Shannon Gibney’s latest picture book We Miss You, George Floyd, due out November 12 via University of Minnesota Press, tells the story of George Floyd’s murder and the 2020 uprisings from the perspective of a young Black girl, who is based on Gibney’s own daughter. Featuring beautiful illustrations from Leeya Rose Jackson, the book portrays the young girl’s questions, confusion, emotions, and abolitionist dreams.
An all-around Minnesota literary treasure, Gibney is the author of several award-winning books, including a speculative memoir, young adult novels, and picture books. She’s a Bush Artist, a McKnight Fellow, and 2023’s Educator of the Year at Minneapolis College. Recently, Racket spoke on the phone with Gibney about the book’s genesis, her hefty to-read list, novel writing vs. picture book writing, and the joys and challenges of being a Black mother.
In addition to picture books, you've written academic works about teaching writing, novels, a speculative memoir, and essays. Do you have a favorite genre to write or do you really like toggling back and forth between different types of projects?
I consider myself first and foremost a novelist. If I'm going to pick something up to read, it’s going to be a novel. Coming up as a reader, novels were the books that really filled me up with meaning, a sense of purpose, and enjoyment. You can put anything in a novel as long as you can make it fit. So, I'm a novelist, but I also like trying new things. I'm in the middle of revising my first middle grade novel.
Because I like trying new things, I end up falling on my face. I went through a lot of drafts for the children's picture books. My first one, Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight, which came out last April, went through like 25 drafts. My agent was like, “OK, somebody who writes, like, 80,000 words going to something that's 1,000 words. This is a big transition.” But it's fun for me. I love learning new things and it helps me learn to embrace loving mistakes, too.
What made you decide on a picture book for the topic of George Floyd and police brutality?
It's kind of an annoying answer, but this is the form in which that the story came to me. This is a pandemic book. It's one of two things that I've written in my entire life that just came out done. I really didn't make many changes to it after that first draft. The other thing that I wrote that came out done was the first essay I wrote about Black motherhood called “Fear of a Black Mother,” which opens up the anthology A Good Time for the Truth. It’s interesting that both of those, in hindsight, have to do with parenting Black children. And the police state.
The subconscious works in strange ways. I don't really pretend to understand mine, but watching my daughter, who was in first grade at the time of the George Floyd murder and the subsequent uprisings, some things were floating around in my consciousness that needed to come out.
That's not an annoying answer at all. Did you and the illustrator Leeya Rose Jackson pair up to sell the book? Or was that collaboration the work of the publisher?
After University of Minnesota Press bought the book, my editor there, Eric Anderson, and I had a lot of conversations about who the prospective illustrator should be. We agreed that they had to be Black, that it would be best that they were from Minneapolis. Eric found Leeya, who is a young Black visual artist here. This is her first children's picture book. I saw her stuff and I was like, “Oh my gosh, she would be amazing.” Eric talked to her. She was really excited about the project.
Then after she started, Eric, Leeya, my daughter, and I met at George Floyd Square, which is about a block from my daughter’s school and ten blocks from our house. We took Leeya back to my house and, of course, anytime anybody comes into the house, my daughter has to show them all her artwork. She's a little budding visual artist, too. So she showed Leeya everything. In early drafts of the book, the main character looks very uncomfortable sitting with her family processing the information about George Floyd’s murder. But after meeting my daughter and coming to my house, the later drafts show the girl not just sitting there, but fiddling with crayons. The artwork is sort of everywhere. Leeya also put this beautiful stained glass from my 120-year-old house in the book, too.
When you are writing something like this book, are you consciously thinking about the reader, the audience, or the setting in which it might be read?
No, it's a much more, sort of, ethereal experience for me. This book just came out of me. I consider myself to be a mid-career writer. I’ve got about eight books under my belt and I know that writing always comes out of community. I view the writer and the artist as the translators. That's our craft: to hone our translation skills. The art is not ours. It doesn't really belong to us. That becomes clear, if you're lucky, when your book gets published and it goes out into the world, then hopefully finds a bigger audience. That’s still happening with my memoir, where people take your book through their own lenses. They see things in it that you didn't necessarily see and it reaches people in ways that you didn't even foresee.
Probably my biggest hope for this book is that it helps children, caregivers, and teachers create a shared language for this traumatic event and its aftermath that we're still really coming out of. I keep going to different events where people are like, "This is our first event since the pandemic." I think the George Floyd murder and uprisings as well, particularly in Minneapolis, it's also something that hasn't really been processed in ways that I think are necessary. I had the opportunity to share the book with my daughter’s class last year—all those kids were in first grade when it happened. And they have stuff to say. I had them do some writing and I did not have to pull out anything. They had a lot to share.
In We Miss You, George Floyd, there's a line: “This is an old fight.” Do you have any thoughts about how you will keep working towards abolition and a world without police violence?
This is where, for me, being a Black woman is really useful. You look at the history. It’s a matter of perspective. When you look at the fact that Black people were dragged here over 400 years ago, all the stuff that Black women have been through just trying to survive and keep our families at least somewhat intact in incredibly hostile circumstances. There have been tremendous losses, but we're still here as a group. That is something that you can't manufacture. That is so real. Navigating the political winds, both in terms of electoral politics and white, violent, dominant culture, and the police state. This is just the latest intimation of that.
I always say that what makes me so glad to be Black, a Black writer, and a Black woman writer is that resistance has always been our tradition, and I hope it will always be our tradition. I consider myself not necessarily special, but rather just one in a long, long line of people who resisted because they didn't have a choice, because it was the right thing to, and because of causes and conditions that they couldn't control. I feel very strongly that the job of the writer and the job of the artist is to help people imagine a different way forward. Not just in the outside world, but inside ourselves, you know?
Because abolition—at the deepest part—that's really what it's about. It's about our own hearts, our own desires to be free, our own desires to punish. These things that are in the deepest parts of us that we don't really have language for, but are pushing us to create the world that we live in.
You said in an interview with The Washington Post several years ago that your work is often preoccupied with not belonging, and the spaces in between fixed identities. How are you and your family made to feel as if you belong or don't belong in your neighborhood near George Floyd Square, and in Minneapolis, in general.
It's some really contested space, George Floyd Square. The city of Minneapolis sends out weekly updates, and I read that they're having their third in a series of meetings about the future of George Floyd Square. That's been really fraught from the beginning, and there was some violence there. I have friends who live off the square. There was a spate of carjacking over there, too. Then the mayor wanted to close off sections of it. There's just all these things, right? Then if you actually go to the Square, there's this amazing tribute, with names of victims of police violence. It's just so layered.
It’s hard for me to say one thing about it. That, in itself, is emblematic of what it's like to live in any community, but especially in a city where there's so many different narratives, so many different communities. The official city and what the city leaders and the leaders of commerce want, right? Then the police officers and what they want. Then you have the teachers who teach at the school a block away, the everyday people who are walking to school, the people who live in the neighborhood, and the people who come from outside the neighborhood to see George Floyd Square.
We had the biggest protests following George Floyd's murder and now, four years out from that, what has changed substantially? When the protests were happening, my kids were pretty young. And now my son, I have a Black male son who's in ninth grade at South High and my daughter, this Black girl who's 10 and in fourth grade at Bancroft. You can prepare yourself mentally. Like, I knew that this day would come. When my son was younger, everybody said, “He's so cute.”
And now he has this young black male body that reads completely differently in public spaces. So what does that mean for me as a Black mother? And then my daughter—the ways in which, as she grows up, she's also read as more aggressive. As a parent trying to find a way through that, where you're honoring their innocence. Not just their desire to be children, but their right to be children in the same way that other children are given in our communities.
I tell my son all the time that my number-one job is not to be his friend, it's to protect him. I know I can't protect him from everything. It's just not possible. But to the extent that I can, I'm going to do that. So it's trying to find a balance between those two things.
I do know that my daughter is proud to be a part of this book. She wouldn't say that, but she's proud. When I read the book at her school, her friends were like, “That's Marwein on the front. We know those purple glasses. She's doing her art.” She's an introvert, but she had this little smile on her face.
What does a multi-genre author like you enjoy reading when you're reading for pleasure?
Not surprisingly, I like to read across genres. My to-read list is always huge and so I'm usually reading two or three things at a time. I've got a book in the car, a book on the ground floor of the house, a book on the second floor of the house. When you’re a weird, extroverted writer like myself, you have a lot of writer friends and you're trying to keep up with your friends’ books. These are good problems to have, though, because of course, I love reading, just like I love writing.
Right now I'm almost done with my friend Ibi Zoboi’s young adult novel Pride, which is a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of this Dominican Black girl in Bushwick and this rich Black guy that moves in to her gentrifying neighborhood. I just finished Radiant, a middle grade novel in verse about this little Black girl growing up in 1960s outside of Pittsburgh by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson that will be published next year. I'm reading my friend Sun Yung Shin’s newest collection of poetry Six Tones of Water.
And you have a middle grade novel coming out next?
Well, children's picture books take a very long time, so the next book is also with the University of Minnesota Press, and it's a book called Where Is My Sister? I actually wrote it before I wrote We Miss You, George Floyd. It’s about this little girl, and her mom is pregnant and then she's not. She has a stillbirth. The book deals with those issues from a child's perspective. The middle grade novel is called Children of Oil City and it's about these teens who are mysteriously trapped in an oil refinery. There's all kinds of magic. The oil has magical properties that it wants to unleash. I'm still working on it. So I hope that'll be soon.
We Miss You, George Floyd Launch Party
What: Reading, discussion, Q&A, and kids art activity with Gibney and Jackson
When: 6 p.m., November 12
Where: Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis
Tickets: Free; more info here
