Nishka Seth is a third-year student at Drexel University with a major in Psychology and two minors in Public Health and Health Services Administration. Along with her focus in health, she is devoted to helping LGBTQ+ communities and educating others about those communities. One way in which she does this is through her passion for writing. Seth’s debut children’s storybook, Jasper Goes to the Ballet, was released this past November and aims to provide the POC LGBTQ+ representation that is often missing from children’s literature.
I had the opportunity to speak with Seth about where she got her start as a writer and the journey of writing Jasper Goes to the Ballet.
Jahdae Gardener: When or how did you discover your passion for writing?
Nishka Seth: I’ve always been writing in my diary since I was a kid but my passion really started to blossom when I was in high school. I had met this really fantastic teacher— It’s always the English teachers that really speak to you and know your worth, and I had one in particular who really saw that I might be talented and kind of cradled me and helped me become a better poet, in a sense. She had me submit my work into a book and I was very nervous about it, but I still did it after a couple months of cleaning the piece up. I got into the book and it has been published, it’s called Imagine. It’s kinda crazy to look back at it now.
JG: Before publishing Jasper Goes to the Ballet, you published a few poetry workbooks. Was poetry usually your go-to form of written expression?
NS: That’s funny you mentioned that because poetry was always my go-to, starting from the very beginning, but I soon turned to expressing my words through storybooks, whether it was fiction or nonfiction. I wrote my own biography and now a children’s book. So, I’m just on a wild ride right now.
JG: How long had you been working on Jasper Goes to the Ballet and where did the inspiration for it come from?
NS: It’s a funny story actually, I was looking through a bunch of my old books because I just moved to Pennsylvania and I was unpacking boxes. Of course, when you unpack boxes you look through them and see what you were all about when you were a kid because you tend to forget that when you grow up. Looking through them, I realized that all the characters in the picturebooks were white and heterosexual… that is not who I am. It really was just sad, so I decided, okay, I gotta change this. With that said, it took me a couple months to generate the ideas and then I started reaching out to graphic designers, but I realized that this would be a little bit more meaningful to me if I did it myself even though I’m not an illustrator. Doing the illustration became a new fun way of passing my time and then I found that I was creating a storyline in my head. Months later, this is the finished product.
JG: The LGBTQ+ community is very broad. What was the process like when deciding what elements of the community you definitely wanted to put into the book because you felt they were essential for kids to learn about?
NS: I’m actually the Director of Research at the Intergalactic Pride Center and so I discussed ideas for the book with the people there, along with the community centers at the Brooklyn Pride Center, which I spent a little bit of time at. Gathering all the ideas together, I was just like, “okay, I need to make a book that includes pretty much everyone under the whole rainbow.” That was a little difficult at first, but I made sure that the ABCs of the LGBTQ community were included, and then at the end of the book I made sure to include all the important identities that both centers thought were necessary as well.
JG: What about the process of publishing this book independently. What was that like?
NS: Well, it was tough for sure. It wasn’t my first book, but it was my first children’s book. Having my art out there when no one’s ever seen it before, specifically artwork that I drew by hand on an iPad with my fingers, made me nervous. And the whole process, publishing on Amazon, is very difficult because there’s just formatting issues and it takes days and days and weeks and weeks. It’s kind of a frustrating process.
JG: What is the most important thing you hope children will take away from this book?
NS: So, I’ve actually been reaching out to a bunch of elementary school teachers all across Pennsylvania because it’s known that LGBTQ education and the general curriculum is very much underfunded and not supported in the state. A lot of teachers reached out to me saying that they are trying to build this curriculum and that they’ll be incorporating my book. So I just really want children to know that there are POC LGBTQ people out there, that they can identify with someone. Even if something’s not on the page or in the book, they can at least identify with one of the identities.
Jasper Goes to the Ballet is available from Amazon.
Jahdae Gardener is a junior at Drexel University studying English and Sociology. She enjoys binge-watching horror movies and TV series, playing videogames, and playing the keyboard. She writes fiction, poetry, and journalistic articles.