Writing into the Future of Kidlit with Carol Fisher Saller

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The Babblery
The Babblery
Writing into the Future of Kidlit with Carol Fisher Saller
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Carol Fisher Saller moved from her career as an editor to a writer of children’s books not knowing that she was witnessing the end of an era. Her first books were published by traditional, mainstream publishers who were running their businesses the way they had been run for decades. Then Carol, along with many other writers, saw the industry change around her.

“I didn’t realize how much luck came into it that I just sent off this manuscript, my first one, to five publishers and one of them bought it,” she says. “I [moved to self-publishing] out of desperation because I when I couldn’t get an agent, and I had all these books I wanted to publish.”

An industry that used to focus on supporting the careers of writers and illustrators is now desperately searching for the “next big thing,” which most writers will never be. And in fact, most writers of children’s books are more like Carol, writing for the child she was, the child who loves stories and wants to be moved and entertained (and possibly learn something along the way).

In this conversation, Carol and I talk about what sent her (and me) into self-publishing, when both of us firmly believe in the value of the traditional publishing process. We address the huge changes in the industry, including the debates over cultural appropriation and representation that are still unsettled. And we talk about why children’s books are so important, still, in a world where fewer adults are reading. [Click for transcript]

I would love it if children are moved by or entertained by the book and that in some way it forms a little piece of their character that goes forward with them, even if  consciously they never even remember my name or the name of the book.

Carol Fisher Saller

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Moving into the Future of Kidlit with Carol Fisher Saller

[00:00:00] Carol Fisher Saller: Hi, I’m Carol Fisher Saller, and I’m a writer. I’ve written for adults, but for the last eight years, I’ve been focusing on children’s and, primarily middle grade. I found my niche that Middle grade is where my heart is. I’ve given up on traditional publishing, and I’ve gone indie, and so I’ve been learning the hard way how to, publish children’s books. It’s really, really hard, and it’s a really dumb idea, but I’m totally committed, and that’s where we are.

Segment 1: Children’s writing today
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[00:00:59]

[00:01:00] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. I heard about Carol Saller from a friend in the publishing industry, and I wanted to talk to her, not just for the show, but because of a particular interest I have. I also write children’s books, but unlike Carol, although I’ve had nonfiction books published, I haven’t been successful at finding a mainstream publisher for my fiction. I self-published my first, a chapter book about a homeschooler some years ago after I learned that just the word homeschooler probably meant that no agent would consider my work. I’m currently working on publishing a middle grade novel, again, about a homeschooler. They say, write what you know, right? Like Carol, middle grade is also where my heart is. if you’re over 40, grown up before the rise of young adult or YA, your children’s literature, heart is probably stuck in middle grade, too. Charlotte’s Web, Black Beauty, Heidi. The Phantom Toll Booth, Mrs. Frisbee, A Wrinkle in Time. You get the picture. Middle grade is childhood for many of us.

[00:01:58] But if you look at that list again, you’ll notice that the industry’s focus, once on supporting career writers, writing books that would endure, has changed. I was drawn to Carol’s story, not because I have self-published, but because she is part of a growing trend, established writers who have been left behind by a rapidly changing industry.

[00:02:17] We are going to start by learning about Carol’s life as an editor, her day job at the Tuna Factory, as she calls it. Then we’ll explore her experiences publishing children’s books through established presses. Finally, we’ll step into the great unknown along with her and a good number of other writers as they work to open a crack in the dominance of an industry currently in a state of rapid change.

[00:02:39] I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[00:02:46] Carol Fisher Saller: I’ve been a writer for a long time, but my career, my day job has been as an editor, for the most part at the University of Chicago Press editing scholarly books. And, um, then there was also a stint as a an acquiring editor at a children’s book publisher, Front Street Cricket Books, which I really loved.

[00:03:08] I learned a lot about publishing as an editor, although I learned a lot about a specific niche of publishing that, you know, I have some funny stories about that, but, um, really, it was like getting a job at the tuna factory. I needed a job. I I had an opportunity because I live on the campus of the University of Chicago, and it was a good job. The university’s an excellent employer I loved the atmosphere and, uh, the work really suited me, although because I’ve lived in academe my whole life, I, I’ve always aspired to the more intellectual sides of, of publishing, but manuscript editing is not intellectual.

[00:03:54] It has a creative aspect but it’s a skill like, like being a cobbler. It is a skill that is more mechanical than intellectual. And that is really where my talents lie, I think, so I was good at it. I was fascinated by the style rules in the Chicago Manual of Style, which is published at the University of Chicago, so I became involved in In the production and editing of that famous book that’s used by trade publishers all over the world, as well as academics.

[00:04:30] And when I went home at five o’clock every night, I didn’t take the job with me.

[00:04:35]

Writing as a compulsion
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[00:04:35] Carol Fisher Saller: And then I could write on the side. I had the energy to, to do my own thing and I raised children and, and had a life enjoying all kinds of things.

[00:04:48] Suki Wessling: I love how you were talking about words as a tool, writing as, you know, the, the language as a tool. Where did you find that space in yourself to go from spending your days with the word as tool, the way that, you know, you might have a hammer in your hand, turning that hammer into a paintbrush?

[00:05:08] Carol Fisher Saller: I think it’s because I already had the momentum of writing as a habit. So almost anything I would have done as a day job would have been separate. I’m, I’m good at compartmentalizing, I guess. But I, I do come from a sort of family of writers which would astonish my ancestors if they could hear me say that, because no one, to my knowledge, has ever published a book or published anything.

[00:05:38] But both my grandmother and my father were diarists and wrote every day. And I, I didn’t know that about my father. I knew it about my grandmother because she told me and showed me her diaries and she gave me a diary, my first one, when I was 12 and I have, I have written in one every day since. So even just the daily habit of sitting and writing, it’s kind of a compulsion.

[00:06:05] I’m afraid it’s genetic and that maybe it’s It’s an illness, because that’s not beautiful writing. I don’t mean I’m writing my deep thoughts and philosophy, I mean like it rained today and I bought potatoes.

[00:06:19] Suki Wessling: You’re not going to be the next Anais Nin!

[00:06:21] Carol Fisher Saller: Not in my diaries, no, and that’s the kind of thing my grandmother did too, just wrote down what she did that day. And that, that is kind of, there’s a word for it, it’s called lifelogging. I didn’t know that until recently, lifelogging, I’m a lifelogger.

[00:06:37] Suki Wessling: What do you think logging your life does?

[00:06:39] Carol Fisher Saller: I don’t know. That’s why I think it’s kind of a compulsion.

The hard work of creative writing
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[00:06:42] Carol Fisher Saller: I really don’t connect the academic, reading, my journaling, or diary keeping, and my creative writing. To me, the creative writing is really hard, hard work. it’s not part of the compulsion. It’s, it’s difficult, I’ve learned over the years, I’ve gotten better and better and faster and faster at it, but I, I’ve learned, I think, a big chunk of how you learn to do that is by reading, because you begin to internalize things that you don’t even realize you’re internalizing.

[00:07:20] Things like, like pacing how much you narrate before you turn to dialogue or a scene or something like that. I don’t plan that out. Some people do to make sure that they’ve distributed it through their novels. But if you read enough in your genre, you do get a sense of how to spin a tale.

[00:07:42] So it, it’s just a very different kind of writing, and I, I don’t think of them as doing the same kind of thing at all. They’re different tasks.

Publishing in the mainstream
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[00:07:51]

[00:07:52] Suki Wessling: So you were in the publishing industry for a number of years on that sort of editing side, but you also did have some children’s books published. Can you explain what that process was like working with a big publisher and it’s very different from what you’re doing now.

[00:08:09] Carol Fisher Saller: Yes, and it was a privilege, I have to say. I, I appreciated it even at the time. I knew that it was an honor and a privilege to be picked up by a traditional publisher and, that they would handle the editing, the illustration of the, the books I wrote for younger children, the not, the books I write now are novels, so they don’t have illustrations, but, and you know, they would hire the cover artist and the interior designer and they even did some marketing and it was really wonderful.

[00:08:40] And I didn’t realize how lucky, how much luck came into it that I just sent off this manuscript. My first one, I sent it to five publishers and one of them bought it. Now, the rule of thumb is that if you haven’t sent your work to a hundred, let’s say agents, because you almost, you can’t really send to publisher’s directly much anymore, to a hundred agents, you haven’t tried, and you should not expect, you shouldn’t count yourself as a failure until you’ve contacted a hundred agents. Well, who has time for that?

[00:09:18] Suki Wessling: Well, okay, I’m, I’m officially a failure. Oh, I’m so excited. Maybe it was 97

[00:09:23] Carol Fisher Saller: Ugh.

[00:09:23] Suki Wessling: though. Hmm.

[00:09:25] Carol Fisher Saller: They don’t mean that you should count yourself a failure at a hundred. They just mean you shouldn’t even start to give up until you’ve reached that level.

[00:09:37] Suki Wessling: So you sent these manuscripts, uh, this first manuscript. So which book was that?

[00:09:41] Carol Fisher Saller: The Bridge Dancers. And, um, I never have been published by a big publisher if you mean like the big five, but Lerner is a big children’s book publisher. Carol Rhoda was the imprint that my book was published under and it had a good long run it was serialized in Cricket magazine and it appeared in Two different textbook anthologies. The things that made me, that pleased me the most was that there was a fourth grade class that filmed it with little, little stop action puppets and narrated it with their little voices.

[00:10:17] It was just adorable. So, that was great. but then it did go out of print and that’s one of the books that I brought back into print last year. I had to update it a little bit because the ending was not quite of a sensibility that would wash today. the main character ends up with a scar, an ugly scar, and she says, well, I’ll just wear pants like the men.

[00:11:21] This takes place back in the day, in rural Appalachia, I’ll just wear pants like the men. And so I changed that to her not minding it a bit because it, it gives me an air of mystery.

[00:11:34] Suki Wessling: Aha!.

[00:11:34] Carol Fisher Saller: I thought, you know, that was better.

Changes in the publishing industry
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[00:11:37] Suki Wessling: Well, you brought up something that’s really interesting and it’s not only the publishing industry that’s changed as far as how the business works, but also it’s really changed in a lot of ways, having to do with what gets published. So, and who it’s for and what sort of messages. So talk a little bit, let’s stick with your, your experience before you went indie to talk about what the pressures were or weren’t when you were publishing with a press.

[00:12:10] Carol Fisher Saller: Yeah, there were very few pressures. I, I know that in the other books that were published, uh, they, they’ve held up pretty well over time, but I, for instance, uh, want, I continued to publish with Lerner, and I did a couple of biographies, and, or sort of a cross between a profile and a biography. One was of George Washington Carver, and I don’t think they would have chosen a white uh woman to do that biography. I chose the topic. A friend and I wrote it together because, he was also white, but he had been a lifelong fan of Carver and had gone to Tuskegee and had read every book about him ever written and he really was an expert. He also was an educator and together I thought we made a wonderful book that focused on, um, you know, most of the books about Carver were about Peanut Man, all the things he could make out of peanuts.

[00:13:08] We didn’t even put peanuts in our book. It was all about his environmentalism and his work with Black farmers. Although the publisher did make us put the peanuts in because they said that’s what everyone wants to read about.

[00:13:22] Suki Wessling: Well, that’s a pretty classic, um, publisher’s story that, you know, that you had to put in something that you felt really had nothing to do with the book because of a preconceived idea that, that you had to fill.

[00:13:35] Carol Fisher Saller: Right. Right. Anyway, that, that one, uh, as I said, I don’t, I don’t think it would be, there are so many great Black writers who need a foot in the door that, um, when there’s a book about a, a a Black, uh, someone who’s a hero, it seems only right that, that, um, it shouldn’t be given to me to, to write.

Whose stories can we tell? And how?
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[00:14:04]

[00:14:05] Voiceover: I am going to break in here both to remind you that you’re listening to the Babblery’s interview with children’s author, Carol Fisher Saller, and also to give you some context. The conversation that follows is really brave on Carol’s part. Right now the subject of race and culture in children’s literature is so fraught that a lot of authors don’t want to address it publicly. I think that Carol does a beautiful job here of explaining the complexity that kid lit authors, especially white writers, navigate. We aim to be inclusive, but at the same time avoid cultural appropriation. We aim to be culturally representative, but avoid tokenism.

[00:14:40] As writers, we are comfortable with writing about characters who are not like us, but at the same time, we have to be respectful, as Carol is, of the way society has historically lifted up a white perspective.

[00:14:52] So allow us a moment of grace here as we navigate this minefield.

[00:14:57] Carol Fisher Saller: It’s really kind of terrifying because there’s this line that you walk between, um, appropriation, say if I decided to have a Black or Asian main character, and, and I would, uh, a lot of people would object to me writing that. So instead, what white writers tend to do now is to have a secondary character um, who isn’t just a, just a minor character, but, but a real ally or friend or, um, sidekick with a significant subplot of their own. But then, you know, that can sometimes, you can, you can, there’s a line between appropriation and tokenism, that both are objectionable, and to get it exactly right and also not step on any toes by falling into some of those traps of, uh, of, right now, I’m, I’m working on a book where, um, the characters, it, it’s, uh, it takes place in medieval times, and there are Black characters and white characters.

[00:16:09] And because in medieval England, um, the African people who lived there were not, uh, race wasn’t the same kind of thing. It wasn’t spoken of in the same kind of terms as it is today, and it wasn’t necessarily recognized. They weren’t slaves, they were citizens like everyone else. And It, it wouldn’t have been right to draw any major distinction between the way they talked or, or anything about them.

[00:16:38] They were dark skinned people who were living in England, who had jobs like other people. There weren’t lots of them, but they were there. And so I tend to even forget that some of the characters are Black and some are white in my Band of Merry Troubadours. That’s mixed, Black and white. And then I get myself into, all of a sudden it dawns on me that um, that something I’m plotting, if you do look at race, is maybe not a sensitive thing to do.

[00:17:11] Like the white character saves the Black character. Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s the way it’s going to read. This is why people now hire sensitivity readers or authenticity readers, they’re sometimes called. In the case of mine, I would need a sensitivity reader because the authenticity, I think I’ve pretty well got a handle on what was going on in medieval England, but I don’t have, I don’t, I need someone objectively to look at my book and say, you know, that’s okay because he saves her in another scene and everybody helps each other and you’ve got a pretty balanced thing going on here.

[00:17:50] If that’s the case, then, you know, maybe I don’t have to worry about it. But, but there are these issues that people will object to and call out in reviews. You know, they can even get you sort of canceled and driven out of, driven out of kid lit if if um, you respond badly. Uh, books have been withdrawn, contracts have been cancelled because of, I mean, I, I feel for all sides. I feel for the writers who, who maybe were thoughtless but, but didn’t mean to do harm and then for the people who were hurt by it.

[00:18:29] Suki Wessling: I’ve, I’ve heard white writers complain that they can’t get published now because they’re only publishing, you know, diverse characters, which is just completely wacko wrong. Uh, it’s just not true. I would say it is true that, um, that writers of color have gotten a ton more publicity and awards and they’ve, they have opportunities than in the past because publishers have bent over backwards to try to, you know, make some changes, but it really hasn’t changed very much the balance of, you know, that 80 percent of the books written for kids just have white characters and, and it’s still a very lopsided formula for, um, children. Uh, with, with maybe the mitigating factor that, that many more children do see themselves represented in the illustrations of a book now.

[00:19:24] Voiceover: You are listening to the Babblery’s interview with children’s author Carol Fisher Saller, when we return,

[00:19:31] Carol Fisher Saller: Very few kids probably live in worlds where there aren’t any nice people. So I just choose to populate my books with, with the nicer people with the idea that it’s a refuge Another book with a bully might be a comfort to a child who’s being bullied.

Guiding children’s view of the worldSegment 2:
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[00:19:47]

[00:19:54] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. I’m speaking with children’s author Carol Fisher Saller, who, after a career in the mainstream publishing industry, is now an indie author of children’s books. In the first part of our discussion, we explored the minefield of race and culture that children’s writers now walk, which rests on the premise that children’s books are important.

[00:20:15] Writers of Kid Lit aren’t just creating a product. They are mindful that they are literally molding young minds. A common experience for parents of my generation, has been that as we revisited the books of our childhood with our own children, we saw a lot in them that we had chosen to reject.

[00:20:31] I found that the first Babar book that we got from the library was shockingly racist in a modern context, but as a child, I remembered loving those books. My children are now grown and some books are literally being taken out of print, such as Dr. Seuss’s formally beloved Mulberry Street, and others like books by Roald Dahl are being edited to reflect more modern sensibilities. I asked Carol how she thinks about her role as a writer who has influence over the way children see the world.

[00:21:01] Carol Fisher Saller: My books are pretty wholesome. I try not to make them goody goody. But one of the things that bothers me is that there’s another line that children’s book writers have to walk between entertaining with characters who are irreverent and sassy and subversive and hilarious in ways that wouldn’t have washed decades ago, where everybody’s, you know, very moralistic and whatever, either evil or too good or angelic.

[00:21:36] Now characters are more complex and the, and the best, most beloved books are kind of outrageous. A lot of them are quite subversive. So I, I have a sense of humor and there’s always humor in my books, but, but I’m, it’s, they’re not full of yucks and I’m not, I don’t tell jokes. So my thing has become, I don’t like books that perpetuate the stereotypical, like, mean girls, for instance. I, I could go on and on about mean girls and bullies. I just don’t put mean girls and bullies in my books. Or, if they’re in there, they tend to be the main character who kind of accidentally does something mean or bully ish and then, you know, gets hurt by it herself or sees that she’s hurting someone.

[00:22:32] It’s, it’s always complicated and sometimes she does it on, she’ll do it on purpose out of anger and then have to make up and apologize later or other times just out of ignorance or, whatever. And it’s the same with, families. I, I know that a lot of families, families are complicated, and there’s often a lot of drama in families.

[00:22:59] I came from a family with a fair bit of drama. But I like to write about families that are loving and trustful. That doesn’t mean that the kids don’t lie. All my characters lie to their parents. And they usually end up in trouble, and they usually end up apologizing. But they, there’s the fundamental knowledge on the part of those characters that, that they’re, that they are loved.

[00:23:31] I also have a lot of orphans. And even the orphans, like, My, the orphan in a book that I haven’t published yet comes from an orphanage that is loving. It’s not the stereotypical orphanage run by evil people who feed them gruel in the basement.

Avoiding tropes
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[00:23:50] Suki Wessling: So let’s get back to the fundamental reason why you don’t do this, because these things are tropes. So, so I, you know, the tropes are, are these things that kids come to expect because they see them so often. The family that’s dysfunctional, the mean girls, the bully boys, the, um, um, You know, the, the, the orphanage, I mean, that, that comes straight from Jane Eyre, right?

[00:24:17] So, um, it has beautiful roots, one of my favorite books. But why don’t you do these, these tropes?

[00:24:24] Carol Fisher Saller: Because I, I think that those things do exist. I think kids, middle graders especially, do live in a world where there are bullies and there are mean girls. But I don’t feel like I have to model them. I don’t have to create a world where that’s the norm. I can show alternatives that are still funny and real, because every young girl who may be bullied by some mean girls, also knows some nice girls. It’s very few kids probably live in worlds where there aren’t any nice people. So I just choose to populate my books with, with the nicer people with the idea that it’s a refuge from that world of bullying. Another book with a bully might be a comfort to a child who’s being bullied.

[00:25:14] I don’t mean to say there’s no place in literature for them. It’s just something that I don’t want to model. I want to show that, uh, loyalty is a big theme in my books, uh, friendship and loyalty. The, the sidekick always has the back of the main character and vice versa, unless the main character’s being the bully. And then, then she loses her friend and has to come crawling back.

[00:25:43] Suki Wessling: One of the things that I’ve noticed teaching writing to kids,is that they have so accepted and swallowed as gospel the, the tropes, that when Um, I asked them a question like, well, have you ever met someone who’s fully evil? A real villain? And they’ll say, oh, no, that’s just in books. Well, why is that in books?

[00:26:11] And if we look at the main sort of view of humanity, how many of those mean girls are fully mean girls? And why are they mean girls?

[00:26:22] Carol Fisher Saller: Yes, on the other hand, what you said made me think of something, and that is that literature, one of the purposes of it is for us to face fears, for us to have that catharsis when evil is conquered. It’s just so primal that, that that’s one of the sources of entertainment that people respond to very powerfully, that I’m sure that’s why those tropes exist in literature and are so popular and that readers seek them out because there is, there is, uh, it is a good feeling, especially for certain kinds of kids to, to put themselves in the place of the hero who defeats the villain.

[00:27:11] Suki Wessling: So you’re writing for middle grade, so let’s talk about that, that age range. Can you explain what middle grade means?

[00:27:19] Carol Fisher Saller: Yeah, um, there’s a pretty clear set of parameters around middle grade. Children who are at the lower end, younger end of middle grade, you g

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