Navigating complex emotions with magic, pictures, colors and community
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Vani Subramaniam I found picture books at a time where language tired me, where I was saturated with words. It was also a time where I worried that I’d lost my love and the necessary discipline for a reading practice. If you’d asked me a year back what my favorite genre of book is, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Today it’s with resounding clarity and joy that I can tell you it’s children’s picture books.
Largely because, it represents a core value for me: take young people seriously. That navigating complex ideas, emotions is best done with whimsy, magic, pictures, colors, creatures and community. That adults have as much to gain from picture books as their younger kin.
Finding joy with children’s books
If memory serves right, I found CBA by joyful accident and have stayed here since, because they have an extremely unique quality of being fiercely inclusive, transparent, democratic and welcoming. I continue to be here because it is life giving for me to be in spaces that exude and model care and most importantly, are a diverse group of folks from different walks of life and given community is our only way forward in a turbulent world, this group is a significant anchor in that.
There is magic everywhere if you know where to look. The world is filled with it. It is, at its purest, simply life. -Heather Hamilton-Senter
With my dose of children’s books