogical tools for instruction for centuries. Yet, the study of their rhetorical power to shape and affirm identity, whether communal, national, racial, ethnic, or linguistic, has only been the focus of scholars for the past sixty or so years. And work focused on multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, specifically from a rhetorical perspective, has been emerging only in the past three decades.

Children’s books, specifically picture books, can be incredibly complex texts given their far- reaching target audience comprising of not just, or even primarily, children, but also of their parents/guardians, families, and teachers.

It is somewhat easy to see how multiple different scholarly fields would have different ways to approach the study of children’s literature. On one hand, the field of rhetoric has narrowed down its focus on the subversive power of children’s books to persuade, instruct, and construct identity. On the other, the fields of social studies and education, both involved with children’s literature for far longer than the field of rhetoric and composition, have instead turned their attention to the pedagogical value of children’s books, and the practical applicability of the texts, as well as the ability of parents/guardians and educators to identify well-written and appropriate content. Yet, it is striking to notice that in the entirety of the research conducted for this project so far, only one source mentioned the involvement of parent-authors in the children’s literature industry. Kucirkova not only produced a case study of a literacy program that actively involves parents in the production of texts for children, but also articulated the need for parental involvement and the benefits of it to the cultural and ethnic communities.

However, even Kucirkova did not discuss the rising numbers of parent-authors in her work. By simply going to Kickstarter’s page (kickstarter.com) and using search terms of

“children’s books,” I was able to find at minimum of thirty different children’s books in various stages of funding. Many were completed, among them works done by all three participants in this project, and many were still on-going. A brief glimpse through the list shows that quite a few projects were originated by a parent or a family member frustrated by the poor market offerings of quality representative children’s literature, which makes it even more surprising that none of the scholarly fields searched above have studied the parent-authors phenomenon. This research

project seeks to fill this gap in scholarship. In the next chapters, I present the case studies built around three interviews with parent-authors who have published within the past decade, all three of them writing from that space in-between cultures and identities from which Anzaldua herself wrote her children’s books as well.

CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY

1. Assumptions and research questions

As noted in Chapter 2, children’s literature, especially juvenile children’s literature represented most often through board books and picture books, is a potent carrier of linguistic and cultural identity. The subversive nature of children’s literature allows for works from this genre to greatly influence an entire generation. The importance of representation and of diversity and inclusion within the pages of children’s books has increased exponentially over the past decade as a result of rapid rise in the number of children in the United States who are identified as non-white or multiracial, according to U.S. Census data. Yet, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book

Center, the U.S. publishing market continues to deliver insufficient number of children’s books that include a person of color—only about a quarter of all 3200 children’s books published in

2018 were about a non-white character (CCBC 2018 data). In other words, non-white children continue to be severely underrepresented in the books they read or that are read to them, which leads to non-white children often being perceived as Other, as the exclusions, the exceptions both by their white peers and in their own eyes.

In response to the rapidly growing demand and sluggishly provided supply of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature on the book market, an unlikely group of authors are stepping up to fill in the gap. Parents of multicultural and/or multilingual children are taking it upon themselves to write and publish the narratives that fulfil the need they have seen

first-hand through their own experiences—texts representing children of color, children growing up as a part of the LGBTQ community, multiracial and multilingual children, and differently- abled children. The stories needed are stories of representation and inclusion, and parent-authors are inserting themselves into an industry that has long ignored these needs in order to fill them.

This project began as an attempt to collect the stories of parent-authors who enter the children’s book market to fill a gap, and to analyze the rhetorical strategies these parents-authors have utilized as they balance multiple dual identities of author and reader, writer and audience, parent and educator, outsider and insider into the writing and publishing communities. This project also aims to unearth any commonalities that may exist in the writing practices of the often first-time authors, who create works that are inclusive, adaptive, and formative as they work to represent and preserve the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identities of their own communities. The project attempts to answer the following questions:

• What motivates parents of multicultural and multilingual children to enter the writing

and publishing community with no prior experience creating children’s literature?

• What rhetorical and writing strategies do these parents utilize when they first begin

writing their stories?

• How do these parents navigate the duality of their roles throughout the creative

process—they are both the author and the intended audience of their books, they are

both writers and outsiders to the writing community, while they are also negotiating

the multitude of roles they need to fill in their own lives: a parent, a professional, an

author, a publisher, a marketing expert, and so on?

• How do the parent-authors begin and conduct the writing process without prior

writing and publishing experience? What strategies do they implement in their

writing process day to day?

• How much, if any, support have the parent-authors received from their local and

cultural communities, and what kind of support have they sought from or received

from the rhetoric and composition community in general?

• How does their own identity factor into the creation of their children’s books?

2. Methods of Data Gathering

Using the semi-structured interview as presented by Selfe and Hawisher, and three of the four critical terms of engagement of the Royster and Kirsch feminist rhetorical practices inquiry model, both outlined in Chapter 2, I have collected and analyzed the stories of three multicultural parents who have successfully published children’s picture books that represent multicultural and/or multilingual characters. For purposes of accessibility, the research partners were selected based on the following criteria: they reside within continental United States; they speak English and publish at least partially in English; I was able to establish direct contact with them via email and online chat; and they were available for an online face-to-face interview. I focused specifically on finding participants who performed the dual roles of published first-time children’s authors and parents of multilingual or multicultural children.

I had hoped to interview between three to five participants, and initially I reached out to five participants, with three of them responding favorably. Since the purpose of the project is to focus on individual, personal, and potentially private experiences of parents entering the writing and publishing world of children’s literature, and on telling their stories, the small sample size

serves the purpose best. Yet, having three participants still allowed me to have sufficient data to gain insight into the rhetorical process and experiences of the participants with the creation of multicultural and multilingual children’s books.

3. The Participants

Following the principles of feminist methodology, as outlined in Chapter 2, and specifically the findings of Selfe and Hawisher based on their experience with the open interview format, this project accepts the participants as co-authors, assisting the researcher not just as interviewees through their own stories, but also actively engaged in the meaning-making process. Both

Anzaldua and Selfe and Hawisher explored the connection between participating in an interview and the writing process. Anzaldua saw giving interviews as making a connection with the interviewer, but also with new ideas. “When I’m speaking it’s kind of like I’m writing in the process, orally, so that I have to expose myself,” she explained (Interviews 3). Selfe and

Hawisher, on the other hand, spoke of beginning to understand their participants “to be using the interview settings and the narratives they told within these settings as their own personal form of social action, a narrative strategy available to all humans” (39). In other words, in an open interview following feminist methodology, the interviewee actively affects the direction in which the project will continue to develop. For this reason, after the initial introductions below, I refer to the three participants by first name for the remaining chapters, indicating that they are not the subjects of this project but its co-creators.

A. Raquel M. Ortiz

When I began the project, I already had the first participant identified in my mind—Raquel M.

Ortiz. I had spoken to Raquel a few times before I approached her for the project about our mutual interest in writing and publishing children’s books, she being a lot more experienced than

I in the process. In those previous conversation, as brief as they had been, Raquel became the person who inspired me to pursue my own book project, Обичам те цялата/I Love All of You, in the process encouraging me to make it a bilingual one.

Raquel is the author of six published children’s bilingual picture books, including Sofi and the Music, Magical Mural/Sofi y el Músico Mural Magical (2015), Sofi Paints Her

Dreams/Sofi Pinta sus Sueños (2019), and When Julia Danced Bomba/Cuando Julia Bailaba

Bomba (2019), all published by Arte Público Press, University of Houston, TX. She also has two more picture books coming out in 2020 and 2021.

Fig. 3. Covers for Sofi and the Magic, Musical Mural/Sofi y el magico mural musical (2018) and

Sofi Paints Her Dreams/Sofi pinta sus sueños (2019), author Raquel M. Ortiz

Yet, as prolific of a children’s author as she is, Raquel’s primary occupation is actually as a bilingual educator and anthropologist. Since 1996, she has taught in various capacities in institutions in Ohio, Illinois, and New York. Her instructional credits include variety of courses:

Spanish, Introduction to Hispanic Literature, Sociology, and Civilization and Culture of Latin

America taught at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, as well as Cultural

Anthropology, Introduction to Puerto Rican Culture, and Spanish Composition in two New York

City colleges. Currently, she serves as a literacy consultant for a number of organizations, including the New York City Department of Education, Cleveland Public Library, Brooklyn

Public Library, and more.

Raquel is Puerto Rican and lives primarily in New York, NY, but she travels frequently to her home town of Lorain, OH and is very active in the Puerto Rican Community of Western

Ohio and Cleveland area. She has two children—a daughter, Sofia, who is 22 and a son, Cesar, who is 12.

B. Pascha Adamo

Pascha was the second participant I identified, and meeting her was rather serendipitous. She and

I are members of an online community, the Pantsuit Nation Facebook Group, which as of April

2020 had over 3.1 million members across the United States and internationally. The group originated in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, initially as an outlet for the disappointment of Senator Hillary Clinton’s supporters, but quickly transformed into an activist platform for people seeking social and political change. One of the ways in which members began using the group was to lift each other up in support of projects or endeavors others were beginning. This is where I found a post by Pascha in late October 2019, excitedly discussing the

publication of her second CeCe and Roxy book, a board book featuring a biracial girl as the main character. I contacted her through a comment on her post, and later on via Facebook Messenger and phone, as we began discussing and sharing resources on our common interest—writing and publishing children’s books that reflect diversity and inclusion.

Pascha is the author of two published board books, CeCe and Roxy: How We Came to Be

(2018) and CeCe and Roxy: A Day in the Life of Roxy (2019), both self-published through her company CeCe and Roxy Books and originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign. CeCe, the titular character in the books, is a biracial girl who also happens to be the only biracial book character in a board book series. There are at least two more CeCe and Roxy adventures in the works as well.

Fig. 4. The covers of two CeCe and Roxy— A Day in the Life of Roxy (2018) and How We Came to Be 2019), author Pascha Adamo

Pascha identifies as white from Eastern European and Irish descent, her husband is

African American, and they currently reside in Auburn, Alabama with their two children, Sophia who is six, and Judah who is three and a half. 65

C. Jerry Zhang

Jerry happened to be the last identified participant, yet the first one I interviewed because of his responsiveness and eagerness to be a part of this project. I reached out to him after reading an article by Brittany Wong in HuffPost Online sent to me by a friend and instructor who knew the focus of my project. The article, “Dad Creates Book For Daughter Who Didn’t ‘Want To Be

Chinese’” (2017) told the story of how Jerry, confronted by his then-4-year-old daughter

Madison with the news that she didn’t want to be Chinese because none of the characters in her books were Chinese, began the search for picture books that featured Asian characters. What he found out that out of the miniscule number of books featuring a Chinese or Asian American character, vast majority were about being Asian—focused on the culture, heritage, customs, and celebrations. While there is nothing wrong with picture books representing a character of color’s culture and heritage, that was not what Madison was interested in. So, Jerry decided to write his own book with a character whose feisty, strong, and funny personality would match his daughter’s. Thus, Pepper Zhang: Artist Extraordinaire! (2017) came to be.

Fig. 5. Cover of Pepper Zhang: Artist Extraordinaire! (2017), author Jerry Zhang. 66

Reaching out to someone I had only read about on the news did not fill me with promise, but his experience fit ideally within the scope of this project, so I took the chance and it paid off.

Jerry responded in less than ten minutes to my initial inquiry, agreeing to be a participant. A lawyer by trade, Jerry, who is Chinese American, and his wife and now two little girls, Madison

(7) and Everly (4), currently live in New York, NY. He is the author of Pepper Zhang: Artist

Extraordinaire!, Pepper Zhang: The Coloring Book, and another coloring book collaboration with the illustrator of Pepper Zhang, A World of Princesses (2019). All books are self-published through Jerry’s book company, Little Ning Books, originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

4. The Interviews

The interviews with all co-authors took place within a one-week period in the beginning of May

2020. I spoke with Jerry on May 2, 2020, with Pascha on May 3, 2020, and with Raquel on May

8, 2020. Each participant was given a brief explanation of the project via email when invited to participate. Then, upon agreeing to be a part of the project, they were invited to a one-on-one recorded Zoom interview with a duration of an hour and a half to two hours, with none of the interviews reaching two hours. In accordance with feminist methodology, the interviews followed semi-guided open format, and a short list of prompts was provided to all participants prior to the interview (See Appendix A). The prompts were used very sparingly throughout the interviews, usually only to begin the interview and whenever the organic path of the conversation had run its natural course. Following the interviews, participants were sent a few additional clarifying or follow up questions via email, but majority of the evidence was gathered during the interview process.

To ensure equal access, participants were given the same introduction into the project and the same maximum amount of time was provided for each interview. From that point on, the interviews unfolded organically into conversations. All three participants were excited and eager to participate, and the conversations developed easily without the need for the use of prompts.

Additionally, each participant was sent the full final draft of findings and analysis for this project, to ensure accurate representation of their words and statements.

5. Data Collection and Coding

Following the interviews, I spent time reviewing the recordings and utilizing open coding to identify any overarching themes or motifs that might have appeared on a first glance. Through the rhetorical practices of Royster and Kirsch, I was able to sit with the stories given to me, and apply the critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation inquiry tools to engage with this small group of parent-authors and explore their experiences with the writing and publication processes, both professionally and as a personal rhetorical journey. For the purposes of this project, I did not utilize the fourth Royster and Kirsch critical term of engagement— globalization. While valuable in the work of feminist rhetoric, globalization was not as applicable to this study of authors. All parent-authors interviewed were English-speaking or bilingual with English as a primary language, writing and publishing in English even when bilingual, and currently reside in the United States of America. Positioning them within the larger globalized scope of parent-authors around the world would have required expanding this research beyond its current limitations.

The initial review of the recordings was done through the lens of critical imagination, freely listening to the conversations without any notions, at least two weeks after the interviews

had been conducted in order to put some space between the events and the analysis. After the initial review and rough initial open coding for general themes, as listed below, in a secondary review I dug deeper through the lens of strategic contemplation, drawing wider conclusions and more specific connections between the themes discussed by all three participants. The lens of social circulation was most useful during the discussions of the distribution of the texts directly, but also to observe the efforts and agency of the authors in how their texts have been released and treated since completion.

6. Findings

One of the assumptions of this project was that parents of multicultural or multilingual children are resorting to writing and publishing their own texts as an act of rhetorical empowerment, not unlike the acts undertaken by women rhetors throughout history, as they have aimed to discover and claim their place in rhetorical practice. Women rhetors have oftentimes had to create their own space-between, or Borderlands, where they can exist and have a voice. The parent-authors who participate in this project have also carved out their own space-between, where their narratives can be written and delivered to a wider audience, thus not only contributing to the filling of a wide gap on the book market, but also in a way establishing a unique sub-genre: parent-written children’s literature.

Through the completion of open coding, I initially identified four overarching themes within the participants’ narratives:

• Inspirations: the stories and personal experiences the authors drew upon during the

pre-writing and writing process appeared in all three interviews—the inspirations and

motivations behind the writing process, as well as any research done on the writing

process, were discussed by all participants.

• The concept of audience: who was the intended audience for whom the parent-authors

originally wrote their books, and who were the unintended audiences they reached

was another common theme. This seemingly straightforward topic is far more

complex, considering the motivation behind the works of these three authors was to

offer texts that are not currently readily available.

• Community support: from finding illustrators and financial backers, to the social

distribution of their texts through the help of local educators and organizations, all

three participants spoke about how others contributed to their experiences as authors.

• Publication: all three authors shared experiences with the publishing community that

had striking similarities in the way the authors’ ideas of multicultural and multilingual

children’s books were perceived and treated.

7. Limitations

Some of the limitations to this research project are a result of the chosen format and methodology, while others are due to the limited research available on the topic. The nature of a study conducted into a largely unresearched area is that one of the limitations will be the participants pool.

The desired sample size for this project was three to five participants, with final number of three participants. While there are certainly advantages associated with such a small sample size, and many of them I sought in order to successfully follow feminist methodology (a smaller group means more time to focus on the narratives, more opportunity to get to know the

participants as active co-creators and not subject), the one obvious limitation is that each parent- author’s experience could be vastly different from the others, making it difficult to answer the research questions in a definitive way.

A second limitation was the product of the open interview format, which did allow me as the researcher to specifically direct the same questions to all participants, since the conversations developed organically, only formatted by the time limit. As a result, I did not receive parallel data from all participants, making it more challenging to compare and contrast specific experiences. For instance, if one of them spent more time talking about their publishing experience, then we did not have the chance to discuss their perception of their identity as an author.

Finally, the project was limited by the time allotted for the interviews and follow up. As

Selfe and Hawisher (2012) observed, with the open interview format the best results occur after a series of interviews over a period of time, allowing for the connection between researcher and participants to develop and for the project to follow the participants as they grow and develop on their own rhetorical journey. Yet, given the time constraints of the project, as well as the weight of other responsibilities all of the participants carry daily, the interviews were limited to the initial hour and a half plus some minor follow up over email.

CHAPTER IV: ONCE THERE WERE THREE PARENT-AUTHORS

In chapter III, I laid out the rhetorical framework of Royster and Kirsch’s feminist rhetorical practices. This framework applies the critical terms of engagement of critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation to understanding the rhetorical work done by women that has gone unrecognized and under analyzed, in order to understand the rhetorical strategies and situations that led to the creations of the texts these women produced. The reason why I selected feminist methodology for this project was the parallel between the often silent or silenced nature of women’s rhetorical work throughout the ages, which Glenn, Royster and

Kirsch, and Ritchie and Ronald all study, and the nature of the work performed by parent- authors. Their identities as authors of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature exist in the Borderlands, where they are not widely considered authors, yet they have published works; where they have to perform the work of writer and reader, of rhetor and audience, as well as, quite often, the roles or publisher, publicist, creative designer, and distributor. The reason why these parent-authors enter the writing and publishing space is the same reason that often prompted women rhetors to do it—to raise their voices and leave a mark, and both groups begin their rhetorical work in the privacy of their home through the means available to them at the time. Feminist rhetoric expands into research into marginalized groups that are traditionally silenced, and provides them with a stage to perform their texts. The work of parent-authors follows the same pattern—through it, the authors identify the voices of their multicultural communities that have been silences by the publishing industry, and raise them up through the publication of diverse and inclusive children’s literature.

In Chapter IV, I will use the lens of Royster and Kirsch’s three critical terms of engagement to analyze the information gathered through the interviews with Raquel Ortiz,

Pascha Adamo, and Jerry Zhang—three contemporary parent-authors. I also use any information available on Anzaldua’s writing process for her two children’s picture books, as available throughout various interviews she had given over the years. The goal of this analysis is similar to

Royster and Kirsch’s pursuit—to unearth the strategies and understand the rhetorical situations that lead to the creation and publication of multicultural and multilingual children’s literature written by non-authors who choose to enter the genre as outsiders. The critical lenses below have been applied primarily to the information gathered from the interviews, along with information collected through communication with the participants over social media, email, and interaction with their publications—their books and online presence.

1. Critical Imagination: Inspirations and Motivation, Writing Process, and

Authorship as Identity

“Have patience, have patience, don’t be in such a hurry. When you get impatient you only start to worry.”- Herbert the Snail via Pascha Adamo

By design, a researcher utilizes critical imagination lens to intentionally and intensely engage the rhetorical act or acts with the various intellectual rhetorical processes while interrogating the contexts in which they occurred (Royster and Kirsch 71). In this section, I have collected the beginning stages of the parent-authors’ rhetorical process, including the conditions surrounding their inspiration to write, the actual writing process and the researching of writing structures and strategies they undertook, and finally looking into the concept of an author’s identity as represented by the three participants. Much of the information gathered in this section was analyzed through the lens or critical imagination both from my perspective, using the first impressions of the parent-authors rhetorical inspirations and observing them without

expectations, and from the perspective of the parent-authors themselves as they told the stories of how they had initiated their own rhetorical journeys.

Reasons to Write

How does one begin to write a children’s book if they have no prior experience in the genre? More importantly, why does one dive into writing a children’s book with no prior experience or knowledge of the book market or the publishing process as a whole? In the case of all three author participants, the beginnings of their rhetorical acts, and later on literary activism, occurred by happenstance.

All three authors easily remembered the beginning of their books, and since my interest in this project began with looking at parents who have published, I was interested to see at what stage of their parenthood did the idea of their books originate. For Pascha Adamo it was very early on—when she and her husband, Adrian, had a co-ed baby shower before the birth of their first child, Pascha wanted to make the event as sustainable as possible. She asked guests not to wrap the baby’s presents, and instead of a card to bring a copy of their favorite children’s book.

The couple ended up with over 70 books, Pascha said, but only maybe three to five of them featured people of color. This struck her as odd right away—not only the lack of representation, but the fact that the guests had not thought ahead and intentionally sought out books that represented her interracial family. She even indicated that she knew a couple of the books they received had a “brown edition,” meaning that there was a version of the book that featured a child of color instead of a white child, yet the guests who brought them did not think about choosing the inclusive edition, gravitating instead towards the status quo. Thinking ahead to the birth of her child, Pascha began searching for the books she wanted herself, only to find a

striking lack of books that represent children of color or mixed children, even being told that

“this doesn’t exist” at a local Barnes & Noble store. Online she was able to locate a few independent authors, some of them also parents like her, and some recommendations for books featuring diversity and inclusion themes and stories, but many of those books were one- dimensional, focusing solely on the racial heritage or history of the multicultural character.

Pascha remembered thinking “I shouldn’t have to search so hard in 2014 to find a book about a child of color that is not about slavery, not about their hair, and not about being brown, but just about being a kid”. Her daughter Sophia had just been born, and after months of searching

Pascha’s husband voiced what she was probably already thinking: why don’t you just write one.

So she did, and the CeCe and Roxy board books series was born.

For Jerry Zhang inspiration came about in a similar fashion, although a little bit later in his journey into parenthood. His first daughter, Madison, was about four years old, a precocious

Chinese American girl, who was already beginning to see that she was different from her white, fair-haired mother and some of her friends. The family lived in the Harlem neighborhood of New

York City at the time, an area vivid with cultural and racial diversity. Madison loved books, so the family began introducing any stories they could find that related to the experience of being

Chinese American. Unfortunately, their selection was very limited and, even more unfortunately,

Madison was not interested at all. She did not want to repeatedly read the stories focusing on cultural narratives, like the book about Chinese New Year that was read once and rejected after that. At one point Madison declared to her dad, with all the certainty and conviction of a toddler, that she didn’t want to be Chinese (HuffPost 2017), pushing the suggested books aside and picking up instead her favorite stories of strong and funny female characters like Fancy Nancy,

Eloise, and Madeline. This was when the idea struck—Jerry thought “what if I write a book,

can’t be that hard”? He shared the idea in the company of friends one night, almost as a way to encourage himself to do it, and received immediate support from the group. What’s more, he received contacts, including the contact information of a young tattoo artist who was looking to do some illustrations. Within six months, Jerry had launched the Kickstarter campaign in April

2017, and the project was fully funded within just three days, reaching over 600% of its initial funding goal by the time the campaign ended in May 2017. The demand was there and things were moving fast for Pepper Zhang: Artist Extraordinaire!

Unfortunately, the process did not move quite so quickly for Raquel M. Ortiz and her first children’s books. Raquel’s inspiration came about in a different way, and was driven more by her career exploration into Puerto Rican cultural heritage in art and music. An anthropologist by education, Raquel completed her Master of Arts degree in Puerto Rican Studies in San Juan,

PR in 2004, and landed a job at an editorial house in Puerto Rico that specialized in the creation of K-6 textbooks. Her work encompassed everything in the publishing process, since the editorial house was a small one and embracing a holistic approach to each project. Her daughter,

Sofia, was six years old at the time. While at the editorial house, gaining valuable experience and knowledge about the publishing world, Raquel began working towards her PhD in Social

Anthropology from Universidad de Salamanca, when it so happened that an article for a 6th grade book on languages was needed. Raquel knew that the article would be illustrated, which appealed to her, so she volunteered to write it. A few years later, in 2008, she completed her PhD while living in Spain, with her dissertation “El Arte de la Indentidad” (“The Art of Identity”) focusing on urban murals and the reflection of Boricua1 heritage and culture in them. She was working as writer-for-hire at that time, she said, and would regularly write every morning,

1 Boricua/Boricuan is an indigenous name for Puerto Rican. 76

whether working on her dissertation or on her work projects, but she found herself daydreaming about one particular mural, featured in her dissertation work. The “El pueblo cantor” (“The

Pueblo Sings”) mural was created during an anti-graffiti initiative and painted by students who were studying Puerto Rican culture at the time. Located on the corner of Prospect and East

Tremont streets in the South Bronx in New York City, the mural was thousands of miles away from Raquel at that moment, but it provided a much needed distraction. She found herself imagining her then 8-year-old daughter as a protagonist of her daydreaming narrative, interacting with the mural and even going inside of it as the characters sprung into life and carried little

Sofia on a magical, musical, flying adventure. This daydream would eventually become Sofi and the Magic, Musical Mural/Sofi y el magico mural musical (2015).

Writing Process and Exploration: How the Ideas Came to Life

An idea is the beginning of something, but without the hard work that follows, without that “umph,” an idea might remain just that. All three authors acknowledged the tremendous amount of effort and dedication that went into converting their blips of inspiration, the ones that struck unexpectedly at random times, into fully accomplished illustrated and published projects.

Once the ideas, the seeds of the stories that would come to be, had taken hold, all three authors set off in search of their narratives. Yet each of them took a completely different approach. For Raquel, the story, so deeply based into her PhD and scholarly work, did not need much research. She based the narrative on things she already knew about and places she had lived in. The story is surprisingly simple—a girl is asked to go to the local store, and as she walks by the giant mural on her way there, she begins to notice the motifs and bright colors, all drawing her in. The location switches from New York City to Puerto Rico as the main character

enters the mural and finds herself surrounded by the music, flowers, and colors of the Caribbean island. In the subsequent books, Sofi Paints Her Dreams/Sofi pinta sus sueños (2019, inspired by

Puerto Rican metal art) and When Julia Danced Bomba/Guando Julia bailaba bomba (2019, based on Raquel and her daughter’s experience of learning bomba2 while living in Chicago), the narratives follow a similar pattern—they are written as stories for children who overcome typical children challenges such as independence, lack of confidence about school work, and public appearance anxiety. The stories are about children being children, but the very relatable narratives are beautifully framed by the experiences of Boricuan culture, without making them the reason for the books’ existence. All of Raquel’s books are bilingual, published in English and in Spanish, reaching out to a wider audience, but the words were not what initially drove the narrative. It was the visuals, the illustrations Raquel clearly saw in her head, and the case was very similar with both Pascha and Jerry.

Unlike Raquel, Pascha and Jerry did not have the stories right in front of them, ready to reach out and pluck, so when the ideas struck they began doing research in story creation, each in their own way. For Jerry, he wanted his storybook to reflect what Madison was looking for in her favorite children’s books: he combined the tales of fierce and funny girls who stood their ground and had big, over the top personalities with the narrative structures he remembered loving as a child in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Jerry preferred structure, and from his experience in writing as an English undergraduate major and from law school, he gravitated towards a more traditional narrative structure. He started with the main character, a young girl resembling Madison, then added a location, secondary characters, a problem, climax, resolution, and a lesson learned.

2 Bomba is a traditional musical style and a dance in Puerto Rico. 78

Pascha followed a similar process—she identified her characters first, already knowing that it would be a biracial girl and her dog, and then began writing stories resembling real life about the adventures they would have together. Writing in the middle of the night, while nursing a newborn and paying off bills, Pascha borrowed stories from everything around her—from the picture of a dog on a local shelter’s page that she wanted to adopt (who later became Roxy), to the article she had read about a non-profit organization helping with the pets of deployed soldiers which merged with the stories of soldiers her husband worked with as part of his job—the adventures of CeCe and Roxy were taking shape all at once. Like Jerry, Pascha didn’t have much prior creative writing experience, but she began searching for patterns in the books she was reading to Sophia, and especially the ones she found to be successful in portraying their narratives.

Both Jerry and Pascha, in other words, conducted their own primary research on writing, intuitively modeling their own work after existing works they found to work for them as readers and as audience, but also the ones that worked for their children. It is interesting to note that none of the participants took to the Internet to look up books on ‘how to write children’s books.’ They instead dove straight into the writing process, which all of them described as fun and enjoyable,

“not a task,” almost an escape to certain extent, reminiscent of the “holiday work” Butler talks about in relation to Tolkien’s writing, which was inspired by Tolkien’s own scholarly endeavors.

With Raquel the parallel is apparent—her children’s books, especially the one that started her career as a children’s author, were directly borrowed from her scholarly work. She even refers to

Bloom’s taxonomy of knowledge in her interview, saying “I think [my books] are a by-product, the whole idea of knowing something really well before going into the synthesis of it? I knew something really well and something else was created out of it.” Jerry and Pascha also reached

the level of synthesis of what they knew really well—their own experiences raising a child of color or mixed heritage, and their narrative needs and wants. All three became children’s authors by necessity but also by choice, driven by the desire to create something very personal and share it with very concrete audiences—other parents like them, other children like theirs, other members of their communities. Yet, during the interviews, all three hesitated to claim the label of

“children’s author,” alternatively identifying themselves as “lawyer by trade” (Jerry), “educator”

(Pascha), and “educator and anthropologist who also writes children’s books” (Raquel). In fact, it was Raquel who summarized their shared experiences the best, exclaiming: “I stumbled into this because of my job, I didn’t wake up one day thinking this is my dream. It was not magical, it is a lot of work.” When it comes to identity, the question is complicated by the parent-authors’ almost split-personalities. They are published authors but the paths their journeys have taken as writers prevent them from seeing themselves as authors.

Writing Identity or the Challenges of the Parent-Authors

In some ways, the answer to why our participants struggled with claiming the label of

“children’s author” may have come from the inherent duality of their roles. Their motivation for writing was pre-empted by and originated from their identity as a parent (in Jerry and Pascha’s case) or was heavily influenced by it (in Raquel’s case). Writing children’s literature is not their primary occupation, it was something they stumbled into and just followed their own adventures all the way into the rabbit hole, “one step at a time,” like Jerry kept repeating during his interview. When they began the writing process, there was no notion of where the finish line would be, or whether there will be one at all. They had no knowledge of how to scaffold their own experiences. Going back to Murray’s five individual writing stages, 85% of the writer’s

work should be focused on the first two stages of the process, the brainstorming and drafting stages, the “research and daydreaming” stages as he describes them (15). Yet in talking to the three participants, it seemed that the daydreaming, along with the actual writing stages, was over in almost an eyeblink, and it took a lot less time than the editing (including the illustrating process and finalizing each page), and the most-time-consuming-by-far publishing stage. This finding was reminiscent of John Trimbur’s conclusions in his article “Composition and the

Circulation of Writing,” in which he makes the argument that in the writing classroom there seems to be a “conceptual separation of the cannons of rhetoric operating in writing instruction that has isolated delivery from invention, argument, and style” (189). Trimbur continues to point out the dangers of equating the activity of composing with writing itself, which altogether misses, according to him, the “complex delivery systems through which writing circulates”

(190). His argument lands very well in the case of parent-authors, for whom the act of composing the narratives for their books was only a small part of the overall rhetorical act, with the process of social circulation, which I will review a bit later, presenting a much more time- consuming and challenging stage.

The work the participants did on their book projects was all encompassing—they were the writers but also, in Jerry and Pascha’s cases, the editors, graphic designers, publishers, distributers, and marketing team. Pascha worked with two different illustrators to complete the

CeCe and Roxy books the way she envisioned them, and provided very detailed instructions on each page—which one should include white background to give the overall look an opportunity to breathe, and which ones should have color edge to edge. Jerry also had a very specific vision for Pepper Zhang’s adventures, and taught himself how to use Photoshop in other to retouch the pages that did not quite fit that vision. He also turned his attention to the overall formatting of the

books—the information on the first page, the cover, the dust jacket—and added personal touches like the review from Madison Zhang on the back cover (“the best book ever!”) and a ‘note from the author’ on the first spread, illustrating the dual roles he performs: it begins with “I’m just a father who wanted to write a book for his daughters.” Raquel, on the other hand, as the only participant who had experience with more traditional publishing process, having undergone both a Kickstarter campaign like Pascha and Jerry on one hand, and having worked with a couple of different publishing houses on the other, laughed off my question about her identity as a children’s author by saying she was “having an identity crisis.” In fact, she was uncertain about claiming any professional identity labels, saying that she doesn’t like labels in general. “I don’t know what my core identity is,” she continued. “I am very comfortable with educator and anthropologist. And I write children’s books,” she chuckled. “I am internalizing it a lot more, books 5 and 6 are coming out so it’s like ok, this is a thing.” For all three of these parents the writing process comes a full rhetorical circle—they are in charge of the invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery of their texts, so it’s no wonder they hesitate to claim themselves as authors when their rhetorical work far transcends authorship.

In the beginning of this section I posed that the writing projects of Pascha, Jerry, and

Raquel truly came about by happenstance or were merely “stumbled upon,” as the three of them seemed to be convinced. Yet, analyzing their combined composition process through critical imagination, I concluded that there has been a level of intentionality as well as serendipity, a rhetorical kairos emanating from a number of elements. While all three projects may have come into existence through somewhat situational rhetorical actions, all three participants had prior writing experience, the educational background, and to some extend the means to compose, complete, and distribute the books they wished to see in the world. What truly pushed them to

take that next step and endeavor upon the writing and publishing adventure was a sudden understanding of their audience. As parents, they identified a personal need that became their

Why, and the fork in the road at which they made the decision to squeeze some extra hours out of their days to accomplish something they never thought possible but were determined to make it so. Despite not self-identifying as authors, despite the bumps in the road, despite having to teach themselves editing and graphic design, along with how the publishing industry works, and despite the non-traditional routes they took to eventually be able to hold their books in their hands and read them to their children, all three participants are published children’s authors, and even further so, rhetors of the Borderlands.

2. Strategic Contemplation: Who Are These Stories For?

“It was what I had assumed was the reason why these books were not readily available—that in the minds of publishers, you know, if you have a child of color then it has to be a book about their heritage.” – Jerry Zhang

Through the critical term of strategic contemplation, I allowed myself to stay longer with what was originally the main focus of this project: the representation of multicultural and multilingual identities in books written by parent-authors for their children. According to Royster and Kirsch, strategic contemplation allows the researcher to “linger deliberately inside of their research’s tasks, imagining the context for practices” (84). Fortunately, I did not have to utilize quite as much direct imagination as Royster and Kirsch did when they interrogated the rhetorical practices of women through archival information. The data for my project was gained through direct contact with my participants and co-authors, with the exception of Anzaldua’s works, so all I had to do was pay “close attention to the spaces and places both [I] and the rhetorical

subjects occupy in the scholarly dynamic” (Royster and Kirsch 85). In the coming section, I explore the ways in which participants’ relationships with their audiences, intended, unintended, and perceived, develop and ultimately come a full circle back.

Cultural Representation and Commonplaces

As discussed above, the motivation and inspiration for the three participants’ book projects were sparked by the authors’ desire to write for multicultural children. Whether specific children, like in Jerry and Pascha’s case where their own children are their immediate audiences, or the children of her own community, like in Raquel’s case, these authors aimed to provide the mirrors that Rudine Sims Bishop talked about back in 1990. Each author was faced with the challenge of multicultural and multilingual representation in a different way, and each of them handled it differently.

In Pascha’s books, the main character, CeCe, is a biracial girl, indicated by her brown skin, whose mother is portrayed as white-appearing and whose father is illustrated with dark brown skin. The multicultural element is thus not overt, but rather, as Chaudhri explained,

“leaving it to the reader to notice, or not, the visual depiction of people” (22). For Pascha, the purpose of the CeCe and Roxy book series was never to discuss multiracial identity, but rather to affirm it, while providing a space where her children, and children like them, can see themselves doing children things—playing with their dog, going to school, reading books. The representation and inclusion of multiracial identity in Pascha’s work is subtle by design but it also serves to carry messages that are decidedly universally American—her first book, CeCe and

Roxy: How We Came to Be tells the story of how Roxy the dog, joined the family after her owner, CeCe’s dad’s best friend, was deployed overseas, and CeCe’s family came to foster Roxy

in the meantime. After providing representation of the challenges of deployment, a rarely seen side of military life, Pascha shared that many military families have reached out to her to express their gratitude for being able to find themselves and their personal narratives reflected in a children’s book. Pascha’s work strives to provide a mirror more so than a window. She acknowledged that children’s books that are direct in their conversation about people of color are necessary, but more so for their white audiences, to allow them the window into black experience, rather than for children of color who sometimes need to see a story like CeCe and

Roxy “about a brown girl doing girl things.”

Jerry Zhang also provides subtle but combined visual and textual representation of the main character’s biracial identity in Pepper Zhang. Apart from the last name of “Zhang,” which happens to be the author’s last name, given to the main character, it also accompanies Pepper’s name wherever it appears in official capacity inside the book and on its cover. “I wanted her

Chinese last name to be in big gold letter across the top of the cover,” Jerry shared, as he discussed the composition and formatting process he went through. The last name is only one of the examples of cultural commonplaces he has included. The illustrations of Pepper Zhang depict an Asian girl of mixed heritage, as her mother appears Caucasian in comparison to her sister and father, yet her mixed heritage is not directly discussed nor is it the focus of the narrative. Instead, the book tells the story of a little girl who does not like to go to bed—a story most toddler parents can directly relate to right away—but who suddenly discovers a new passion, quelling her bedtime tantrums: painting. Encapsulating the experience of child and parents alike, Jerry provides a story that appeals to both, thus extending his audience further to attract not just children but the ones in charge of bedtime stories as well—their parents. The last multicultural element Jerry included in his book was the characters of Nai Nai and Ye Ye, or grandma and

grandpa, in Mandarin Chinese. In his interview, Jerry discussed that the incorporation of the

Mandarin names is the only cultural part of the book that he sometimes discusses when doing a reading in front of predominantly white audience, but it’s also the element most often recognized when other Chinese American children are present, providing both mirror and a sliding door aspect to his book.

In Chaudhri’s book, she explained that when it comes to picture books depicting multicultural characters, there is a spectrum of the extent to which the identity of these characters is the focus of the narrative. While Pascha’s work is on one end of the spectrum, with primarily visual representation of multicultural identity, and Jerry’s work is moving towards the middle, by integrating cultural elements but keeping the focus on other issues, Raquel’s work is moving even further towards the other end of the spectrum towards didactical representation of multicultural experiences (Chaudhri 2017). The Boricua culture is up front and center in all three of Raquel’s books, with multilingual identity directly influencing the presentation of all text in both English and Spanish. Some words that do not have an exact equivalent in English, are present in Spanish even in the English text—like “amapola flower” and “vejigante.” (Anzaldua followed a similar approach in both of her children’s books, choosing not to translate “La

Llorona” and “la curandera,” keeping both in Spanish throughout the English text.) The rich colors of Puerto Rico shine through all the illustrations, and the skin colors of all primary and secondary characters are all shades of pink and brown, much like the population of the island itself. Yet even here, the focus of the Raquel’s narratives is not on the multicultural identity of the characters, but on their experiences as children. In Sofi Paints Her Dreams/Sofi pinta sus sueños, Sofi struggles with having a bad day at school, something any child her age can relate to, while in When Julia Danced Bomba/Cuando Julia bailaba bomba, where the cultural elements

are more pronounced and central to the narrative, the conflict is still not about identity. Instead, it takes the reader to a dance class, where Julia is asked to do a solo for the very first time. The audience sympathizes with Julia as she embarks on her dance in spite of her insecurity, and celebrates with her as she overcomes her fears. It’s a story about friendships and supporting one another, but with elements that illustrate the rich Puerto Rican music and dance culture, and a child of any racial or ethnic background can find it intriguing and relatable. When Raquel does author’s visits or readings of Julia, she often accompanies them with actual bomba music played by the children under her guidance. The day of the interview, she had just done such a reading at a local NYC school, and she shared some of that experience. “When I read to the kids today,” she said, “it wasn’t to infuse them with every last Puerto Rican idea in the universe. It was to celebrate them and me and this moment with a story that they can join me in telling.” Sometimes the stories happen to be about Afro-Boricuan music, she added, because that is what has peaked her interest as a writer at the time. But most times, Raquel laughs, the experience is “about them banging on a drum while I bang on a drum and we have fun.”

It is interesting to note that the representation of multiraciality in all three projects is consistent with Chaudhri’s analysis of how different groups introduce their heritage in children’s literature. In her chapter on multiracial stories in picture books, Chaudhri stated that, generally speaking from her research, authors and illustrators who portray “white-black biracial experiences include information about variations in skin color” (23), just like Pascha did in the

CeCe and Roxy books, while “books with Asians and Latinos have an immigration and/or bilingual approach” (24). Both Jerry and Raquel took the bilingual approach, expressed very mildly in Jerry’s use of Pepper Zhang’s last name throughout the book and the Mandarin

Chinese names for her grandparents, while Raquel’s books are explicitly bilingual, with all the

text in English and Spanish, and Spanish words sprinkled throughout the English portions.

Similarly, Anzaldua’s two children’s books are very explicitly bilingual, going even further into addressing the issue of immigration, once again consistent with Chaudhri’s conclusions.

Children and Parents

This project is about parents, who become authors as inspired by their children. In the process of interviewing the three participants, I discovered that their inspiration may or may not have come directly from their children and their identity as parents, but one way or another, the authors’ children are intimately and intricately involved with the writing projects, and to some extent, the children’s identity has been weaved throughout the creative and publishing process.

For two of the authors, their children were a direct influence on their work. With Jerry’s

Pepper Zhang—Pepper was directly inspired by Jerry’s daughter Madison’s declaration that she didn’t want to be Chinese because she didn’t see anyone who looked like her in the books she read. And for Pascha, the inspiration came before Sophia was born, but from the acknowledgement of her baby’s biracial identity and the knowledge that she will need to see someone who looks like her in the books they would read together. With Raquel, on the other hand, the influence might be more subtle in terms of the story or elements of her daughter Sofia’s character, but she is the only author whose child’s name appears directly in the books: Sofi is the main character in two of her books, even though this was not her original intent. While the idea for the Sofi and The Magic, Musical Mural/Sofi y el magico mural musical was born when Sofia was young, and in her mind Raquel imagined Sofia as the character going into the mural, the name of the character was originally intended to be Marisol, after the mural’s artist Maria

Dominguez. However, the publishers at Artè Publico Press at University of Houston had other ideas, and changing the name was among a number of other requests they made in the very first round of edits they sent out. “When I got the edits I cried, I wanted to throw away the contract,”

Raquel remembers. The day she received them, she was at a public laundromat with her daughter, so looking at her in the moment, she asked if the character can be named Sofi. The publisher agreed, and for Raquel the fit was good because it created a more intimate relationship with her work. “You want to have a personal connection with the characters,” she added, “you’re doing all this work and sacrificing so much.” That notion of sacrifice and risk was also present in the interviews with all three participants, and was another reason for the established and visible personal connection between the three parent-authors and their work. When you write for the children of the Borderlands, you put a piece of yourself into your work, and sometimes the representation of that piece of you is the child. In some cases more literal representation than others.

While Raquel’s character carried her daughter’s name, for Pascha and Jerry the book characters exhibited more physical similarities to their own children. During his interview, Jerry shared that Pepper is very much a visual reflection of Madison. The illustrator used Madison as a model for the character of Pepper, even including some dresses Madison actually wore. The family in the book is modeled after Jerry’s family—dad is Chinese, mom is white, and Pepper has a baby sister. Madison’s favorite red dinosaur from a few years ago is also featured up front and center in the book, having its own page spread.

Fig. 6. Page from Pepper Zhang, Artist Extraordinaire! (2017)

For Pascha and her family, the representation is also visually there but not as direct.

CeCe’s mixed heritage is represented in her skin color, and her father is illustrated as black while her mother is illustrated as white. Unlike Sophia, though, CeCe has an older sister instead of a younger brother. The changes make sense, however—CeCe as a character was conceived before

Sophia was born, and completed when she was just a few months old, before Sophia’s brother

Judah was ever in the picture. The visual similarities between CeCe and Sophia are mostly coincidental—CeCe’s wild curly hair arranged in two ponytails and tied with red bows is actually modeled after the childhood look of the CeCe and Roxy illustrator, Caroline Merino, who is herself biracial and of African American and Mexican heritage.

Fig. 7. Page from CeCe and Roxy: A Day in the Life of Roxy (2018)

Physical similarities aside, all three parent-authors created books for their own children and children like them, but also with the parents in mind. As Saunders points out in the introduction to The Rhetorical Power of Children’s Literature, children’s books, especially ones for young children in pre-reading age, are unique texts in terms of audience because the authors have to consider the readers (parents, guardians, teachers) as much a part of their primary audience as the listeners (the children) (3-4). In their Borderlands identities as parent-authors, the three participants all took that characteristic of picture books into consideration. Jerry incorporated a conflict every parent of a toddler is intimately familiar with—struggles with bedtime—into Pepper’s story, but his attention remained on his primary audience: Madison and children her age, regardless of race or culture. Pascha’s stories came from real life family stories—things their own dog does or adventures that Sophia and Judah may have gone on, that any child can relate to, while at the same time providing one of the very few narratives that introduce deployment and the challenges of military personnel who leave behind civilian life and

responsibilities. And Raquel, an educator herself, found a way to consciously combine the adventure stories meant for her children audience with didactic elements for the adult audience, and she attributes her success with the publishing houses to this combination. “I can write a cute story that’s [also] pedagogically sound and has some anthro[pology] background to it, that’s just icing on the cake,” she remarked, laughing.

More importantly, however, was the fact that Jerry followed his daughter’s desires about the way she was represented in the book. There is nothing about Pepper that specifically focuses on her heritage; even Jerry’s idea to have Pepper eat dumplings for dinner in the book was met with resistance from Madison, whose favorite food is pizza. Hence, Pepper was served pizza—an illustration of Jerry’s intent to focus on universal messages, not ones specific to Chinese-

American audiences. He wanted to write just a fun story, he said, not teach the readers about

Chinese culture, but to provide a story that would be accessible to any young child. This is why when, he was approached by a literary agent in 2017, Jerry surprised himself.

The agent reached out to Jerry personally during the Kickstarter campaign, which ended up being wildly successful and raising over 600% of its initial goal. The campaign funded a total of $30,639 towards an initial goal of $5000, with the initial goal met within a few days, and the agent’s interested was peaked. He wanted to work with Jerry. The advice the agent had for Jerry, however, went against the very reason why the book existed in the first place. “I think you should consider Pepper Zhang embracing her Chinese heritage,” the agent essentially told Jerry.

“It was what I had assumed was the reason why these books were not readily available,” Jerry confided. “In the minds of publishers, you know, if you have a child of color then it has to be a book about their heritage.” Yet this was not the reason Jerry wrote Pepper Zhang, and ultimately, it was not what Madison wanted to see in her book, so Jerry chose to decline the publisher’s

offer and continue on the Kickstarter route he had already began his travels on, retaining full artistic control over the book and its content. He was not the only one to have a similar experience with a representative of the publishing community. Raquel, whose proficiency is more directly tied with publishing houses, confirmed Jerry’s experience and also echoed

Pascha’s concerns with the lack of books for “brown children who are just being children.” “A lot of people of color do biographies because that’s the happy space, we are allowed to rehash history,” Raquel noted as a side note during out interview. This is why for her to be in a “fiction fiction” genre, as she described it, in other words stories that do not directly pertain to historical narratives of people or color, is exciting and different. “Most of us don’t get to write that,” she said, with “most of us” referring to authors of color. Is it a wonder, then, that so many parent- authors choose to forego the traditional publishing route, opting instead for crowdfunding sources such as Kickstarter?

The parent-authors are acutely aware of their immediate audience, in some cases they live and raise their immediate audience, so for them any edits suggested by potential or actual publishers feel more personal and more difficult to swallow. I had to think about how would I react if a prospective publisher asked me to remove the Bulgarian text from the book I created for and about my daughter, because there might be a wider audience for the book if the text is in

English only. This would not be the same book, and the personal connection Raquel talked about would be severed completely. Parent-authors fiercely protect their book projects like they are their children, because, in some cases, they are.

During each of my interviews, conducted over Zoom during the national stay-at-home isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the children made an appearance on or off screen, but always existing in the immediate space around the authors. During my interview with

Jerry I met Madison, who was happy to graciously answer a few questions about her book. And I met both Sophia and Judah, who insisted on having Pascha’s attention back, both of them used to

CeCe and Roxy online chats, having even done some readings with Pascha on Instagram. While not immediately on camera, Raquel shared that the reading she had just finished prior to our interview, also done virtually, featured her son Ceasar playing the drums for the school children.

In other words, just like in their books, the parent-authors’ identity is closely tied to their parenting identity, the two forming indelible one. As Rozen points out in his article “Writing Is

Linked to Identity”, also published in the Naming What We Know collection, writing functions as means of displaying our identities, plural. “Through the writing we do,” he continues, “we claim, challenge, perhaps even contest and resist our alignment with the beliefs, interests, and values of the communities with which we engage” (51). Consequently, not only does writing provide rhetorical outlet for all of our identities, realized and claimed or not, but as an activity writing also has the ability to connect us with all of the communities with which we engage. And this connection might be exactly what parent-authors seek.

3. Social Circulation: Community Reactions, Support, and Resources

“I came to the game late, it’s all been self-taught, I wouldn’t suggest that. [Things like] ‘look at submission guidelines’—I didn’t know any of that. And I don’t know why I didn’t know any of that.” – Raquel M. Ortiz

When it comes to understanding the rhetorical process through the critical term of social circulation, for Royster and Kirsch’s feminist rhetorical practices this includes the juxtaposition of private vs. public spaces, personal vs. communal. For centuries women rhetors utilized rhetorical practices that originated in the homes, distinctly women’s domain, only to spread into

the public sphere. In the same way the rhetorical moves that created the books written by parent- authors originated in an intensely personal space, the one between a parent and a child, and grew into a largely public endeavor. Even the publication process began its existence originally in a surprisingly private sphere within each author’s immediate community, until it grew to expand outside of that and into a larger world of publication.

In the coming section I will elaborate on the communities and communal relationships that parent-authors interact with as rhetors. As Royster and Kirsch pointed out, “the idea of ever- shifting social circles pushes us to move beyond the public-private dichotomy and beyond just calling attention to social networks” (101).

The Kids in the Books

Madison, Jerry’s daughter, is now seven, but she still remembers being recognized from the

Kickstarter video that featured her. “My ambition was to write a cool story inspired by

Madison”, Jerry acknowledged during the interview, continuing to share that the publication and popularity of the book has led to Madison having a the added benefit of greater self-confidence in the years following. Even now, however, Madison still does not recognize Pepper Zhang as an example of multiracial or multicultural representation in children’s literature. To her, it is just a book, her book, that she now sometimes reads to her little sister, Everly (4) and proudly gives out as a gift to friends at school. For Pascha’s kids, Sophia, who is now 6, and Judah who is 4, the fact of their mom being an author is something they have always been familiar with. They have never known anything different, because Pascha embarked on this journey when Sophia was very young. So even though majority of the time Pascha is a full-time stay-at-home mother and educator, the kids recognize her travels to conferences, workshops, and book readings as being a

part of her job. They get involved with the promotion process as well—in a recent Instagram reading of CeCe and Roxy, Sophia and Pascha collaborated on a performance of both books where Sophia read the story, while Pascha showed the pictures to the camera. Sophia was also sporting jewelry and hair accessories inspired by CeCe’s trademark red hair bows, and Judah made an appearance towards the end of the video as well, both of them simultaneously climbing all over Pascha as she tried to wrap up her message. For Jerry and Pascha’s kids, the ones who had directly inspired the texts produced by the parent-authors, being involved with the process of writing and promoting children’s books is normal, a part of who they are as much as it is a part of their parents’ identities. Both Madison and Sophia know that they are not the book characters, yet they know they are connected to Pepper and CeCe. And there must be something special in the knowledge that you were the first to hear a story made up just for you.

For Raquel, the presence of her children in her work is both more and less obvious than with the other two participants, but it also carries a different weight. Raquel’s daughter, Sofia, who is now 22 and a college graduate, did lend her name to one of her mother’s titular characters in not one but two books, and the shared experiences of mother and daughter are reflected throughout Raquel’s work. However, when Sofi came out in 2017, Sofia was already too old to be interested in the book or her connection to it. Her brother, Ceasar, on the other hand, was not.

Now 12, Ceasar is heavily involved with the creative and marketing process for all of Raquel’s projects, even to the point that he actually gets 10% of all profit. “He grew up with it,” Raquel explained, “he does virtual author’s visits with me—he sings, he dances, he is known as ‘the author’s child.’” When he was six years old, Ceasar would sign books alongside his mother at conferences, and two years ago he told her that he wants to be an author, which, she admitted laughing, scared her. “Oh no, another starving artist,” she said she thought at the time, although

it is clear from the way she speaks about him in the interview how proud she is and how much it means to her to see him develop in that way. In fact, Raquel shared that one of her future projects she had already begun working on, a middle-grade children’s book, is exciting for her because it relates to Ceasar. “As he grows and he does that stuff, I want to do it with him a little bit,” she explained. And there was a reason for that too—when Ceasar was in first grade, he struggled to pass the year because he wasn’t reading. Knowing that, it’s easy to see the connection between

Raquel’s identity as a parent and her work with literacy programs through her books—she prepares lesson plans to go along with her books, she does author’s visits to classrooms and promotes literacy and reading. She is an educator who is driven by her personal narrative. “I was a success as a writer and a failure as a parent,” she shared, mock-jokingly, when she told me the story about Ceasar’s difficulties in the first grade. Needless to say, Ceasar has overcome his reading difficulties in large part due to his engagement with Raquel’s writing and publishing projects, and he is now thriving as “the author’s child.” Yet, this example illustrates that while for Jerry and Pascha the motivation to write came from desire to have their children represented in the books they read, for Raquel it is coming from her desire to share the reading experience with her children, but also to address the literacy problem within the Latinx community. Her books serve as a bridge between the private inspirations for her writing—her area of scholarly interest and her relationship with her children—and the needs of the overall community she is a part of, and whose reactions to her books have been overwhelmingly positive.

Community Support and Reactions To the Books

Taking the ideas for their books from private to public happened very quickly for all three parent-author participants. In fact, had Jerry and Pascha not taken their ideas public and

shared them with friends and family, the books may have never seen the light of day. Jerry’s friends encouraged him to pursue the idea of creating a book about a Chinese American girl who has an adventure that has nothing to do with her heritage, and they put him in touch with the artist who later illustrated Pepper Zhang. Pascha, on the other hand, received the supporting push of her husband to begin her writing journey, and was later on encouraged by others, like the videographer who agreed to complete her Kickstarter video for free because he believed in the project. In fact, one piece of advice Pascha had for any aspiring parent-authors, was to put yourself out there sooner, get people involved from the very beginning. “Put it out there that this is what’s happening,” she said, “you never know who is listening and can help you. People love being a part of stuff, being involved.” Once they took their projects public, all three parent- authors experienced immense uplift from their communities, both immediate geographic community as Jerry pointed out, and from the communities represented in their books.

For Jerry, the support came from places such as the shared news of Pepper Zhang on

NextShare.com (“it’s like HuffPost for Asian American news,” Jerry explained humorously), the

Museum of Chinese in America, who invited Jerry for a reading and sell his book in their bookstore, and celebrities like actors George Takei and Mark Ruffalo, who tweeted support and encouragement for Pepper Zhang. For Pascha, friends and relatives who were also interracial couples reacted extremely positively to the CeCe and Roxy’s stories, excited to see their own kids represented on the pages. But she also received incredible boost from the military community, something she didn’t quite expect when she introduced Roxy’s origin story as the foster dog of a service member who is deployed and needs to rehome her. “I kept hearing ‘I’ve used these [books] for my child to tell him where his father is going,’” she said emotionally, explaining that it would make her cry to be able to help by creating something so small. Raquel’s

journey, as different as it is in many ways from those of Jerry and Pascha, also began as a result of community support. Her first two books before Sofi were both published through community grants and in conjunction with school programs for gifted children and ESL students, and once

Sofi came out, her community rallied around her. She was quickly able to introduce her book as an addition to the curriculum of twenty-seven schools New York City after the superintendent who knew her reached out to her. That proved very helpful with Raquel’s Texan editorial house,

Arte Público Press, majority of whose New York sales are through Raquel’s children’s books.

Connections through local schools and libraries were also essential for all three parent- authors, emphasizing once more the relationship between the emerging authors and their immediate communities. Yet, there was a lot to learn for all of them about how to build those relationships. As it turned out, they could not simply walk into their local public library and ask them to add their new book to the permanent collection. While the libraries were open to doing an author’s reading in some cases, there were proper channels the library staff had to go through before adding a book. As Pascha, who lived in four different states while working on CeCe and

Roxy, found out, each state and sometimes each county or city may have different rules on how they review and accept books. This was similar to how local and commercial chain bookstores operated. And getting their books into bookstores was also a goal for all three participants, but unfortunately had proven to be difficult to reach or, in some cases, utterly disappointing.

To Kickstarter or Not to Kickstarter, That Is the Question

When I first began my research project, I knew that at one point or another all three participants had opted to bypass the traditional publishing route in favor of crowdsourcing solutions like Kickstarter, that gave them a lot more freedom and creative control, but also

limited them in terms of distribution and reaching a wider audience. For Jerry and Pascha,

Kickstarter was a way to immediately fill the need they had and have their books in hand right away, instead of going through potentially years of additional steps through traditional publishing—seeking an agent, contacting a publishing or editorial house, sending manuscripts, pursuing contracts, etc. Each of them kicked off the fundraising campaign at a different time during their writing process. For Jerry, the Kickstarter was created almost at the same time as the idea of Pepper Zhang emerged, so the editorial and fundraising processes paralleled each other for a time. For him, going through Kickstarter was a way to retain complete creative control over his book, without compromising the original intent of the story—to write about a feisty, quirky

Chinese-American girl but not have the story revolve around her heritage or identity. He had made the conscious decision from the start that the book will be published through crowdsourcing, yet, being new on the publishing stage, he was not aware of all the challenges that would come with that.

Jerry’s Kickstarter campaign opened on April 9, 2017 and reached its goal of $5,000 just three days later, on April 12th. By the end of the campaign in May, the project had been funded at over 600% of its original goal, $30,639 from 775 backers, enough for a first edition of 2500 copies. A successful Kickstarter like this doesn’t not happen on its own, however, and Jerry shared how much work it was to ensure their goals were met. He prepared meticulously for the campaign—he sought out journalists and columnists who had written about the lack of diversity in children’s literature, like the Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers father-son team did, and emailed them directly letting them know when the Kickstarter is going live. He got a lot of traction from that, especially when the story was picked up by news sources, eventually ending up on Huffington Post from where a few celebrities like Takei and Ruffalo reshared through their

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social media to an even wider audience. After this overwhelming success, the printed copies arrived at the Zhang household at the end of the summer in 2017, and that’s when Jerry realized that the writing, editing, and printing steps had not been the hardest, but the distribution might be. Jerry was very honest from the beginning that he had been taking the process one step at a time, not knowing what’s behind the next corner, and finding out more about the publishing process as he went along. “I found out each step as I was experiencing each step,” he said, echoing very similar sentiments as the ones Pascha and Raquel shared as well. “The biggest part is distribution, that part is real.” At the end of that summer, Jerry had just short of 2000 copies of

Pepper Zhang in his house, after fulfilling the Kickstarter orders, and no idea where to go next.

The enormity of the production, publication, and distribution process from a purely technical standpoint would be vastly overwhelming for any one person. Its magnitude is also the reason why self-publishing is a tremendous undertaking specifically for parent-authors, who are not seeking to make a career out of writing children’s books, but they are performing this work in addition to all of their other responsibilities as professionals, caretakers, and educators. Both

Pascha and Jerry ran into the distribution problem. Initially assuming they can approach local libraries and bookstores with their books, each of them found out independently that there is a lot more to having your book at a local library or bookstore than simply getting it there. For once, distributors work directly with publishers on one end, and with the bookstores on the other, serving as intermediary of sorts. “There are like three distributors,” Jerry explained, “and if you don’t work with them, they don’t want to work with individual authors.” Pascha, on the other hand, found out that each library system has a different set of rules on book selection, and this could vary from town to town, county to county, or state by state.

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Since her family moved quite a bit in the past few years, Pascha did the research and the groundwork each time again, finding out how she could get 2-3 copies of CeCe and Roxy in a local bookstore or do a reading at the local library. All of that mental and physical labor, however, was getting to be a bit too much for not as wide of a distribution as she had hoped, so as of the time of the interviews, Pascha was actively looking for an agent to help her take CeCe and Roxy to the next level. “Right now I can’t get my books into Barns and Noble or Target” she shared, showing that she had thought long and hard about what that meant. She acknowledged that signing on with an agent who could assist her in getting connected with a larger publishing house, like Penguin, would mean less payback and less creative control over what happens with the next few books, the stories and illustrations for which are already completed. Yet, Pascha also knows what the tradeoff for that would be in terms of distribution. “[The books] will be more widely available to audiences” she said during the interview, an emotional wave coming over her as she described more kids being inspired by her stories to have conversations about the military, diversity, having friends who don’t look like them. “Kids of color might feel more seen.

Using books as bridges to me would be worth the pay cut, the ripple effect of compassion and empathy and understanding, that would be worth it.” For Pascha, just like for Jerry, relying on crowdsourcing began as a way to get her stories published fast and the way she imagined them, but now that two of her books are out and popular, Pascha’s passion for education and representation is pushing her to seek the opportunities for wider audience and recognition that currently only the traditional publishing industry can afford.

It is interesting to see how all three parent-authors balance their expectations of what success for their project is measured in—control over the creative process or wide general distribution seem to be at the two ends of spectrum. For Jerry, creative control was of utmost

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value, and even at the time of the interview he was considering continuing using crowdsourcing for his next planned project—an illustrated book-collection of great Asian women from various areas. Pascha, on the other hand, has reached a point at which she is ready to surrender some of the control over her vision for CeCe and Roxy in order to gain wider distribution. Putting the books in children’s hands to entertain and charm them, but also to start in other families the conversations because of which her books exist in the first place.

As the parent-author with most extensive experience from the three participants, Raquel made that choice between control and wide publication with every next book. While she had also learned everything she knew about the publishing industry in incremental steps, just like Jerry and Pascha, Raquel was very much still learning even a decade into her children’s literature adventure. She had experienced a successful Kickstarter campaign, publishing through grants and local printing presses, and negotiating contracts with agents and editorial houses. For her, the process still came down to the same thing—being able to take a bit of inspiration from her own identity, put it in words, and present it to the world. “We tell stories,” she said towards the end of our interview. “It’s about how we tell stories.” Raquel, Jerry, and Pascha’s stories are all ones that need to be heard and seen, not just because they provide mirrors and windows for children of all backgrounds, but because they are the representation of one of the most inherent rhetorical acts we all have access to—storytelling.

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4. Summary and Conclusions

The interviews conducted with the three participants were invaluable in establishing my understanding of the writing process and rhetorical challenges of parent-authors who enter the children’s literature market space. The feminist methodology approach allowed for a very fluid research process. I had no expectations of what the findings will look like, no preconceived notions of what my conclusions would be. As a researcher, I felt freed from the pressure of seeking specific answers to my questions, instead being afforded the opportunity to listen to the experiences of three individuals who, despite their vastly different backgrounds and approaches, had remarkably similar things to say at times. Royster and Kirsch’s feminist rhetorical practices allowed me to take somewhat of a backseat to the process of discovery, and to just listen. As I listened, I heard Pascha come to terms with her decision to seek an agent; I was privy to Jerry’s realization that his father, also a self-published writer, might have been an influence on him after all, even though he had never even thought about it; and I heard the battling notions in Raquel’s hesitation to claim the identity of a children’s author. As I listened to these moments over again,

I realized all of them had come along completely naturally, like magic happening on screen.

Towards the end of our interview, Raquel came back to talking about her identity as an author, having finally reached a conclusion with which she was satisfied. “I am still very comfortable with [the labels of] ‘educator’ and ‘anthropologist’” she said thoughtfully, “and I write children’s books.” It was then that I made probably the biggest realization of the entire project: her identity as a parent-author, much like with the other two participants, was tied not to the label of “author” that comes with being fluent in the process all of them stumbled through on their own, step by step, but with the act of storytelling as social engagement. They had all gone such a long way from when they initially composed their stories, that they felt distanced from the

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writing process which we often associate with authorship. Instead, their rhetorical act of putting themselves into an unknown space, on the border between two identities and two cultures, telling stories that need to be told, was very much like the experiences of female rhetors and other marginalized groups throughout history. The similarities went beyond their existence in the

Borderlands, as well. For all three authors their rhetorical journeys began at their homes, which had been turned into, as bell hooks’ would describe them, their sites of resistance. During each interview, I was allowed in the participants’ homes, making the connection back to hooks’ stories of black women who turned their homeplaces into the site where they could feel safe enough to begin to fight back and make a difference, “the site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist” (384). Parent-authors are more than children’s writers because their work involves a lot more than writing, it involves rhetorical activism.

The three parent-authors participating in this project hesitate to claim the title of “writer” or “author,” and it could just be because they feel, deep down, that their work is more closely associated with activism and making a difference than with the concept of authorship. They are driven to storytelling not for profit or out of personal or professional self-exploration as writers.

They are using all of their available means to raise the voices of their communities for the sake of their children and their children’s children. To call them “children’s authors” would be to use a label way too narrow to describe their rhetorical journeys and contributions. “Parent-authors” would, in fact, be a much more appropriate term, encompassing all aspects of their work, and I would bet we would need the term more and more. Our current social and political reality in the

United States, and the success stories of these three, and many other, parent-authors, will undoubtedly bring more parents into this space of storytelling activism. So, what we need to ask ourselves, is what comes next?

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CHAPTER V: TOWARDS A HAPILY EVER AFTER?

“In the beginning there is light/ and two wide eyed figures standing/ near the foot of your bed,/

and the sound of their voices is love.” (Love, Matt de la Pena/Loren Long, 2017)

This project began with the story of how I wrote a book for my daughter. I had thought that my experience of wanting to write the book for her, a book in her two languages, a book in which she could see herself, was somehow unique and isolated. I had assumed mine was a solitary pursuit of creating the bilingual literature I so desperately wanted her to have, and that nobody else had experienced this process the way I did. This project began with the story of a mother writing a picture book for her little one. But in the process of conducting my research, I gradually realized my story was not a unique one at all. It turned out that other parents had endeavored to do exactly what I had set out to do. So, this project grew to encompass some of their stories of writing for their little ones as well.

I am grateful that the participants and co-authors of this research were willing and able to share their own storytelling experiences with me. Pascha, Raquel, and Jerry have already walked the paths of their narrative calling and they have each walked it alone. They entered the space in- between a parent and an author, a space unknown and difficult to navigate like a pitch-black forest, not having realized how many other parent-authors were blindly stumbling along, bumping into trees and being caught in branches as well, some making it through, others not so much. The Borderlands space is where majority of young children and their parents in the United

States currently exist. As the demographics have shifted minorities are no longer minorities, and most of the children about to enter the school system this year will claim at least one non-white racial heritage or culture. This new reality is forcing more and more parents of multiracial,

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multicultural, and multilingual children into the dark forest of parent-authoring for the children of the Borderlands. They will enter with no light sources and no guidance, but with pure determination to provide the stories their children need to see, that other children like them and unlike them need to see. These parent-authors are determined to provide the mirrors and windows Sims Bishop talked about, and to do so they become rhetors and activist in their own right, collecting and amplifying the voices of their communities through their own.

1. Summary of Findings

In the above pages, I investigated the rhetorical power of children’s literature, the need for and lack of representative multicultural and multilingual children’s literature, and the ways in which parent-authors enter the stage in their dual role to fill that need. Scholars form the past nearly six decades have been loudly pleading with the writing and publishing communities to pay more attention to the need for diverse children’s literature, especially when it comes to representing children of color. “White supremacy in children’s literature will be abolished when authors, editors, publishers, and booksellers decide that they need not to submit to bigots,” this is how Nancy Larrick concluded her article from 1965. Yet, in 2014, children’s author Walter Dean

Myers found himself having to prove that argument all over again. “Books transmit values,” he writes. “They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color”? He concludes his article with a simple statement, somewhat echoing

Larrick’s: “There is work to be done” (W. Myers NYT). There are nearly fifty years between their two articles, and while the CCBC is showing incremental improvements in the number of children’s books about people of color, the progress is too slow, and parent-authors have noticed.

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The three parent-authors who participated in this project had very little in common at a first glance. They represented different cultural groups and backgrounds—Latinx, Chinese

American, and a black and white racially mixed family; living in large urban areas like New

York City and small towns in the Midwest and the South; their children at different ages; their books on different topics and published in similar ways but through different means. Yet, there were three striking similarities that emerged overall. The first one was the extent to which all three parent-authors went through the writing and publishing process entirely on their own, discovering what the next step was as they got there. Yes, they received the support of their families, friends, and strangers through Kickstarter once they got the word out, but the burden to research and extrapolate the process from the information they could find was entirely on them.

Ironically, not a single one of them ever googled “how to write and publish a children’s book,” and neither did I. All four of us assumed the resources were not there, but we also didn’t know what questions to ask to get the right answers, or any answers. All four of us, also, assumed we were alone in our quest to write a children’s book as parents. As a result, during the interviews all three parent-authors indicated their desire to connect with other parent-authors and exchange resources and experience. Pascha and Jerry directly asked if they could get in touch with one another, while Raquel, citing her busy schedule, initially did not express interest in connecting, but at the same time was incredibly responsive to all of my questions about her process and resources she used. All participants were eager to share their experience, to guide others through the forest if possible, and to continue growing themselves, and all three of them expressed gratitude to me for pursuing this project, which took me aback.

Another similarity between all three participants was that none of them felt like they were done with the writing and publishing experience at the time when we spoke. Raquel, the most

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prolific of the three participants, already has two more books almost completed, is additionally researching how to write for middle school-aged children, and during the interview she shared ideas for at least two more books, the stories for which had come to her in a stroke of inspiration: one about the process of writing music, and one about socks from different parts of South

America. Sometimes you have to acknowledge the story as it arrives, she laughed, adding that

“you write certain stories because you want to write them,” whether they go on to see the world or not. Jerry and Pascha, on the other hand, both have their next ideas for more books fully formed and ready to go, and are exploring more narratives as well. After Pepper Zhang, Jerry published two coloring books through Little Ning Books, one of them inspired by his daughter

Madison’s love for princesses, but he also wants to complete the collection of strong Asian women he had started and for which he had commissioned the illustrations. And Pascha already had two more CeCe and Roxy books completely done, speaking of them with such certainty that at one point of the interview I felt like I had missed them somehow on her website. She laughed, informing me that no, they were not published yet, but very soon, as she was converting all of

CeCe and Roxy’s adventures into pictures books with expanded texts and soft pages for slightly older children. All three parent-authors felt they were not done telling stories just yet. In spite of the challenges they all faced, the additional physical and emotional load of carrying practically a second full-time job for little-to-no pay, not one of them said “I am done, I did one book and that’s good enough.” Their reasons for entering this space were not to produce one thing and profit from it, but to make a lasting difference.

The third commonality that I discovered after talking to the three parent-authors, was that all three of them had access to resources that enabled them to pursue their activism. All three of them are highly educated, with two of them holding master’s degrees and one of them a

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doctorate. Their education allowed them to perceive the inequality in representation of people of color in children’s books, and to know the first steps to do something about it. I would argue that not all parents of multicultural and multilingual children can benefit from the privilege of educational background that allows them to understand their experiences in a comprehensive way, and to possess some of the tools to begin making a difference. While none of participants had direct children’s book writing experience, all three of them had had the benefit of being instructed in writing practices, whether in their undergraduate or graduate degrees. In addition to the benefit of having solid educational background, all three participants had steady income in their families, and experienced relative financial stability. This allowed them to be free from the concern of whether writing their books will bring additional income, and even to take the risks that it may not. Every single one of them invested their own time and money in their projects, and were ready to do it again. I would be amiss to not acknowledge their privilege and through that, my own, as I self-published my board book paying for the 20-30 copies completely on my own, just to have the story out there. As we continue to build on our experience as parent- authors, and encourage others to follow in the footsteps of creating and publishing the much- needed multicultural and multilingual children’s stories, we need to acknowledge that the ability to do so also comes from a place of access and certain privilege.

2. Recommendations

As I began moving forward in my experience as a parent-author, and as a direct result of working on this thesis project with the three participants and co-authors, a few ideas for supporting parent-authors began to emerge. Scholarly work in a number of fields already supports the need for representative and inclusive multicultural children’s literature, and researchers like

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Kucirkova even openly encourage parents and guardians to get involved in the book market in order to fill in the gap. The recommendations below would hopefully enable future parent- authors to enter the writing, publishing, and distribution spaces more easily, thus increasing the number of stories with and about children of color on the U.S. market and beyond.

Industry Recognition

The findings of this project lend themselves to a few direct recommendations. First and foremost, there is a need to acknowledge the rhetorical work parent-authors do and will continue to do. I truly hope that organizations such as the Society of Children’s Book Writers and

Illustrators (SCBWI), which all three parent-authors cited as a resource they found on their own, would dedicate resources specifically geared towards parents who want to enter the industry. It is necessary to acknowledge the phenomenon of parent-authors, and to begin conducting scholarly work that investigates and supports it. The variety of journals dedicated to children’s literature, and specifically children’s literature for multicultural and multilingual children, should also dedicate space, and maybe even funding, to parent-authors. Journals like The Lion and the

Unicorn and Children’s Literature by Johns Hopkins University Press, Project Muse’s

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature Assembly’s Journal of

Children’s Literature, and Kweli, a journal dedicated to emerging writers of color, would be great places to start. Many of them have had dedicated issues to multicultural children’s literature, but not to literature specifically written by parent-authors.

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Data Gathering On Parent-Authors

Directly related to the recommendation above, I would make the recommendation to have the CCBC begin to include books by parent-authors, whenever possible, into their annual report, and for the Library of Congress to add a tag for parent-authors on their library database. Much in the same way that Chaudhri was able to search multiracial children’s books through the Library of Congress’s database by using search terms like “mixed,” “biracial,” and “multiracial,” adding a tag for parent-authors will allow us to see how many parents have wandered into writing for the children of the Borderlands, and how this phenomenon has developed over the past decades.

The data from the CCBC could also provide a snapshot of annual trends of parent-authored literature, and see any shifts in tonality, style, and themes, as well as compare multicultural and multilingual representation in parent-author written books against the representation in all published books as a whole. Collecting that data and allowing it to exist will in return provide more searchability for any potential parent-authors, encouraging more participation and, hopefully, closing the gap on accessibility by providing the resources needed for anyone to begin their storytelling journey.

Organization and Accessibility of a Parent-Authors Community

During the interviews, it became clear to me that there is a drastic need for some sort of a communal forum that can connect published and prospective parent-authors, a place they can access for resources but that is flexible enough to accommodate their unpredictable schedules and varied needs. Both Pascha and Jerry indicated that they would not only welcome, but seek contact with each other and other parent-authors. Jerry had already been approached by another parent from his daughter’s school, an Indian American father who wanted to write a book about

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their religious and cultural heritage, and Jerry had made the time to share with this father everything he knew. Had he not done that, the other father would have had to go through the same grueling, isolated process that Jerry, Pascha, and Raquel all went though, yet Jerry took one small step towards creating a community of support. I would like to build up on that through the creation of an online space, ideally through social media for reasons of accessibility, where parent-authors can browse through resources and connect with each other, but all on their own time. Time was often brought up as an obstacle during my interviews with the participants, and understandably so. Social media affords groups of people with similar interests the opportunity to connect on their own terms, dedicating as little or as much time as they have to the communication. The desire to connect is there, there is just a need for platform that can successfully accommodate the multiplicity of needs the parent-authors have to juggle. Yet, if the conclusions of this research are correct, and the phenomenon of parent-authors is here to stay, we should look forward toward the opportunities it presents for children’s literature.

3. Outcomes and Looking Forward

It would be irresponsible for me as a researcher to not recognize the ways in which this project grew and evolved in the year and a half of its development, and the way its perspective shifted in the final stages of my research. During the months the initial interviews were conducted and immediately after that, two significant events impacted the way I saw the goal and purpose of this project as well as the outcomes of it. The first event was the arrival of the

COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in February 2020, resulting in a nation-wide social isolation from March 2020 until June 2020, which saw schools and daycare centers close en masse. With the childcare facilities closed, many parents were forced into the roles of educators

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for the very first time, suddenly becoming a lot more aware of the texts and narratives to which their children were exposed.

Overlapping with the already enormous stressors of the pandemic and isolation, in late

May 2020 a series of protests against racial injustice and institutionalized racism spread around the U.S., in a response to the Memorial Day 2020 death of George Floyd, which became the last straw in a series of African American deaths in the hands of police officers that had included

Breonna Taylor, Freddie Grey, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Eric Garner,

Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many others. With protests spreading out to nearly every major city in the U.S., and many international ones as well, an entire nation began waking up to the need for more education on the plight of black communities in the United States. Social media outlets like Facebook and Instagram filled with recommendations on books and movies and TV series for allies and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, or really for anyone who felt they wanted to know more and do more.

As a result, my personal social media filled with children’s book recommendations and lists. Groups and individuals I had followed in the process of researching for this project provided titles that can help talk to your child about race, to actively raise an anti-racist citizen, to highlight the diversity and inclusion we as a society would need in order to raise a generation that will no longer endorse violence perpetuated based on race, culture, language, gender identity, or sexual orientation. The focus of my project shifted again. It had started as a small study about one parent writing a book their child can see themselves in, and had later grown into a research of a group of parent-authors’ rhetorical journeys. Yet, it suddenly evolved into a project about the frantic need for these books and for the existence of parent-authors providing multicultural texts who need to be given the platform to reach as many people as possible. My

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research project became a reflection on the rhetorical acts of people and communities whose children have been invisible for too long, whose voices have been underrepresented, and who are now fighting for their place in an industry unwilling to change. This industry remains determined to only include books about children of color as representatives of the Other, the Not-Us, the minority whose challenges are not everyone’s challenges and whose skin color or language defines them. Earlier in this project, I quoted Anzaldua as saying that writing a children’s book is a rhetorical act and an act of activism, and I think this bears repeating. Children’s literature is meaning-making; children’s literature is rhetorical work, and writing children’s literature that lifts up the voices silenced for so long is activism. The parent-authors I spoke with are representatives of a first wave of this activism, the ones who will lead the way for many more to come.

For months, we had parents isolated with their children because of the COVID-19 pandemic, who were then forced to explain to their little ones the insanity of the world around them through lens the children would understand, and it’s not a stretch to assume the parents turned to children’s literature. And when they did not find the books they sought, just like Jerry and Pascha did not, and when they wanted their communities represented in a different way like

Raquel did, these parents would turn to the rhetorical acts of inventing, composing, revising, publishing, and finding an audience for inclusive texts and representative illustrations.

I began this project hoping to turn the attention of the scholarly community to the rhetorical actions of parent-authors, who choose to write and publish children’s literature, and the power contained in the duality of their roles. I admit, I also naively hoped on some level that my research would gain enough traction to contribute to a shift in the publishing industry, one that would allow for other parents to more easily find their road to publication through editorial

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houses. However, as my research deepened, I was no longer convinced that the work of these rhetors has any need or use for validation from the traditional publishing industry as a whole. As

Kucirkova pointed out, parents are uniquely qualified to create texts appropriate for their multicultural children—in her examples, parent-authors serve as both language and identity brokers, having the ability to provide relevant narratives for their children, “in their own language, and to share them with the school and wider communities” (127). In other words, the social circulation aspect of parent-authored literature is not limited to the printing and distribution process, but it goes beyond that into being an act of rhetorical empowerment.

Trimbur makes a similar argument. “To my mind, delivery can no longer be thought of simply as a technical aspect of public discourse,” he appeals, “it must be seen as ethical and political”

(190). In the case of parent-authors, self-publication or working with small editorial houses is a way to circulate ideas and stories with the explicit purpose of providing representation outside of the possibility for profit. The nature of children’s literature has always been subversive, especially in the literature that has staying power, as Lurie, Rose, Saunders, Chaudhri, Larrick,

Sims Bishop, Anzaldua, and many others pointed out. The work of parent-authors writing for their multicultural and multilingual children is subversive not only because of the message of representation and inclusion it sends, but also because it rejects the necessity for a traditional publishing model that has proven it is slow to change in response to the needs of the current population. The market for parent-authored children’s literature should expand and be encouraged for sure. But it needs to remain independent, as much as possible, from overarching children’s literature industry trends that focus on the pedagogical and the didactic, normalizing the white experience above all. The purpose of the literature created by parent-authors is not

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merely to educate, but it is to build a house entirely of mirrors and windows where everyone is welcome to find themselves and their place in the world.

In the coming years children’s literature may very well become a wider stage for activism and addressing inequality. Expanding on the demand for more multicultural and multilingual voices, for inclusion and diversity, parent-authored children’s literature is in a position to change the way the conversations about race and culture and inequality occur in the homes and classrooms around the country. The parent-authors to come will not be moved to write just so they can see their child represented in a book. They will need to have complete control over the stories they write because they will be writing with the voices of their own communities, to raise them up so they can be heard. The new narratives will be written for and about their children, not just so their children’s lives are different, but so their children can survive. And this is a very different motivation.

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Appendix A

Interview Preparation and Questions/Prompts

Thank you for participating in this project and for agreeing to be interviewed as an author of bilingual and/or multicultural children’s literature. Prior to the interview, please review the prompts listed below. The interview format will be a guided interview, meaning that it will follow the natural flow of a conversation centered around a specific topic, in this case your experience and writing process. We may use all or only a few of the prompts below, depending on how in-depth our conversation becomes, because the main goal of this study is to allow you to tell your story as an author in a niche genre. If you think of any additional prompts or specific stories you would like to share, please feel free to bring them to the interview as well.

Prompts: Personal history

• How did you become a writer/storyteller? • How did you choose the genre in which you currently write? • How did your own personal background influence the works you have created? • How has your community perceived/accepted your work?

Writing experience and process

• How do you come up with the ideas for your stories? • What does storytelling mean to you? How do you feel your works incorporate that idea? • Where do you find the inspiration for your books? • What kind of initial research do you conduct when starting a new book? • What role does your culture play into your writing process? • How to you select and incorporate your cultural commonplaces into your work? • Did you seek out feedback from your community on your work? What was the feedback you received? • What challenges did you face in the writing and publication process? What were the hardest ones to overcome? If you could, what advice would you give your past self about this project?

Importance and future of multicultural children’s literature

• Why do you feel that multicultural and multilingual children’s literature is important in today’s society? Is it more or less important in the current cultural climate? Why do you feel this way? • What advice would you give to another parent who is embarking on a creative journey with the desire to compose literature for young children with multicultural or bilingual elements?

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• What books would you recommend as examples of successful works in this genre? Why these works? • What organizations/writing communities/scholarship would you recommend to a new author in the genre? • What are some ways in which you feel the larger writing and publishing community could support parents who wish to write children’s literature for the first time?

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