In terms of writing, I never think of myself as controversial. Other people call it that, but I think of it as real world, I write realistic fiction and in writing realistic fiction, I try to represent all the people and as many people as I can get in the world who are walking through the world on sort of pages.
I remember when I wrote If You Come Softly which is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet and I tried to make a present day story about Romeo and Juliet and the kind of relationship, between a middle class African-American boy and a middle class white Jewish girl.
It got challenged and it got challenged because of the inter-racial relationship, and this is what 30 years, 40 years after the miscegenation laws were taken out of the world.
I don’t get to experience it a lot, but I know people do say, why do you write about stuff like this, like people say, well where’s the dad in that book? That book is just about a mom and a daughter. I’ll say, well by a show of hands, how many of you live with your mom and dad?
Maybe half or a quarter will raise their hands, and then how many of you live with your mom, how many of you live with your grandma, how many of you live with foster parents, how many of you live with two moms or two dads?. Then I talk about how there are all kinds of ways to have family and that’s why in those books, that’s that family. We don’t know where the dad is, because I didn’t write him into the book.
I’m also really careful in how I qualify. One thing I grew up with was literature where I’d read and it’d say, well a boy walked down the street and then a girl walked down the street and then a black boy walked down the street. I thought, okay so I assume whiteness unless otherwise stated.
I never do that. When I was teaching, I never let my students do that, if you qualify the race of one, qualify the race of the other so that the reader doesn’t feel like I’m on the outside of this because I’m that black boy reading this story or I’m that white boy reading this story.
That kind of stuff is really important and urgent to me, but I think a lot of times people are uncomfortable with it and they’re going to continue to be uncomfortable with. I think it’s part of the reason I write for young adults because they’re not.
They’re just figuring it all out and they’re open and they’re brilliant. They’re going to change the world.
