In her Personal View for our current issue of PaperTigers, Uma Krishnaswami ponders some of the questions that have come her way as a writer recently. Make sure you head on over to the main website to read the whole article; in the meantime, here’s the introduction. I found her pondering over the word ’swale’ particularly fascinating as I live not too far from Swaledale in the UK – and it certainly catches a lot of rain too! – could there be a connection?
Four years ago, an uncle of mine, D.V. Sridharan, started the crazy, impossible, madcap project, of restoring a wasteland in a rural area near the city of Chennai in India, and turning it into a sustainable farm. The reason this has anything to do with my own crazy, impossible, madcap occupation, writing books for children, is that his endeavor too had to do with words.
Words like “swale”: Roll it on your tongue. How round and beautiful it is. How it creates a resonance in the air. Swale. A low tract of land, a swale follows the contour line, and can catch water when it rains. Holding the rush of a monsoon shower, the swale in turn recharges underground water sources so that in the dry season, wells can remain refreshed. Swale. The thing is as magical as its name.
The name of that restoration project is “point Return.” The capitals are intentionally placed, intentionally withheld. The point, Sridharan says, is to return. To come back again and again to the places and the ideas that give us sustenance and hope, that are generative and regenerative in nature, that keep us going, that lead to a larger sense of who “we” are.
Story does this too. Thinking of story as cyclical in nature rather than linear, with a beginning, middle and end, changes everything. It stops me from rushing after answers, grabbing the first one that comes along. It allows me instead to live with questions.
I am happy to say that I have managed to make a career out of living with questions.
As I said, do read the rest of the article, in which Uma talks about her latest picture-book, Out of the Way! Out of the Way! (illustrated by her near-namesake, Uma Krishnaswamy, Tulika Books, 2010), which certainly provides scope for lots of questions, and gives a tantalising look ahead at her forthcoming middle-grade novel The Grand Plan to Fix Everything (Atheneum Books, due ot 2011) – and then pay a visit to Uma’s wonderful blog, Writing with a Broken Tusk.