Five Questions With: AUTHORS, Mariko Clark and Rachel Eleanor
To address the severe lack of Children's Bible story books, creators Mariko and Rachel have made "The Book of Belonging," and it's incredible.
Welcome to my series, “Five Questions With,” where I introduce you to people from various industries and walks of life by asking them five questions about their work. This series is free for all readers.
The month of April will be, Five Questions With: AUTHORS.
I hope you enjoy getting to know these incredible authors, and please consider supporting them by checking out their books.
Earlier this month I attended the Post Evangelical Collective national gathering in Raleigh, NC. One of my favorite moments came when two women were brought on stage to discuss their new work, The Book of Belonging: Bible Stories for Kind and Contemplative Kids.
And yes, it’s as incredible as it sounds.
My window for having small children to read this book to has realistically been closed for awhile (my youngest is 12). But for a solid decade our family longed to have resources such as The Book of Belonging so that we could share stories (yes, from the Bible!) that highlight and align with the kind of God we see revealed in Jesus.
And… more to the point.. the kind of God we see revealed in DIVERSITY.
You really need to read below to hear about the creation of this book, but if you go to their website you’ll see this graphic:
Which depressingly highlights just how under-represented females are in all of the most popular children’s story Bibles.
It’s not so much that females aren’t represented in the Bible at all, but rather that their stories have simply not been told en masse (let alone to our children). Plus, as you’ll see below, it’s not just females that Mariko (author) and Rachel (illustrator) are ensuring get proper coverage in The Book of Belonging, Rachel has committed to showing the full spectrum of humanity in her artwork: ethnicity; ability; socioeconomic; body-size; etc.
It’s quite stunning.
Okay, without any further ado than I’ve already adone, I present to you, FIVE QUESTIONS With…
Authors Mariko Straton and Rachel Eleanor.
Enjoy.
1. Where did the idea for this book come from, and why did you decide to pursue it?
MARIKO (author): It actually started with my kids! My daughter Aidah - who was six at the time- asked me, “Does God love boys more than girls?” and my jaw dropped.
I thought I had raised her to be a proper feminist! I said, “of course not! What makes you ask that?” She went on to explain that her story bible had only two “girl stories” and the rest were boy stories. I assumed she was exaggerating, but nope!
So, I did what any normal person would do and immediately ordered all of the top story bibles on Amazon and went through, page by page and kept a tally. Now, I was raised fundamentalist, so I’m fully aware that the Christian world can skew toward the masculine, but even I was pretty surprised by what I found:
On average, only 7% of the stories had a female main character,
only 19% featured a female character and
only 23% of the pages even showed a female in the illustrations.
I kept pulling at the thread, trying to get behind what I was discovering:
Why aren’t the female stories and presence being included? ...but also…
Why do the male stories glorify violence and empire?
Why is God gendered?
Why are so many of the angels blonde?
Why isn’t Jesus brown?
Why are so many of these stories centered around morality and obedience?
Why aren’t we talking about the Holy Spirit?
I knew I wasn’t the only parent asking these questions of their kids’ faith resources. And I knew I wasn’t the only parent resolving these issues with a sort of homemade hodge-podge storytelling.
In my own quiet time with my kids, I had been telling them my own renditions of the stories of Deborah, Huldah, Lydia and Phoebe...
I had been supplementing King David’s emotional intelligence and Jacob’s contemplative practices...
I had been incorporating mindfulness and holy imagination…
But I started to wonder: What if I didn’t have to hobble together these practices for them every night? What if I just created the book that I’m… already creating?
So I did.
It’s been a whirlwind ever since, with God basically drop kicking me through doors before I can even approach them. Meeting Rachel, being fully funded on Kickstarter within 10 days, signing with Penguin Random House, expanding our vision - I never could have dreamed up these past two years, but it truly matches the God that I love so dearly and that I hope I’ve introduced kids to in these pages.
A God that never asks me to be smaller or tamer, but more expansive and abundant and inclusive.
There’s this beautiful Jewish Passover song called “Dayenu” – which roughly translates to, “it would have been enough”. It’s a song about thanksgiving and I think about it all the time. It would have been enough to write this book for my kids. It would have been enough to make enough copies for my friends’ kids. It would have been enough just to meet our Kickstarter goal.
But God keeps busting past my expectations and limits and I think that’s just a very fitting journey for a book like this
2. Question for you, Rachel: as the illustrator, what was your north star (in terms of, your guiding value for how you’d create your images)?
A guiding principle for me as an illustrator is to assist the writer in creating moments to show rather than tell.
Particularly with picture books, it's easy for us grownups to get overly verbose and didactic, and there's definitely a risk of leaning too far that way with bible stories. Kids love rhythmic, concise, interactive stories with gobs of pictures to break up all those words because they're wired for imagination and have limited attention spans.
Marri has this gorgeous, poetic prose in her stories, so I wanted the pictures to help do any heavy lifting describing scenes, settings, characters, emotions, etc, that might otherwise weigh down the story's pacing. It's unusual for many writer/illustrator combos for the illustrator to be so involved early on in the writing of the manuscript, but this process worked for the two of us.
I also consider: Who's sharing this book? What does the wiggly toddler climbing across your lap need compared to your 9-year-old? I try to weave as many pictures as possible throughout the words to create periods of visual rest, wonder, and further storytelling. I love sneaking in little stories beneath the stories Marri tells so that later, maybe a 4-year-old picks up the book, points at the pictures, and retells the story to herself.
As far a North Star goes, specifically for this book, I'd say the North Star would be sacred embodiment. With this book, Marri and I were looking to meet the spiritual needs of a large group of people who feel let down or left behind by the Christian faith.
Many of the grownups reading this book to their kids inherited a faith bereft of physicality. A disembodied faith. One with negativity towards anything that is body-based and is steeped in toxic purity culture. For many of us there's still this deep-set feeling that to be human is to be sinful, and to be naked is to be shameful. Anything corporeal is a lesser state than a bodiless, airy spirit. So, I wanted to show all kinds of bodies and portray God as a being with a body (sometimes).
3. Similar question for you, Mariko: As the author, what was your north star? Your guiding value for how you wanted to approach the telling of these stories?
MARIKO (author): I worked in academic publishing for a long time and taught creative writing for a while too - so I had some lofty pedagogical ideas in the beginning.
The main three were:
Naming (who does God say God is? Who does God say you are?)
Wonder (creating space for kids to engage with mystery) and
Contemplation (guided practices of solitude, silence and stillness).
There’s plenty of information on our website about each, but the one that I could call my “north star” was Naming.
I think so often with kids' faith resources, we jump straight to instruction. The good old Western educational stance of rote response. Which is fine - instruction is important. But if every story and every spiritual encounter is ultimately about instruction, kids may come to believe that God loves them because of what they do or what they know as opposed to who they are. And that just leads to behavior modification, right?
It’s not transformative.
But I’m a firm believer that identity informs action. So if we tell kids who God is (God is loving, trustworthy, near) and who God says they are (you belong! You are loved! You are very good) then hopefully, from those identities, they can (as Moses begged his behavior-modifying friends to do!) choose life.
Choose flourishing.
Make choices that match and reflect what God is like and what we were made for.
So before I started each story and before I submitted it to my editor, I asked myself “What does this story teach kids about who God is? And what does it teach them about who God says they are?”
4. Rachel, was there a story that surprised you—either because the final images were so different from your first concept, or, because you’d had such a familiarity with that story that you thought you knew what you’d draw, but then Marri’s words changed everything?
One story that surprised me was "The Great Baby Rescue."
I grew up watching The Ten Commandments over and over again. I adore The Prince of Egypt. The Exodus story has always been one of my favorites, so I had a pretty solid highlight reel in my head for it.
But I was revisiting many of these stories after a several years-long break from scripture. It created a wonderfully fertile space for me to be surprised and delighted old familiar tales.
When beginning this project, I did my best to protect my sense of curiosity, and I held off on making too many plans until I saw Marri's ideas for each story.
Marri floored me with her retelling of the Exodus story. She brilliantly highlighted the role of women in the Exodus narrative, shifting the focus away from Moses as the central hero, to the bravery, fears, concerns, and love of the women involved. I was invited to imagine the courage of the midwives. I found myself thinking deeply about the experiences of Jochebed, Miriam, Zipporah and even Pharaoh's daughter.
It became more than just Moses' story; it became a complex story of courage, love and grief for all the women involved in Moses's life.
5. Marri, how about for you? Was there a story that surprised you? Maybe you went in to it thinking/assuming you’d tell it one way, but then after studying or sitting with it, it went a different way?
Probably the story “Crowded Tables of Kindness”.
I knew I wanted to write a story about the early church. I remembered reading this quote from Celsus (an ancient Greek philosopher who loved to trash on Christianity) about how the way of Jesus was, “for only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid…only slaves, women, and little children.”
I was so compelled by this ancient troll and the idea that the people he dismissed back then are clearly still dismissed today, if my stats are any indication!
But the story of the early church is tricky because it’s scattered across quite a few New Testament books and spans a massive geographic area from Europe, Asia and Africa. How could I tell a concise, cohesive story without minimizing it all? It felt like I needed a distant narrator, a character to put the pieces together for the reader.
So the first draft of the story was actually told from the perspective of a cat, haha. And the cat is all grumpy because these groups of people have started gathering in her previously peaceful house and singing loud hymns, reading letters and arguing about this Jesus person. And she confers with the cats across town who carry news from across the Roman Empire of these crowded tables springing up all over the place. All the cats are grumpy and snobby about the dirty children and low-class people, etc.
I thought it was cute.
My editor did not. Ha!
Come to find out, stories with an animal narrator are somewhat taboo in Christian spaces. And while that didn’t necessarily scare me (we have certainly done a few things in this book that will ruffle more feathers!) I decided to give it another shot, with a human narrator.
Which is how I found Rhoda.
Her story is only a few sentences long, tucked into the book of Acts as part of a larger story about Peter. She is a young girl who works in the home of a female church leader (enslaved or indentured, it’s not clear) and has this almost comical encounter where she hears Peter (who is supposed to be in prison) at the door and is so excited that she runs to tell everyone in the house, without letting him in.
I have this James Cone quote taped to my computer monitor that says
“There can be no Christian theology that is not identified unreservedly with those who are humiliated and abused. In fact, theology ceases to be a theology of the gospel when it fails to arise out of the community of the oppressed.”
This felt like the perfect opportunity to not only have someone narrate what an early church gathering would be like, but also to center the experience of someone marginalized. I wrote Rhoda as this delightful little daydreamer who is at first mystified by this group of strangers gathered in her house and then comes to trust not only their radical and generous way of living…but also her belonging with them.
In an ideal world, this would be every person’s experience within a community of Jesus-followers, right?