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Roger Sutton: So, how does a person find awe in a world like this?

Chana Stiefel: That’s a great question. I think awe is needed more than ever, and I think that's why Susan and I were so drawn to doing this book. It started three years ago. I was listening to the 10% Happier podcast with Dan Harris, and his guest was Dr. Dacher Keltner, who is a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley. My whole life I've loved nature, like Susan. My parents instilled in us a love of nature, big and small. We grew up in Miami near the Everglades and we would go on swamp tromps and look for all kinds of creatures and feel the blades of sawgrass. We would go to the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Smoky Mountains. My parents taught us to appreciate a good sunset and just watching waves at the beach. But I never could put my finger on why I love those experiences so much until I listened to that podcast. The topic was awe, and the new research on awe, and basically Dr. Keltner was saying how healthy it is for us to experience awe every day because it makes us less anxious, more grounded, more connected to other people. That's why I feel like we need awe right now. Because if we could just get outside a little bit or connect with friends, connect with people we care about, that's part of reminding us who we are and why we're here.

RS: Susan, were you involved from the start?

Susan Gal: Pretty much. Chana approached me and said, “I've written something and I would really like you to consider it. I kind of had you in mind.” When I read it, I instantly fell in love. For me the best books to illustrate are the ones that ignite my brain as I'm reading the manuscript, and all these visuals just started coming to me. Chana has such a beautiful way with words. She doesn't preach to the reader. Instead, she taps into all those feelings that we feel and distills them and then gives us what those feelings mean and how to connect with one another and the importance of generating awe in our life and taking the time to connect with it. Usually, we illustrators are not supposed to talk to the author when we do a book, but Chana and I had become fast friends after we did our picture book The Tower of Life together, and we thought, Heck, why not? We're just going to go for it. We’re like soul sisters. I really got what she was trying to say, and I wanted to do right by the book’s message.

RS: It seems to me that each of you had a very tough task. Chana, you had this very abstract subject, right? It's not a story, it's a concept. And then, Susan, you had the challenge of turning that concept into visuals. We understand the importance of the emotion, we understand its importance to you—why did you think this needed to be a book for children?

CS: I think kids are natural repositories of awe because everything's new to them and fresh. But it's important for kids to be able to put words to their emotions. That was what was such a revelation for me when I first heard that podcast and when I read Dr. Keltner’s book, that there's a word for that emotion—awe—and it was so important to give that word over to kids so that they can identify what they are experiencing and try to find it every single day. So that was my motivation. This was a joyful journey even though it was challenging, as you said. It was pure joy to work on this. I've never written a poem like this before. I've tried to write lyrically before, but not an actual poem, but this is how it came to me. When I started organizing it, it went from small to large, like “supersized”—and we have a double gatefold we could talk about—and also from silent to loud. The book is saying that you can find awe in many places, many different iterations, and everyone finds it in different spaces, which I think is very cool to look at. The double gatefold is like a dream. I don’t know how Susan figured out how to do that. Maybe, Susan, you can explain. But it is awe itself.

SG: I give the art director technical props for that. Originally I thought, Okay let's do a single gatefold, and then I thought, You know what, why not go for broke and go bigger? This is about awe, let's really have the reader feel that magic. So we proposed a double gatefold, and they went for it. In terms of the visuals in general, the way I see it is Chana did all the hard work. She handed me this beautiful bouquet of flowers and I put them in water and arranged them. But it was a challenge to figure out how to touch on everything. Because how many kids are going to go into the space shuttle? How many kids live in the city? How many kids get to stand at the base of a redwood tree? And so we put a lot of thought and effort into finding awe in everything, all those feelings you can experience no matter where you are in life, what part of the country you live in, or what your socioeconomic level is, because it's a human feeling and we all feel it in certain ways. And I loved how Chana started out with nature then pulled it together with people, and then we pulled it back to being part of this planet. And the people, I thought, were really important. That's what really hit me instead of just the awe found in nature. Because it’s those little miracles. You see a race and somebody falls and another runner helps them up and helps them cross the finish line and everybody gasps and it moves you, it makes you cry. That's awe. That's the awe of the human connection, helping other people, reaching out. So with the gatefold we just wanted to have little surprises to keep the reader on edge and say, “Yeah, you're interacting with awe, you’re feeling it, you're touching it. It's tangible and you can go take that and find it in your life.”

AWE! in progress in Susan's studio.

RS: Illustrators I've interviewed before have talked about getting a gatefold for a book. They think, Oh, let's have a gatefold, and the production department and the editor and the budget respond, “Wait a minute.” But when you went to the editor with your dummy for this book, the gatefold was there?

SG: Yeah, I put it in there, and we said, “Let's just try it,” and thankfully Scholastic said yes. I think when you see it, it just feels right. Not everything worked. Chana had this beautiful line about showering in the mist of a waterfall and how that changes you, and we tried so hard to get that in the book because it's a beautiful image. Being next to a ginormous waterfall and having the mist envelop you. But it just didn't fit. We had to get the pacing and everything right, so that was the biggest challenge. There's so much awe out there—how do we distill it and make it flow and really touch the nature, the people, the planet aspect of it all?

RS: You're making me remember being on Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls. The feeling is certainly one of awe when the waterfalls are all around you. We can see awe in your pictures, but how do you convey that feeling in words? Because we all just say “wow” or “awesome” but it's very hard to articulate, more than any other emotion that I can think of. I think that’s where Chana’s challenge comes in.

CS: I learned in researching awe that we can use all our senses to experience it. Sometimes there are verbal expressions of awe. It’s universal, around the globe, that people express themselves in that way. I don't watch football, but my husband and my son do, and in one of the playoff games one of the Chicago Bears caught a forty-yard pass in the end zone, and my husband and my son were like “Whoa!!” They were jumping off the sofa, and I think that's awe too. In sports, in athletics—kids can relate to that. Athletes do extraordinary things, and those things are very visual. I used as few words as possible. Susan said my words made it easier for her, but no, if you look at these illustrations you can see they're awesome. They're awe itself. You can see the layers of color and movement and just so much love poured onto these pages. She made the emotion come to life, so she actually made my job a lot easier.

RS: For the readers of this interview who can’t see Chana’s face over Zoom, I want to point out Chana’s great Home Alone moment in expressing awe.

CS: We also talk about collective awe, such as being at a concert. Concerts can be a big giant singalong. And you don't have to go to a major league game, you can go to your own town or your own school game, and just be in a crowd shouting together, cheering. So: “Awe can be silent [and that spread shows the aurora borealis] / Awe can be LOUD! / Awe feels AWEsome when shared with a crowd!” And it's that feeling of “we're all in this together,” which is another thing that we need right now. So many kids have been to protests recently, or rallies or parades. And those are important parts of growing up, that you belong somewhere, you feel a connection to other human beings.

Chana and Susan working on AWE! at Books of Wonder.

RS: I’m thinking now as you talk that watching fireworks by yourself is a very different feeling from watching fireworks in a crowd of other people watching fireworks.

SG: Or listening to music. There are those transcendent moments that you only get in a crowd where you're picking up the energy of everyone else. My daughter's first concert was at the UC campus in Berkeley. She was in high school, and we picked her up afterward, and she burst into tears before she came into the house. I thought, Oh my god, what happened at this concert? And she said, “It was so beautiful; everyone was singing the song.” It still tears me up. I said, “You transcended, right? You were in that moment where you picked up the energy of everyone, and it lifted everyone up.” You know it when you feel it. And Chana put that in there, and we thought, How can we capture that and relate that to a concert, the energy of just being together and experiencing a moment together? Magic, it’s magic.

CS: I was thinking also when you said transcendence—we included a definition in the back matter that “awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” I think for some people that is looking at a sky full of stars or at the aurora borealis, where you feel like there's this greater force out there. And we also included spiritual awe. Susan did this spread with...

RS: ...lovely candles and lights.

CS: “Awe can be mystical, lyrical, spiritual...a miracle!” A lot of kids are very spiritual, and they find those awe moments. They could be in a place of worship, but they could also just be in a silent place in the woods and just feeling that mystical spiritual feeling.

RS: And when you talk about transcendence, I think of awe as something you experience that's too deep for words, which certainly doesn't make your job any easier, Chana.

CS: I did a school visit last week in the Bronx, at a public school, PS 66. It was an early reading of AWE! for an organization called Start Lighthouse, so shout out to them. They promote literacy in underserved areas and in public schools in New York—they bring in authors and every kid goes home with a book. So they gave copies of AWE! to all the first graders. It was wonderful reading it to them, and we also had an activity where they could draw what makes them feel awe. A lot of them drew their family, one of them drew the puppy that they got for Christmas. It's interesting to see where kids found connection. One of them drew a shark eating a little fish.

RS: In your experience with these kids, how quickly did they pick up on what awe was, and did they distinguish it from awww, because when you say “puppy,” I say awww.

CS: We start the book with that. “A fin! A tail! A giant splashing whale! What's that mind-blowing sensation? That's...AWE!” And then the text says “Awww? Like these adorable kittens?...Not exactly...”

RS: They’re related though, I think.

CS: They could be for sure. For example, a newborn baby. It might be awww adorable. But in the eyes of the parents and family members there's nothing more awesome than a new human being brought into the world and how your children can bring awe into your life. But you asked me when the kids got it. Well, when I do a read-aloud, I like to involve the audience. My definition of awe for children in the book is this: “an Awesome / Wondrous / Empowering emotion! / When chills travel down your spine, / and sudden tears surprise your eyes. / When your heart exclaims, “Ooh! Ahhh! Whoaaa!” / That's when you know you’ve found AWE.” So I had the kids say ooh and then ahhh and then whoaaa, and as soon as they said those words out loud, all of a sudden you could see the wheels turning. They were getting it. They knew, and all they had to do was look at Susan's art and the expressions of the kids in these pages and they got it. And that comes very early on in the book. I will point out one really fun thing. In the gatefold there's a child in the middle with his arms spread wide. I had told Susan that my mom, whenever she's out in nature, tends to spread her arms wide, embracing it all. My kids call my mom Savta, which means grandmother in Hebrew, and so we call that savta pose. When we're out in nature my kids do savta pose with their arms spread. If you look through the book, starting from the cover, you can see savta pose all over. That is a bodily expression of awe, and maybe some kids will grasp that and then get out there, get outside, spread their arms, enjoy nature—and then send us some pictures, so we can see how our readers are connecting. I would love that.

Chana's son and Savta in savta pose.

SG: And we didn't start with the traditional way you start a book. You know: “Here's a title page. You turn the page and then you explain awe.” We hit the ground running. I thought, How can we really shake this up a little bit and do something a little different? So the opening endpaper tells a story and then we start with Chana’s beautiful text about the mind-blowing sensation that's awe—and that's our title page. Then we go into the book.

RS: Susan, how did you work with the book designer on making all this happen? Who was the designer, by the way?

SG: Marijka Kostiw with Scholastic. And actually we didn't go back and forth with her too much, it was mostly me working one-on-one with Chana and the text. She gave me the space to run with it and I felt such a strong connection to it. I actually followed in some of Chana’s footsteps and having some of the experiences that she had like going to Loch Awe in Scotland. I live in California, about four hours from Yosemite National Park, and we go there all the time. Chana gave me the space to just put everything I thought should be in there at first. And then we distilled from there. So the book was pretty much what we had done together and then we tweaked it and had the luxury of working with the art director to give us more pages—give us space to flesh the book out and have the pacing and the timing really work. Throw a little bit out, let it settle, throw a little bit out, let it settle, and then build up at the end. I suggested making the ending be about being on this planet and seeing it from the stars and looking back. Like that famous photo we all know from the moon landing, the first time we saw Earth from space.

RS: Earthrise.

SG: And that puts us all collectively together for awe and puts us together on this humble planet. That’s the awe in itself. And then ending with the beautiful nighttime sky. I think awe can also be part of making your smallness matter in the bigger picture of the whole universe. We're all made of stardust along with everything else, and kids get that.

Susan at Loch Awe in Scotland.

RS: The double gatefold spread of the Grand Canyon made me wonder: if you live on the rim of the Grand Canyon, does it ever get old?

CS: Great question. I live near New York City, and it never gets old. I could go to a Broadway show tonight and have tears in my eyes. And some of them I've seen more than once and had the same experience. Susan and I both went to the top of Edge, which is a building in Hudson Yards that's 102 stories high with angled windows that allow incredible views of the city. I never get tired of it. There's always some drama, something exciting happening in New York City. My daughter, who lives there, sent me a picture recently. There's something called Manhattanhenge, where you see the sun set through the canyon of the buildings. Well, one morning she saw the reverse—sunrise through the buildings—and she sent me a photo. And that’s awe. I notice that my own children are now sending me “awe” pictures. I love that.

RS: I remember the first time I saw the Grand Canyon. I’d seen pictures of it and you can never understand from a picture what that experience is like because you don’t have the depth you get when you’re actually standing there looking at it.

SG: So, Roger, what did you experience? Did you feel like, “Oh my god, this just goes on forever”? Was that one of the feelings you had when you stood at the edge?

RS: As one of those dorky little kids who loved his Viewmaster, I thought I knew what the Grand Canyon looked like. When I got there—I was probably in my early thirties—I thought, This is so different from what I thought it would be, and that's where the awe came from. I realized I was having an experience that a picture couldn't touch.

SG: And that's why we did the Grand Canyon gatefold, because I remember that feeling of standing there. I really wanted to figure out a way to get the reader to feel that feeling in a book. And watching your face, Roger, you still feel that.

RS: I’m getting goosebumps remembering it.

SG: I love to bring visiting family to the redwood forest and go across the Golden Gate Bridge into the places that are iconic and inspire people here, and I get joy from watching them experience it too. So no, I don't know if that can ever get boring or tiring.

CS: We also love to go to national parks, and we took my son to Yellowstone when he was a baby. Now, a little kid can't appreciate Yellowstone—the geysers and everything. He was tiny. But he loved the squirrels and the chipmunks. And in the book there’s the line “awe can be small—yet splendid,” and that’s why Susan shows young children looking at butterflies and spiderwebs and little lizards and gorgeous flowers. Kids are so close to the ground and they can appreciate the beauty of nature on that level. I'm sure many kids can also appreciate these grand vistas, and they should, but not everyone gets to see those, so we wanted to get across that if you just take an “awe” walk every day with the intention of searching for awe, you can find it. I went on a walk yesterday, and all the trees were covered in this white frosting of snow, and it was stunning. And when winter ends and there is a dandelion pushing its way through the cracks of the sidewalk or a crocus in Central Park, that's also awe. The research backs this up, that making it a practice to find awe makes you less anxious. And we're all experiencing anxiety. It makes you feel, again, more connected to people and makes you more curious about the world so you're more likely to want to learn more and experience more. They've researched awe, and they found that if high school or college students go on “awe” walks before exams, their minds are clearer. They perform better on exams because their minds are more open, they're less cluttered. I find that as an author...

RS: “Awe-thor.”

SG: Oh, that's another one!

CS: I’ve been using a lot of puns. “Extra-awe-dinary.” And now I’m an “awe-thor.” I have to write that down. I’ll credit you. As authors, we often get stuck. There's classic writers' block. One of the ways you can break through that is by going on an “awe” walk or jog or run or swim. Something that will clear your head, and maybe you'll run into another human being that inspires you. You can definitely see it in nature, but one of the things that I really love about this book is the focus on people. And we didn't mention this, but when I see people being creative, it makes me want to be more creative. It could be drawing, it could be painting, it could be music, dancing—all these different arts. But also when people are more generous and kinder and you're in awe of them, it makes you want to be more generous and kinder. So there's this really lovely spread Susan created where “awe surrounds us everywhere. / In people who care. / In the love we share.” And we see a line of people waiting for food and there's so much love there, and I feel like that's what we need right now. We need this human connection and caring and getting back to those daily acts of kindness.

RS: Susan, you really could have taken the easy way out by just having awe-some pictures. The Grand Canyon, fireworks. But you’re always showing people having the experience of them. Awe is a human thing; it’s not something that’s in the fireworks.

SG: Absolutely.

RS: I thought you did a great job. You make me understand more about how awe not only connects us to the universe, it also connects us to our community of people.

SG: Thank you for that. What I loved, as I said before, was putting in the connection. And to me, having a soup kitchen or a soup line, the best way to help one another is to feed one another. That's such a human thing showing compassion and showing love and thinking of how we help one another and see the humanity in all of us, and boy, do we need that right now.

RS: Amen.

SG: Big time.

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Scholastic

AUTHOR LINK:

Chana Stiefel

Susan Gal

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