How Kids Co-Created Another Way to Realize the Democratization of Art
When I quit practicing law to write children’s books, I never planned on writing about protests.
Or suffrage.
Or the fight for inclusion.
I’d done all that before… though, in legal briefs, not illustrated rhymes.
And I genuinely wanted to leave it all behind. In fact, I thought I was leaving all that behind. After nearly two decades in the law, over half of which in the trenches of civil rights work, I wanted, I NEEDED, whimsy, lightness, and laughter—stories that felt like the best kind of childhood afternoons.
But, I suppose, you can take the girl out of the law, but you can’t quite take the law out of the girl.
When I started writing children’s books, I imagined them as joyful escapes—celebrations of the magic of childhood. On some level, it was a reconnecting with my own kids’ childhood because, when they were little, I was busy. Too busy to listen. Too busy to play. Too busy to get down on the ground with them and see the world through their eyes.
My first book, Becoming Bug, started from there. It was about what happens when parents step into their children’s worlds and play alongside them. That kind of play can spark whole new identities, open unexpected doors, and lead to places we never imagined. Instead of that type of play, my own kids got a “not today, I’m working.”
My second book, The Big Garden Gig, carried that same spirit. With a theme of finding joy in the work, the characters rolled up their sleeves to tackle chores they didn’t want to do—only to find themselves in the middle of a silly, unexpected garden party.
By book three, the ground began to shift. In The Should Sorter, Billy wants to turn into Bug and play with his sister Mary (aka Bear), but he’s weighed down by all the “shoulds” in his head. Mary turns him upside down, shakes them loose, and—just like that—the story introduced a cymbal-playing monkey, an idea my son contributed. The “not today, I’m working” that he’d been used to hearing had somehow, quietly, turned into collaboration. “Hey mom… what if this happened.”
The dismissive “not today, I’m working,” turned into a collaborative “hey mom, what if” and, from that moment, the spark of a movement was born. Kids should get to help decide what goes into books.
At that time, though, I was still firmly ensconsed in the fun and lighthearted and lets keep this silly. I created the idea of Participatory Publishing and, with it, a series of three Creativity Challenges per book: Theme Team, Word Weaver, and Sketch-Off.
I wrote The Story Shapers as a bridge between writing solo and creating alongside children. The next two books, Faye’s Foil and Painting Grace, were true co-creations.
When we launched the Theme Team contest for Book Six, the prompt was simply an image of ants cheering (an image we’d pulled from Book Two–The Big Garden Gig). The competing Theme Team Submisisons were a race between a turtle and a snail and women’s suffrage. Much to the chagrin of the lawyer I was trying to leave in the past, women’s suffrage won.
And with that, the seeds to what would become Painting Grace were planted and the former lawyer who once wanted to leave the law and write something light found herself creating an activism book—a rhyming children’s story about women’s suffrage, protest, and inclusion. And, with that, the kids brought me full circle, to a place where I really think I should be.
Painting Grace is about more than why the 19th Amendment matters.
When women’s suffrage prevailed as the winning theme for Book Six, my instinct was to write a historical fiction book for 10-year-olds that explored why the 19th Amendment matters. But then, I recieved the winning submisisons of the Word-Weaver Winner and the Sketch-Off Winner and it opened up the story of what the world could be, should be, not what it was.
So the final book doesn’t just tell the story of the fight for the right to vote—it explored why the 19th Amendment matters, not only for what it accomplished, but also for what it did not accomplish. We talked about how winning the vote didn’t mean the work was over, how movements grow stronger when everyone’s voice can be heard, and freedom for some but not all is not freedom and is not sustainable. And, to be honest, I’d love to co-create a book with kids that explores the complexities of the other side of the issue.
With book six, my worlds collided. Now that its published and out in the world, I couldn’t be more proud of what we created, together.
This world needs fun, escapist children’s books. And, when those themes win, fun, escapist children’s books we shall write–together.
But, for me, Painting Grace opened the door up for the overwhelming need we have, in this country and beyond, for the democratization of art.
My art form (right now, anyway) happens to be rhyming picture books. But the mission is so much bigger. The misison is to put creative tools in children’s hands, to help them see their ideas take shape in the real world, and to prove that what they have to say matters.
Beyond that, the misison is to show kids–through co-creating books with them–that they have the power to use art to change the world around us. To teach kids to say what they think needs said and, more importantly, to teach them they don’t need to say what other think should be said. And, if we keep doing that, even a book that is fun and silly and wimsical will take its place as an activism book because activism can be just as much in the method as it is in the message.
More Than Just an Activism Book
We don’t need more bestsellers. We need more pathways for people—especially children—to see their voices in print, to know their perspective counts. That’s what the democratization of art looks like in action: not gatekeeping creativity and distilling the message so it is the most pallatable to the masses, but inviting many, different voices into the room, and creating ways for each of them to be heard.
Any book that avoids the traditional gatekeeping process is an activism book–and the more we support this and other small, independent artists, the more we support the democratizaiton of art, which has far-reacing impacts on how each of us see ourselves in the world.
I love all of my books, but the two co-created ones have opened doors I didn’t even know existed. They’ve shown me the path forward. And, while each additional co-created book will likely not be an activism book, per se, the creation of books in this manner is its own form of activism.
So to my Painting Grace Story Shapers: thank you. A million times, thank you. This project is still small, still growing. But you’ve laid the groundwork for something bigger. And one day, when we look back, you’ll get to say: I was one of the first. Your contribution to this activism book was so much more than simply winning a contest.
