Understanding the people behind the stories and the issues was one of the messages Canadian author Deborah Ellis brought to a Guelph elementary school Monday morning.
Ellis, who also describes herself as a feminist and peace activist, is the author of over 20 fiction and non-fiction books.
Her most notable work is The Breadwinner. Published in 2000, it details the story of a young Afghan girl forced to present herself as a boy in Taliban-controlled Kabul in order to support her family and search for her imprisoned father.
The Breadwinner has sold over two million copies worldwide and was made into an Oscar-nominated animated film that had Angelina Jolie attached to it as an executive producer.
Ellis spoke to Rickson Ridge's Grade 7 students about understanding the people behind the war, behind the drugs and behind the prisons - all things she explores in her books.
"We have to be able to see the human person inside the person we're being told to kill," she said of war. "My feeling is that once we know somebody, it becomes harder to kill them, and I hope that's true."
She recalled watching the invasion of Iraq by American forces and how the television commentators discussed at length the weapons being used as live shots of Baghdad being attacked were shown on CNN.
"Not a single person talked about the people on the ground living through it," Ellis said.
Many of her books deal with those "living through" war and other ills: the disenfranchised and forgotten, most notably children, in various countries around the world.
AIDS, forced child labour by drug lords, same-sex relationships in Iran, children who live in Bolivian prisons with their imprisoned parent, leprosy and children in foster care visiting their imprisoned mothers are just some of the topics and themes among her catalogue.
Ellis, who listed Guelph's Jean Little as the author who fuelled her early love of books, said the hardest thing she's faced in her many travels was forced child marriage.
The Breadwinner, she said, was a fictionalized version of the people and stories she met and heard when visiting refugee camps.
Rickson Ridge Grade 7 teacher Mike Selman has been using The Breadwinner in his classroom for the past seven years.
"I thought it would be great to expose the children to a Canadian writers and it's such a great message," Selman said.
"It's a strong female character, a strong female lead, and it had something to do with something that was outside of Canada ... it was such a great story and I found that many of the boys in my class really took to the story too."
When The Breadwinner animated film came out a field trip saw Grade 7 and Grade 8 students go to see it.
"It was very different, so that elicited a huge discussion in my class. It was just amazing," Selman said.
A student asked Ellis why the movie of The Breadwinner differed so much from the book. She replied that after writing the original screenplay, she had no creative control.
"There were things I wish had been in the movie ... but taken as a whole, I think they did a pretty good job," she said of the film, which Angelina Jolie served as an executive producer on.
Asked about advice for young writers, she said "just write."
"If you want to write, just write. Get a notebook and a pack of pens, sit in a Tim Hortons and just write," she said.
"Don't worry about it. Maybe it's going to be garbage. It probably will be garbage," she said to laughter from the students. "But you've just got to get through the garbage to get to something good sometimes."
Asked how she knows something she's written is "garbage," Ellis quipped that usually happens "whenever I think I'm the smartest person in the world."
She said her editors at publishing company she works for are not afraid to tell her when something doesn't work.
Ellis has a new non-fiction work coming out this fall about young people who have been in the Canadian prison system.
