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In We Are Big Time, picture-book writer and middle-grade novelist Hena Khan essays her first graphic novel, illustrated by another first-timer, Safiya Zerrougui. Aliya is the new kid in town and in her Islamic school: could basketball be her ticket to success?

Roger Sutton: I’m curious how you see the reception of children’s books with Muslim characters and topics. How has that changed over your career?

Hena Khan: Oh wow, it has changed drastically. When I began, I was one of a few authors writing stories with Muslim protagonists for a mainstream audience. At that time, it very much felt like I was beating down the doors of the publishers, saying Please consider these. When I wrote my first picture book, Night of the Moon, which is about the month of Ramadan, I remember thinking, How do I make this extra appealing to educators and librarians? How do I make this about more than Ramadan alone? I didn’t think that topic had enough weight. I tried to tie it to the lunar cycle, thinking there was more value in that. I thought Julie Paschkis’s illustrations, which are really lush and filled with Islamic art, would appeal to art teachers. I went in thinking of a school and library market, because that’s where I felt it was needed. And I wanted my own children to have access to books about themselves in the library. Each time I wrote a book, starting with that one and then Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns a few years later, I thought, Well, that was fun. I wrote a book. So let’s see if I get to do that again. But I didn’t know if the industry would continue to support books like that or not. It’s been amazing to see the response of publishers to the gradual opening up of the market and the industry. Of course, We Need Diverse Books and other efforts have shown that these books not only are needed, but they do sell.

RS: You alluded in your answer to pulling in other things to make it more attractive to teachers and to non-Muslim children; I wonder about how you strike that balance, because you do that also in this book, right? You don’t want Muslim readers to feel talked down to, but you don’t want non-Muslim readers to be at sea. How do you balance that?

HK: A lot of that is through the perspective of the character I’m writing about. Even something as simple as a concept book about colors is told from a personal point of view, and you learn about things that Muslims care about. It works on a basic picture-book level, but also for novels. You don’t want to overexplain. I very much don’t want readers who share my background to feel like they’re reading a social studies project. I don’t include glossaries in my novels (I do in my picture books), even though I know some writers do. That was a conscious decision; I want Muslim readers to feel like they are the center of the story and that it’s not written for another audience. If you don’t know a particular word, then that’s on you to look it up if you want. It is a delicate balance to strike in terms of making sure everyone gets what they need from the books.

RS: In We Are Big Time, you have the gym teacher, Coach Jess, who is not Muslim. There are a couple of points where she does ask her Muslim students for clarification.

HK: I interviewed the coach and several players from the team that inspired the story. The coach said that as a non-Muslim who didn’t know a lot about Islam and hadn’t been around a lot of Muslims prior to taking the job, she asked a lot of questions and in turn was asked questions by the kids. I love that idea of there being questions on both sides. The kids can ask, “What does your tattoo mean?” And the coach might ask about praying at school or wearing the hijab. Definitely a two-way experience.

RS: The non-Muslim teams that the girls play against also give you an opportunity to provide information in a natural way. How did you find out about this team?

HK: An educator named Aliza Werner in Wisconsin sent me an article about them. Aliza was hosting me for the Wisconsin State Reading Association meeting, and we were talking about logistics. As a footnote in her email, she said, “By the way, this popped up in my inbox and I thought you might find it interesting.” I clicked on the link, and it was about the Salam School girls’ basketball team and their turn-around season. I started searching for other articles and found a Bleacher Report segment on them that was captivating. I thought instantly, This is a special story that I want to tell. After I read as much as I could, I reached out to the school and asked if I could talk to someone, and the coach was very responsive to being interviewed. I talked with her first and then a few of the players. It was great to get that insider perspective, because I wanted to move beyond the stories in the media and how reporters poked and tried to get certain answers.

RS: I love that you do that in the story too. You have people ask the girls questions, and the girls are like Why aren’t you asking me about basketball?

HK: Right? Why are you asking about immigration? I don’t know anything about immigration. Some of the articles talked about the challenges the girls faced when they played other schools, implying that there was a lot of racism or discrimination because of their hijabs. I asked them about that, and they said, “Yeah, there was some, and we didn’t get taken seriously. We would sometimes go to a school and they would laugh when they saw us. We felt like we had to show them who we were, that we could play.” There were a few comments here and there, but it wasn’t as much of an issue as much as you might think. I wanted to highlight that; they got some questions and side-eye, but it was really a lot of just regular trash-talk like all basketball players do. It had nothing to do with who they were or what they looked like. And that’s the way they wanted it; they wanted to be seen as basketball players first. All the other stuff about carrying the weight of representing Muslim women was secondary in their minds. They’re kids, and they’re athletes. They wanted to say, Look at us from our game.

RS: It’s so interesting to me to see this integration of a story of cultural identity with basketball. You wrote a sports novel — were you aware that that’s what you were doing?

HK: I was aware of that. I have written about basketball before in my early middle-grade novel series, Zayd Saleem, Chasing the Dream. I live with a basketball-obsessed family, so that was helpful.

RS: Go Celtics.

HK: No, not in this house. In fact, my poor character in that series is a Wizards fan because I live in the DC area and have suffered for it. So I did have some experience writing about basketball, but this was the next level and it definitely felt more sports reporter-like. I wanted it to be that way because as someone who doesn’t wear the hijab, I always take an outsider perspective. I don’t know what it’s like to go through life navigating that experience. This felt like something I could write about both as a non-basketball playing fan and as a Muslim, but one who doesn’t wear the hijab. It was exciting to write about a girls’ team sport because I feel like we need more female protagonists in sports books.

RS: Sure. And that’s another sort of gap you must bridge. It’s not only Muslim readers and non-Muslim readers — it’s kids who know how basketball works and kids like me who are clueless.

HK: For that reason, I thought the graphic-novel format was helpful because if someone doesn’t know all the technical language around a basketball game--what it means to box someone out or to set a screen-- then I’d have to describe what was happening. In a graphic novel, you get the excitement of the game, and you see the scoreboard and know they’re winning or losing. You know they either made the shot or missed it because you’re just capturing these moments in the game. It was easier to capture that emotion and the ups and downs without getting too technical. I felt like this format might be inviting to people who aren’t basketball players or huge fans for whom describing plays and getting into the specifics might be less appealing.

RS: I loved the inclusion of the scoreboard because that did help me as a non-basketball player to keep track of what was going on.

HK: One of the other things I realized when we were working on the book was that it was helpful to have the girls all have different colored hijabs. It did stray from the actual team that has the hijab matching the rest of their uniform, but I asked for the girls to have distinct hijab colors so that it would be easier to keep track of who is who.

RS: How did you like writing a graphic novel?

HK: I loved it. I took a class several years ago through DC Comics: their inaugural talent development workshop taught by Scott Snyder; it was the first time I learned about writing comics — specifically superhero comics, which are so different. We had to write two comics over the course of the class, and because I’m primarily a middle-grade fiction writer, my characters were exploring their feelings and friendships. I’d get feedback such as: “How about some more explosions? Let’s have some more fighting.” I would add in more fighting, but it was still all feeling- and friendship-focused, and it was really funny. I thought, Well, hopefully someday I can merge the two. But that whole idea of writing frame by frame and visualizing the story you’re trying to tell is definitely a different way of storytelling for me. I really enjoyed learning how to do it. Of course, We Are Big Time was longer than a twenty-page comic, so the story arc and the page turns and all of the specific things that you have to consider when writing a graphic novel are things I had to figure out and learn with the help of my editor, Rotem Moscovich

RS: Who was my student many years ago.

HK: Oh, wow! Yeah, she’s amazing. So good at what she does. I love her.

RS: It was your illustrator’s first graphic novel as well, right? When you finished the manuscript and said, “Okay, Rotem, here it is.” What did the text look like?

HK: I guess the closest thing would be a screenplay. I wrote it out panel by panel. I think different graphic novelists do it differently, but I described every page of the book in panels, so Panel one: Girls gathered around the coach. Panel two: Coach is talking. I also write the dialogue, so there’s dialogue for each character. That’s a very different way of visualizing and progressing the story than a prose novel. And when it comes to something like the basketball scenes, you’re taking snapshots and thinking, How do I advance an action scene through a series of sequences that add up to mean something. It’s as descriptive as you want it to be, really, and I tend to try to set up a lot of specific details that I think would be helpful to the artist. Safiya Zerrougui did an incredible job rendering it all. I love the expressions and the lines and the movement on the page — it really is magical to see your imaginings come to life in such a beautiful way. I’ve written picture books where I tried to minimize art notes to only essential ones that describe what the characters look like or the setting, but it’s still really cool to see that come to life.

RS: I thought that Safiya did a great job with using almost minimal lines but getting real expression from the faces and adding individuality to them. It was another way to tell the girls apart from one another.

HK: Absolutely. That was something else that made me want to write this as a graphic novel: to represent some of the diversity of the school and the players. People don’t always consider the level of diversity that exists within the Muslim community, and that was nice that she was able to capture different features and different races in a really nice way.

RS: I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never really thought about Muslim schools. I mean, I figured Muslim schools were like what I went to as a young Catholic kid where you go to religious class once a week.

HK: Yep. That’s what I did.

RS: But there can be a whole school with regular old reading, writing, arithmetic curriculum as well as religious instruction. That was a whole new world to me.

HK: There are a lot of Islamic schools around the country. I know several in my area. And sometimes they are affiliated with a large mosque that may open its own school. Oftentimes they’re just regular private schools, charter schools. You see all types.

RS: So that was new to you as well? You didn’t attend one as a child?

HK: No, I did not. I don’t know of too many that were around when I was growing up in the eighties, but there are more and more of them now. I know people who attended, and as an author I’ve visited many and spoken at some. It is a learning experience for me in the sense that their education and their environment is so different than what I experienced as a kid in Maryland public schools, where my fish-out-of-water experience doesn’t necessarily relate to what they’re going through.

RS: It’s very different because there’s so much commonality among the girls. You know that they’re in the school together, they’re all Muslim, and they all like basketball. It’s not a story of an outsider, which so many of our stories about diversity seem to be.

HK: Yes, absolutely. And that’s what I learned as a presenter when I went in and told my story about what it felt like to go to the library and not find a single book that had a character like me. Now their libraries are full of books, and they’re not limited to mainstream published books. They have books from Islamic publishers, too. It was nice to be able to talk to the girls and get a sense of what their concerns were in all areas — not just related to basketball. One girl told me that she had moved from somewhere else and that the basketball team helped her adjust to being new. Another girl told me how as a player she was hard on herself, and the coach had taken her aside and made her aware of all the good things she had done; I built that into the story. It was great to just be able to move beyond, like you said, that whole outsider narrative and focus on the characters’ hopefully relatable experiences even though they are in this very specific environment.

RS: But that’s what’s so quietly revolutionary about your book. The fact that 95% of the characters are Muslim is just a given. But as a non-Muslim reader, I’m not being spoon-fed information in any way. All readers enter this book equally. I felt that you respected that. And that, to me, is the revolutionary part.

HK: Thank you. I hadn’t considered that. I appreciate that.

RS: And the fact that being Muslim is very important to these girls and to the setting of the book obviously, but at the same time you’ve still got the mean girl, you’ve got the new girl, you’ve got struggles with parents, you’ve got homework versus practice. It’s all relatable stuff in a framework that most of us hadn’t considered before.

HK: And that’s where I hope that readers of all backgrounds will be able to connect with Aliya and the other girls and think, Okay, I know what it’s like to be a student athlete and have to juggle practice and exams. Or I know what it feels like to be the new person and walk into a lunchroom and not know where to sit on the first day. Whatever it is. Readers can connect with them on another level, too, and think, So these girls are all Muslims, so what?

RS: I feel like there are a lot of different places where a reader can enter the story.

HK: I hope so. Playing basketball, being new, being curious about the hijab.

RS: Or just sports stories, graphic novels.

HK: I’m really excited to see how readers react.

RS: Did you know how the season was going to end for these girls in your book?

HK: Yes. Without spoiling it, I wanted it to be one of those dramatic turnarounds, feel good sports stories that we all love. Even though I was fictionalizing, I did want to stay somewhat true to the real experience of the real-life team and its season. I exaggerated what happened at the end and built it up in a different way than might have happened. But the heart of it and the way they responded to how their season ended was very much based on what they told me. I like that it’s not a cliche, even though I hope it’s still satisfying despite it not being exactly the typical sports story.

RS: Do you think you could revisit these girls in a sequel?

HK: I hadn’t thought of that. As you see through my work, I love to write series and love doing sequels; that’s always my go-to. This is one that I had not considered. But now that you’re saying it…

RS: She’s only a freshman, so you’ve got three more years with these girls.

HK: That’s a really good idea. I’m going to say it was your suggestion and encouragement when I go back to Rotem and say, “Your teacher said we need a sequel.” I think it would be fun. One of my very favorite things to do is to establish strong characters and then play with them again in a different book.

RS: Did you understand basketball more after you wrote this?

HK: I did. I think with every book it’s always a process of figuring things out and learning a little bit more. This one was funny because I had my husband review the art with me when it was still in sketch form. He picked up on the fact that Safiya had illustrated most of the players, if not all the players, shooting left-handed. I did not notice that, even though I’m a lefty myself. Maybe that’s why.

RS: Hey, me too! High-five!

HK: He said there wouldn’t be this many left-handed shooters, especially not at that age. Little things like shooting positions where it wasn’t clear that these are free-throw shots and not lay-ups. Or illustrating boxing out, which I had heard of but didn’t really understand. It’s when you’re getting into a defensive position, and you stick your bottom out to try to block an opposing player out. I had to research that and sometimes provide source material for Safiya. I’d say, “Look at Steph Curry shooting, this is how we want it.”

RS: Do you think she’s left-handed and that’s why she did that?

HK: I didn’t get a chance to ask her. She did play basketball in middle school, so she was very good at the basketball stuff. She could have inverted it in her mind and not considered it, but I’ll have to ask her.

RS: Well, girls’ basketball — women’s basketball is certainly having a moment.

HK: I know. I feel like it’s wonderful timing to have this book come out with the interest in and passion for women’s basketball because of the excitement around Caitlin Clark.

RS: I watched some of those shots she made. What do you call the ones that are from far away?

HK: I don’t even know.

RS: How does a person do that?

HK: She’s phenomenal. It’s so fun to see, and it’s long overdue to have the excitement for women’s basketball. There are so many talented players, and I’m glad that just like with women’s soccer, we’re seeing this surge in interest. I hope it continues

RS: I hope so too. Would you do another graphic novel? Forget the sequel, just a graphic novel?

HK: Yes, I love the format. I am working on another graphic novel with Rotem. The title is not final yet, but it’s a very different story about a family and travel overseas based on my family’s travel experience. I’m really excited about that one too. It should be really beautiful, and I thought writing about a foreign country and kids getting to experience it through the art would be fun. I’d love to do more. I can see why kids love them so much. I didn’t read comics as a child. When I took that comic writing workshop, I felt like the class dunce because not only did I not know anything about writing comics, but I didn’t really understand how to read them. I wondered, Do we read from left to right? Do we read down first or across first? I was that much of a novice and needed a crash course on caption versus thought bubble and so on. But now I feel like I am appreciating them as a reader as much as I’m enjoying writing them.

RS: They are a lot more work than I think many adults give them credit for. It’s not like reading a comic book, for one thing. I mean there are many conventions that are the same between comics and graphic novels, but reading graphic novels for middle graders or teens or adults is different to me. I’m so word oriented, and it’s hard because you really must look at those pictures.

HK: You do. One of the tools that was helpful to me when I was thinking of this was reading comics in digital format. I am usually a physical book person, but reading comics digitally advances the panels for you, which is a nice sort of guide. Especially when graphic novelists get creative and do a full-page illustration or a different type of angle, diagonal or something. I’m thinking, Where am I looking? I feel like that’s my being new to the format, but that really helped me. And because it was zoomed in on my computer, I could study the art in a way that I might have passed through quickly if I was reading it and getting to the page turn. I saw so much detail and so much thought put into the art. Like a picture book, it’s an amazing art form to see those two, the words and the physical drawings, come together.

RS: And we must, I think, retrain a lot of adults to pay close attention to pictures. You know, even when they’re reading a picture book to a young child, they figure, Alright, I’m going to read the text on this spread, and then I’m going to turn the page. You’ve really got to give the kid more time. Look, because the kid is more patient than you.

HK: For sure. And the kid is going to find things. And ask questions like “Why is this here?” or “Who is that?” I love that. I think educators have come around with graphic novels and respect them as reading, but I think a lot of times parents think, Oh, my kid finished that in an hour. So it’s too fast. Like many other books, kids go back to graphic novels over and over. They’re still learning about storytelling and story arcs and themes and character development; it’s all there, and whether they get through it in half an hour and then go back and savor every page later or they do it slowly, every reader’s going to approach it differently. I think there’s value there.

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