Sita Brahmachari is YBA Award winning author and a champion of reading and creative writing for young people. She is also and we are thrilled to tell you this, a judge in our writing competition – “Then and Now” for Under 18 category.
Sita is unusual for an artist in that she can explain why she chose a career as a writer by reflecting on the connections between her background, process and what she wants it to achieve. Anyone who listens to BBC Radio 4 – Desert Island Discs or interviews with artists can hear them describe their backgrounds but it tends to be quite hard to unravel how they create their art but for Sita this is a joyful part of her work. She loves to share her process in hopes that it can inspire a new generation of young writers.
So, what was it in her background that led to her creativity?
Sita describes her mixed heritage; her father came to the UK in 1959 from India. He worked as a doctor and married her mother, a nurse from the Lake District. When she was growing up the family lived in Hull, The Lake District and Shropshire, while sometimes visiting Kolkata or being visited by family from India. She was therefore moving between cultures, classes and different landscapes and seeing the world from a global perspective. From a very early age she began writing stories and poems asking big questions about belonging and history. Often as a child she asked where do I belong?’ ‘Why am I treated like a stranger. ’She talks about being inspired by both the beauty of the landscape in the Lake District and then all the excitement of the bustling, bombarding city in Kolkata. She also remembers what a great storyteller her father was, sharing stories from his own childhood, but also as a child she observed the things that he did not speak about so much like the impacts of racism. Growing up in 1970’s this was also part of Sita’s experience growing up. Sita finds that her own lived experience and work experiences help to bring her into a deep empathetic connection with the experience of migrant and refugee people. She remembers her father describe the experience of having family near and far away as feeling like he was forever ‘suspended between landscapes and cultures’. In that suspension she understood as as a child there was also a world of imagination and possibilities to see the world through a wider lens. She has always been imagining the threads that connect us and often finds these in her novels through the natural world that connects us.
From childhood Sita was always a writer of poems and kept a diary and a journal as a teenager. The practice of observing life and situations close up in diaries and journals is a form she has used in several of her books, ‘Artichoke Hearts’ (written in diary form) ‘Jasmine Skies’ (in which she drew on her teenage Kolkata travel journals) and Carnegie shortlisted YA novel ‘When Shadows Fall’ (the journal to wellbeing of 18 year old Kai King)
How does she create her award-winning books?
Her methodology is fascinating, and she calls it ‘The Patchwork Storytelling Method’. She starts with an emotional feeling in her belly, or a question, a sense of awe and wonder and she lets the feeling swirl: often it’s an animated or emotional feeling or a strong sense that something’s not right with the world – she believes it’s a healthy thing to hang onto the question you hear children announcing – ‘it’s not fair’. She especially hates it when adults’ response is that children should just accept that life can’t be fair because she believes that somewhere in that sense that things are not what they should be, a reaching for new possibilities and hope, connected to the leap of the imagination and empathy – is where creativity lies – holding the need and the wish and the joy to express.
‘You have expressed something and now you need to place your voice in it’.
To let these feelings and thoughts have free reign she doodles to let her creativity flow, and she sketches down observations of the world around her in her notebooks. In her patchworking, she collects snippets of writing and found objects (stamps, feathers, holey stones, travel tickets etc) that encompass moments and memories that made her feel the need to explore something in writing. She enjoys the slowness of writing so moves back and forth between doodling and writing in her notebook. Sometimes it’s something as abstract as a spiral that sheds light on the way she will move forward in a chapter or the line of a poem.
When I write, it’s my word, it’s my notebook, my random imagination and it’s in my hand. That’s precious and empowering – gradually I work out what it is that needs to be communicated.’
The photo is of Sita’s storytelling quilt containing the pieces of all of her stories and inspirational material from her life and work – sewn by textile artist, Grace Emily Manning.
She also talks about how writing is not separate from the life going on around you, it’s not about going on a retreat or having an actual ‘room of your own’.
‘Writing opens space wherever you are – at the kitchen table, on the bus, resting in the hollow of a tree… daydreaming – whenever and wherever the writing comes to you I urge you to find time to collect a thread of words that you may later metaphorically sew it into a patchwork piece of writing. Patchworking moves you away from a tendency to strive for something sealed, complete and perfect in one sitting.’
Sita describes how she keeps layering up a character, adding new dimensions to them. In her book Phoenix Brothers, she discusses how she started with a character; who from the outside looks like a tough boy causing trouble at school but through gradually peeling back the layers of his story we come to understand all those times in his life that made him so protected and defended. She conveys this to the reader, and we end up feeling empathy for Mo who we now understand is living with trauma and working out how to fit in.
‘In writing we are privileged to see beyond the surface or the front that people put on, the masks we people wear sometime to protect themselves…’
What does she want to achieve with her writing?
Throughout her career in youth theatre, as a novelist and engaging with human rights organisation Amnesty International, Sita has worked with refugee survivor people, children and adults. She has run the Art and Writing Class with Jane Ray and team at The Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants for over a decade and is currently working with Amnesty to hear the voices of migrant and refugee young people in Europe in Creative Protest about their human rights. In all of this work she is committed to opening up opportunities and raising empathy for the experiences of migrant and refugee survivor people by sharing stories about the complexity of what it means to have to leave your homelands and rebuild your life anew.
Most of all Sita wants people to find elements of shared humanity in her stories and to place minoritised young people as the protagonists and storytellers. Sita grew up in this country with books for young people that did not encompass the complexity, richness and global identities of who we are. When she had her own three children, she found the same absences. In her writing Sita wants to open up new narratives that give young people a sense that they can be the writers of tomorrow.
