A Conversation with Jack Wong — THE NEEDLE AND THE KNIFE

Jack Wong (黃雋喬) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. In 2010, he left behind a life as a bridge engineer to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in Kjipuktuk / Halifax, Nova Scotia; he has called the east coast of Canada home ever since.

A self-declared actual Jack-of-all-trades, he has also tried his hand at bookkeeping, teaching art, managing a psychology research lab, and running his own bicycle repair shop, just to name a few—a real education for creating children’s books, if you ask him!

Working as a children’s author/illustrator, Jack seeks to share his winding journey with young readers so that they may embrace the unique amalgams of experiences that make up their own lives.

Jack’s debut picture book, When You Can Swim (Scholastic), received the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in Picture Books, the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature – Illustrated Books, and was a finalist for the Ezra Jack Keats Award. His second picture book, The Words We Share (Annick Press), is currently a nominee for the Ontario Library Association’s Blue Spruce Award. His other forthcoming titles include All That Grows (Groundwood, 2024), and an untitled picture book biography on acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma (with author James Howe, Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2025).

I’m so excited to share my conversation with Jack, who I believe is one of the strongest, most interesting picture book makers working in Canada today. Both his writing and his illustrations reflect a deep commitment to craft and artistry and an immense respect for his readers. Given that he is currently busy launching his beautiful, much anticipated new book, All That Grows, I was so honored that he made the time to speak with me, and I’ve been thinking about our conversation and the candid, thought-provoking insights he shared ever since.

While my recent interviews and features have mostly been conducted via email, this one takes me back to my earlier practice of speaking with creators over Zoom. As a result, it’s a bit of a longer, looser read, but I so hope you won’t let that stop you from diving in. And if you don’t yet know Jack’s warm and wonderful work, I hope you’ll seek it out. With the daffodils and chives just beginning to poke their heads out of the dirt, this would be a perfect time to share All That Grows with the budding gardeners and naturalists in your life. Signed copies are available from Jack’s beloved local kid’s bookstore Woozles. Regular copies are available everywhere, but of course Jack and would encourage you to find it at your local independent bookstore if you can!

Ok, let’s jump in!

KJL: I love your idea of structuring this as a conversation about our plant books, but is it ok if we start with a few rapid-fire questions as a warm up?

JW: Okay.

KJL: What picture book was most important to you as a kid? What’s your favourite picture book currently?

JW: (Laughing) That’s not a rapid fire question!

KJL: It totally is.

JW: I didn’t have one. I’ve been thinking more about this recently. After a while of being, like, did I just not have good reading habits as a kid? I realized that because I immigrated with my family when I was six, and there was this whole time of—I don’t want to call it chaos— but just a lot of stuff going on, I think I missed picture books. I went from whatever I was reading in Hong Kong, which I don’t remember at all, to trying to read as many early readers and chapter books as I could. So, I have these gaping holes in my picture book knowledge.

My favourite picture book now is called Stories of the Night. It’s by a French Belgian author-illustrator named Kitty Crowther.

KJL: I don’t know that one.

Obviously I immediately ordered *Stories of the Night*. When someone like Jack gives you a book recommendation, you don’t sleep on it!

JW: It’s three fairy tale-like stories that are written in a style that’s all her own. Whenever I feel like I’m too caught up thinking about what everyone else is doing, I just look at that book and think about how she very clearly did something completely her own.

KJL: I love that answer. That’s a great rapid-fire answer! Next question: What’s your favourite hour of the day to write?

JW: Around 8 o’clock.

KJL: At night, or in the morning?

JW: In the morning.

KJL: Do you tend to work for the full day, or you do an hour or two and then a take a break and do something else?

JW: So, now that I work full-time as an author-illustrator, it’s fairly regimented. I have to do the writing and illustrating before everything else under the big umbrella of ‘administration,’ which is just managing your own career and business. I feel like the administrative monster is always trying to grab your attention— that reply you should send to an email because you don’t want to keep the person waiting. Whereas your book is always a deadline five months from now, so it always gets pushed down the line. So, I have a very regimented drawing block in the morning, then an administrative block in the middle of the day, and then another writing and drawing block in the afternoon.

KJL: This next one is a two part question. Part one: coffee or tea?

JW: Coffee.

KJL: Correct! Part two: what snacks do prefer while you’re writing?

JW: When I’m working, I go into this state where I often forget to eat and come out of it extremely hungry. So, I don’t really snack, but when it comes time for breakfast and lunch, I’m famished. Recently, I’ve gotten really into grits. I visited New Orleans for the first time last year and had shrimp and grits, and it was the best, so now I’m trying to replicate it for breakfast.

KJL: Nice. Ok, next question: If you could have an imaginary dinner party with any three people from the book or art world, who would they be?

JW: Are we talking just the living?

KJL: Any, living or dead.

JW: Okay, I shouldn’t have asked that, because I’d have been fine with just the living, then I would have had a small pool to choose from. Hmmm. . . . Kitty Crowther, the author of the book I mentioned earlier. And then Annemarie MacDonald and Toni Morrison.

KJL: Very nice. Okay, last rapid fire question: Is there a type of book or medium that you haven’t made yet that you’d love to tackle?

JW: I want to do a graphic novel, but I don’t want to draw a whole graphic novel, so I was starting to toy with idea of doing a hybrid that’s half graphic novel and half chapter book. Like, with the prose on one side of the page and graphic panels on the other.

KJL: That’s such a cool idea. The illustrations in your second book The Words We Share make sure beautiful use of a graphic style, with that inked linework. I would be so excited to see a book where you moved further into that world.

Jack’s book *The Words We Share* is currently a finalist for the Blue Spruce Award, part of the Ontario Forest of Reading program.

JW: I also want to do a community project at my local community center.

KJL: Amazing! Do you have a specific project in mind?

JW: Yeah. It’s kind of a secret invention that I want them to be involved in, so I can’t say too much.

KJL: That’s ok. I like that it’s a secret. Ok, let’s move on to talking about your new book, All that Grows, which launches so soon, and is unbelievably beautiful. As I mentioned your last book, The Words We Share utilized more of a comic style of illustration, whereas this book returns to something closer to your first book, When You Can Swim. Not that the art is the same— this book is pastel, while When You Can Swim was paint, I think?

Jack’s first book, *When You Can Swim*, one the 2023 Governor General’s award, the 2023 Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and is a finalist for the 2024 Ezra Jack Keats Award. Like, no big deal.

JW: When You Can Swim had pastel and some watercolor.

KJL: How do you choose what medium and illustration style you’re going to use for each of your projects?

JW: I have this rule for myself— rules you make for yourself are the worst, because they’re arbitrary, but once you set them, you forget they’re arbitrary. I really like each book to not be limited by what I’ve done before, partly out of a kind of artistic pursuit of finding the right medium for the right story, and then partly, again, because it’s a rule I’ve set for myself, which I really should ditch one of these days if it doesn’t work out. So, that explains in part why the three books I’ve put out so far are in three different styles.

When You Can Swim is a very gentle text about the splendor of nature, so I wanted a style that captured that. The Words We Share is so much more about the characters going about their day, and that line work and kind of comic style matches the speed that they’re going at. The backgrounds are a little less the star of the images.

The style of All That Grows, as you said, is kind of like When You Can Swim, but also a little different. It’s a bit looser. That was for two reasons. One was that the looseness goes with this sort of Springtime haziness, the light you get in late winter that’s still very low. Things aren’t very sharp and defined yet. Secondly, thematically speaking, the character is dealing with a lot of things he’s unsure about, so the looseness kind of fits that as well. Whereas, in When You Can Swim, there’s a lot of certainty, at least for the speaker of the story—they’re telling the child, these are some of the things you’ll find, and they’re beautiful, and they’re waiting for you.

KJL: That actually touches on something else I was going to ask about. I love that in this new book, the character goes on a journey, not from uncertainty to certainty, but from uneasy with uncertainty to a comfort with it. In the middle of the story, there’s this beautiful spread where they’re laying in bed fretting about how their sister knows all of these things about plants that they don’t know, wondering how a person is supposed to learn it all. But by the end of the story, we see the character ask the older sister a question about the plants, and the older sister says they could look it up, but they decide they’re fine to just wait and see what happens.

JW: Yeah.

KJL: Thinking about what you said about the adult narrator in When You Can Swim having this tone of certainty, it makes me think about how there’s this dynamic in that book of a parent or other caring adult supporting a child while the child tries a new thing, something that pushes their boundaries maybe. Like, the child is making a leap, but it is bumpered by this reassuring adult voice that gives a sense of safety.

All That Grows is different in a way that reflects the difference between the parent/child relationship and the sibling relationship. The character is desperate to know everything the big sister knows about plants, but then, in the end, they develop a different relationship to the natural world, one that’s all their own. They are more interested in observing in wonder while the lives of plants unfold around them.

JW: Yeah, yeah.

KJL: It’s really lovely. Did you start out wanting the story to land there, or was that something you ended up with as the result of process?

JW: It came from real experience. In this case, the story and how I wanted to tell it kind of developed hand in hand. I’m really gratified and thankful that you’re immediately talking about these themes, because of of the ways in which a book like mine—and yours as well—could be marketed is in terms of its STEM appeal, how kids can learn about plants and all the better if there’s a bunch of back matter. Whereas for me, it was always about the emotions around being a beginner.

In this case, my real life inspiration also became the subject for the book. My wife is the gardener in our family, but she’s also fairly new to it, so I watched her learn to deal with the complexity of it. You think you need to learn about one thing, like the growth cycle of a tomato, but then you have to worry about companion plants, and plants that shouldn’t be planted together, and it just balloons into 10 other things you never realized you didn’t know. So, I saw her having that experience and then I also had that experience more directly myself when we would walk the neighborhood and she was able to tell me things about the plants we saw. So, it’s a combination of my perspective as a learner, and watching her as a learner. In any case, it’s a story that uses gardening and natural flora as it’s entry point, but it’s really about an emotional learning topic. Which is why I thought we’d get a great conversation, because I saw all those elements in Beatrice and Barb, too. I was curious, for example, if you learned something about Venus flytraps and then as you were developing a story about it, the emotional learning subject matter came about. Or did it happen the other way around? Did you have this emotional subject matter you wanted to drive home—which I believe can be crudely summarized as the difference between The Golden Rule and The Platinum Rule, where Golden Rule is treating people as you’d want to be treated and The Platinum Rule would be treating people they’d like to be treated—and you were just looking for a vehicle for it?

KJL: That’s such a great question. I think the answer is neither. It sort of started as a visual joke that popped into my head. My kids have always loved to name and anthropomorphize things. Like, I remember once being asked to make clothes for a Pyrex measuring cup named Susan. When my oldest daughter was a toddler, I thought it would be a fun project for us to cultivate a sour dough starter together. We talked a lot about how it was alive. She named it Toot, and started to talk to it like a pet. This image popped into my head of a kid taking their pet sourdough starter for a walk. I thought it might be a funny premise for a book. I quickly realized, though, that a blob of beige dough wouldn’t be that dynamic in terms of illustrations. So I started thinking about house plants as an alternative. Fly traps seemed like an obvious choice, because they seem more animal-like than another plants, so I started researching them and was blown away by how fascinating they are. They’re only native to one habitat in the Carolinas. It’s area where there are a lot of forest fires, so the soil is depleted and ashy and the water is very acidic, so, they’ve developed this extraordinary evolutionary mechanism that allows them to survive in this very difficult landscape. The flip side of that is that is they struggle under the conditions where normal plants would thrive. So, the emotional core became that idea that caring for someone requires you to really know and understand them for who they truly are, not whom you assume them to be.

Which is a long winded way of saying that I didn’t come to the story as a flytrap expert, or with a clear message I was trying to convey; those things both evolved organically through the writing, which is what I prefer. Honestly, I’m still not an expert. I would call myself, a flytrap enthusiast. I’ve never really figured out how to keep them alive. It’s a bit of an open secret that I’ve killed so many Barbs in the last four years.

KJL: One thing I’ve been thinking about is this fundamental way in which your character’s journey is different from mine’s. My protagonist, Beatrice, is on a journey to become a caregiver for her plant in the same way one would care for a domestic animal or another person, which is to say having to take responsibility for that being, being precise and responsive in meeting their needs. On the other hand, you story deals with wild fauna, and with gardening, which is sort of this liminal space where wild and domestic landscapes push up against each other. Because of this, it is more a story about that ethic of uncertainty and experimentation and curiosity, which is related in that it’s still about care and paying close attention, but it’s also a different thing. With a house plant, there are rules that must be followed or your plant will die, and it will essentially be your fault. Your character, on the other hand, gets to wait and see what nature does on it’s own.

JW: That’s interesting. The idea of a garden being like a borderland between those two worlds, the wild and the domesticated. At the end of the story, my character is making a choice to move a little more into the wild, both figuratively and literally.

But another thing that was really interesting as you were talking about the Venus flytrap is that you were a beginner. And as you were learning about them, the story was growing in your head at the same time. And that was really quite similar to my experience. For example, learning that our neighbors maples are actually an invasive species. That made it into the book. The story comes from a place of non-expertise. A lot of writers, I can only assume, would feel like they can’t write about a thing unless they’re an expert about the topic, but there’s a lot of activity that happens in the act of learning. That’s where the factual stuff in both of our stories feeds the emotional content. I don’t know if that rings true to you. Does it?

KJL: It definitely does. When I was reading your story, I was also thinking about my own trajectory with plants, and how, when I first wrote my story, I was in a very place in my life. I had just bought my first home and had my first baby. I was thinking a lot about the value of domestic tasks, and of care work in particular, how it involves really, profoundly understanding who the being in front of you is, what they need. Really watching and listening. In the years since, I have had another child, who is about to turn nine. We got a dog along the way, and he is a very anxious, neurotic soul who requires a lot of patience. I have also begun caring in a significant way for my parents as they age. So, my life is full of care work, and I feel like, most days, I do it pretty well. But I’ve also learned that there’s a limit to how many living things I can take responsibility for on that level. I no longer have the bandwidth to have that kind of relationship with plants.

JW: Hmm. Yeah.

KJL: When we started out in this house, I built these big raised veggie beds, and I was learning about companion planting, and I was going out every morning to water and weed. And it all seemed so easy. I didn’t understand that part of the reason I was having so much success was that the soil was fresh, and the truly annoying pests like currant worm and squash beetle hadn’t had a chance to establish themselves yet. I was a little smug about it all. And then the years go by, and the soil deplete, and the pests start to overwinter in the soil and suddenly your kids are in 78 extracurricular activities, and your aging parents have so more needs, and suddenly I felt like the whole things was so stressful. I felt so bad about having written this book about the beauty of caring for plants when I had become such a neglectful gardener.

But, I live in a suburban neighborhood that has lots of green spaces. We’re right on the Grand River and I walk my anxious dog three times a day.

JW: Mmm.

KJL: What I’ve become interested in is watching how these wild plants change day to day, how these common place weeds that we never see grow to their full scale in our gardens because we pull them out can take over an empty lot and grow into these towering, majestic things. I’ve become more and more like your character.

JW: Yeah, yeah.

KJL: I find so much peace, now, being part of an experience of plants that is bigger than me, that goes on with or without me. I can just be a witness.

JW: That’s how I like to relate to plants.

KJL: Did you grow up with plants? Were you parents gardeners?

JW: My parents were gardeners in a very specific, cordoned off, partitioned kind of way. There was a little garden in the back, but as a kid, I don’t think I even knew about it. I knew the back of the garden was where they would spend an hour every once in a while. And I knew that my mom liked flowers, and she would plant them in the front of the house. But, yeah, they took it on as more of a chore. I don’t want to say they didn’t approach it with joy, because they might have, but they never had enough of a surplus of joy to share with us, at least.

KJL: Shifting gears, I wanted to talk a little bit about how your frame your images, how you move your camera in this story. There’s a wonderful shot where the character is in bed looking at the window. They occupy one side of the frame, and they’re sort of in shadow. The other side of the frame is taken up by these gorgeous shafts of moonlight. Something about the way it’s framed seems to give it such emotional power. It’s a moment where, it seemed to me, the character was feeling small in a big world. Towards the end, you have this gorgeous arial view of the garden. Because of the perspective, the sisters look almost the same size. The protagonist is walking very confidently, and we see that she has come into her own in the garden space. Can you talk a little bit about your process for how you come up with, for lack of a better term, your shot list?

JW: I’m going to use that. I’m going to refer to it as a shot list from now on. I do use the language of cameras and shots quite a lot. With all three of my books, I’ve approached it first and foremost, from the fact that it really brings me a lot of pleasure to find the right view. Let’s say I’m drawing a scene with a tree. I can either draw it from the ground looking up at the big tree, or I can drop within the tree and look down at a tiny character on the ground. Both of those images actually do speak of a big tree. And I would draw both, or multiple variations of both, and just one of them will feel more right than he rest. That brings me a lot of satisfaction.

There will be key scenes that I’m really called to do in a certain way, and then with the rest of the scenes, I won’t have a strong a feeling that, intrinsically, it should be done this way or that way. I just ended up varying it so I end up checking off boxes. I want to make sure I mix it up so there aren’t two scenes in a row that are too similar. So, once those key scenes are in place, the rest kind are kind of decided by process of elimination.

KJL: I see.

JW: I do want to get a way from that a little bit. Not to worry so much if, for example, two spreads in a row are repeating a certain way of framing if it just really works for both spreads. I don’t want to get so caught up about making sure that it is so consistently varied. The way you’re nodding makes me thing you get what I mean, about reaching a point where you’re just checking off boxes.

KJL: I think writing the text for a picture book can start to feel like that for sure. You’re thinking about which spreads you’ve created lend them selves to single spreads, to doubles, to spot illustrations. You ask yourself if you’ve distributed those in a satisfying way. Or, maybe you have places where there are little cliff hangers that propels the reader to turn the page, and you want to make sure you’ve spread those out—that you’re not over playing that trick. Even though I don’t create the images, and I try really hard not to overload my manuscripts with illustration notes, I’m constantly thinking about what kind of shots I’m implying, or inviting the illustrator to create. Which seems, now that I’m saying it out loud, a little sneaky. I might be better off to think less about that. I don’t know.

I so wish I had any illustration talent at all. I sometimes get eaten up with jealousy about the moves that author/illustrators are able to make. I consciously seek out interviews by creators who are true masters of writing text-only manuscripts—people like Mac Barnett—who make such an art out of leaving space for the illustrator and also for the reader. Consciously reflecting on the special beauty of that collaborative relationship between author and illustrator, the magical leap of faith that is required of non-artists, is my way of dealing with the fact that I am not in control of the full artistic process.

JW: The next book I’m working on is a picture book biography of the Yoyo Ma, written by author James Howe. It’s the first book that I’m illustrating that I didn’t write.

KJL: And how are you finding that?

JW: A lot of author-illustrators will talk about, well, what you were saying about this thing where they have full authorial direction of the thing, and it becomes this kind of masterpiece of word and text together. For me, even though I think I achieved what I set out to do with all three of my previous books, I don’t think they relied very heavily on that sort of directorial mode. It wasn’t until I started illustrating this next book, written by somebody else, that I started to understand certain things, like the distance between what the words on the page say and what the images show. It seems to be the case that a lot of author-illustrators figure that out while they’re working on their own projects. They’ll want to write half of the scene and then illustrate the other half, and that’s how they’ve arrived at this kind of synergy. For me, for my first couple of books, I would say I probably did illustrate just what the words said a little more than I could have, and it wasn’t until I’m illustrating a book for someone else that I finally have a productive tension between words and images. It’s a beautiful text. I’m in a kind of adversarial relationship with this text, where so much of what I can draw isn’t in the the text, and struggling with that is what has really taught me how to enter that mode of illustrations telling their own story.

KJL: It’s like you’ve unlocked a new level of artistry.

JW: Yeah. For some reason I wasn’t able to crack that nut while I was just working on my own books.

KJL: I love that term you just used—productive tension. I feel like so much of picture book writing is just calibrating the tension between opposing elements and impulses. Even, for example, that balancing act between a sort of poetic compression, where every word must earn its place, and the desire to maintain a sense of looseness, a feeling of spaciousness and ease. Whenever I’m struggling to crack a text, it’s usually because I’m trying to get that balance right. You’re always pulled in two different directions. Which is what makes it such a maddening form to master, but also why, when it works, it’s magically able to do so much more than 400 or 600 words should be able to do.

JW: Yes.

Before we end, can I ask you one more question?

KJL: Of course.

JW: So, in the case of All That Grows, the place of not being an expert was a really nice space from which to generate a story, but it’s kind of scary, because one of these days, this book is going to be in front of a gardener. I started to think, what if this is all stupid and inaccurate, and whatever. So, it took me a while to step out and be able to find the quote-unquote community that this book belongs to, or to identify with that community. Because my wife is a gardener, she had a connection with the local urban community farm. The final scene is that overhead shot of the garden you mentioned earlier. Each bed has recognizably different things growing in it. I drew up a garden plan, and I ran it by the director of the community garden. She gave me suggestions based on what time of year this was supposed to be depicting. I told her this scene is happening in July, and asked her all sorts of questions about how tall things would be, whether there would be fruit yet, and so on. She was so generous and answered all those questions.

I was really curious because I saw in your Instagram post about how you had the involvement of, I believe, Gold Leaf Botanicals. I wondered whether that was a community that you were already connected to, or an expert who was already invested in the subject matter of your book? Did you already know them, and if not, what was the process for reaching out?

KJL: I did a few different launch events at different independent book stores and libraries, but my main launch was at my local branch. I knew I wanted to do something really special for that one, something involving a community partner. I had this idea that a local plant shop might come and do a pop-up shop, so that any families that wanted could purchase a small plant pet of their own to take home. Even though I have bought a lot of plants at local greenhouses over the years, I had never been into Gold Leaf Botanicals. I really loved their Instagram account, though, because they had such a focus on plant education, and seemed so community minded.

So, I went into the shop with my youngest kid, intending to ask them if they wanted to partner with me, but I chickened out and just bought a plant. I did that a few times, and then finally got up the courage to ask. That was a really important aspect of launching my first book—learning to be braver and more resilient, to risk people saying ‘no.’ I don’t tend to be great at that stuff, but if you publishing a book, particularly with an indie publisher, you have to be willing to shout about your work.

Jack: For sure.

KJL: So, I finally did pitch them the idea of doing a pop-up shop, and they said “yes,” which was such a relief. But then I didn’t really hear from them for a while. I started worrying that maybe they weren’t going to come through. Then, on the big day, Brian showed up with 60 fly traps, which he gave out for free to every single kid. It was magic. I didn’t know before I put this book out what a draw carnivorous plants would be for kids. Seeing their joy and awe that they got to take a real, live flytrap home was my favorite launch memory.

Now, as the release of my next book creeps slowly closer (so slowly!), I have started to figure out what the flytrap factor is going to be for this one. What is the thing I’m going to hang the presentation or the class visit on? Do you think about that?

JW: I’ve been lucky enough that for each book, I landed somewhere that I’m comfortable with. I won’t say they’re amazing presentations, but I have battles, like, being comfortable enough to stand up there and do your spiel and not feel like, ‘this is stupid.’ I’ve only been doing this for a little bit, but I always feel that the presentation is this opportunity to do the thing you’re not supposed to do when you write the books, which is to tell people what it’s supposed to be about! You’re supposed to stay mum on that, and I’ve always thought presentations were this kind of amazing loophole where you have this captive audience with kids and you get to tell them how to interpret your book.

So, with that in mind, for When You Can Swim, I talked a lot about how I’m actually not a very strong swimmer, and how I was able to write the book anyways. So, again, I really like driving home the point that you don’t really have to be an expert to share something as long as you share authentically. Because, as we’ve talked about, that book ended up having this adult narrator who provides a tone of assurance, but it’s also also so tentative, and it’s able to capture this tentativeness. I hope the trepidation of being at the edge of the water comes through, because that’s how I felt about it myself. I tell my audience that the book would be a very different book if it was made by someone who likes to jump into the water any chance they get with no inhibitions. And that other book would be valid for that person; what’s important is to stay true to that and not pretend.

So, in that presentation, I tell them a little bit about that before I start reading and I asked them to guess which of the scenes was extra scary for me. I told them one them was so scary, I almost didn’t want to do it it, and it’s the scene where they’re jumping off the bridge. As I’m reading, I hear all these gasps of kids thinking they’re too excited to keep it in that they think this is the one because I said I’m gonna ask them afterwards.

For All That Grows, again, I get to tell people what the book is about, so for the presentation, I really don’t focus on plants. I focus on being a beginner. I have them write down one thing they really want to learn, but is kind of overwhelming. Before I do this, we talk about the word overwhelming, what it means, what those big feelings are like. So, they write that down, and then we do a bunch of exercises about the things they are experts about. Then it comes around full circle, being able to say “look at how you’re experts of all these things, whether it’s math, or Roblox, or Minecraft, or whatever it is. Then they kind of draw the line line between this new thing and the thing they’ve already experienced, and all the feelings that once came with being a beginning.

I found it kind of interesting when I landed on this approach. I really didn’t want to do a presentation about plants-- about how to draw a dandelion or design a garden. That didn’t seem true to me.