Adam Prudhomme
Editor
When Napanee-based author Catherine Hernandez began working on her soon-to-be-released children’s novel Where Do Your Feelings Live?, she work shopped it among some of the harshest critics: kids.
Their feedback-blunt as it was at times-was just what she needed to help create her story, which aims to help young readers understand the complexity of their emotions. Her story is told through the help of illustrations from Quebec-based artist Myriam Chery.
“This is a really scary time where a lot of things are happening, you have a war and a pandemic and a lot of conflict between people, things changing in the environment in really scary ways,” said Hernandez. “(Kids are) probably watching their parents thinking what’s going on? Kids are not fools, they can sense when things are wrong. This is the kind of book that teaches kids that feelings are real. Just asking them where do your feelings live, where in your body and can we be really compassionate for the feelings that we do have in that moment instead of judging ourselves or trying to make it stop.”
Wanting to make the subject more accessible to ages four to seven, Hernandez related each feeling to an animal.
“In the book you see children alongside their feelings as if they’re a tiger, a rabbit or a deer and imagining the feelings to be these animals that they can care for,” said Hernandez. “Just to give kids an idea of how do you build awareness around those feelings.”
The notion came to her when talking with her partner Nazbah Tom.
“Nazbah is a therapist and I was definitely in consultation with them for the process of how do we explain this to children,” said Hernandez. “They were like ‘absolutely just lean into the idea of it being an animal.’ If your anger could be a tiger for example. Could fear be an ostrich? Those kind of things. Little kids really connect to animals.”
The book also strives to be a resource for parents and caregivers to relate to young children.
The story was inspired by videos Hernandez would post to her Facebook page during the early stages of the lockdown, relating heavy topics to kids during the pandemic. When schools were closed, Hernandez would routinely post videos of herself talking about serious topics in a way that made it easy for kids to relate.
“Even if I could give parents half an hour while I read a book for them to be able to check their emails or just to enjoy a cup of tea in silence, I just knew that it was important for people to have that time if they had small children,” said Hernandez.
The presentation was so well received she was invited to do it during a Black Lives Matter event, hosted by Nadia Hohn. A representative from Harper-Collins was in the audience and later approached Hernandez with the idea of turning the presentation into a children’s book. While working on the story she’d run ideas by the kids she was looking after in her home daycare.
“If they didn’t like it, they’d actually just leave and go off play and you know you didn’t do a very good job,” she said. “I became very in tune with what kids liked and don’t like.”
Where Do Your Feelings Live? marks a notable departure from Hernandez’s previous work Scarborough, which was recently adapted to film.
“With a children’s book you have to be very concise with the words and then also working alongside an illustrator to make sure a story is understood,” Hernandez said of the difference between writing a kids book compared to an adult novel. “How can you make sure that kids can look at the pictures, hear the words or read the words themselves and understand what the story is, over the course of 30 pages? It’s very short with one or two phrases per page, so how can you make that happen?”
Still relatively new to Napanee, Hernandez said she experienced a uniquely Napanee moment when she found out Scarborough had won Best Adapted Screen Play at the Canadian Screen Awards, one of eight awards it would end up winning. She was at home with her partner watching the awards virtually when she found out.
“When we won best picture, if you’re in Toronto you just drive to a bar or something,” she said. “We could just see (the members of the film crew) and scream. But we were in Napanee, in the middle of the dark wilderness in our home. We went outside and we were like ‘oh my gosh, we have no one to tell’. All we could hear were the frogs. We were laughing, nobody is here to party with but it was beautiful because it was a full moon and there were frogs singing. We were like this is hilarious but beautiful that we live here now in the quiet of the country side.”
Where Do Your Feelings Live? will hit bookstores May 17 and can be found at https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443464291/where-do-your-feelings-live/.
Amid her busy schedule of re-modeling her home and writing, Hernandez will be one of the guests at Greater Napanee Pride on June 5, where she will read a selection of Scarborough at Conservation Park.