Meeting Canadian Writers and Illustrators of Children’s Books
What inspires the writers of the books your students read? How does an illustrator decide what to draw? Is it true that most authors and illustrators don’t know each other? This column features a different Canadian children’s book creator in each issue and shows you the story beyond the covers.
Uma Krishnaswami — specific texts, universal truths
I kept coming across wonderful picture books that seemed light, but I knew they must have taken a lot of research. Books like Look! Look! and Book Uncle and Me, and Two at the Top, a picture book about Everest. All of these books were written by Victoria, BC based author Uma Krishnaswami. How do picture book authors make their work seem easy when it often takes years to write one story?
Margriet: You write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more! Is one of those a favourite genre?
Uma: Not really, but there are genres that fit my writing needs at a given time. When I’m getting to the end of a long writing slog, a novel, for instance, I often feel the need to dabble in something shorter, just for the fun of playing with words. That could be a picture book or a poem. The best follow-up to a serious non-fiction project might be a funny chapter book. Because I always have four or five drafts at various stages of development, I go back to my files and either find the next project or start something new. In each case, I’m looking for what will best channel my writing energy or cleanse my palate or refill my word-bag, or whatever writing intervention seems needed in the moment.
Margriet: Did you always know you wanted to be a storyteller?
Uma: I think so. As a child growing up in India, I was constantly telling stories, tall ones sometimes. I wasn’t always faithful to socially accepted boundaries between truth and fabrication. Which is to say that sometimes I’d tell whoppers. This was when I was quite young, so I think I always had this innate desire to shape the world through story. The thing is, I wasn’t able to shape that instinct into any kind of career goal early on because it simply didn’t occur to me that someone like me could be a writer.
Margriet: Was English your first language?
Uma: No. My first language, my mother tongue, is Tamil, but for complicated reasons, my language of writing and of greatest fluency is English. My father worked for the Government of India, and his job required us to move every few years. If I hadn’t gone to schools that not only taught English but also taught in English, I’d have had to learn a new regional language every time we moved. So it was a practical decision but also a loss, because while I can speak Tamil adequately, my reading and writing are slow and inept. I can only access its ancient and contemporary literature in translation. Colonial relic or artifact of modern life? Hard to say, but there it is.
Margriet: You spent your childhood in India, lived in New Mexico and now in western Canada. Do these settings still play a role in your writing?
Uma: I spent my first two decades in India and then over thirty years living in the US, in Maryland, and then in New Mexico, before I moved to Canada. India will always be in my bones. The Book Uncle trilogy is set there, as are three of my picture books, and a fourth to come. When I wrote my middle-grade novels, The Grand Plan to Fix Everything and The Problem with Being Slightly Heroic, I set them partly in Takoma Park, Maryland, and partly in a small town in the hills of South India. New Mexico skies were an inspiration for my picture book, Bright Sky, Starry City, even though the setting there is urban and undefined. I have a novel in progress that is set in the Pacific Northwest—it’s such an amazing place we live in, here on the continent’s edge, and I hope one day I’ll do it justice. I suppose my books go back and forth between continents as I do.
Margriet: You have written biographies, like Threads of Peace and Two At the Top. One is a non-fiction novel, the other a picture book. How difficult is that research and how do you determine your format?
Uma: I find research enthralling—almost too much so. It’s interesting that you describe Threads of Peace as a non-fiction novel. It’s certainly the kind of non-fiction that calls on me to use a fiction writer’s tools, while at the same time staying true to the historical record, so nothing’s invented. The research for it was like taking a kind of personal independent study course, uncovering a single focus, reading about the many aspects of those two lives, asking searching questions, finding connections, and interrogating my own understanding repeatedly. I could happily spend months immersed in work like that. My challenge is always extricating myself from the research, distancing myself from the voices of the writers I’ve read so that I can pin down the story I’m trying to tell. It’s much easier to do that with a picture book like Two at the Top than with a long non-fiction work like Threads of Peace.
Your question about format made me laugh. More often than not, when I start writing something, I don’t know what it will end up being. At first, I thought Threads of Peace was going to be a picture book about the Kings (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King) and their trip to India in 1959. But the research quickly made it clear that this story was bigger than that. It needed more pages, and it needed to be aimed at an older audience.
I suppose with research as well as format, a writer should beware of falling in love with her own words and assumptions. I really do try to serve the story rather than myself.
Margriet: Where did the idea come from to tell Two At The Top, the story of climbing Mt. Everest, in two voices—Sir Edmund Hillary and the sherpa?
Uma: That idea took a scenic route, as many of mine do. Initially, I visualized a picture book about Mount Everest. I thought it was going to be a poetry collection. I read a lot about Everest and the Himalaya region—all kinds of books. Stephen Alter’s Wild Himalaya made me think this might be a sort of natural history of Mount Everest—in poems! So I wrote those poems—22 of them in all.
In the end, it was Nan Froman, editor at Groundwood, who said she wasn’t sure about the collection but liked one poem, “The Summit.” She wondered if it could be developed into a picture book with a note at the end containing information about Mount Everest. So that is what happened.
Two of those 22 poems were discarded altogether. I turned nineteen of them into prose, condensed the prose, and turned that into two spreads of back matter. The single poem in two voices that Nan liked grew into the text of the picture book.
Margriet: In Threads of Peace you combine the stories of Gandhi and Dr. King. How difficult was that research? How long did it take you to write that book?
Uma: It was difficult and deeply educational. I thought I knew this material, but I learned so much. I visited sites related to Gandhi in India and King in the US. I read as if my life depended on it.
I knew I’d need to find a hundred or so photos. I decided to use a combination of archival photographs and some that my husband and I had taken in India and Atlanta and Montgomery in the US, as well as photos from other places important to the lives of both Mahatma Gandhi and Reverend King.
As I settled into the search, I began to uncover treasures. I found a photo of an Imperial medal of the same vintage as the one that Gandhi had given back to the British government, saying he could not, in conscience, keep it. I found the Inner Temple archive in London that housed the logbook where Gandhi had signed in as an entering student. A photographer in South Africa granted me permission to use his photo of the station where Gandhi had been thrown off a train. A railway archive gave me a picture of Durban in 1869, the year Gandhi arrived there, with horse-drawn carriages in the streets. Each picture had a story of its own.
The King pictures were even more moving, closer as they were to the chronology of my own life. After several days of perusing the Library of Congress and the US National Archive websites, I began to recognize the work of photographers who documented the civil rights era—like Flip Schulke, who took intimate, beautiful pictures of the Kings’ children. His image of the family dining room featured a photo of Gandhi hanging high on a wall, as if watching over the parents and their children. Or Rowland Scherman, in his eighties when I talked to him, who signed copyright over to the US Information Agency on his iconic images of the March on Washington. Scherman also told me of his stunningly beautiful picture of a 12-year-old, Edith Lee-Page, who never knew how her photo had appeared in papers around the world, and whose cousin came across it years later in a black history calendar and told her, “Hey Edith! You’re a star!” And then there were the letters and telegrams I found in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Howard Thurman and MLK collections at Boston University. It was like touching history. Sometimes, a photo or a paper gave me material that I could work into the text. Sometimes it gave me enough for a sidebar. Mostly, the search made me aware of what a delicate dance this was, trying to recreate events and feelings of times gone by, trying to show the people who lived then, whose actions changed the timeline we are part of today. That book took me nine years to complete.
Margriet: You speak in many schools. What do you generally do during a school visit?
Uma: I usually do some combination of reading and sharing drafts and revisions. I often intersperse talking about my work with creating something (a poem, a paragraph, a scene) that I crowd-source from my audience so we can read it together at the end. What I gain from school visits is the opportunity to engage with the energy of young minds—their eccentricity and fresh perspectives are joyful to encounter.
When I wrote Book Uncle and Me, I wasn’t thinking of a trilogy. I just wanted to write about three young friends, one of whom, Yasmin, has a mission to read one book every day for the rest of her life, only things begin to go wrong. I was pretty happy with the book, and I thought I was done with these characters. But during a Zoom talk for North Vancouver Public Library, a child asked, “Will you write a sequel?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Should I?” We had a discussion and pretty soon we had consensus—there should be three books because there were three friends, so they should get a book each in their point of view. And that’s exactly what has happened.
Margriet: When speaking with young readers, do you feel your books’ topics help to open their eyes to different cultures and circumstances?
Uma: I hope that my books will be mirrors for some readers, windows for others, and invitations for everyone. I hope the characters and dilemmas in my books will ring true to young readers. When I read Out of the Way! Out of the Way! to children, I’d like them to think about a tree and a road in their neighbourhood. Maybe Look! Look! will lead them to the water cycle or to the idea of taking a single step, then inviting others to join you.
You can only tell universal truths through very particular contexts. Above all, what I want my books to convey is this: this story has its own context, its own where and when, and yet nothing can connect us like stories, whether their settings and topics are familiar or not.
For more information about Uma and her books, check out: umakrishnaswami.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margriet Ruurs
Margriet Ruurs is the author of over 40 books for children and conducts (ZOOM) school presentations: margrietruurs.com.
Enjoy her travel-and-books blog here: globetrottingbooklovers.com.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Fall 2025 issue.
