Inspiring wannabe young writers to feel ‘Oh, I too can’
Lively session: Sita Brahmachari (above) engaging with students from Galle schools (right)
Sita, here in Sri Lanka, to hold four children’s writing workshops for the Gratiaen Trust in Galle and Colombo, is always with a gurgle of warm laughter and wrapped in colourful shawls—the kind who “remembers what it was like to be a child,” as Anthony Horowitz would say.
With a mother who was a nurse—Lake District-born and bred—and a father who was a doctor hailing from Calcutta, things jarred just a little as Sita grew up: the books she was devouring had little to do with her father’s tales of Calcutta, its medical college, and the momentous partition.
So Sita started writing her own yarns, inspired by writers like Maya Angelou in journals and diaries.
Sita’s happiest memories are of “jumping on a trampoline with siblings, sharing a huge ice cream with (her) family at sunny Morecambe Beach, going to visit an uncle in Norway and being told stories by (her) parents.”
Visiting Calcutta at seven, Sita was struck by the poverty, and in later life, all her books tried not to make “a child who already feels a little disenfranchised, to read my stories and feel more disenfranchised in life.”
“I want them to say, ‘Ok, I recognise that; I recognise hunger, poverty, or lack of something, but I also recognise that the character has the power to move through something—to another place’.”
However, her reams of writing did not seem anything like what she was reading. “So I thought, I’m not the kind of person to be a writer.”
Nonetheless, she had a passion for literature and poetry and a first degree in English. Her first job at the Royal Court Theatre was to help people record their oral histories to chronicle the ‘diversity of Britain’.
It was a chance event that made her pluck up courage.
Her mother-in-law, Rosie, a Bohemian artist famed for her beauty (and at this time frail and tiny), was to tell her after a minor road accident that she had once been the object of so much attention yet was now ‘completely invisible’.
“Something visceral” then rose up in Sita. She suddenly had the courage to tell a story, imbued with the spirit of Rosie, to pass on to her children.
That first book, Artichoke Hearts, won the Waterstones Prize. Luckily, she had a patchwork of writing from many years preserved, for she was soon asked, “Now, where’s the next book?”
At 40, Sita had arrived as an exciting voice in children’s literature, her second book being Jasmine Skies.
Sita then set herself the ‘test’ of writing for every age group—picture books to age 18.
Finding stories in little things: Parakeet's feather that inspired a magical tale
Her last novel, When Shadows Fall, comes in the form of an 18-year-old boy’s journal from kindergarten days to the cusp of adulthood: first loves, first mistakes, being excluded from school—it reminds one of Judy Blume — adolescent angst and bittersweet poignancy.
The picture books come gloriously illustrated by Sita’s friend Jane Ray.
When it comes to inspiration, Sita does as the magpie does: she carries a colourful notebook in which she gathers inspiration’—snapshots, , little poems, patchwork pieces, and even a parakeet’s that fell on her hair at Devon, which was the inspiration for a magical story called ‘Rain’.
Sita chides those who tell her that they have a book in them but don’t have the time. “Just for five minutes a day, collect some inspirational jottings of a meeting, a view, and when you come to write your novel, it will all fall into place.
After the workshop at Galle, Sita, meandering through the Fort, was fascinated by a traditional lady selling trinkets and brought a small musical instrument for her son and a card, in which she now holds “my patchwork pieces of the comments from the teachers I’ve been working with.” They would later inspire her.
“It’s just like stitching,” says Sita, touching her own self-stitched shawl. “The two are very similar.”
It’s always pen on paper for the first drafts for Sita—the timeless process does’something to the brain’. She revels in the messy process of scratching lines out, balloons added to the corners, the collage of sticky notes, and the whole notebook coming alive like a chatty friend.
Sita bemoans that today children think of the craft of narrating as a part of exams. They strain to produce pieces as perfect as an algorithm. Often, this is harmful to those sensitive children who are good storytellers. Only once a child learns the inky mess, editing, and the possibility and pleasures of wrangling it into shape does one think “Oh, I too can do it”. They have to see that “it’s like shining something that at first is not bright and beautiful”.
At the Galle Gratiaen workshops, she worked with A’ Level students as well as teachers—a ‘fantastic exchange’. She talked about the stories dear to her of Indian ayahs of the Raj brought back to England with their little charges—paid only for one passage and so stranded in London and the shires.
“And I could see (the teachers) immediately thinking, ‘Our children could not only read these stories but can write their own!’”
One of the most touching moments for Sita was when the teachers professed they had been inspired to ‘write our own story’.
On the way from the south to Colombo, Sita says she was bewitched by the ‘lush greenery’ that clothed the roadside and the buffaloes, birds, and monkeys. Her faithful notebook has already been privy to some frantic jottings, and so Sita’s next novel may well be set on our own shores.
Searching for an ideal partner? Find your soul mate on Hitad.lk, Sri Lanka's favourite marriage proposals page. With Hitad.lk matrimonial advertisements you have access to thousands of ads from potential suitors who are looking for someone just like you.