Several year’s ago I wrote a story about a children’s hike at the Bouverie Preserve. I had trained as a docent and had led many hikes with 3rd and 4th graders. The story follows a group through the preserve as they look at what’s there to talk about.
Because I had a couple drawers full of fabric scraps, I sew a lot, I decided to make the pictures out of fabric. I enjoyed selecting the colors and the prints as I designed each page. For ease of producing pictures that include children I made them separate so I could photograph the children placed on each picture as needed. The final count is sixteen pages. And with the text pages the book would be about 22 pages, a nice size of a children’s book.
That’s as far as I got, then. The book has been tucked away in the closet for all these years. Now I brought the fabric pages out to photograph with the children, read the story on the computer, and started integrating the two. It’s hard work and I lost interest when I was through. I wanted to make it a printed book out of it. I knew I needed money to do that. So I waited as I wondered who to get to do the book.
I discovered my memoir teacher did editing and layout. As we talked back and forth we finally agreed to work on the project together. Now I’m busy redoing the children to make them more like 3rd and 4th graders. My cohort is editing and doing the layout and adding some science pages to the back of the story. I’m excited to be working on it with a partner and envisioning how it will look in the end.
Chlele Gummer, Author & Artist 