AN AWARD-WINNING children’s book author highlighted the importance of seeing the world through a child’s eyes in writing children’s books as their perspective tends to differ from that of adults.
Author Sophia Lee encouraged aspiring children’s literature writers to visualize what children see as they navigate through their lives, a method present in four of her children’s books she showcased in the seminar “Writing for the Young and Writing for the Heart” on Tuesday, Feb. 18 at the Tanghalang Teresita Quirino of the Benavides Building.
What Things Mean (2016), published by Scholastic, is a coming-of-age story that follows 14-year-old Olive struggling to find her place in her family. The concept of the book was based on Lee’s past experience of struggling with opening a jar.
“That simple jar of pasta sauce that I couldn’t open, I was equating with something larger, with my independence,” Lee said.
Out of curiosity, Lee looked for the definitions of the term “jar” in a dictionary and realized that the word had multiple meanings. The realization eventually became the inspiration in introducing each chapter of her book by defining a word that is significant to the chapter.
“So it became more than just the pasta jar that was frustrating me and my hunger, it became an idea in my head, and I liked that the jar could be a symbol of something deeper to me,” she said.
Lee’s next book, Soaring Saturdays, was also published by Scholastic in 2019 and revolves around Sarah and her father as they deliver letters around the city. The book was also part of Lee’s manuscripts that she submitted to the Silliman National Writers Workshop.
Soaring Saturdays reflected on the time when her grandmother, uncle and aunt moved overseas. They would send her voice tapes and letters, and in exchange, she would draw the outline of her feet on paper to let her grandmother know her shoe size.
“That was my earliest concept of people having longing for each other and writing letters and wanting to be connected to each other. That’s how I built the idea for my next book,” she said.
Lee added that she also wanted to explore the idea of a little girl who was dreaming of being elsewhere and recalled studying her aunt’s albums that contained pictures of her cousins in Disneyland.
Published by Simon and Schuster in 2022, Holding On was the third book to be showcased and was written when Lee was still living in New York with her grandmother who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“There would be days when she wouldn’t know who I was. There would be days when she would go out of her room and she would point to me and ask her maid, ‘who’s that girl?’” she recounted.
The last book to be presented and the latest of the four books, Lolo’s Sari-sari Store (2023), chronicles the life of a girl who helps her grandfather run his store every summer.
“I was really inspired by watching the grown-ups who were running our sari-sari store, my mom, my grandparents, my titos and titas,” Lee said.
Lee also expounded on the idea of observing patterns and connections around her, a unifying concept that helped her narrate her past experiences in the form of children’s stories.
Lee, who has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the New School in New York City, currently works as an instructor of creative writing at Writopia Lab.
Some of her notable achievements include the second prize at the 2015 Samsung KidsTime Authors’ Award for her book Soaring Saturdays. Holding On was also cited as one of the best picture books of 2022 by the Chicago Public Library and became a finalist at the 2024 Georgia Children’s Book Awards.
Her fifth book Nine Mornings will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2027.
The seminar is part of the UST International Authors and Scholars Series organized by the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies. F – Franz Zoe Stoelzl Baroña
