Should We All Celebrate? by Chitra Soundar

We All Celebrate, don’t we? Autumn is here and that means across the world, many communities are celebrating different festivals through the next few months as skies darken and the air turns cold and traditionally was the harvest season in the Northern Hemisphere. 

Last week marks the start of Dussera or Navarathri for me as a Hindu from India.  Hindus across the world mark nine days of Dussera celebrations in different ways. And then it leads up to Deepavali or Diwali, one of the largest Hindu festivals. Did you know the same day is marked as a festival by Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs too? 

As a writer of picture books and writing in the UK, I always wondered why there weren’t that many picture books about Deepavali (or Dussera for that matter) and why the lead up to Christmas, booksellers didn’t highlight this wonderful festival of lights?

So, when Albert Whitman from the US asked me to write a Deepavali book, I was absolutely elated. 

Illustrated by Charlene Chua

In some ways, the US had caught the wave a little sooner. These books were published both by indie and big publishing houses and very popular among South Asian families and western families in the US.

But my original complaint remained – why aren’t UK publishers not interested in other religious and cultural celebrations? 

Do we need another Christmas book? Actually, do we need another Santa Claus / Father Christmas book? Even if we do, can they feature different communities celebrating Christmas in diverse ways? 

Will the children that are not celebrating Christmas be missing out on their own celebrations?

To counter this dearth of books, I wrote a Diwali counting book (which will come out soon! Shh!). 

Then I wanted to address the above question. Can I highlight celebrations that are not so well-known? So I pitched this book (We All Celebrate) to Tiny Owl and they loved it. With Jenny Bloomfield's glorious illustrations, this book will be out this autumn, right in time for the festival season. 

Illustrated by Jenny Bloomfield and published by Tiny Owl Books

But back to Deepavali (or Diwali as many call it) books in the UK... I went looking for books that celebrate this festival, written by authors and illustrators from the culture the festivals belonged to. 

So, if you don’t see Peppa Pig or Mr Men Celebrating Diwali in this list, that’s why. 

Here are two that came out decades ago.

And here are two just out this year, right in time for this year's festival. What are you waiting for? Go and grab these! 

That is it. Two new books in decades. 

While I have to scroll through a long list of Christmas books, books about Diwali, I can count on one hand - published across four decades. 

We need more books about all the little and big celebrations everyone is celebrating across our country – because we all celebrate and so, let’s celebrate together. 

Here is a call to action!

Are you a picture book writer? Do you celebrate a festival that we are not familiar with? Do you have unique traditions of celebrating a well-known festival? Then why don't you try writing a picture book about it? 

Writing about a festival need not be dry or didactic. It can be full of wonder and storytelling, it can be filled with activities and hands-on fun and it can be joyous inviting others to join in. 

Have a go! Write something different about Christmas or pick another festival from your own heritage and tell us a story that resonates universally! 

On being told what to draw. . . by Jonathan Allen

From 'Fish and Chips' - a book by Julia Donaldson for Oxford Reading Tree

I have, in my career, done a reasonable amount of illustration work for educational publishers, and found it enjoyable, and a good way of keeping the wolf from the door in the 'inbetween books' times that I assume most writers and illustrators go through.

Although ostensibly it is doing the same job as illustrating a picture book for a non-educational publisher, if that's the generic term ;-) there is a completely different relationship between artist and editor.

For a non-educational project, you get given the text, with the pagination pretty much sorted out, and are, by and large, left to work it into rough visual form. You can have input into the position of the text, and can make a case for changing the layout from the original guidelines should the visual dynamics be shown to demand it. So you are a key part of the creative process and your skill and experience is made full use of.

An educational book project isn't like that. The layout is as good as set in stone, and you usually get very detailed instructions about what should be in each picture and where, down to what seem sometimes to be pedantic levels. As someone who has made a living out of being original and creative, this prescribed approach was a bit of a shock the first time I encountered it ;-)

This isn't really a moan about me, the poor artistic type yearning to be free but being strangled by the pedantic demands of educational publishers, it really isn't. I actually enjoy switching off my creative side for a while and just doing a bit of 'Doing'. I know I can do it well, and I guess I am happy to trade my artistic skill for the money (especially what they pay these days, say no more!), but not my ingenuity. That's extra ;-)

Which leads me to my main question, which is, "How did this artist/publisher relationship come about?" It does seem overtly and anxiously controlling, and to me, a bit odd. I detect a distinct lack of faith in what illustrators are capable of doing. I smell committees. . . and hear the wheels of corporate decision making grinding. Maybe they are right, maybe illustrators come up with total garbage when not reigned in. . . I dunno, but right or wrong, it has evolved into 'the way things are done' in the educational sector and I am curious as to why. And why the non-educational sector is so different in it's mindset when, as I mentioned before, it seems to me that they are producing, by and large, the same thing.

Do writers have these sort of issues? I imagine writing for a very particular age group must have strict 'do's and 'dont's'. . .