Deborah Diesen listens to her young readers — including her younger son. In fact, it was after a conversation with her son about voting rights that the Michigan-based author got the idea to write Equality’s Call. Deborah is the author of many children’s picture books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Pout-Pout Fish, the story about a fish that revolves to be fun instead of glum. Deborah loves playing with words and rhymes and rhythms. She has worked as a bookseller, a bookkeeper, and a reference librarian. We’re so happy she’s hanging out with us now on THE KIDS ARE ALL WRITE!
What inspired you to write Equality’s Call?
One day back in 2017, my younger son and I were discussing politics and voting, and he mentioned how relatively recently it was that women had gained the right to vote – that it hadn’t even been 100 years. As I thought about that milestone, I started thinking about perhaps writing a children’s book about the women’s suffrage movement. I figured a book about the passage of the 19th Amendment would coincide nicely with its ratification centennial in 2020.
But as I began to learn more about the history of the right to vote, I realized that I couldn’t write about the 19th Amendment in isolation. Limitations on the right to vote have been a significant part of our country’s history since its founding, progress has been at times uneven, and barriers to voting still remain. The overall story of voting rights is complex, and the fight for the right to vote is ongoing. To tell any part of the story, I would need to find a way to tell it all.
When I realized that, I came close to abandoning my project. I felt overwhelmed and underqualified to tell such a complicated story. I was also concerned that the truth of the history might make for a discouraging book. But I decided to try anyway. I did my best to write a story that is honest about the inequities that have been present in our country since it began, but that is also celebratory and hopeful about the history-altering impact that people have when they speak up for rights and equality.
It is incredibly timely, with this year being a presidential election year along with increased scrutiny about whether everyone is getting an opportunity to vote. Was the timing of the publication intentional?
When I began submitting the manuscript, my hope was that it would be a 2020 book. In addition to being a presidential election year, 2020 is also the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Seemed like a good year for a book about voting rights!
But really, any year is a year we should all be thinking about voting rights. The work to secure and guarantee voting never ends. New voting barriers, for example those created or worsened by COVID-19, need to be identified, worked through, and addressed on an ongoing basis. The journey of democracy is never over!
You did a wonderful job making a complicated concept — the right to vote over the centuries in America — accessible for kids. Was rhyming part of the way you made it accessible and had you planned to rhyme from the beginning?
Rhyming was part of my plan from the beginning, though I didn’t end up writing the story I initially set out to. My initial thoughts on the story, focusing on women’s suffrage, had me playing with rhymes and rhythms that could work with the names of famous suffragists. But as I began to shift toward the wider and longer story of voting rights history, equality became my main character. The rhyme scheme, meter, and structure of the story developed around that.
The structure imposed by writing the book in verse helped me in making choices about what to include and how to pace the book. Limitations make writing both harder and easier!
I am impressed by how you embraced rather than simplified the voting obstacles faced by different groups in America. Can you share your research process and how you decided what to include, what to leave out, what to feature in the back matter?
I learned so much when I was working on the book. I had been naïve about our country’s history of voting rights. There are so many ways in which voting rights have been denied that I had been unaware of. And my knowledge base is still growing. I thought at first my own steep learning curve should automatically disqualify me from writing this book. But I realized that it actually gave me an important perspective – that of a learner. If I could learn and then succinctly express what I learned, my experience could help kids (and their grown-ups) take a similar learning journey through the book.
The rhyming text in the book is only 400 words long. It paints the broad contours of voting rights history, but it definitely doesn’t cover all the ways in which the right to vote has been denied or all the people impacted. The book’s introduction and backmatter provide some of those additional details. My hope is that kids, classes, and families will use this book as an entry point in their journey to understanding – and to speaking up for -- the right to vote.
Please share the journey from idea to finished manuscript. How long did it take to get it where you wanted it to be? How long did it take to find it a home?
I started jotting some notes for the book in December 2017, and I worked on it in earnest in late January and early February of 2018. I started submitting it later that February and had an offer by March. That sort of timetable is extremely unusual: my writing invariably takes much, much longer than that; and the submissions process often moves on a glacial timetable. But it just all came together! Andrea Welch, my editor for this book, guided me through some manuscript revisions as well as into the creation of the introduction and backmatter. I’m extremely grateful for her wisdom, encouragement, and insight. I also consulted with a wonderful historian, Marsha Barrett, who helped me better understand the history. Her knowledge and assistance were particularly important and useful as I wrote the backmatter sections. The book grew much the better for it! Any mistakes are my own.
Was there anything that surprised you about Magdalena Mora’s illustrations? Do you have any favorite spreads?
I wasn’t sure how an illustrator would mix together the past and the present, but Magdalena did it seamlessly. Her art is vibrant and strong and amazing, and I love it all. I particularly love the final spread, which shows assembled together voting rights activists of the past with young people of today. Each time we vote, we vote with them all!
Do you think it will surprise fans of the New York Times best-selling Pout-Pout Fish to see you as the author of Equality’s Call? Is there anything that links the Pout-Pout Fish series with this new book?
Writing about voting rights history was quite different than writing about the adventures of a pouty talking fish, but many of the themes of The Pout-Pout Fish stories overlap with those of Equality’s Call, including: helping one another; speaking up about what’s important; and working together to solve problems.
The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen, illustrated by Dan Hanna (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
As Mr. Fish and his friends know: Together, we’re the answer!
What do you hope children will take away from your book?
I hope that kids who read Equality’s Call will be encouraged by the history of voting rights activism to use their own voices to speak up about the issues of our time. The last section of the book’s backmatter provides brief bios of activists and then poses an important question, one for all of us to answer with our words and with our actions:
How will you answer equality’s call?
Visit Deborah on social media!
On her website: deborahdiesen.com
On Facebook: Deborah Diesen
On Twitter: @DeborahDiesen
On Instagram: @deborahdiesen