SERIES: Imagine

Goodbye to Poetry Workshops (for now)

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Dec 7, 2018 in Book: BROWN IS WARM, Race, School Visits, SERIES: Imagine | 0 comments

I posted a while back about the fact that the Imagine series has no people of color in the illustrations–not a single one in three books. And about the fact that I didn’t notice this until my daughter pointed it out.

(I’m still pretty embarrassed about that.)

After thinking it over, I’ve decided that I won’t be offering school visits or poetry workshops using these books anymore. I can’t change the artwork or the fact that the books are on the shelves, but I can decide not to actively promote them.

I’ll be sorry to take these poetry workshops out of my repertoire. I’ve always had such a good time encouraging kids to look deeply at and react to Rob Gonsalves’s innovative, intricate art. I’ve had teachers actually blown away by the poetry their students produced. But I just don’t feel right about using books that offer such a narrow vision of the world.

I do hope that my new book, Brown Is Warm, Black is Bright, will be the basis for some excellent poetry workshops when it comes out from Little, Brown. I’ll just have to wait until then.

Children Make Good Teachers

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Jun 14, 2018 in Illustration, Race, SERIES: Imagine | 0 comments

Okay, these particular people are VERY white.

Sometimes we need people to help us look at our own work with new eyes. Children are especially good at this. They don’t come with automatic reverence (assuming that something is good because it’s been published, or won a medal, or been labeled a classic.) And they have that special brand of ruthless honesty, particularly when they are related to us.

This can be a helpful, as when my daughter pointed out to me that all of the people in the illustrations of Imagine a Night are white.

“What?” I said. “No way!”

I grabbed the book. We looked through it together. And of course she was correct. Sixteen illustrations in that book and not a single one of them showed a person with something other than pale skin.

Well, maybe it’s just a coincidence? Maybe the companion books, Imagine a Day and Imagine a Place, show more variety?

Nope. A total of forty-nine pieces of art in all three books, and not a single person with a significant amount of melanin.

My immediate reaction was to explain that this was not my fault. I did not paint the images (the illustrator did that). I did not select them for the book (the editor did that). The book is not narrative or sequential, so I was concentrating hard on each image individually as I wrote the poems that went with them, not thinking as much about the book as a whole.

But I bit those thoughts back. They are true, but they are not particularly relevant here. Because I may not have been able to change the illustrator’s paintbrush or the editor’s choices (I was brought onto this project quite late, after the selections were already made), but I certainly could have done one thing.

I could have noticed.

Imagine a Night was published in 2003. It’s still in print. I’ve read it aloud hundreds of times. I’ve used it in countless school workshops. And I never noticed that there is not a single person of color in the entire book. How could I not have seen?

If all the people in the art had been male, I bet I would have noticed.

My own blind spots continue to amaze and dismay me. Thanks to the people who keep helping me see what I should have seen myself, but did not. I can’t change this book, but I can try to do better in the future. I can try to notice more. And once I’ve noticed, I can try to take action.