UNTITLED #1: A collaboration between me (age 6) and my child (age 3)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
N and I sit at the dining room table and color a gigantic set of fabric butterfly wings for her to wear. She’s been working on them since the beginning of January. She hasn’t worn them once; I’m not sure she ever will. She’s more interested in the making, and so we color: her, a medium heart, mostly outside the lines, and me, a small circle, mostly inside the lines. Hers is better.
We chat a little here and there, but mostly we are each lost to our thoughts.
As an author who wants to write for children, and as a person who has children, I find myself returning to my childhood often—perhaps too often. I mine my past for particular memories and recall the feeling of experiencing them. For a handful of scenes, I am transported viscerally: even after 30 years, my body holds onto the feeling. It’s chosen to, though I don’t always understand why. For the rest of my childhood, I am simply a member of the audience, watching a tape that has been rewound and replayed so many times that the quality is beginning to wear.
When I feel nostalgia for childhood, it’s mostly for a period of life where I had an abundance of time: time to practice whistling; time to wake up and read, half falling out of bed, letting the blood rush to my head; time to run until the breath caught in my chest, astonished at how my own body worked; time to think about nothing and no one or everything and everyone; time to take multiple hours to eat a lollipop, and then still wrap it back up for later; time to mush and mix—sand, flour, water, spices, broken glass, tin foil, paint, grass, mud—just to see how it feels. Time to be bored. Time to dream.
For many, childhood is a harrowing time, full of unknowns and a loss of control. It is impossible to become—a big kid, a grown-up, an author, a mother, no matter how badly you want to—until one day, you are. There is no guarantee; there never is. Children understand that, but children also know how to dream, and dreaming provides immunity.
For the last 15 years, I’ve cast off dreaming in favor of pragmatism—and in all truth, this method has served me well. I am practical and (mostly) disciplined. I set achievable goals. But when N came home from school and told me she’d used a very tall ladder to climb into the sky and take a nap in the clouds, I found myself in awe of her imagination and disappointed in my own, unsure of when I’d lost my ability to dream.
I color another circle. I think about how dreams are barriers that stands between the crags of life and hopelessness. I think about how believing in a different world is essential to creating any change: to changing the way we think, feel, and behave. I think about how expansive dreaming is, how it becomes easier to remain open—and accepting, if you can consider alternate possibilities, even those unknown.
I think about how N was my dream and now she is her own, and how much good I’ll have done if I can teach her to remember that. I think about how open and forgiving she is. Her unprejudiced spirit gives her more clarity than I could ever hope to have.
“I like this color blue,” I tell her. “It’s soft but also bright.”
“I like that one, too,” N tells me. “I love all of the colors that I know.”
TUESDAY
UNTITLED #1. Cut paper collage and acrylic paint on paper. Begun in 1993, completed in 2023.
I made this paper dinosaur when I was six, and N painted this acrylic landscape toward the end of 2023. A few days ago, I collaged them together. Our first collaborative painting.
It is the first, I hope, of many collaborations—paintings, books, choreographed dances, and of course, building our relationship. The biggest collaboration; the best dream.
WEDNESDAY
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” —James Baldwin
THURSDAY
Today I sat on a panel discussion with a few peers to discuss book publishing and how books have helped build our brand. The conversation was interesting for me, and I enjoyed learning more about my peers, each of us with our own distinct paths and challenges. A career in book publishing is not simple or easy for most of us, but it is possible—and if you love books, that’s what matters most.
My own experience with my brand and how I view creativity has changed so much, especially in the last two years. The conversation moved quickly, and I didn’t get a chance to speak about what I really wanted to, which was: treating your brand as a living, breathing thing.
If enough of you are interested, I’ll write about this topic for the next edition of my Craft series.
If you missed yesterday’s panel talk (with Katie Daisy, Rebecca Green, Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, Jane Mount, and Meenal Patel), you can watch the replay here.
FRIDAY
To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last
inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice
for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be
no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China
for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go
fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say
their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,
can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be—
a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.
To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming
their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D
& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment
with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you—
blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.
To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.
—When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
xx,
M
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