We Are Creating a Children’s Book for Family Travelers
From the family travelers behind Slow Camino comes My South American Classroom. The picture book narrates the highs and lows of our family gap year from the perspective of our third grader. We’re launching a Kickstarter campaign to support some of the costs of self-publishing, before release in late 2025!
Children’s books lay in haphazard piles everywhere in our house. We haul them home by the dozen from the library in a big plastic wagon. Whether we are planning a big trip, anticipating a life change, or want to broach a complex topic with our boys, a children’s book serves as the perfect conversation starter. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot out there for a family planning a gap year abroad.
Our family of five spent an entire year homeschooling—or world-schooling, as some like to call it—while traveling South America. It was a beautiful and awe-inspiring experience. And, as one would expect, we also suffered the occasional low point.
Liuan is a professional writer and author, and I’m an amateur artist. Combining our talents, we decided to create the bedtime read we wish we had before we left home. We hope to release it fall of 2025.
The Synopsis
Is it better to spend third grade on another continent, making friends in different languages and exploring new places, or am I just missing out on life back home?
Eight-year-old Oliver asks himself this throughout a year of traveling with his parents and two little brothers. Will his friends have fun without him? Will he get behind on schoolwork? Are all these endless bus rides worth it? As Oliver makes friends who don’t speak the same language, overcomes travel mishaps, and takes on new challenges, he grows in his confidence to navigate different landscapes and cultures.
We decided the book should culminate and resolve at the lowest point of our trip: the time we failed to cross the Argentine-Bolivian border. To make matters worse, Oliver, our oldest son and the book’s protagonist, suffered severe altitude sickness. (Every family member capable of writing wrote about it. Here are Oliver’s, Liuan’s and my takes).
As parents, we typically try to shoot straight with our kids. As such, we didn’t shy away from centering the narrative around our travel drama, while also including the more captivating experiences like hot springs, waterfalls and volcanoes.
Overall, it’s a book about overcoming fear and anxiety, not through some trick or life hack, but simply by trying, enduring, and coming out on the other side eager to see what comes next.
The Creative Process
Shortly after our return from our year abroad, Liuan hatched the idea for this project. We started by separately writing a story, attempting in relatively few words to provide an engaging and accurate account of what it’s like to do what we did.
Our boys listened to our stories and gave feedback. Liuan’s scored a ten and mine a 9.5, so we used hers as the base and added the best parts from mine. Then we continued share our work-in-progress and improve it based on the comments we received from our kids and family friends.
By far the most time-consuming part of the process was, and still is, the illustration. I do all my artwork in acrylic on canvas paper. I use photos from our trip, sometimes mixing a background from one with the boys in action from another. There are things I would do differently if I could start over, but I’m happy with results. Though it’s taken me 18 months and counting, I wouldn’t dream of taking any shortcuts. Hopefully all the loving effort is made manifest in the final product.
We plan to self-publish with the help of an independent publisher (Midwinter Press) who will finalize our work and guide us through the process of getting it out to the world.
How You Can Support Our Work
We chose to self-publish to keep full creative control of the project. While we eagerly welcome critical feedback, it is our own story and we insist on staying true to it.
So we approached our book the same as we approach travel: with a strong dose of DIY. But it would be a shame if, after all that effort, we put out a mediocre product. So as a compromise, we will contract with Midwinter Press to put a professional touch on our labor of love and guide us through the steps of self-publishing.
Relative to some of the other publishing options we had, the price tag is quite reasonable. That’s because we will have done all of the design and layout work ourselves and will print on demand. But it’s still an upfront cost. So if you believe in our project and have the means, an advance order or a pledge, no matter how big or small, will mean the world to us.
We will launch a Kickstarter campaign in the coming weeks and provide the link. For now, if you wish to be informed of the launch you can contact us and we’ll send you the link. Or you can sign up for our Substack for updates.
