“This one’s for me.” a Guest Post by Dev Petty

Today we have a guest post from author Dev Petty, explaining the unique dedication in her latest book . . .

This one’s for me.

-D.P.

That is the dedication I wrote for my upcoming book, Monty and the Mushrooms which will release March 18^th and is illustrated by the extraordinary Jared Chapman and brought to life on the shelf by Kendra Levin at Simon & Schuster. 

This one’s for me. Because it’s big and loud, it has a song about mushrooms, an irritable marmot, some quasi science, and a wee bit of a dark ending- among other oddities. It’s for me because it is totally, utterly, warts-and-all…me. 

It was still in the peak of the pandemic when I began writing it. I’d had a couple of releases which had landed with a thud, and had actually wondered if anything would ever be funny anymore. Indeed, predicating one’s career on channeling humor is a tricky business in dark times. I talk a lot about “threads” in picture books, that thing which winds through the words, anchors it, the thing you pull on to honor your story idea. The truth was, I’d kind of lost my own thread and I wasn’t entirely sure how to get it back.

In those dark moments, somehow one day, I thought about these snarky, annoying, boisterous mushrooms and found they brightened a little corner of something. I started writing something I had no idea how to write, nor how to explain to anyone without sounding like a lunatic. “See, there’s a bunch of loud mushrooms who gossip and have puppet shows and annoy a marmot, got it?!” I’m not sure I was even concerned with getting it published, I just liked what I was doing and wanted to see how it might come out. And humor is always risky anyway, isn’t it? I’m not sure there’s anything more self-revealing than sharing what YOU find funny as a creator. The simple truth is, others may not. I do have a developed inner six year old and I often have the knack of getting some laughs, but there is no guarantee. Ultimately, you…one…or in this case, me, must find it funny.

I braced myself sending it off to my agent, Jennifer Rofé at ABLA, even though she always pushes me to be…ME. But being one’s self isn’t always easy there’s about a million ways we talk ourselves out of things. Too weird. Too long. Too much. I wasn’t sure if she’d like it or speed dial someone to come talk me down. 

By now, you can see where this is going. My agent, did in fact, like the text, and she found it a home, part of a two book deal (hope ya like mushrooms!). And so I got to write a dedication which will serve as a reminder to myself to stay true to what I love. To push myself. To commit. It is a reminder not to  extinguish sparkly things before they have a chance to light up a corner of the world, even if it’s just my own.

It can feel weird or selfish to lean into one’s quirks and joys and loves during difficult times. What I’m telling you is these are precisely when you need to lean into your art, whatever it is. You must do this for you and your sanity and you must do this because they want you not to. They want you to find everything sort of ho-hum, useless, hopeless. That is a feature, not a bug, and you must fight the urge to divest from the things that make you…YOU. You may wonder if you should table goals or extinguish the sparks of ideas, in deference to attending to more global matters, and I’m here to tell you, you should not cede yourself to the times. 

I found myself musing about this upcoming release and my feelings about sending my strange book off into the somewhat grim, challenging Universe we find ourselves in right now. It makes some kind of crazy sense that this book was born of a terrible period of time and will poke its silly nose into a world with a different sort of terribleness. But for lack of a better way to say it, that’s the task. One of my favorite quotes is from Piet Hein, mathematician, inventor, designer, writer and poet, who wrote (paraphrasing here a smidge) “Art is the solving of problems that cannot be expressed until they are solved.” As such, we people who are writing things they might dedicate to themselves, or painting canvases which may never be hung anywhere but your own wall, or whatever that little light that comes up through the cracks leads us…we are all artists right now. 

Dev Petty is the author of many unique picture books for kids, including I Don’t Want to Be a Frog, Don’t Eat Bees (Life Lessons from Chip the Dog), How Old Is Mr. Tortoise?, Claymates, and the upcoming Monty and the Mushrooms. She has eleven published books with eight forthcoming, among them her sixth series. 

Dev used to be a visual effects artist but now writes silly books for kids and their people. She lives in Berkeley, California, her hometown, with her family, dogs, cats, and a snake named “Boots.” You can visit Dev online at DevPetty.com

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