I met Jane Park during a children’s literature happy hour over Zoom. In one of the breakout rooms, she mentioned that her latest picture book, Juna and Appa, was coming out in 2022. It’ll be her second publication with Lee & Low publishers, and her first book with them, Juna’s Jar, was published as a result of her winning Lee & Low’s New Voices Award, which is given to a children’s picture book manuscript by a writer of color or Indigenous/Native writer. Park’s work is joyful and sensitive, depicting with sharpness and nuance a life lived multiculturally, so I sat down with her over Zoom to talk about everything from endings to political activism.
The Writer: When we first met, we had a chat about endings. We talked about how the conventional wisdom skews more toward happy endings in children’s literature. Can we talk a little about how you view endings and how that works its way into your books?
I think to have happy endings in picture books really does a disservice to our children. We’re socializing them to think that there’s always an answer, all things can be resolved in 32 pages if you just try hard enough. If you’re just special enough. We all know that we can try and be as good as we can be, and things still don’t work out. And, children’s stories need a “happily ever after?” Sometimes we might need the fantasy and have things end neatly. But sometimes we just need some comfort from knowing that others go through things like this, too, and that we’re not alone.
