So today, I wanted to offer a prompt to help you reach this source of inspiration, which, like Smile, can be elusive. The fact that it comes from such a deeply rooted experience, I think helped me to keep on trying. And while I had no idea that it was going to be about Bear and Smile (who would be personified) or any other details, I knew that in some way it would come into existence. LOOKING FOR SMILE is a story I have been trying to write for many years. That day my relationship to the world went from this: Lauren Stringer, the illustrator of Looking for Smile, captured it perfectly. And while the particulars are (obviously) very different, the feeling of confusion about being in a world that looked and felt different than it ever did before is very much the same. The roots of the story go back to a day when I was five years old and just like Bear, I woke up and found my smile gone. And without his Smile, Bear feels alone for the first time. LOOKING FOR SMILE, illustrated by Lauren Stringer (Beach Lane Books, 2020), tells the story of Bear and Smile who are always together-they wake up together, they splash in waterfalls together, they eat honey together, they look at the stars together. And more specifically at a moment when we needed a “story” to help us. Specifically I wanted to look back at our own childhood selves. Today I want to focus on looking inside (a little like Bear from my new book, LOOKING FOR SMILE, is doing in panel three) and also looking back in time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |