Minibabble: Carol Fisher Saller on Inclusivity in Children’s Fiction

Posted on May 2, 2025May 2, 2025 by suki

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The Babblery

Minibabble: Carol Fisher Saller on Inclusivity in Children's Fiction

00:00 / 14:45

Children’s writer Carol Fisher Saller started her career as a children’s writer in an industry far different from today’s children’s publishing scene. She said there was little pressure from the publisher about what to write and how to write it. But as her career has matured, so has the industry. In the full episode interview with Carol, we talk about the industry changes that led her to become an indie publisher. But in this mini-episode, we focus on a change that has both energized and confused writers: the push for representation and the elimination of cultural appropriation. Carol speaks with refreshing candor about the difficulties she faces as a white writer who genuinely wants to to strike the right balance between cultural appropriation and tokenism. She talks about the myths and misperceptions, as well as the challenges, as she tries to make her way in a changed industry.

For more details, please visit “Writing into the Future of Kidlit with Carol Fisher Saller.”

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Minibabble: Carol Fisher Saller on inclusivity in kidlit
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[00:00:30] Carol Fisher Saller: Hi,

[00:00:31] I am your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble. Children’s literature is important. It molds the way children see the world. 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: 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. I’m definitely stuck on middle grade, as is today’s guest Children’s author Carol Fisher, Saller.

[00:01:01] The children’s publishing industry, like the rest of media, has been going through massive changes in recent years, but in the case of a product that literally molds young minds, the changes have been deep and fiercely contested. Some of the business oriented changes have driven writers like Carol, formerly career writers in the industry to the indie or self-publishing world.

[00:01:21] We speak about that in the full episode, which you can find @babblery.com. This mini episode focuses on the push for diversity and inclusion in kid lit. Right now, the subject of race and culture in children’s literature is so fraught that a lot of writers don’t want to address it publicly. I think that Carol does a beautiful job here of explaining the complexity that kid lit writers, especially white writers, navigate.

[00:01:43] We aim to be inclusive, But at the same time, avoid cultural appropriation. We aim to be culturally representative, but avoid tokenism. 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. We started by talking about how her old books, such as her first book, the Bridge Dancers, feel different being read in a modern context.

[00:02:12] Carol Fisher Saller: 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. 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.

[00:02:47] Suki Wessling: Aha!.

[00:02:48] Carol Fisher Saller: I thought, you know, that was better.

[00:02:50] 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. and who it’s for and what sort of messages. So talk about what the pressures were or weren’t when you were publishing with a press.

[00:03:16] Carol Fisher Saller: Yeah, there were very few pressures. I, I know that in the other books that were published, 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. 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.

[00:04:26] Suki Wessling: Well, that’s a pretty classic, 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.

[00:04:39] Carol Fisher Saller: 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.

[00:05:07] Voiceover: The children’s publishing industry, given its prominence in the educational world, had to do some serious reckoning about the writers and topics they had chosen to publish in the past. Prominent books about Black kids, like A Snowy Day, were often written by white writers if they were written at all.

[00:05:22] So the industry did some big soul searching and suddenly it seemed to writers there were new rules that were hard to define. Carol Saller speaks here so thoughtfully about how established white writers had to learn to think differently about their work.

[00:05:35] 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 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, the characters, it, it’s, uh, it takes place in medieval times, and there are Black characters and white characters.

[00:06:45] And because in medieval England, 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.

[00:07:12] 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.

[00:07:46] 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.

[00:08:25] 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.

[00:09:02] Voiceover: There’s been a fair amount of grumbling by writers who were uncomfortable with the new rules, but Carol points out that this corrective was necessary and hasn’t resulted in any of the unfairness that some might complain about.

[00:09:14] Carol Fisher Saller: 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.

[00:10:10] Voiceover: 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.

[00:10:26] 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 formerly 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.

[00:10:55] Carol Fisher Saller: 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.

[00:11:27] 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.

[00:11:53] 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.

[00:12:25] Voiceover: Representation matters. Diversity matters, but no matter what they’re writing, children’s writers always come back to the fundamental task in front of them: to write books that kids love and that they carry forward with them, the way I have carried Harriet the Spy with me.

[00:12:42] Carol Fisher Saller: I would love it if children are moved by or entertained or both by, by the book and that, 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.

[00:13:38] Thanks to Carol Saller for sharing her independent publishing adventure with us. You can learn more@carolsaller.com.

[00:13:46] The songs Wheel of Time by Ayla Nereo and Lullaby Sweet Dreams by Elena Smirnova are courtesy of the free music archive.org. You can find more information about the subjects we discussed on the show page at babblery.com. Thanks for listening.

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