Nia Davenport: In the collective conscience, literature defines who matters and who is human enough to have stories told about them…
Sirens Studio takes place October 22–23, 2019, just prior to the official start of the conference, and gives attendees the opportunity to enrich their learning in the form of small-group workshop intensives. We’re thrilled to interview a few members of our tremendous faculty on their work, reading, inspirations, and workshop topic! Today, we’re chatting with Nia Davenport, who will lead the reading workshop “The Danger of the Single Narrative” this fall. To learn more and register, please visit our Sirens Studio page.
Accompanying our interview is a selection of book covers Nia references in her interview below: Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes, Roshani Chokshi’s The Gilded Wolves, Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels books (first in series is Angel’s Blood), Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter books (first in series is Magic Bites), and L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress Legend books (first in series is Minion).
AMY TENBRINK: Let’s start at the very beginning! You have a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, a master’s degree in public health and another in teaching, you’ve worked in public health, you currently teach both science and English to kids (and lead the Science Department), and you write fiction. How do you manage to do it all?
NIA: Haha. That is an excellent question. If I was asked this question four years ago, I would’ve said a lot of sleepless nights, cramming tasks into every spare second of my day, and forgetting to feed myself a lot of the time. I’ve learned that my former way of doing things isn’t healthy or sustainable. Now, I’ve found a better rhythm. Teaching provides me the privilege of having summers off. So, I draft new writing projects during the summer when I can give them full-time attention without running myself into the ground. I use the fall and winter, when I’m back at work, to work with my agent to revise those summer projects. For me, book edits are much less time consuming than writing initial drafts. With edits, the foundation is already laid.
Teaching is also a job that comes relatively easy for me because I have amazing students. I love what I do, and when I’m at work it doesn’t feel like actual work. Since I write a lot of Young Adult stories, it also helps me write better. I’m constantly around young adult voices, having meaningful conversations with them about real-world issues. So, it allows me to see the world from a teenager’s perspective, and I employ that cool advantage in my writing.
AMY: What ultimately drew you to teaching? What do you love about being in a classroom and working with students?
NIA: I was a tutor before I decided to teach. The fact that working with students as a tutor never felt like a drag and it was a job that I never dreaded going to, is what drew me to teach. I realized I have a passion for learning and working with kids. Kids are amazing. Teaching them is also a constant learning process for me. I think I learn as much from them as they do from me.
The thing I love most about being in the classroom and working with students is being able to engage them in conversations about real-world issues. So often, adults dismiss teens as not having anything intelligent or competent to say. This couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of them see things with more clarity and intelligence than us adults.
As a teacher, it’s never my mission to just deliver instructional content to my students. I care more about if they leave my classroom having more confidence in who they are as a person and having a greater love of critical analyses, reading, and investigating new things than I do them knowing the difference between a complex sentence and a compound-complex sentence or how DNA is replicated.
AMY: What kinds of fantasy books do you use in your classrooms? How do you incorporate them into your curricula? How do your students respond to these books—and which ones have they loved?
...To see this answer along with the rest of my interview, click HERE.
I'll be at Siren's conference October 2020!