Indie authors have an uphill battle getting their books noticed. Bloggers can make all the difference. One such amazing blogger is Sue Vincent. Sue hosted me on her blog and shared the following post with her readers; to visit her site, click the link at the bottom of this post.]
It was daylight.
I was alone on a dirt road that stretched as far as I could see.
There were no houses…no trees…
Just me.
I glided along the road.
I couldn’t see my hands, or anything that would identify me as me.
“Who am I?” I wondered.
What did I look like?
What colour was I?
I didn’t know.
I tried guessing—I thought I was probably a deep brown.
But I wasn’t sure.
All I knew was that whatever I looked like,
I was me.
I dreamed that twenty-five years ago.
I had recently been introduced to the concept of Unity in Diversity, the understanding that although people were diverse, with different skin colours, different languages and ways of doing things, humanity was one.
The dream unseated my unconscious identity of myself as a woman with white skin. In the dream, I was just me. None of the cultural packaging of what being “white,” or “brown,” or “black” meant had any reality.
My picture book, The Nightingale’s Song, sprang from that dream.
It starts out,
“Last night, I had a dream,
That my skin was brown, like mahogany,
My outside had changed,
But my inside was ME,
And a nightingale sang from the nearby tree…”
The Nightingale’s Song is about the beauty of humanity, about how our diversity is a strength. Children reading this book see themselves in its pages, and see themselves as beautiful, as they are.
It was published in 2018, but shortly thereafter the publisher closed its doors. In its short time out, it won silver in the Nautilus Book Awards as a book that promotes peace.
I am getting this book back out there. I am running a Kickstarter campaign through Kickstarter Canada, entitled, “Changing the World, One Child at a Time,” to fund its reprint.
As the nightingale sings in The Nightingale’s Song…
“Brothers and sisters we shall be,
Stars of one sky, leaves of one tree.”
That dream changed me forever, and by its inspiration, I hope to be part of the change toward a world in which every human being is cherished.
Join me.
Visit my Kickstarter campaign, Changing the World, One Child at a Time, to back this project, and be a part of the change to make the world a place fit for children.
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