Storybelly Digest: It Started With A Song

outside my kitchen window this morning

Morning, everybody. Welcome to a story about how a song written in the 1980s by one person; turned into a poem written in the early 2000s by another person; turned into a revised poem that became a picturebook edited by two different editors at one publishing house; illustrated by yet another person came to be printed, bound, and put into readers’ hands a full 40 years after its original inception on a Thanksgiving day after Jim broke bread with good friends in Atlanta, Georgia, and long before anybody knew what they had on their hands.

This was the song Jim wrote, “Thanksgiving.”

I heard this song — and the story behind it — many years later, and fell in love with the song, the story, and the guy. I said, in just the way Jim had told me that my book One Wide Sky suggested music, that his song, “Thanksgiving,” suggested words. So I wrote some. This was what I wrote — you can play the music and read the words alongside it, to see how I was parsing the lines to go with the music:

Thanksgiving

The clouds above surround our world
and wrap us in their arms
The rain that falls upon our shoulders
blesses fields and farms

The earth beneath our feet spins ‘round
and rivers ‘cross it run
The day awakes, I see your face,
bright shining as the sun!

It’s me again (the clouds)
It’s you again (the rain)
It’s us again (the earth)
Come ‘round again.
Love connects us every one,
The world is one.

I hear the song that nature sings
that links each heart to mine
The ocean blue, the sky above,
the forest with its pine
We laugh, we cry, we share our lives,
we watch this play divine
The earth, the wind, the waves, the sun ­
we all are intertwined!

It’s me again (the sea)
It’s you again (the woods)
It’s us again (the wind)
Come ‘round again.
Love connects us every one,
The world is one.

The sun will set, the day will sleep,
the moon will breathe goodnight
To all the children of the earth
and everything in sight
We’re different yet we’re all the same,
we’re loving, brave, and bright ­
Like blades of grass or mountains grand ­
a visual delight!

It’s me again (the sun)
It’s you again (the moon)
It’s us again (all things!)
We’re home again,
Love connects us every one,
The world is one.

I loved the poem so much, I sent it to my agent, hoping we might sell it as a picturebook. I sent him Jim’s music as well. He warned me that the publishing industry wasn’t “into” coupling music with words — and this was back in the day when the publishing industry wasn’t seeing the value in “comic books” that turned into graphic novels. So I decided to keep trying.

I had a vision for the book and music together, the same way I’d had a vision for One Wide Sky with its music, so I held onto that as the manuscript made its rounds.

Unfortunately, my agent was right, the publishing world wasn’t into packaging a CD with a book, or even putting in the backmatter a link to the music. They also weren’t into buying my book. And this was at a time when self-publishing was mostly vanity presses, and in addition I was no artist so would need to find someone to illustrate my words…

The Book:

Here’s where the right-time, right-place comes in. I pulled the ms from consideration and held onto it for years. My agent and I brought up from time to time in book discussions, market discussions, possibility discussions. I think we sent out the ms, almost to test the waters, a time or two more. One year grew into ten. I wrote other things.

And then one day my agent called to say there was an editor at Roaring Brook, Kate Jacobs, who was looking for a book about gratitude, and he thought of my Thanksgiving ms. I sent him a fresh copy, he sent it to Kate, and Kate made an offer to buy the book. But she wanted revisions. I said okay.

My idea was a book about the universality of morning/noon/night and the experiences we all have as human beings on this planet… how we are more alike than we are different and how gratitude can bring us together. These are lofty concepts (or at best abstract) to impart to a young child.

Kate’s idea made sense, to bring the book onto a parent’s lap with a child and let them connect closely to the day and the world around them using plain language and objects children would know, while keeping the universal feel of the story, and perhaps while losing a bit of the parsing, because now I would not be writing to a song. A song is not a picturebook. Sigh.

And I said yes, I would try. I delivered a revision — maybe a couple of revisions — and that’s what you have in your hands, if you have the finished book. You can see the changes we made to make it as accessible as possible. It doesn’t parse with the exact notes of the song anymore, but it does better suit a young child’s sensibilities so they can connect with it, and that’s the point, yes?

Then Kate Jacobs was laid off, like so many were in publishing shake-ups during the pandemic, and Mekisha Telfer inherited Thanksgiving, which became Simple Thanks. All of this took a while to shuffle and settle including the time it took Bao Luu to illustrate the book, of course. Bao was one of three we were looking at to illustrate, and my top choice. My only notes on illustration were that I was hoping for a book that helped all children see themselves and the natural world and know how amazing was the living of every day.

And in that, Bao delivered. I had a book I was proud of, and that many people had had a hand in making.

I wanted to include the first stanza of the hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” in the frontispiece, and we did that, too.

I had championed the music to no avail, so I knew that the music, if I wanted to use it, would have to come separately, in the way that Jim’s music for One Wide Sky was on CDs that I took to schools and left with teachers after I presented the book and we had learned it and sung it and danced to it. Which is what I did with One Wide Sky and its successor, We Are All Under One Wide Sky.

The Music:

Jim had recorded the tune on his first record album (which we call The Red Album) years before he and I met again. “I was living alone in my late 20s, and I went to Thanksgiving dinner with two really kind old people, lol, and when I got home I felt inspired, and wrote this tune. I put it on the Red Album, had 500 copies of that album made. It had no distribution and it became immediately obsolete because CDs came along right at that time, and nobody was buying a vinyl album.”

For a long, long time, that was the only way to hear “Thanksgiving” outside of gigs where Jim might play the tune for the offertory at his steady church gig or as part of prelude music before the wedding march as people were getting settled in their seats.

On Oct. 6 this year, Jim played the song for us: you can watch him play it here, on his IG account and you can read along with the finished book to see how the music still fits the tone, the intention, and the words. Many stanzas have stayed the same, actually… we just made some concrete tweaks and here are some of them:

Which version do you love most? :> One thing (among many), and maybe the most important point I wanted to make with this book, was this phrase:

One of my deepest held beliefs.

All to say, don’t give up! Times change, people change, circumstances change, and it’s a wild ride sometimes, or at the least, a long one. Today we have many more roads to publication as well that are worth investigating, as many of you are.

We tell our stories and share them in so many ways, and that’s the important part. We never know where a gathering will go, where a song will go, where a poem will go, or who will listen to our song, read our poem, open our book, tell our story. That’s the beauty of paying attention, asking questions, and making connections in order to say we were here, and are here, and have stories to share.

And with that, I leave you on a frosty November day here in Atlanta. American Thanksgiving is two and a half weeks away and, 45 years after a lonely young man found inspiration at a Thanksgiving table with “two kind old people,” I can see the trajectory of that moment folding into this one, with a book in my hand that shares with youngest readers a story (and a song) about the art of appreciating the most simple gifts the earth gives freely to all of us, every day.

Have a good week, everybody.

xo Debbie