June 2002
Jane Kurtz, was born in Portland, Oregon, but grew up Ethiopia, Maji, a small town in the Southwest part of the country. Jane, is not only a well known, and award -winning author of children's books but she is also the first non-Ethiopian author who writes Ethiopian children's books such as Fire on the Mountain, Only A Pigeon, Pulling the Lion's Tail and so many other books. So we decided to get know more about her work, as to why she is interested in writing Children's books in general and Ethiopian Children's books, in particular. We also asked her if she speaks Amharic? (The Ethiopian official language) About some of the difficulties that she has encountered in the process publishing her books? And abut her future plan as to how she is planning to introduce her books to the larger American readers?
My parents moved to Ethiopia in the 1950s to work for the Presbyterian Church. When they reached Addis Ababa, I was two years old, so I had no memories of life in the U.S. and never thought about comparing my experiences in Ethiopia to any place else. My parents studied Amharic in Addis Ababa and then took their family (four children by then) to live in Maji, in the southwest corner of Ethiopia. I visited the U.S. when I was in the second grade and again when I was in the eighth grade, but otherwise I spent my whole childhood in Maji or Addis Ababa.
Maji was a magical place for me. We had no television, of course, or movies or telephones or anything like that, so my sisters and I would make up our own stories and act them out for days at a time. Often, we would pick my mother’s flowers to use in our games or scoop frogs out of the inset plants. The Ethiopian adults around us didn’t like to see us handling frogs and would sometimes scold us and make us drop them. Maji is mountainous and green even in dry season. One year, my father’s parents came to visit, and my grandfather and my dad built a house for us, using the materials that everyone used around Maji—mud mixed with straw for the walls, a koro koro roof (tin).
The new house had square walls instead of the round wall of the house I’d lived in up until then. My sisters and I would climb into the attic of the new house and play paper dolls with families we cut out of the Sears catalog. After my mother taught my sisters and me how to read, we loved books and got many more ideas for stories from reading and re-reading the few books we had in Maji.
When I was in fourth grade, I went to boarding school in Addis Ababa run by the Presbyterian, Mennonite, Lutheran and Baptist missions. After that, I only went home to Maji at Christmas and during summer vacation. When I was in high school, my parents moved into Addis Ababa. They lived in Ethiopia for 23 years, finally leaving in 1977 when it became dangerous for ferenjis (foreigners) to stay. I loved growing up in Ethiopia and would never trade my childhood for another kind of experience, even if I could. I learned enough Amharic to play with my friends and bargain in the markato (market place) and so on—and enough to understand what was being said around me. I never studied the language as my parents did, and I wish I had. But in Maji, my family, a nurse, and a teacher were the only people who spoke English, so I heard Amharic and Deeze and other languages around me all the time. My oldest sister and my brother both taught in Ethiopia during the 1980s and 1990s, and they became fluent in Amharic because their ears were used to the sounds. I went to boarding school in Addis Ababa through high school, attended college in Illinois, and eventually earned a master’s degree at the University of North Dakota.
Jane said, I always loved to read and write, but I didn’t have any dream of writing children’s books until my own children were young and I was reading hundreds of books to them. That’s when I fell in love with children’s books. At first, I wrote stories inspired by my children’s childhoods. In 1990, after I had moved to North Dakota, I became quite homesick for Ethiopia and realized that I could reconnect with Ethiopia by writing stories that related to my own childhood. I started by writing my own versions of some of the stories I remembered hearing as a child in Ethiopia. After that, I ended up writing a novel set in the time of war in the 1980s, a picture book based on the daily life of a shoeshine boy who was a friend of my brother’s, and a picture book inspired by the experience of some Ethiopian friends here in the U.S.
I hadn’t been back to Ethiopia for 20 years until 1997 when I was invited to speak in three schools in Addis Ababa, the international school, the British school, and a mission school. During my years away, I heard news of Ethiopia from my parents, who went back to visit quite often, and from my brother and older sister when they lived in Addis Ababa. I also kept up with what was happening by reading. This Christmas, my parents, five of their children (including me) and seven of their grandchildren (including two of my children) went to Ethiopia for about three weeks. We climbed Maji mountain, visited Lalibela, and spent time at the girls’ school run by the Presbyterian church in Addis Ababa. The other project that has kept me in touch with Ethiopia recently is that I was asked to serve on the board of a non-profit organization called Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation. It was started by Gebregeorgis Yohannes, who was born in the small town of Negele Borena in southern Ethiopia, left Ethiopia in the troubled 1980s and eventually (with a MLIS degree from the University of Texas) became a children’s book librarian at San Francisco Public Library. Nineteen years old when he first read a book outside of school, Yohannes now lives by the motto “Books change lives.” In the 1990s, he began to try to figure out how he could share books with children in the country where he grew up. He formed a nonprofit organization (the Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation, or EBCEF) and asked me to serve as a member of the board. He gathered about 4,000 books and other educational materials.Then he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Ethiopia with a goal of publishing the first Ethiopian picture book and setting up a book center for poor Ethiopian children. He wrote down a favorite story from his childhood, Kilu Mammo (Silly Mammo), hired an Ethiopian artist to do the illustrations, and started to look in to printing possibilities.
So far, Yohannes has not been able to get NGO status to operate in Ethiopia. In the meantime, he and the Board of Directors decided to publish the first edition of Kilu Mammo in the U.S. in order to provide a resource for the many Ethiopian families in the U.S. and raise money for the operation of EBCEF in Ethiopia. Kilu Mammo is at the printer right now, and we hope to have copies available within the month—a picture book in both English and Amharic.
When a new book comes out, the publisher typically sends copies to all the review journals and sometimes to newspapers and so on around the country. After that, it’s up to the author to try to find ways to let readers know about her book. For most children’s authors, the primary opportunity to do that is speaking in schools and at conferences, which I do. In the last few years, I have spoken in such places as California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Maine, Tennessee—and overseas
in Ethiopia and Kenya. I was invited to be
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one of fourteen children’s authors and illustrators to speak during Laura Bush Celebrates America’s Authors Day in Washington D.C. last year at the time of the inauguration. Everywhere I go, I show pictures of my childhood in Ethiopia and talk about that beautiful country. I do, indeed, hope that Ethiopian families who find my books will tell others about them, too, because word of mouth is one of the main ways people find out about books.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a real “multicultural boom” in the world of children’s books. Though I had to work very hard to find my first publisher—and got rejection letters for 10 years—I also found editors very interested in stories that showed a glimpse of life in far-away places. Now it’s harder to get multicultural books published because many of the publishers have become huge corporations concerned about profits.
If books don’t sell in big numbers, they often feel they cannot afford to publish them. So it’s an on-going struggle to get new books accepted. That’s one reason I appreciate this opportunity to let people know about my books. If people can find out about my work and tell others, it will help keep the books in print and help me find a publisher for other books.
You can find an order form on my web page, http://www.janekurtz.com.
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