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Soccer-playing fifth-grader Skye's plans to join the all-star team are nixed when her Japanese father's family relocates to Virginia from Japan. While her ailing grandfather receives cancer treatments, Skye must now take frustrating Japanese language lessons and look after her cousin Hiroshi at school, where he hardly fits in. For his part, Hiroshi resents Skye and the relationship she develops with Grandfather, a master kite-maker, and is angry about missing his first rokkaku kite battle in Japan.
Ultimately, the cousins are brought together by Grandfather's decline and death, along with their triumphant teamwork in an American kite-battling contest, in author Natalie Dias Lorenzi's debut middle-grade novel, Flying the Dragon (Charlesbridge, 2012). Told in chapters that alternate between the kids' viewpoints, the writing is refreshingly honest, inspiring Kirkus to rave in a starred review, "A quiet, beautifully moving portrayal of a multicultural family" and Publisher's Weekly to enthuse, "An empathetic and quietly affecting fish-out-of-water story, with both children struggling with disappointments, prejudice, language difficulties, and being caught between cultures."
"It actually began as an idea for a picture book, believe it or not." —LORENZI
AUTHORLINK: How did Flying the Dragon come about?
LORENZI: It actually began as an idea for a picture book, believe it or not. I had never heard of the sport of kite fighting until I read Khaled Housseini’s novel The Kite Runner. Once I did, I was fascinated that a seemingly gentle, relaxing pastime could be such a physically taxing, high-speed sport. I did some research and wrote an article on the history of kite fighting for a children’s magazine called Learning Through History.
After that, I tinkered with picture book plotlines and enrolled in an online course in writing for children, but later discovered that the course was really geared toward writing novels, not picture books. One of our assignments was to write a 500-word scene featuring an interaction between a protagonist and antagonist. I wrote a classroom scene where Hiroshi has just arrived in his new American classroom and is trying to start a conversation with a Japanese-American classmate who is not at all comfortable with speaking Japanese. From there, plot ideas and themes started to take seed, and I knew that I had a novel to write, not a picture book.
AUTHORLINK: Japanese culture, kite flying, ESL (English as a Second Language) and JSL (Japanese as a Second Language) classes—you so effortlessly fold in details of very specialized topics into your story. What kind of research did you do?
LORENZI: For the ESL classes, I drew heavily from my own experience as an ESL teacher. I’ve worked with hundreds of children over the years who are new to the US, like Hiroshi, and hundreds more who, like Skye, feel 100 percent American even though one or both of their parents immigrated to the US.
Skye’s frustration in her JSL classes came partly from my own experiences trying to decipher Japanese while living in Japan, and partly from my ten-year-old daughter’s experiences in her Saturday Italian classes. My husband is Italian and we used to live in Italy when my daughter was small, but her spoken Italian became rusty once we moved back to the US. The other students in my daughter’s Italian class have come straight from Italy and are only here for a few years, so their goal is to reenter the Italian school system, and the preparation is rather intense. Even though we’ve told our daughter that she’s only there for the exposure and practice in Italian, I know she’s felt like Skye at times when the others are more fluent than she is.
“To make sure that the snippets of Japanese and cultural details were correct, I asked two Japanese teachers to look over the manuscript.” —LORENZI
To make sure that the snippets of Japanese and cultural details were correct, I asked two Japanese teachers to look over the manuscript. They both teach in Japanese language immersion elementary schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, so aside from being familiar with their own Japanese culture and language, they work with American kids every day. Their input was invaluable, and they saved me many times from making errors that would have pulled a reader familiar with Japanese culture right out of the story.
For the kite fighting and flying scenes, I consulted with David Gomberg, a name I’d seen in the acknowledgements section of Linda Sue Park’s historical middle-grade novel The Kite Fighters. David was then president of the American Kitefliers Association, and he also referred me to Harold Ames, past winner of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Rokkaku Challenge in Washington, DC, the same kite battle that my characters Hiroshi and Skye enter at the end of the story. Both gentlemen were incredibly generous with their time, reading over my kite scenes and answering all of my questions.
“The dynamics between the characters was definitely fueled by my experience as an ESL teacher.”
—LORENZI
AUTHORLINK: The interactions between children of different cultures in your book seem so honest—and certainly not rose-colored. How did you conceive and craft them?
LORENZI: The dynamics between the characters was definitely fueled by my experience as an ESL teacher. The scene were Ravi tries to help Hiroshi in ESL class with the drawing assignment is one example; a trend I often see is that after a child has been in a US school for a few months, he or she loves becoming the “expert” for the next brand new student. Ravi was no longer the “new kid” once Hiroshi arrived, so he was eager to help and entirely empathetic to the swirl of emotions that Hiroshi was dealing with.
So many of my students came to mind as I wrote certain scenes and they feel like such a part of this story that I actually dedicated the book to them.
AUTHORLINK: Grandfather's terminal illness and death are also depicted in a very straightforward way. Did you have to fight any impulse to "protect" your characters (or readers) from the painful truth? Did you experiment with different ways of handling those scenes?
LORENZI: I did, indeed. There were many e-mails that flew back and forth with my critique group about Grandfather’s fate! We all loved him, but in the end, his death is what ultimately heals the family, including Hiroshi’s and Skye’s cousin rivalry. Had Grandfather lived, I don’t think Hiroshi would have moved on to accept his new circumstances and become his own person.
Unfortunately, many of my students have experienced the death of a grandparent or loved one, and I didn’t want to romanticize Grandfather’s passing. It’s a sad thing, and it should be depicted that way. That said, I didn’t want the story to end too quickly after Grandfather’s death, especially for a middle-grade audience—I wanted to leave readers with a sense of hope and levity. Readers have told me that they thought the kite battle scenes at the end were exciting, and I think that helps them to move on from Grandfather’s death, just like Hiroshi and Skye learn to do. Grandfather is certainly not forgotten in those last chapters, but the focus is on the flying, which is exactly how Grandfather would have wanted it.
“I had just finished the online writing course when I joined SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators)”
—LORENZI
AUTHORLINK: What was your path to publication with Flying the Dragon? Did you put your drafts through a critique-group wringer? Submit to agents? Submit to editors? How long did the project take to sell?
LORENZI: I had just finished the online writing course when I joined SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) and found my critique group on the message boards. We’ve been swapping pages and ideas together for about seven years.
Once I had finished writing and revising the first draft (which took about a year), I started querying agents. I stumbled across a notice for an online SCBWI chat with Erin Murphy, an agent I’d heard glowing things about. She was closed to submissions except via client referral and from attendees of conferences where she’s spoken. Since I lived in Italy at the time and had never met any of her clients, I jumped at the chance to participate in the chat, which ran from 1:00 to 2:00 in the morning for me! I ended up signing with Erin within a month of that chat, and we did light revisions before sending the manuscript out into the world.
Over the course of about a year, all the rejections we had usually said something like “lovely writing, but too quiet for the market.” At the time, the story was completely Hiroshi’s point of view, and Skye was a classmate named Susan. In the middle of the submission process, I’d told Erin that if this manuscript sold, it would be fun to write the story from Susan’s point of view. When Erin and I pulled the manuscript to start talking revisions, Erin asked me if maybe it wasn’t time for Susan to tell her story. I loved the idea, but didn’t want to lose Hiroshi’s point of view, so we settled on a dual point-of-view rewrite, with the chapters alternating between Hiroshi’s and Susan’s point of view. Susan the classmate eventually became Skye the cousin, and the more Skye’s point of view came out, the more I saw another less serious side of Hiroshi.
During that revision/rewriting process, I went back to teaching, and the next year we moved back to the US. I had a lot on my plate, so it took me two years of on-and-off (mostly off) rewriting and revising before the project was finally ready to submit. We had interest from Charlesbridge within a few months, and then it took a few more months for everyone at Charesbridge to read and approve the manuscript and make a formal offer. So it was a five-year journey from very first draft to contract!
“I adored working with my editor, Emily Mitchell.”
—LORENZI
AUTHORLINK: How much revising did you have to do after landing the deal with Charlesbridge?
LORENZI: I adored working with my editor, Emily Mitchell. We worked on building up Skye’s end of the plot; since the story was originally Hiroshi’s, I hadn’t noticed that his chapters were longer and that his character was perhaps more developed than Skye’s. Most of the revision process with Emily involved evening out the plotlines between Skye and Hiroshi. Emily knew my characters just as well as I did; in a few cases with Skye, she would ask, “Would Skye really say it like this? This sounds more like Hiroshi.” And she was right, of course. Another delight about working with Emily is that she’s got such a sharp wit and could always make me laugh, even when I was stressing over deadlines and questioning whether the heck I could even do this.
AUTHORLINK: What kind of marketing/promotion will you be doing?
LORENZI: Charlesbridge has been phenomenal to work with. If there’s a speaking opportunity for their authors in a certain area of the US, they let us know so that we can apply. About six weeks before my book was set to release, I was a featured presenter at the Gaithersburg Book Festival in nearby Maryland; Charlesbridge not only let me know about the event ahead of time, but released copies of my book early for a signing. A press release they sent to Northern Virginia Magazine, a local magazine, has resulted in the inclusion of my book in a fall round-up piece on local authors that will be out this September.
On my end, I’ve done a lot of online legwork (keyboard work?). I’m part of a group blog of debut writers from the Erin Murphy Literary Agency called Emus Debuts, and they held a fabulous online release week for me with posts that included behind-the-scenes interviews with my agent and editor, a hilarious post on multicultural living, a helpful post on working with ESL students, an interview with the wildly talented cover artist, Kelly Murphy, and an interview with kite expert David Gomberg, one of the expert readers I consulted on the manuscript.
Aside from that, I reached out to about thirty blog reviewers who had reviewed multicultural middle grade fiction and asked if they’d be interested in taking a look at Flying the Dragon for a possible review, giveaway, interview, or all three! Most said yes, and Charlesbridge sent along copies of my ARC for those reviewers. As those reviews come in, I post them on my website, as well as the interviews.
I also reached out to my local indie bookstores and have been invited to talk with a middle-grade ARC readers’ club and participate in a local book festival in September. Although I’ll be teaching full-time, I do have three local school visits lined up, which I’m really looking forward to!
“Writing is a solitary pursuit, but that doesn’t mean that we need to create and plan and plot all by ourselves.”
—LORENZI
AUTHORLINK: What advice would you give aspiring children's authors?
LORENZI: To not write in isolation. Writing is a solitary pursuit, but that doesn’t mean that we need to create and plan and plot all by ourselves. Join SCBWI, jump into a writer’s forum the like the Blueboards at Verla Kay’s website, and attend writers’ conferences when you can. Not everyone enjoys being a member of a critique group, but it’s worth exploring to find whether or not it’s for you. The kid-lit community is a warm, giving place to be, and it’s worth becoming involved and getting to know your fellow writers. And if it takes you five (or more) years to sell your first book, you’ll have all the more people who will be ready to celebrate with you.
About Susan VanHecke
Susan VanHecke is an author and editor of books for adults and children. Her titles for young people include Raggin' Jazzin' Rockin': A History of American Musical Instrument Makers (Boyds Mills, 2011), Rock 'N' Roll Soldier (HarperCollins, 2009), and An Apple Pie For Dinner (Cavendish, 2009). To find out more about Susan and her books, visit www.susanvanhecke.com and www.susanvanheckeeditorial.com.
