Patricia I might write a memoir about this very topic, so briefly . . . my response is: Everything. Dancing and living abroad has shaped who I am.

We’re all shaped by our experiences. Students I address during author visits are awed by my experience living in Greece and in London. I encourage these awed students to visit other countries, investigate other cultures. You can start by simply going to restaurants (Chinese, Middle Eastern, Mexican are prevalent). Food is a huge part of a culture. But to get to know people of other cultures broadens our own perspectives—it gives us the ability to empathize with those different than ourselves.

Patricia While hitchhiking through Europe in the 70s (which I would not advise today) I remember being astounded that Germany felt more modern than the U.S. while England seemed quite old-fashioned. Thirty years after WWII, Europe was still recovering from wartime. But every German household I visited had electric gadgets like coffee grinders and coffee makers, which simply hadn’t arrived (in my experience) in the U.S. And a German woman said to me, We’re not who you think we are. I hadn’t judged her harshly, but this statement made me think. A lot.
And London felt depressed, gray, not yet recovered from having been bombed during the war.

And being a dancer? It is so much who I am. I oftentimes say my body is smarter than my brain. My body tells me that I MUST get in a pool and play to make my joints happy. I’m in pain otherwise. And I’m tuned in to who a person is by how they move and gesture. As a choreographer I choreographed gestures—maybe made a small movement into a vast movement or simply used a person’s small gesture to indicate her personality. I do that in writing too. I might say about a character who doubts another, “his one eyebrow shot straight up” or describe a gesture that shows a reaction.

Patricia For the most part a dancer cannot dance into old age. So I knew even back in my 30s that eventually I’d need a new career. I still had something to say. The arts are the way I know how to express myself so I always encourage kids to dance, sing, draw, paint, play music, tell stories, so they might continue to express themselves throughout their lives—whether they become professionals or not.

But anyway, while touring with my dance company in South America I started writing a novel called LOON DIVE while I waited between lighting rehearsals and performance time. It was a fictionalized autobiography. I started writing it back stage and then took two years to finish that novel. I never submitted it. But I might go back to it one day. Who knows?

When I was transitioning out of my dance career I needed a practical credential so I could support myself, so I went to library school—that is I got a MS degree in Library and Information Science, thinking that I’d work at a library then go home and do what I really wanted to do which was write. But that’s not what a library career is at all—it’s a full time impassioned investment, so I became a substitute part time librarian—and went home and wrote. And I chose Children’s Librarianship because that’s where I could spend more time examining literature. And during library school I became fascinated by storytelling. So I became a dancing storyteller or a story performer. And I started writing and illustrating my first book FROG PLUS FROG—also a fictionalized autobiography. It’s the story of my dance company One Plus One told by and about frogs. I’m sorry it’s never been published. I still love it.

So I was storytelling, painting, writing and I had to choose. Which wasn’t easy. But I chose writing.

Patricia Actually I didn’t take off 8 years. I was storytelling during that time—writing the stories I told, and I realized I liked the writing better than the presenting. I did take some time off to care for my parents in their home when they were dying over a three-year period. But I never stopped writing. I wrote two unpublished novels, one of which got very close to being published, but never did. That was MADDY—also a fictionalized autobiography—a story of my 11 year old self.

Patricia The other, WAITING FOR RAIN, was about a 13 year old boy who fled into his attic to avoid his family’s dramatic interactions and found the Amazonian Rainforest, which came from a dream I’d had. I also have a file cabinet full of unpublished picture books and collections of retold folktales.

Then came Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker which I reworked on and off for those eight years. As a librarian I witnessed and got to know young girls who needed a role model—that became Josephine who felt she could do anything she set her mind to. And she was a dancer. I SO identify with her.

I studied footage of her, danced her dances, did her movement—became her—in my living room in order to write her story. Besides being a dancer and singer, Josephine spied for the French and the Allies during WWII, adopted 12 children of different cultures and races, and she was a civil rights worker. That civil rights component would lead me to future projects.

I grew up in a household with remarkable, socially conscious parents. I learned by example, that when you saw a social injustice you do something about it. Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case is the love story of Richard Loving (a white man) and Mildred Jeter (a black woman), where the Supreme Court ruled to legalize marriage between races. That case of social injustice was of great interest to me. The book is a love story, set in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Patricia Let me start by saying it is completely nonfiction. True. There’s relatively little known about Lil Hardin Armstrong because after she died her house was ransacked—all her photos, documents and the first five chapters of an autobiography she was known to have been writing disappeared. They were never found!

But there are her early music recordings from the 20s, which I studied and there are recorded interviews of her, one by Studs Terkel where she tells stories about her early life. My husband is a jazz trombonist and his band Traditional Jazz Orchestra plays early jazz including tunes by both Lil Hardin Armstrong and her husband the famous Louis Armstrong. My husband Morgan Powell suggested I write about Lil. Living with Morgan for the last 35 years has me living inside the jazz world. Jazz musicians often speak in slang. I read from the era and found all sorts of great slang terms and phrases. Plus I did a good deal of research to be sure that the slang I used—such as “gutbucket cat”—was used in the 20s.

I used this colorful jazz slang because, one, it’s a jazz story and, two, to make the story authentic. The colorful phrases help create a strong rhythm. And I thought kids would find it fun. I sure think it’s fun. I wrote Struttin’ for middle grade readers, so 3rd though 7th grade readers, let’s say. I thought they’d care some about the romance between Lil and Louis. For instance: Lil was savvy and Louis was a bumpkin to Lil’s eye. But she got over that when she realized what a great player he was. I think that almost anyone can relate to that.

Patricia It definitely does. I’m a dancer before I’m a writer or storyteller. Dance has been in my bones forever. When I hear music which speaks to me, I dance. Even if I’m sitting, in a concert, at a club, I’m moving to music. So, I wrote Josephine as a dance. I danced her Charleston and I found the verbs and the rhythm that I felt conveyed her dancing –

Patricia And then I continued the whole story with rip-roaring Josephine rhythmic energy.

For Struttin’ I listened to the early Hot Five which is the band she put together for her husband Louis Armstrong. It’s a very early jazz music recording. I got inside her and Louis’ music—till it filled me. That was easy. Then I wrote in that melody and rhythm. That was work, to convey what I felt—work that I love.

As for Loving vs. Virginia, watching footage and newsreels of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving—their soft spoken Southern speech sounds like lyrical poetry to me. Thus, verse.

Patricia I do. It’s a huge responsibility. I do a load of research—reading, listening, interviewing. I bring my writing to African American friends and colleagues to get their insights, their call, their approval. But I think writing is an empathetic activity. Maybe living in other cultures and becoming part of those cultures helps me feel that I can be inside other cultures. I remember when I first arrived in England and heard black people speaking with British accents, I was amazed at first. My best friend from London, Corrine, is from a black family that had escaped South Africa in the fifties. Her family in Leicester took me in when my family was so far away in the States. I needed them. They made me feel part of their family, part of their culture.

My friends in England, overall, urged me to use British table manners and utensil use—you know, how they use knife and fork differently than Americans. I was young and like a sponge. I spoke with a British accent until I returned to the States. Maybe because I sponge up culture I can readily empathize. Maybe because I had that experience when I was young, when I was still forming it’s what I do easily. (But I have the good manners to return to my own culture. 😉

Patricia No, I don’t. I write from my heart. I want kids to love the music of Lil Hardin Armstrong. It’s such happy music, it makes you want to dance. I want them to love Lil who respected her mother but she had her own ideas about what she wanted to do. She didn’t want to stay at Fisk University and play only Brahms and Schubert. She wanted to play her wild raucous popular music—the blues, which Lil help evolve into jazz music.

Patricia Thanks, Sihui. Yes, I read adult books, young adult, middle grade, picture books, fiction and nonfiction. I read what I consider literature because that’s what I want to write. I read the best. I read award-winners. I’m attracted to historical work—both historical fiction and nonfiction.

Inspiration? It comes from everywhere. Lately, I research and stumble upon the next vein that I want to write about. For instance, I’m completing a YA book on women’s suffrage. And I realize the bicycle was instrumental in giving women freedom so I want to write a picture book maybe entitled The Mighty Humble Bicycle about that.

I draw inspiration from what I see happening around me, my own life certainly, my dreams, as I’ve mentioned. From nature. I love the Earth. I’m surprised I haven’t written an Earth centered book yet—well, one that I’ve gotten published.

Patricia I joined SCBWI as soon as I found out about it. What a fabulous service organization! (scbwi.org) When I began, the internet was nascent. I used Literary Market Place—the book— to find publishers as well as SCBWI publications which they now call The Book. It lists publishers, what editors want, agents. It’s a lot to absorb and it takes time to learn the field. It can be daunting, so I’d say, just keep reading, following social media, and go to conferences. SCBWI conferences happen all over the world and within all U.S. regions. Lately, many have been broadcast as webinars and can be accessed on line for a small fee. First, join SCBWI.

As far as collaborating with illustrators, it might seem counter-intuitive, but don’t do it. It’s the editor’s and art director’s jobs to match text with art. That’s their job, not yours. If you submit someone’s art with your text it looks amateurish, like you haven’t done your homework. That is, unless you are one and the same. Hooray for you if you’re an author/illustrator. You will find it much easier to find an agent. An agent who submits your text only receives half the royalty. If you’re also the artist, your agent (and you) gets both halves of the royalty.

The most important advice is to read read read read. And write. You get better by doing it. Find or create a writer’s critique group. My critique group started in the early 90s and we’ve grown up together as writers, gotten published together, celebrate each other’s successes.

Patricia Lift As You Climb: The Story of Ella Baker comes out with Simon & Schuster in 2020. Then the Woman’s Suffrage book with Chronicle Books, which is part graphic novel (which was SO fun to write). I have manuscripts in the pipeline about the making of Nancy Drew, a collaboration which centers on Ella Fitzgerald and a young white man, the bicycle book I mentioned, and I’m working on a biography about Joan Baez. I tend to work on one book at a time (this week I’m working on the bicycle piece), but they’re all at different stages. I’ll eventually get to that memoir.

Patricia We are in a climate right now of “own voice” or “self voice” which is important—very important. So I think you should write such a book, Sihui. I write about African American women because the arts and civil rights get me all worked up, but I’m steering away from Civil Rights now to leave room for People of Color to write about People of Color. I’ve been a mentor to several writers of color and we’re beginning to see more and more books about this underserved population and written and illustrated by People of Color. Whereas writing is a process of empathy, no one can know a culture better than one who has grown up in and experienced it daily.