Hello you gorgeous individuals, it's Kav here and today I'm here with a member of the
book community who I've admired for, like, as long as I've been in the book
community, Dhonielle Clayton. I'm so happy to be here. She is the author of The
Belles which is a new release that just came out a few days ago and I will put
links to where you can purchase it. And, today, she has graciously agreed to chat
with me for a bit, so we're gonna do that. Yayyy, thanks so much for having me, I so appreciate it!
Of course, thank you so much for being here! My first question is one that's very
personal for me because I've been wondering about it for the longest amount of time -
what exactly does Cake Literacy (*Literary) do? Oh my goodness, okay, so Cake Literary
believes that making a book is like making a cake and so when I was in grad
school, I met my business partner, Sona, very chatty - we were always talking about
how we didn't see ourselves enough in books when we were kids
and we definitely didn't see ourselves in
the fun stuff and so we wanted to show publishers a way to do fun books about
diversity or having diverse characters, so we believe that making a book is like
making a cake and if you had to eat the same flavor of cake every day for your whole
life, it would be really boring, so that's where it comes from.
What we do is Sona and I come up with ideas, then we find writers, and we hire
them to write those ideas and then our agent sells those projects to publishers.
And I get to make projects with someone that I love and treasure and we just have a
lot of fun. My follow-up question is you're also one of the leaders of the We Need Diverse
Books movement and whereas I know about it I'm not sure all of them do, so
could you tell us a little bit about that and how you yourself got involved with it? Sure!
The We Need Diverse Books movement started in 2014 and it started as a
hashtag in reaction to a panel of 'children's luminaries' at BookExpo of America which is
one of biggest book industry events that we have in our industry and it was all sort of white men
and a grumpy cat. There were no people of color or women of color or men of color
included in the lineup, so Ellen Oh got all of her friends together and said
"hey, we need to talk about why we need diverse books for our kids and for all
kids in America," so it became a viral hashtag and then we
started programming to fix the issue at many different levels from interns to
grants to library awards because the issue stems from many different places, so now
I'm COO of the company, so I help run it with Ellen Oh and we just want to
make sure that every kid can walk into a bookstore and see themselves because
that's the point. Of course, from these two answers you can tell that Dhonielle
is someone who cares very deeply about representation as I myself do, so kind of
for you, has there been any book or any form of media that you kind of saw
yourself in for the first time or something that was like what
you hope to give readers yourself. Well I watch a
lot of TV and when I watch shows by Shonda Rhimes, I realize that that's
what I want to do - I want to do the Shonda Rhimes of YA and I want to
show kids and teens that they can be who they are and also be doing all of these
different things, so Shonda Rhimes does a great job of what's called incidental
diversity, so you have doctors - they're doctors, but they're also people
of color and they are going through the drama of those things - so I want to do that for--
--for teens and for YA because I think that we have to work on making
sure that the types of stories that we tell about different people have a
variety. It can't just be about pain and suffering. I want magic and romance
and love and going to outer space and we deserve to see ourselves in those worlds.
So now we're gonna switch gears a little bit more towards The Belles which
is the book that she's here for. First of all, why don't you tell us a little bit about the book?
Sure, I pitch it as Scott Westerfeld's Uglies meets Marie Antoinette's court.
It's set in a world where everyone's born sort of looking
degenerative or sort of gross, but there are these women that can
change you for a price - down to your bones, anything about yourself. And, I
loved Uglies and I wanted to take this question and wrap it around a purely
female dominated world and what it might look like if you could actually change every
single thing. Hopefully, it opens up some questions. When you were answering
questions you mentioned how you weren't always a writer, so how did you kind of
get into writing? So I just wanted to be a teacher and a librarian and a nerd, so I
went and got my masters in children's literature and I thought I was just gonna be
a librarian and I was gonna read and nerd out and force children to read all
the books I loved, and then I realized that there were so many stories missing.
When you read and study the canon of children's literature from back in the
day when it first started, you see that it looks very white, and it's very cis, and it's
very hetero, and it's very able-bodied and then it's like 'whoa, there are so
many stories that are missing' and I felt like I needed to write into that space
and create opportunities to bring other, especially people of color and people
from marginalized backgrounds, into publishing so that they can publish
their own stories. So many people were writing about my community that weren't
part of my community and I felt like it wasn't fair. You kind of touched on this during the talk,
but of course none of these people were here - so, you are obviously someone that
has talked about the importance of sensitivity readers multiple times, so, like, how did
sensitivity readers play into your writing of The Belles?
I had 6 sensitivity readers for The Belles, I had 12 for my first
series, and I did that because I wanted to make sure that--I don't know what I
don't know, right, I have my own spots that I can't see and I made some
mistakes - in my ARC, I misgendered someone, and that's because I didn't know.
And I was thinking about, in my world, how does everyone orient themselves? So my
sensitivity readers were great and they were able to help me figure out the
places in my world where I needed to be more clear to make sure that any reader
who reads that can know - 'okay where am I? If I was in this world, where do I belong
and where do I exist and how can I be seen?' So sensitivity readers for me are
a part of my process, I have to have them. I don't know how to write a book without
having someone else read and give me their feedback, so for me it's a craft
issue - it's making me better and I think all writers should use them. I think the
term is what gets people mad - the idea of "sensitive." Even though I do think we
should be sensitive to each other - we live next to each other, we share space,
we share neighborhoods, we share schools, we share this planet - but that word seems
to be irritating people, it's a bee in their bonnet and they get really mad at
me about it, but really I think it's an authenticity read and that's what I
like to call it. I like that term better 'cause it's more accurate for
what the word actually is. You're not being sensitive, you're being an editor and
you're reading for a very specific thing.
Of course in your first duology you co-wrote with Sona, so what was it like going
from co-writing to writing this book on your own? It was really sad, I missed my
friend! I cried and whined to her on the phone, but what's great about her is
she's my work wife, so I can call her and say I can't figure this out because Sona
is really good at plot - she has a master's in screenwriting - so she can fix
and get me out of any problem that I get myself into. I felt like I was never
alone - yes she didn't get to--she wasn't writing and helping me, but she could
help coach me through the things that I had difficulties with. Sona's also really good at the kissy
scenes and the dialogue, so what I did was I wrote all the stuff
that I was good at which are character and world, and I left all of the other stuff
for later and then I cried to her on the phone and then she was like okay do this
and then that helped me get the sort of strength to go back in there and fix it.
Kind of as a follow-up to that, why did you decide to do The Belles on
your own? Well, Sona's really in the contemporary space. She loves high
stakes contemporary books - that's what we do together. Her book comes out next spring
and it's about an awesome 16-year old doctor and sort of the trials and
tribulations of that. I mean she loves fantasy, but she really does well in the
contemporary space, so I just had this idea sort of haunting me for a long time
and yeah. Fantasy has always been my love, it's what I started reading first. Not
that she won't write a fantasy 'cause she does have a good fantasy idea set in the Mugul Raj.
Get that fantasy out there. Yes, harass her, looking at you - where's that Mugul Raj fantasy? So those
are all the questions and, as you can tell, Dhonielle is very well-spoken,
so you can bet that her writing is gonna be as beautiful as her spoken
words. Thank you for having me, you're the best. Yes, of course. This was such a surreal
opportunity for me because I've looked up to you for so long so, thank
you so much for being here. Thank you all so much for watching, I hope you're
having a lovely day or night wherever you are and I will see you soon. Goodbye!
Thanks so much.
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