I was honored when Britt asked me to contribute a project to the third and final iteration of 20 Collaborations in Book Art. In the second installment of Britt’s brainchild, I had represented my family’s business with a book on the label art for Yazoo Brewing Company. This time I wanted to make something that was personal. So I asked my daughters, Lucia (age 14) and Lilli (age 13), to join me in the creation since they represent the most personal and essential aspects of my life. These two girls are so passionate, creative, energetic and supportive. With Lucia and Lilli, and the insight and encouragement of Britt, an amazing story could be told. The results of the project would surely be unexpected, joyful and, probably, a bit chaotic and visceral, as is the case with raising children.
For our family, storytelling is an important part of self-expression and a way to position ourselves within our world. When the girls were little, my husband Linus and I would try to keep them interested at the dinner table by regaling them with accounts of our own childhoods. This morphed into them telling us their stories, both real and imagined. Today Lucia and Lilli are both published authors, and they are currently working on their second novels.
When Lucia lost her first tooth it was hard for her to give it up to the tooth fairy. She decided instead to write a note to the fairy explaining her unwillingness to part with her tooth. Later, if they lost a tooth during class in elementary school, the girls would come home proudly with a little plastic tooth-shaped container on a string around their necks to keep the tooth safe. They would then slip it under their pillow and awake the next morning to see how many coins or bills their tooth fairy had exchanged with them. Speculation about the tooth fairy began. Did they have the same tooth fairy, how did she get under their pillow, what did she do with those teeth? These questions were resolved and wrapped into tales told around the dinner table.
Of course, there were mishaps. Once their grandmother accidentally dropped a baby tooth down the drain while rinsing it off. Another time, the tooth was loose but then just disappeared from the gums (“Did I swallow it? Gross!”). Lilli fell twice, knocking her front tooth into misalignment and sending her for emergency and multiple visits to the dentist. Lucia’s front tooth came in crooked and it was discovered after an x-ray that she had an extra tooth, mesioden, growing in her gum and that had to be surgically removed. Teeth became a source of frustration, inspiration and wonder.
Books are one form of storytelling. As Britt and her many collaborators have demonstrated through 20 Collaborations in Book Art, the structure of a “book” is multi-dimensional and expands beyond pages contained within a front and back cover. I find that piecing a quilt is a good antidote to the mayhem of life, since the arrangement of the squares allows full control and the ability to create stability and uniformity. Lucia and Lilli practice and explore with words and their relation to ideas, aspirations and self-expression and they use storytelling to decipher and influence. With the creation of From My Mouth, Lilli, Lucia and I came together to tell a story that is an integral and ubiquitous part of childhood using different perspectives and via different forms: a quilt, a poem, and a play.