Lynn Miller-Lachmann
Lynn Miller-Lachmann is the editor of MultiCultural Review and the author of the award-winning multicultural children's bibliography, Our Family, Our Friends, Our World and the latest novel, Gringolandia. Lynn is here today to talk about the journal and her work.
Welcome to the Examiner, Lynn. It's a pleasure having you here today. Since 1994, you've edited the award-winning journal MultiCultural Review. Would you tell us a bit about this publication and how it got started?
MultiCultural Review first appeared in 1992 as a quarterly journal, with its purpose to review books and publish articles on topics related to ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural diversity. Its principal audience was public, school, and college/university librarians and educators at the K-12 and college levels—people who would be selecting and using these materials. The founding editor, Brenda Mitchell-Powell, had previously edited Small Press magazine, and she wanted to highlight the works of independent ethnic presses as well as books from major publishers. I have continued this mission while expanding the journal. We have gone from reviewing 40 books per issue to 150 books, and our feature articles range from annotated bibliographies and bibliographic essays to effective practices in multicultural education, interviews with noted authors and educators, and reports on multicultural films and film festivals. Among our regular columns is a twice yearly roundup of recommended books in Spanish for children and teens, written by Isabel Schon.
What prompted you to become its editor?
In 1992, after my award-winning multicultural children’s literature bibliography Our Family, Our Friends, Our World was published I joined Brenda Mitchell-Powell on a panel at the American Library Association conference. She asked me to review children’s books for MultiCultural Review, which I agreed to do. I was a reviewer for about a year and a half when she retired from the journal and an editor with Greenwood Publishing Group—at that time the publisher of MCR—asked me to take over. I loved writing for the journal, and it took me about ten seconds to say yes. The transition to my editorship began in summer 1994, and my first issue as editor came out in spring 1995.
Do you consider freelance submissions? What are you interested in?
We consider freelance submissions for feature articles, and we encourage people to contact us if they’d like to review books and other media. All of our reviews are assigned, so those interested in reviewing should contact me with a list of areas of expertise (ethnic, religious, or cultural specialty), preferred genre (fiction, poetry, visual arts, memoir, history, social sciences, reference, music, etc.), and age level (juvenile or adult). For feature articles, we are always interested in bibliographies on specific topics and cultural groups, especially ones that have received little coverage in the past. About two-thirds of our feature articles cover children’s literature or best practices in multicultural education at the elementary and secondary level. However, about two-thirds of our reviews are of books for adult readers, because that is a much larger segment of the publishing industry.
You're also a published author. Please tell us about your book.
My latest book is titled Gringolandia. It’s a novel for both young adult and adult readers about a refugee teen from Chile living in Madison, Wisconsin with his mother and sister in the 1980s, during the Pinochet dictatorship. The boy’s father, an underground journalist, is a political prisoner and has been brutally tortured. When the father is released unexpectedly and rejoins his family in the United States, both father and son see how much the other has changed. The boy, Daniel, wants a relationship with his father like the one he remembers from before, but he has also become assimilated, with a rock band and a “gringa” girlfriend, while his physically and emotionally damaged father wants only to return to Chile and continue the struggle. To complicate matters, the girlfriend has a serious case of hero worship and pursues Daniel’s father in order to start a bilingual human rights newspaper, which Daniel fears will bring back his father’s past and drive him further toward self-destruction.
While the book depicts a dark time in history with many implications for the present, it is above all a family story—a story of young people trying to survive in a dangerous world, to love each other, and to heal a family member who has been broken.
Are you a disciplined writer?
I am very good at meeting deadlines. I would not have survived in the magazine business otherwise. My biggest problem writing fiction is that there are no deadlines, at least until the manuscript is accepted and on the publisher’s schedule, so it’s easy to procrastinate.
Describe a regular day in your life.
I’m a night owl, so my best time for writing is after 10 pm. I usually begin my work day by checking and responding to e-mail, and then I do whatever has to be done for MultiCultural Review—which can range from editing articles and reviews to packing boxes of books to be sent out to reviewers—during the day. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on promoting Gringolandia. It took me by surprise, the amount of time I’d spend promoting the novel, but it’s a good surprise due to of the level of interest sparked by all of the great reviews and award nominations the novel has received.
You've also edited a collection for young adults, Once Upon a Cuento. Was the collection your idea? What are some of the themes in the stories?
Actually, the collection was the idea of Nicholasa Mohr, who approached Curbstone’s Editorial Director, Alexander Taylor, back in 2000. She contributed three of her stories to the anthology but was unable to take on the task of editing it because she’d just purchased in brownstone in East Harlem that she was restoring (a restoration later written up in the New York Times).
In all, there are 17 stories from 14 authors in Once Upon a Cuento, and the collection is divided into five themes—history and heritage, family relationships, relationships with friends (including animal friends), and dealing with differences, one’s own and others’. In addition to Nicholasa Mohr, several well-known authors are featured in the collection—Virgil Suárez, Sergio Troncoso, Diane de Anda, and D. H. Figueredo. Others, like Malín Alegría, Xavier Garza, Lorraine López, and Nelly Rosario, have gone on to write acclaimed novels for children and adults.
Do you have a website/blog where readers may find out more about you and your work?
Yes. My website is web.mac.com/lynml, and I have a blog there. My blog consists of reports from my speaking engagements, observations on literature and the writing process, and commentary on current issues related to multiculturalism. A lot of what I write about on my website ends up in the editorial for MultiCultural Review, so reading the blog serves as a kind of preview for the issue.
Thanks for the interview, Lynn!
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