UPDATE: Now Available! When the World Went Quiet is available now on Amazon, worldwide! Click here to learn more.
Do you have a favorite story? Storytelling is as old as civilization. It's how we both communicated and connected. It's how we learned and felt a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves.
I love stories. I believe that every person has at least one life-changing story to share. Whether it's something that changed their life or the lives of those around them, "sharing story" (as my friend Victoria says) is one of our greatest gifts.
It's no wonder, then, that I became a storyteller.
On September 28th, my first children's book is coming out. When the World Went Quiet tells the story of the wild animals that took to exploring what were previously human spaces. During the global pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, reports started to come out about wildlife showing up in unexpected places. Goats were munching flowers and grasses in private gardens in Wales, while capybara in Argentina wandered peacefully through residential neighborhoods.
The stories seemed somehow fantastical, and yet they were (mostly) true. With each new tale, my mind began daydreaming, and I found myself smiling more. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of nature reclaiming abandoned human spaces, like buildings and streets. Indeed, nature is the best storyteller of all.
I knew I wanted to capture this moment in time, so I set about crafting a poem to share these adventures and mark them down for posterity. Much like the cave paintings of old, the words I chose represent a moment in time—a moment in our collective history in which the entire planet shared a single experience for the first time in our history.
As I was thinking about it, I reached out to Kelly Ulrich, one of my company's illustrators, and asked her if she felt the same. I knew she would before I ever picked up the phone. Together, we have created something new that captures this experience from a different perspective. Instead of writing a story about humans, we created a story about humanity by focusing on the nature that surrounds it.
I truly can't wait to share this with the world on July 31st. It's a gift that we hope will inspire the next generation to get a little more involved with their environment. To that end, we also decided to donate 10% of the proceeds to conservation. Hopefully, like the cave paintings and storytellers of old, this little book will become a cherished piece of history for the future and help the animals that inspired it.
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