My book is about Ruth Asawa, but she was not the only artist or even the only female artist imprisoned because of her Japanese ancestry during World War II. Currently an exhibit at the Smithsonian that runs through August 17, 2025 features the artwork of three Japanese-American painters, all of them women: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Mine Okubo. The New York Times carried a review of the exhibit by Aruna D'Souza. 
     I was fascinated by the painting Wind and Dust by Mine Okubo.

This painting was created at the prison she was sent to in Topaz, Utah. This camp was notorious for the bleak, windy conditions, which she captures with the unadorned barracks surrounded by beige sand without a single tree or blade of grass in sight. But what I am drawn to in the painting is the image of the family all holding onto each other, rollled up into a ball while the winds of fortune buffet them on all sides.  The figures' closeness shows the way family bonds functioned to protect people, but simultaneously their defensive postures illustrate the fragility of those bonds under massive duress. The three individuals do not look at each other. They are just trying to survive. 

Ruth Asawa was incarcerated in Arkansas, not Utah. Okubo was already an accomplished artist when she was imprisoned, but Ruth was just a highschool student. Ruth did not create paintings of the camps. However, after being imprisoned behind barbed wire, she chose wire as her favorite medium. With wire she wove her mysterious sculptures that cast mesmerizing shadows on the walls.

A big box arrived just as the snow storm began here. "It's very heavy," my husband said.

I want to share this article by Dan Rather about Mitsuye Endo who just received the Presidential Citizens Medal posthumously from President Biden. Like Ruth Asawa, Mitsuye Endo was incarcerated in a detention camp as a young woman. She became the plaintiff in a law suit brought by the Japanese American Citizen's League that challenged the legality of this incarceration. After she won her case, most of the camps were closed.   

I hope that my book, A Line Can Go Anywhere, brings attention to the injustice of Executive Order 9066 at a time when politicians are talking again about mass detention and the incarceration of families. Ruth was resilient, but she experienced heart rending family separation. Her father was sent to a separate prison from the rest of the family because the government viewed him as suspicious. His leadership in the small Japanese American community of Norwalk was his only "crime." Ruth did not see him for five years. Her mother did not speak English and it was up to the children, Ruth and her siblings, to write to government authorities to try to find her father and reunite the family. Ruth
was also separated from her younger sister, who had been sent to Japan before the war to visit family. 

​I am very excited about this glowing review from Kirkus. This book has been such a long time in the making with so many hiccups along the way, but all along I knew/ felt it was special.  ​


A LINE CAN GO ANYWHERETHE BRILLIANT, RESILIENT LIFE OF ARTIST RUTH ASAWA
by Caroline McAlister ; illustrated by Jamie Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2025
A title worth moving to the head of the line.

An artist grappled with boundaries.
Growing up in California, Ruth Aiko Asawa (1926-2013) was keenly aware of an “invisible line” separating her life at home, where she was called Aiko, from school, where she was known as Ruth—though “she could cross back and forth or even straddle it if she had to.” This beautifully wrought metaphor for a bicultural Japanese American experience is echoed throughout the book: in the lines a young Asawa drew in the dirt at her family farm and the way she lined up for the Pledge of Allegiance at school. The most important lines, however, were those she made as an artist, especially when creativity sustained her while she and other Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. She studied to become an art teacher, but “because she looked like the enemy, her college wouldn’t place her at a school.” She persevered and, after the war, found her way to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Drawing inspiration from Mexican wire baskets and memories of barbed wire at the camps, Asawa was driven by the conviction that “art is for everyone.” Infused with emotion, the unflinchingly honest text and exquisite mixed-media art, which layers dazzling pops of blue onto muted backdrops, detail the oppression Asawa faced—and her resilience. An informative author’s note provides additional context for this story of an innovative artist whose legacy of democratizing the arts is utterly inspirational.
A title worth moving to the head of the line. (photograph, bibliography) (Picture-book biography. 7-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781250310378

Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025

Categories:
CHILDREN'S BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CHILDREN'S HISTORY

​My big news is I have a new book coming out in February 2025.  Here is the notice from the Rights Report.

Finding Narnia is my second book with Macmillan; the release date is November 19. For both John Ronald's Dragons and Finding Narnia the production process feels a little mysterious from my end. Out of the blue I'll get an e-mail from editor Katherine Jacobs informing me of the release date. Then an ARC, advance release copy, will land on my doorstep. Then e-mails arrive with copies of the reviews.  If a review is negative, my agent, Jennifer Mattson, will try to provide soothing words and context. But with Finding Narnia the two reviews I have received have been wonderful, so no soothing words necessary, only kudos and joy. But especially kudos and joy for the starred Kirkus review!

,So I've been trying to expand my repertoire beyond the picture book biography, and to that end, I have been reading a lot of middle grade novels. My favorite at the moment is Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell. I found out about her because she had reviewed The British Library's Harry Potter exhibition for the London Review of Books.  www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n24/katherine-rundell/at-the-british-library.  She grew up on Rowling's books and shares with her a genius for the tropes of classic British children's fiction: quasi-fantastical Victorian settings, orphans, and eccentric guardians. The gangs of enterprising street children are reminiscent of Charles Dickens and Eric Kastner.
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​Apparently Rundell was inspired to write Rooftoppers by her own adventures climbing the roofs of Oxford. (It is no accident that Philip Pullman blurbs her book.) Here is a link to an article she wrote about climbing for the London Review of Books.   www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n08/katherine-rundell/diary

​ I am  interested, however,  in what I can learn as an aspiring middle grade writer from Rundell.  I feel my weakness is plot so I am intrigued by how other authors construct theirs. The plot of Rooftoppers is driven by the main character's, Sophie's, desire for her lost mother. Although Sophie is still an infant when she is separated from her mother, she has memories: "Sophie's skin was too pale, and it showed blotches in the cold, and her hair had never, in her memory, been without knots. Sophie did not mind, though, because in her memory of her mother she saw the same sort of hair and skin--and her mother, she felt sure, was beautiful. Her mother, she was sure, had smelled of cool air and soot, and had worn trousers with patches at the ankle" (13). I love the detail of the patches at the ankle because a small child would notice things at ankle height. But to get back to plot, everything depends on these memories of love and connection.  Sophie clings fiercely and stubbornly to them, coming to think of herself as a "mother-hunter."  So lesson number one is the plot must be driven by the main character's desire. In children's fiction the desire for a parent's love is powerful.

Lesson number two has to do with the obstacles Rundell creates for Sophie to overcome before she can  realize her desires.  She faces external obstacles: a conformist child services bureaucrat, unhelpful French authorities (imagine!), and a feral gang of French street children. But she also faces internal obstacles: her fear of the water and her fear of heights.  The internal and external obstacles are inextricable. She cannot overcome one without overcoming the other. So lesson number two is throw exciting challenges in front of your character that create tension, but also allow the character to grow internally and mature.

Lesson number three has to do with Rundell's similes. I love the way she uses similes to describe feelings, especially feelings of joy and wonder connected to music and reading. For example, she describes how Sophie's eccentric guardian sings with perfect pitch: "Charles had no musical instruments, but he sang to her, and when Sophie was elsewhere, he sang to the birds, and to the wood lice that occasionally invaded the kitchen. His voice was pitch-perfect. It sounded like flying" (10). Then there is the first time that Sophie hears cello music: "It was so beautiful that it was difficult for her to breathe. If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone. It was like all the voices in all the choirs in the city rolled into a single melody. Her chest felt oddly swollen" (24). And most wonderful of all is the description of a good cello practice session. "When the music went right, it drained all the itch and fret from the world and left it glowing. When she did stretch and blink and lay her bow down hours later, Sophie would feel tougher, and braver. It was, she thought, like having eaten  a meal of cream and moonlight" (26). A meal of cream and moonlight! I love that she uses synaesthesia, comparing the sound of music to the taste of food. I once went to a talk by Itzhak Pearlman and he described Beethoven as sounding like beef.  Lesson number three: the writer's job is to make the reader experience what she describes, and synaesthetic similes can do that.

I will obey the rule of three and stop here. If you read this post, please let me know what middle grade novels you have enjoyed and what writing tips you have gleaned from them.

P. S. Here is one more link to an article about Rundell's newest book, The Explorer, which I may just have to read next.  

What I most love about Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage is the attention to the minute details of making things by hand, for example, the locks that Mr. Taphouse builds for the priory at Godstow, the hoops in neat brackets that Lord Asriel has affixed to Malcolm's canoe, and even the food prepared by Sister Fenella: "Nothing was wasted at the priory. The little pieces of pastry Sister Fenella had left after trimming her rhubarb pies were formed into clumsy crosses or fish shapes, or rolled around a few currants, then sprinkled with sugar and baked separately" (5).
I have never done woodworking or carpentry but the passages devoted to cooking really spoke to me.  Malcolm helps Sister Fenella peel potatoes and prepare brussel sprouts. When she is finished she puts the leavings in the stock pot: "Sister Fenella gathered up the discarded sprout leaves and cut the stalks in half a dozen pieces and put them in a bin for stock" (18). I was so intrigued by these details I started saving scraps and made my own vegetable stock for my new year's Hoppin' John--cilantro stalks, celery leaves, onion skins, kale stems.  The results were delicious.
These details anchor Pullman's fantasy in the reality of the physical world.  They also serve as a metaphor for his own craft of writing.
How fun to think of writing like cooking--taking scraps from our own lives, from the world around us, from the books we read and admire, and putting them all together into a stock that comes out completely different, new, rich, and all our own.
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