Interview with Uma on Threads of Peace
My good friend, Uma Krishnaswami, has a new book coming into the world on August 17th entitled Threads of Peace. It is a deeply insightful exploration of two world-renowned champions of peace, Mohanda “Mahatma” Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had the privilege of reading Uma’s book prior to publication, and I asked her if I could interview her about her process. She not only agreed but responded with fascinating information about her writing process.
Enjoy!
Uma, the first thing I thought when Threads of Peace arrived in the mail was, Wow! What an impressive undertaking! How long did your process take, researching, writing, finding photographs . . . revising after the manuscript was in your editor’s hands?
Thank you, Marion. You’re very kind. I certainly wasn’t aiming for impressive—that would have been too scary. I’m not sure what I was aiming for when I began exploring this idea but I can tell you that from proposal to publication, this book took me nine years.
What kinds of difficulties did you encounter along the way? What unique rewards did you discover?
It sounds like a cliché, but I do believe that every book teaches me how to write that book and no other, so I suppose the primary difficulty was that I had no idea how to go about writing this one. The first draft was dreadful. It was like tramping through sludge—all information and no direction. I simply couldn’t contextualize all the reading I’d done. My editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy wrote me three patient, hugely enlightening letters. You know, the kind with an encouraging paragraph up front. I’d hang onto that first part for dear life as I plowed through the next ten or so pages of notes on everything I still hadn’t managed to figure out. It was all difficult but it was all such good work.
Navigating the world of archives, finding ownership and provenance of images—that was an entirely unexpected learning experience for me, but so rich. It gave me whole new ways to think about the stories in this history.
Is this your first nonfiction book?
It is. I’d written nonfiction magazine pieces before this, and I’d begun to think about nonfiction in a picture book way, but this was different.
How was creating Threads of Peace different from your experience with your many picture books and novels? And in what ways was it the same?
At first I thought I’d do the photo research as I wrote, but that proved impossible. In the second edited draft, I was really struggling with structure, so I plotted it out the way one would plot a novel, with scenes and sequels. That really helped, so I could visualize timelines and mark up connections.
My brilliant editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, gave me so much to think about and work with. She said now that I’d done all this research, I had to make it my own. I had to come to it, not as the expert in the field, but as an outsider. She quoted Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay about writing in Italian, as an “outsider to fluency.” It was eye-opening. I know what it’s like to be an outsider to linguistic and cultural fluency. As a child who moved constantly and an immigrant to two countries in my adult life, I know how it feels not to be the expert resident of anywhere.
So what, I thought, do I know? To this, Caitlyn said you write this thing as if you were writing a novel—in scenes, with characters. You make it speak and sing and shout as if it were a novel. Take all the big chunks of exposition where you’re basically saying this happened and then that happened and trace it all with cause and effect. Tell the story. Throw out everything that doesn’t belong.
And she asked, what is the story? She suggested I develop a thesis. That stopped me short, because I’ve talked about that for years in my teaching at VCFA, in students’ critical essays, but never had I thought about a thesis for my own creative work. It was a really great exercise. I wrote a thesis statement out and referred to it all the way through copyedits. For fun, and because I was also revising a picture book about the ascent of Everest, Two at the Top, I tried writing a thesis statement for that as well. It worked!
What lies ahead for you? Are you considering more nonfiction of the same scope? If so, what other topics are tugging at you?
I think I’m in recovery at the moment. I need the palate-cleansing effect that picture books have on me, so I’m playing with a picture book combining poetry and nonfiction. It’s a smaller container, which feels doable at the moment. I have a couple of novels tugging at me, and I may go there for the next long project. I’m in reading mode again, so I’ll wait to see what topics might surface.
Do you have any stories to tell about your process with this book? Did you make discoveries in your research or writing that surprised you?
I knew I’d need to go looking for photos, maybe 100 of them. I had decided to use a combination of archival photographs and some that my husband had taken in India, Atlanta, and Montgomery, Alabama. So I figured I’d be looking for contemporary photos of other places important to the lives of both Mahatma Gandhi and Reverend King. But I did not think then of the interrelationships between my text and the pictures I would be seeking – nor did I think of the pictures as windows into their own stories or as filters through which I’d begin to see my project differently. I hadn’t yet thought about the effect of the photos on me or on the story I was trying to tell.
But as I settled tentatively into the first Internet searches and began to pay attention to the photographs in history books, I began to uncover treasures. I found a photo of an Imperial medal of the same vintage as the one that Gandhi had given back to the British government, saying he could not in conscience keep it. I found the Inner Temple archive in London that housed the logbook where Gandhi had signed in as an entering student. A photographer in South Africa granted me permission to use his photo of the station where Gandhi had been thrown off a train. A railway archive gave me a picture of a Durban street in the 1860s when Gandhi arrived there, with a double-decker horse-drawn carriage. Each of those pictures was curated, titled, described and preserved by someone who cared about it.
The King pictures were even more moving, closer as they were to the chronology of my own life. After weeks of perusing the Library of Congress and the National Archive websites I began to recognize the work of photographers who documented the civil rights era—like Flip Schulke, whose image of the Kings’ family dining room featured a photo of Gandhi hanging high on a wall, as if watching over the parents and their children. Or Rowland Scherman, in his eighties when I talked to him, who signed all rights over to the US Information Agency on his iconic images of the March on Washington. Scherman talked to me about his stunningly beautiful picture of a 12-year-old, Edith Lee-Page, who didn’t know for years that her photo had appeared in papers around the world, until her cousin came across it in a Black History calendar and told her, “Hey Edith! You’re a star.” I talked to the widow of one photographer and the daughter of another. Each image had a story behind it.
And then there were the letters and telegrams I found in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Howard Thurman and MLK collections at Boston University. I felt as if I were touching history. Sometimes, a photo or a paper gave me material that I could work into the text. Sometimes it gave me enough for a sidebar. Mostly, the search made me aware of what a delicate dance this was, trying to recreate the events and the feelings of times gone by, trying to show people who lived then, and whose actions changed the timeline we’re part of today.
You and I have both taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program in Writing for Children and Adults. During the years I was there, I often tried to turn some of my students toward nonfiction, but I rarely succeeded. That’s not what they came there to learn. Have you had the same experience?
Yes. But I also think about my own stubborn self, and how I often have to work hard to let go my initial convictions about what kind of book I’m writing. There was a time when I thought everything that I ever wrote was going to be a picture book because I was so in love with the form. Our mutual friend Susan Fletcher (writer of wonderful, meticulously crafted middle grade and YA novels) might call this “woo-woo” but at some level I’m convinced the material I’m working on contains the answer to the question of what it’s going to be, the way stone contains a sculpture and the sculptor’s art is finding it. I’ve tried for years to get students to let go their preconceptions about what something might be and try to step back and imagine all that it could be. But I also see that I’m not always very good at following my own suggestions.
Do you find that nonfiction—we need a better name so it isn’t being defined by what it is not—is gaining more literary credibility in recent days?
It’s like nonviolence, I guess. Maybe we have to define some things by what they’re not. I do think that we’re fortunate to see how much nonfiction for young readers has grown in terms of craft and artistic quality. The standards are so much higher now and that is a good thing.
What I see in nonfiction today is visual artistry and the excellence of quality in the digital age. But I also see a willingness to explore challenging subjects in depth and a greater openness to stories that counter conventional narratives. I get the sense that we’re trusting young readers to understand complexity because kids the world over have stepped up to show us they worry about the problems of our world and they want us to tell them the truth.
Your roots in India gave you deep access to Gandhi, and the connection between Gandhi and MLK, which I hadn’t thought about before, is clearly a natural one. But even so, did you have any hesitation—given the fierce questions being asked today about who has a right to tell whose story—about taking on such an important Black American figure?
I should tell you that I’m always deeply suspicious of new ideas. They feel giddily uplifting, but I’m so aware that they can turn into tinsel and then fall apart when I try to do something with them. At first I didn’t dare to think of this as a project I could take on. So I thought, I don’t have be a writer of this idea, do I? I’ll just read about it. But the more I read, the more I was intrigued by the Gandhian repertoire of methods and action and principles that I’d known about all my life and this whole other area—the influence of Gandhi on King and the American civil rights movement. I found wonderful scholarly work on this subject. But no one had come close to writing about it for young people, so I wondered, do I dare?
I thought maybe I could treat it as (what else?) a picture book. I thought it might be about the Kings’ visit to India in 1959. That approach raised more questions than it answered. My editor didn’t think it was a picture book—she said she’d take it on if I could see being able to treat it with a much wider lens, as middle grade nonfiction. That was the nudge I needed. Perhaps I could learn to be the writer this book required.
The work of both men remains unfinished, which is inevitable, of course. Perhaps it could even be said that some of the gains they each made have been lost. But after having immersed yourself in their lives so deeply, does your own sense of hopefulness hold? Do you believe we humans are moving any closer to peaceful co-existence?
I knew I didn’t want to write from the kind of “pastist” nostalgia that has given us so much one-sided history. But the danger in keeping my contemporary eye on past events was that I kept getting bad attacks of “presentism.” Every time the news cycle got me down, I’d start feeling like Gandhi’s legacy and King’s were going down the drain—what was the point of it all? My writing group had to talk me off that ledge a couple of times. They finally convinced me to keep my window narrow and just do the work that lay immediately ahead.
But in a way, the book sustained me, and every time I heard about a nonviolent protest, or young people raising their voices, or drives to register Black voters, I could feel the principles of nonviolent resistance and organizing, still combining in our time. Do I think we’re moving closer to peaceful coexistence? No, because the countering forces of violence and oppression are also very much alive. Maybe it’s always going to be this way, which is all the more reason for us to understand that peace isn’t the end—it’s the means by which to work toward truth and justice.
John Lewis said, “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.” So there’s a good narrow window to focus on. Losing hope is not an option.
