SATA

• When You Can Swim Scholastic (New York, NY), 2023

1. When you can swim LCCN 2022020145 Type of material Book Personal name Wong, Jack, 1985- author, illustrator. Main title When you can swim / Jack Wong, Jack Wong. Published/Produced New York : Scholastic Inc., [2023] Projected pub date 2305 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9781338830989 (ebk) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• All That Grows - 2024 Groundwood Books , Toronto, ON, Canada
• The Words We Share - 2023 Annick Press, Toronto, ON, Canada

• The Signal - https://signalhfx.ca/halifax-illustrators-debut-book-invites-readers-for-a-plunge-in-nature/

  Halifax illustrator Jack Wong’s debut book invites readers for a plunge in nature
  When You Can Swim wins Governor General's Award

  Nov. 15, 2023 | 2:58 p.m.

  By Yuan Wang
  4 min read

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  An author who is not that keen on swimming and is even afraid of it has won the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award for a children’s book about learning to swim.

  Jack Wong, a Halifax-based author and illustrator, was the winner for young people’s literature – illustration (English), and he’s the only Nova Scotian among all winners, which were announced last Wednesday.

  The prize, run by the Canada Council for the Arts, is worth $25,000 for seven English and seven French categories, including fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature-text, and drama.

  When You Can Swim is Wong’s debut book. The book presents different scenes of kids learning to swim outdoors, with short poetic descriptions of what it’s like to swim in different waters, and what the body feels in nature.

  It’s a book that seems like it’s teaching people to swim, from the title to the content, but Wong said that he didn’t set out to create a book for that purpose, and he is not even an avid swimmer himself.

  “The book really became an encouragement for myself first,” said Wong.

  Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Wong grew up with a fear of swimming, especially in the local pools, where he felt social anxiety from kids his own age. It wasn’t until he moved to Halifax in 2010 and started trying to swim outdoors, that anxiety was replaced by the raw fear of being in the water and being unable to see the bottom.

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  Swimming outdoors became more appealing when he realized that the natural environment offers a marvellous sensory experience. “They outweighed or at least balanced my fear,” said Wong.

  He began documenting scenes and experiences of himself and his family and friends swimming in nature with photographs, paintings and notes. Wang said once he had accumulated a great deal of material, the book took shape almost organically.

  The image of the little girl on the book cover was inspired by one of Wong’s nieces, who’s also hesitant about swimming. Wong thought about how his experience could be a message for kids, but his niece did not change her attitude towards swimming after receiving the book and its encouraging message.

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  A passion for arts
  Wong had a passion for arts when he was a kid, but he was also good at math and science. When he was told by everyone around that he should aim to become an architect, he studied engineering at the university, earning a bachelor’s degree.

  During a trip to Europe, he realized that he had no interest in buildings or engineering after visiting a few places. Then he spent the rest of the time immersing himself in European museums and galleries and chose to pursue fine arts at NSCAD at the end of the trip.

  “I always loved to draw from life,” said Wong. “Just the idea that a few lines, and scribbles and turn into a picture of something always fascinated me.”

  Wong recalled being impressed by his father’s simple doodles of a motorcycle as a child, and his father was not an artist at all. “Nothing beats just like being able to make something out of so little, just a pencil and paper,” Wong said.

  Wong doesn’t consider himself to have a style of painting; he has a slight addiction to novelty and likes to try new things. Some people at art school may have artists they love and follow for life, said Wong, but he may like one this week and discover a new favourite next week.

  Wong said that When You Can Swim could represent drawing the way he knew best for the first book, but each later project is a different story and he wants each to have a unique style.

  “I’m gonna have fun figuring out what it’s supposed to look like, but without the assumption that just because it’s coming from me, it should look the same,” said Wong.

  Wong’s second book, The Words We Share, was released in September and was nominated for the 2024 Ontario Library Association Blue Spruce Award. His latest picture book, All That Grows, will be published in the spring of 2024.

• Jena Benton - https://jenabenton.com/2023/05/04/simply-7-with-jack-wong-when-you-can-swim/

  Simply 7 with Jack Wong: WHEN YOU CAN SWIM
  May 4, 2023 / jenabenton
  Today I get to share a stunning author-illustrator debut picture book with you. Just wait until you take a peek inside!

  JackWong_PhotobyNicolaDavison(Dec2022)_3600pxJack Wong (黃雋喬) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. In 2010, he left behind a life as a bridge engineer to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University (Halifax, Canada), where he now lives with his wife and two cats. You can learn more about him at his website or follow him on Instagram or Twitter.

  0-CoverWHEN YOU CAN SWIM is a gorgeous picture book all about swimming everywhere you could possibly swim: lakes, rivers, ocean, and pools. It’s written in 2nd person point of view, addresses potential fears of swimming in the wild, and shares the joys and wonders of swimming in a variety of settings. The illustrations are gorgeous and capture a variety of angles that will keep every reader fascinated as they turn from page to page (and you’ll see what I mean in just a minute). Trust me when I say, this isn’t a book you will want to miss!

  Welcome Jack!

  Me: What was your artistic journey? When did you start creating art? How did that bring you to writing and illustrating this book?

  JackWong_Simply7_01Jack: I’ve been drawing and writing for as long as I can remember—but because I was also proficient at math and science, I was steered towards a more technical field. I completed a degree in engineering and briefly worked in the field, before my love of art came calling again… and even then, I went to art school, stayed at the university as a researcher, started a bicycle repair shop, and had a stint as an office administrator at a construction company, before finally taking the leap into writing and illustrating. It was the long road, but for what it’s worth I think it was an invaluable one. For one thing, I find that most author/illustrators in the picture book space identify more strongly with either illustrating or writing—they came by PBs via one route, and often downplay or even delegitimize their (often equally amazing) skills on the other side—but I actually identify 50/50 as a writer and an illustrator! I have my diverse occupational history to thank for that, since I tend to feel comfortable with not being any one thing in particular.

  Me: That’s amazing. You have a lot of different styles and use a lot of different mediums. Can you talk about your art process for this book? Did you use traditional media or digital, or a blend of both? What made you decide to use this medium for this book?

  Jack: I do work in a range of styles—my next book involves digital collage! For me, each project will hinge on certain needs that dictate style and medium, almost as if by process of elimination. I felt that When You Can Swim needed a material approach that allowed each page to be completely its own thing—for example, an underwater view of a tannin-soaked lake needed to be dark, while smoke on the water needed to be light and airy—and a combination of pastel, watercolour, and toned paper was what allowed me to cover that spectrum. That combo was new to me, and all of a sudden I had more than one way to achieve any given visual effect, so one of the frustrations in the process was actually having to redraw a spread multiple times in different material configurations, because I couldn’t envision in advance whether, for instance, the blue of the sky ought to be in pastel or paint.

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  Me: But the end result is stunning! I love the way you’ve combined a variety of natural settings, a variety of characters, and learning to swim. What gave you the idea for this story?

  Jack: Thank you! I think the variety and synthesis you’re pointing to came about organically. The book didn’t even start out being about swimming(!)—I was just collecting random visual ideas and fragments of text whenever I was camping or hiking in nature, when a story about swimming evolved out of my journal. When I came to that realization, I actually felt like an imposter—who am I to write about that, when I’m not even that comfortable with swimming myself! In hindsight, I appreciate that it’s because of my particular point of view that the book embodies the dual trepidation and excitement of standing at the water’s edge; someone who’s a fish in water could equally write a book about swimming, but it wouldn’t be the same one.

  I’m proud of the book for its emphasis on equity and representation—but I think it’s important to share that this too wasn’t a predetermined goal. Initially, I just felt that drawing the same characters over and over would be a boring creative choice when the environments around them were so rich and diverse. But as soon as I decided to introduce different characters for each scene, the question of who to depict followed suit—which led to new questions and learning opportunities that I couldn’t have anticipated, like speaking with several amputees (their terminology) about the practicalities they consider when wearing a prosthetic into a lake.

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  Me: What an incredible opportunity. I am blown away by the text in this story. It’s almost poetry! It’s a beautiful love song to the forces of nature found in and around water that reminded me of a haiku-like approach. Was this story always this tight? Or did it become this polished through many revisions with your critique group, etc.?

  Jack: To answer your question honestly, I went back to the first drafts—and I have to say a lot of the text was already formed in my journal, before it even reached the word processor! All credit, however, goes to the special experience and true privilege of writing it in nature over time.

  JackWong_Simply7_05There were some evolutions though. My wonderful critique partner Sara gave the manuscript its first eagle-eyed edit, but will forever miss the stanza I nixed about little lobsters basking in the shallows (so I’m immortalizing it here in her honour). The order of stanzas also changed when I realized that I could create a slow buildup from the more relaxed swimming scenes to the more intense ones. Finally, after some sound advice about pacing from author Shauntay Grant, I extended the climactic scene into a series of verbs—“rising, floating, daring” etc.—which are all actions featured in previous spreads. I’m proud of this edit because I wanted to hint at the notion that all the experiences and skills gained on the other pages contribute to successfully tackling the biggest swim of the book—but I also wanted it to be subtle enough that it’s not the whole point of the story. We already have so much linear goal-oriented thinking and language in our lives, and kids don’t need more of that in their faces.

  Me: I love that! You are both the author and the illustrator of this wonderful story. The illustrations are every bit as stunning as the text. This is an incredible debut picture book. What was harder, the writing or the illustrating of it? Why?

  Jack: Thank you! I mentioned above that I identify 50/50 as author/illustrator, but illustrating was definitely the more intensive part of this project. Part of the reason was that I had more or less finalized the text at my leisure before submitting it to publishers, while the illustrating work happened after acquisition and was my first go at completing a book on a timeline and figuring out how long each step of the process needed (spoiler alert: it’s always more than you think). I also had so much to learn on-the-job, from digitizing the images properly to managing crises of confidence! I want to thank my art directors, Patti Anni Harris for her oracle-like wisdom, and Doan Buu for guiding me through every last step of the process.

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  Me: In your back matter, you mentioned several fears around swimming. You also mentioned the appropriate safety precautions to take in each environment as you researched. Yet your love of swimming and the water shines through here so wonderfully. Do you now love to swim as well? If so, was it one moment in time that changed your opinion of swimming?

  Jack: I’m still kind of afraid of swimming—I think it’s a healthy fear, to be wary of open waters! However, my hesitations around swimming as a child had to do with things other than just the water, including being a Chinese kid among mostly white classmates (at least when we first moved to Canada) which contributed to a lot of anxiety around being singled out for body differences. There wasn’t a single moment when my opinion changed, but in my adulthood I moved to Nova Scotia (on the east coast of Canada), where swimming outdoors is such a popular pastime—and I learned to love interacting with the water in a way that wasn’t mediated within a confined social setting. So now, as much as the water still makes me uncomfortable, the thrill and magic of it keeps me going back for more.

  Me: Yes! Any advice for new picture book writers and/or illustrators?

  Jack: Try not to write with an agenda. If the process for When You Can Swim is any indication (it certainly taught me a lot, upon reflection!), a book can start as just a series of sensory details, or an anecdotal event, without a message already worn on its sleeve… those ideas and themes can grow and become integral to the story, even if it didn’t come to you from the get-go. I do worry about seeing writing that feels strongly like it was agenda-first, rather than from a place of discovery.

  That is such great advice. Thank you for stopping by my blog today Jack.

  Dear readers, this book was just released into the world this week. It’s a glorious exploration of the nature of water, the fear (or respect) of swimming in the wild, and all the joys and excitements that come from first learning to swim. The text and the illustrations both are exuberant and somehow manage to contain the zen I feel every time I enter the ocean to swim myself. Don’t miss this one!

• Jena Benton - https://jenabenton.com/2024/03/04/simply-7-with-jack-wong-all-that-grows/

  Simply 7 with Jack Wong: ALL THAT GROWS
  March 4, 2024 / jenabenton
  If you ever felt a bit overwhelmed when learning something new, then today’s picture book is for you!

  JackWong_PhotobyNicolaDavison(Dec2022)_3600pxJack Wong has visited my blog before. His debut picture book, WHEN YOU CAN SWIM, was released last year and became a national bestseller, as well as winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Jack Wong (黃雋喬) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. In 2010, he left behind a life as a bridge engineer to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University (Halifax, Canada), where he now lives with his wife and two cats. You can learn more about him at his website or follow him on Instagram or Twitter.

  COVERALL THAT GROWS is Jack’s third picture book release as author-illustrator. It tells the story of a young boy who is experiencing spring with his sister and learning about plants. How does she know so much about growing things? It’s a quiet journey of wonder and curiosity through the natural world that is breathtaking. I just love talking with Jack about his books because he dives so deep into the thought process behind their creation, which is mirrored so perfectly by his main character here. There’s a deep internal monologue that is peaceful and beautiful at the same time. This is a book I will read in my classroom over and over again as it’s all about learning anything new and the process we all go through.

  Welcome back Jack!

  Me: I do not have a green thumb (I have in fact joked with friends for years that I have a black thumb). So I definitely identify with your main character who loves trees and nature, but can’t identify plants and views them as a bit of a mystery. What gave you the idea for this story?

  Jack: Most of my stories, the ones that I’m most excited about, are the confluence of several things going on in my life, and one story is able to touch on multiple things at once. That was the case for this story as well.

  On one level it was born during the start of the pandemic which accounts for some of the scenes in the book that you have: characters walking, taking long neighborhood walks, starting their own garden. I mean, it could have been starting your own sourdough bread. You know all the kinds of things we did at the start of the pandemic, but those are the scenes that kind of represent that time.

  My wife is the gardener in the family, although she previously had more of a casual interest. Right about the same time as the pandemic started, very coincidentally, she was starting to get really interested, delving into gardening a lot more, and learning lots of new things. I was watching her go through that, and I both was able to watch her go through the process of learning about plants and put that into the character in the book. I was the beneficiary of a lot of new things she learned and passed on to me. So that aspect also went into the character of the book.

  At the same time, as you know, it’s a book about spring and a book about gardening. This book has this STEM subject matter on the surface (and I think that will be a really great draw for some kids and some educators). But I also really think that it’s a book about the process and the feelings that come along with being a beginner and learning something new, as well as being daunted and overwhelmed, and how to deal with that. So in that respect the book really speaks to my experiences, having tried different things in life and pursued multiple careers, and knowing the feeling of what it’s like to begin again, plus learning to farm among all my other experiences as well.

  So when I put those layers together, the book is really about what it’s like for a child to be confronting the complexity of the world for the first time, whether it’s through farming or something else. And that was also an experience that a lot of kids, not to mention everybody else, were going through in the pandemic: realizing that there’s actually a lot more going on in the world which that time brought to light. But there’s so much that all of us don’t really know, and we’re learning on the fly. So I think ultimately, it’s a book that circles around those themes. And in that sense the book is also about turning our focus to smaller things, to our communities. It’s about the roles that family members might take as educators. The sister in the story is really someone who watches after the education of her little brother. The book was all those things swirling around all at once. And when I thought of a story that can kind of grab hold of all those themes at the same time, and put it into words and pictures in this one story, that’s when it really compelled me.

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  Me: I absolutely love the illustrations in this book! The softness, the dapples of light, and the darkness are just stunning. Can you talk about your art process for it? Did you use traditional media or digital, or a blend of both?

  Jack: The book illustrations were all rendered in traditional medium: pastel on paper. Although there is a lot of digital manipulation that goes on, kind of in the polishing towards the final product. However, interesting to note, for my book launch, I’m holding an exhibition of the original artwork at the local library, and because there’s all these little differences between the final art and the art in the final book, it’s actually going to be called “all that grows, a spot-the-difference” exhibit.

  I just love the idea that we’re all taking this seriously as fine art, a visual art. I feel strongly about the work. I’m proud of it. But it’s also a unique opportunity that it’s at the library where someone who might not usually go to an art gallery, especially kids, who are, you know, only 6 or 7 years old. They will encounter the art on the walls just as they’re running about, you know, having fun and whatever, and I love that we’ll be able to mix those two together and not have a boundary between higher and low art. I just love the fact that there’s going to be a spot-the-difference exhibit work, and there’s going to be a little contest where they’re all encouraged to fill out a form of like 5 differences they can find. I love those in those old spotlight magazines.

  Me: It’s been said to new picture book authors and illustrators that they should have work that is similar in tone and/or look. You now have three books published as an author-illustrator and each one looks so different. What made you decide to use a different medium for each book? Does it worry you that others might not be able to recognize all of your projects as all coming from you?

  Jack: I think we all understand that each story deserves a particular artistic representation, an artistic style, and you know, if that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have publishers that want to pair authors and their manuscripts with particular illustrators. Even if you’re one author, each book is going to be paired with a separate illustrator based on what the feel/theme/tone of that story is. I think we all understand that. You know every story doesn’t deserve the same illustration approach.

  So it kind of follows that as an author-illustrator you either A) write stories in the same style or tone, or you write stories within a range that is covered by one style. There are some authors who do an amazing job of that. I heard an interview with John Klassen once, where he’s only able to draw characters that look deadpan. So he ends up writing stories are deadpan, he ends up illustrating characters that are deadpan, and he’s able to build out a range of stories from that, but with kind of a similar illustration style that kind of seems to fit his writing.

  You have that option. or B) if you happen to be an author-illustrator that writes stories that don’t stick to one tone, or theme, or style or kind of voice, it kind of follows that you are not just one illustrator, but many illustrators for your different stories, just as if you were a different illustrator for each manuscript. So that’s the best craft focused explanation of how I think through that question.

  In terms of that real worry that we all might have about how it’s perceived in publishing, well, I think I would just be kind of bored: to be thinking about what I should write, based on the one illustrating style I’m allowing myself to have. So I’m just following my interests in what I’m doing.

  And also I feel that even if I were to stick to one illustration style, there’s no guarantee that the next book or the next contract is going to come. So I might as well make each book exactly what it needs to be, and let that be my best effort at doing what publishing wants me to do.

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  Me: That’s brilliant. I love that. And I love that you leave a little mystery in the book. The reader never finds out what exactly is growing in that mystery patch in the garden. Even the knowledgeable sister didn’t know! Why was that important for you to include? Why did you want to leave a little mystery like that for young readers?

  Jack: Within the context of the story, it is just the little mystery at the end that keeps you kind of wondering. If the reader sees it as a just a little mystery, that’s a great takeaway for me. It’s actually quite central to the theme of the book. If I were to boil it down into a pithy statement, it would be that learning. or even life in general, isn’t about knowing everything, because we can’t know everything. And it’s really about how we deal with not knowing. That’s the journey that the protagonist goes on: from a place of feeling overwhelmed (and possibly in his own childlike way, inadequate in some way to his sister, and by extension the world), and he comes to a conclusion of being able to live within that space of not knowing, and is still able to act.

  That ending was really there from the start. There was no other way of ending it for me. There were lots of changes to the different scenes of the story : the way it’s worded and the examples I use. However, the fact that the story ends with him, discovering something that neither he nor his sister knows, and there’s this moment—the first moment where he’s assertive in what he’s going to do next. Yeah, that was there from the start.

  Me: What is one thing that surprised you in the creation of this story?

  Jack: As much as the book is kind of encouraging us to be able to live in uncertainty, the creation of the book actually necessitated that I do the exact opposite. That was a surprise. Because I needed to draw the flowers for the book, I really had to know the anatomy and get into it. Even though the character never finds out what the mystery flower is, I actually know what the mystery flower is, and I had to look for the right mystery flower.

  There were multiple choices for what the mystery flower would be, and I had to pin it down, the one most likely for the season they’re having or the fact that it’s in the shade. I had to know everything about this mystery flower, and I needed to take real life reference photos of it out in the wild and then draw it.

  It’s just really funny that I actually have such a different journey than the character in the book, in the limited sense of gardening. I had a slightly different relationship to nature than what the character ended up with. I spent three years obsessively researching, photographing, and documenting plants. What the seasons are like, when plants bloom within the season, and all that stuff. But I think in general, the themes and messages of the book still apply at a larger level, just maybe not in the production of the book.

  If you had to illustrate it, it would make sense that you would have to know all those factors too, beside writing it. The book came to me in written form first. Then I did a dummy which was very rough, and I sent it to the publisher. Afterwards, it took about three years before it was published, so I passed through three more spring seasons. The writing was already done. I could have left it in the space of ambiguity I could have shared the viewpoint of the protagonist, and not known what the mystery flower was. Yet because I was illustrating it, I spent the next two spring seasons, really, obsessively researching and documenting everything. So it’s really the illustration of the book that drove me, which is really weird. I don’t know how else to describe it, except I didn’t follow my own advice.

  Also, a really quick anecdote about that. My editor and I did discuss whether or not to just make up a flower, so that it truly is a mystery flower. Meaning that even if someone tried to look it up in a book they wouldn’t be able to find it. Then it’s a mystery to all of us. I could’ve used an illustration style that was more loose and less representative, then I wouldn’t have needed to do that research. But it didn’t feel authentic to the story that way. For me, it was as equally authentic to delve into the passion of learning, as it was to live in ambiguity.

  So really that’s two surprises. The character experiences both those things, and I end up experiencing more of the delving into, you know, really wanting to learn a lot about this new field.

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  Me: I sense a love of nature in your work (and you have said as much in previous interviews). Yet I wonder if you identify with the main character in this book? Do you have a green thumb or do you find plants a bit of a mystery as well?

  Jack: I don’t have a green thumb, although I have volunteered on organic farms, and I love farm work. Volunteering on an organic farm is such a rich experience where you are guided through what to do. Your task for the day is to pull up the weeds, so you do that, and I love that work. But on my own I don’t really have much of green thumb and have never started a garden at home on my own.

  I’ve helped my wife a little bit, but I do find plants a bit of a mystery. I also have this kind of Meta level of wondering about why we need to know the names of nature. I’m not sure that theme is touched upon in the book. But, for example, when I’m walking through the forest, one way of enjoying nature is to be able to point to that tree and say, “Hey, that’s a that’s a birch, and that is a tamarack.” I get satisfaction as I walk through the woods by identifying these things, in admittedly anthro-human terms, to kind of pin them down by category and by species, so that they’re known rather than unknown. I’ve often wondered how we can have a relationship with nature without seeking to label it. And that’s something that may be the topic of another book.

  But I find myself, for example, when I go somewhere, and I don’t know what the plants are, I think, “Oh, I really wish I knew.” Then I wonder, why would it matter? How does it change the experience of being in nature, of opening our senses to the smells, sights and sensations? Why does it matter that we need to know what plant that is? I often try to figure out where that balance is. There’s no answer to that. It’s just interesting.

  Me: I heard that you may be working with one of my favorite authors (James Howe of BUNNICULA fame). Is it true? Can you talk about any other future projects you’re working on? What else can we look forward to seeing from you?

  Jack: It is true! I’m working with James on the picture book biography of the cellist YoYo Ma which he has written and I’m currently illustrating. That book is coming out probably in 2025. I’m also thrilled to report that James is a lovely celebrity and just the most open, engaged, and generous person to work with. This is actually my first illustration project where I’m illustrating someone else’s work, and getting to know that productive tension of working with an author, of coming together as two halves. So maybe the way he originally pictured the book in his head, is not exactly how I’m going to do it. I couldn’t have picked a better person to experience that for the first time with and be guided by because he’s such a veteran in the industry.

  Milo WalkingI also wanted to mention a book he released last November: MILO WALKING. It feels like a companion book to ALL THAT GROWS. Milo is another child character who is going on walks and noticing things in nature. It has James’s trademark wry sense of humor, something that ALL THAT GROWS sorely lacks. We didn’t know each other and yet we were both working on these books, both finished years before we started working together.

  After that project, I’ll be working on my next book with Scholastic, which isn’t a follow up or direct sequel to WHEN YOU CAN SWIM, but it is with the same amazing team: editor Andrea Davis Pinkney and Patti Ann Harris. It’s an unnamed project that we are looking for the same emotional impact. It’s a story that we haven’t quite nailed down yet, but it’s exciting to be working on that next.

  Congratulations on both of those projects. They both sound amazing. And thank you for stopping by my blog again today Jack.

  Dear readers, ALL THAT GROWS, releases tomorrow. Keep your eyes out for this one. It’s a quiet story that slowly grows to full bloom, just like learning something new. This is one you won’t want to miss.

• The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia website - https://writers.ns.ca/author-spotlights/author-spotlight-jack-wong/

  Author Spotlight: Jack Wong
  Author Spotlights
  Author/illustrator and NSCAD alumni Jack Wong has had quite a prolific year! With two picture books out in 2023 (When You Can Swim, Scholastic; and The Words We Share, Annick Press) and a third one coming in spring of 2024 (All That Grows, Groundwood Books), Jack has made a splash on the children’s literature scene to great acclaim. His accolades include receiving the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature for When You Can Swim, and a Blue Spruce Award nomination for The Words We Share. Jack has participated in competitive mentorships from Annick Press and Visual Arts Nova Scotia, and he spends his free time volunteering in the Reading with Newcomer Children program, an initiative of IBBY Canada. He will also be participating in the 2024 Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in New Brunswick. We were thrilled that he had time in his busy schedule to chat with us about his work.

  You’ve certainly been busy this past year! Have you had any chance to catch your breath?

  Not really! Releasing three books in the span of a year has been pretty intense. It wasn’t really planned that way: I had the opportunity to be interacting with three separate publishers, and their respective projects ended up landing at around the same time. It’s a great fortune, but I’m also living with the consequences! And publishing is of such a pace that you can do a course correction (e.g., have a better eye for scheduling future projects), but you’re kind of stuck with any decisions you already made for another three or four years.

  We’ve heard you describe yourself as a “Jack-of-all-trades.” After a varied career in several other fields, what made you turn your attention to writing and illustrating children’s books? And how have your previous life experiences prepared you for the task?

  I’ll skip over how I ventured into the arts from another career altogether (engineering) and pick up after graduating from NSCAD, when I spent several years struggling to find a means of artistic expression. I recall during that time several chance encounters with picture books that felt like the most moving and exciting aesthetic experiences I’d had in a long time — comparable to memorable moments at art galleries, for example — and deciding that that was the medium I wanted to work in, too. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that those chance encounters with children’s books came, in the first place, as a result of doing little projects with family and friends for their children.

  One thing I’ve learned, not from working in any field in particular but just from having tried so many things in general, is how not to worry about imposter syndrome. We can focus so much on not fitting some imagined standard and lose sight of the fact that, by dint of our own grab bags of individual life experiences, we’ll all invariably approach the same task slightly differently. That slight difference is all that any one of us, as artists, ever has to offer.

  It’s an impressive talent to be able to both write and illustrate a picture book. Do you start with the text first, or the illustrations? Or do you create them in tandem?

  At the beginning, when a story or idea is still just all in my head, I find that I’m thinking in both words and pictures. For whatever reason, I tend to grab at the words first, aiming to pin down a manuscript before attempting the illustrations. I think it’s mostly because it takes a lot more effort to be drafting with a sketchbook than with a word processor!

  For your debut picture book, When You Can Swim, you embarked on a promotional tour to schools in the United States, from North Carolina to California. What was it like to connect with your young audience? And what advice would you give to other kidlit writers preparing for school visits?

  The first school visit I ever did, I was introduced by this archetypal children’s librarian: the one with the sonorous, expressive voice and infectious energy that just commanded the whole room — and for a brief moment I was petrified, thinking, “Right, that’s how you address a room full of kids — was I supposed to be like that?” Thankfully, I realized pretty quickly that other people play their roles so that you can play yours: by doing what they did, that librarian had perfectly prepared their group to be ready and attentive for me to do my thing.

  My best advice is to be yourself and to be very well-prepared (which I hope isn’t paradoxical). I have a fairly small voice, but sometimes what actually results from that trait is a more intimate experience: at times, I can feel kids are on the edge of their seats just because of my hushed delivery. Being prepared allows me to play to my strengths: instead of just stumbling upon the moments where that effect is desirable, I try to have my script down to the exact words so I have opportunities for suspense or surprise built in.

  When You Can Swim is such a beautiful love letter to the joy of swimming! What do you enjoy most about swimming, and where is your favourite place to swim in Nova Scotia?

  Thank you! It may surprise some people that I actually find swimming kind of daunting and uncomfortable. Any time I swim outdoors, I need a big mental push to get in the water, even if I’m invariably glad afterwards that I took the plunge. If the book is successful in creating an encouraging yet empathetic tone towards swimming, it’s because I actually wrote it as much as a pep talk for myself as for the young reader.

  Though many places represented in the book are further afield (as far as Meat Cove at the northern tip of Cape Breton), my go-to place to swim is probably Chocolate Lake, which is just up the road from me. We live in such a beautiful place to have lakes dotting the landscape — kids here don’t know how lucky they are!

  The Words We Share will surely resonate with many newcomer families in which children often translate a new second language for their parents. Why was it important for you to write this story, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

  The Words We Share draws from my own childhood experiences, immigrating with my family to Canada from Hong Kong when I was six years old, then translating for my parents when I picked up English much more quickly than they did. I’m certainly thrilled at the prospect that kids who have similar experiences will feel seen by and represented in this book, but I also think that the higher service I can do is to make other kids see and understand them through story. For that reason, my focus was always to create a story that was engaging and entertaining and universal — the reader who doesn’t have lived experience of immigrating or translating should still be able to feel it’s a story for them, too.

  All That Grows is due to come out this spring, just in time for us all to get excited about digging into our gardens! Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect from this book, and what inspired you to write this story?

  All That Grows follows a boy learning about the natural environment when he starts helping his green-thumbed older sister in her garden. The more he hears about different plants, however (not to mention their seemingly arbitrary classifications as flower, vegetable, or weed), the more he becomes aware of how complex the world is, and the less he feels he knows — especially in contrast with his sister, who somehow seems to know everything.

  While this book has STEM appeal on its surface, I hope it succeeds in conveying larger things than the apparent subject matter. I wrote the story during the first months of the pandemic; for me, a child contending with a flood of received facts and judgements about the natural world serves as an analog for that period of time when what we learned from daily health briefings seemed to raise more questions than they answered, and reminded all of us that we really don’t know very much. How we resolve to move forward, in the face of uncertainty, is very much the underlying theme of the book.

  You’ve held several book launches at Woozles and seem to have a great relationship with their staff. How important is it to build relationships with booksellers? Any advice for authors who might be hesitant when it comes to self-promotion?

  I am extremely lucky to have the support of Woozles! While it’s been invaluable to have a relationship with my local children’s bookstore, I didn’t intentionally set out to build one. For a while, I was just that childless shopper who always felt sheepish browsing for hours at their old Birmingham Street location… It was such a relief that the staff (starting with long-time seller Nadine King) welcomed my presence just the same, and I was eager to meet their kindness. I think it helps when the professional relationships you need to forge are with those whom you admire anyway, and Woozles made that easy.

  I’ve personally found so much enrichment in reframing “self-promotion” as acts of expressing gratitude. It’s an incredible thing for any person to give their time and consideration to a book. All I’m really doing is either thanking the reader for having read it, or thanking them in advance for reading it in the future!

  What do you do when you have writer’s (or illustrator’s) block?

  I can’t say I’ve figured that out! I try to subscribe to the old adages: write anyway, everyday, so that you’re present when the good stuff arrives, etc… More often than not, however, I find I’m not so much blocked — I know I have an idea in my head — but the prospect of actually grabbing hold of it is so daunting. Over time, I’ve learned to place more and more faith in incremental improvement, and try to adopt the mindset and the conditions for that to happen. When I have to revise a piece of writing, I’ll give myself just an hour or so each day over a period of time, and each session I’ll completely re-type the previous day’s draft, whether I have anything in mind to revise or not. Each time, a few choices are made in the process, however minor, and the ball is advanced an inch closer to the goalpost. Of course, it helps that most of the things I write are very short!

  After your third book comes out this spring, are you going to take a break, or do you have any other projects on the go?

  I took a bit of time off for the holidays, but other than that, it’s nose-to-the-grindstone. Luckily I’m very excited about the next things! I’m currently illustrating a picture book on acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma (written by James Howe, author of Bunnicula and other classics), while working on early development for my next written-and-illustrated book with Scholastic.

• Quill and Quire - https://quillandquire.com/authors/jack-wongs-debut-is-a-poetic-ode-to-the-natural-world/

  Jack Wong
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  Author Profiles

  Jack Wong’s debut is a poetic ode to the natural world

  Jack Wong, a self-declared jack of all trades, makes his author-illustrator debut with When You Can Swim (Orchard Books, out now), which explores the joys that nature’s waters can bring. He also has two upcoming picture books, one slated for this fall and one for early next year. Interestingly, Wong’s path to children’s books wasn’t a straightforward one.

  As a child, Wong was keen on drawing and writing and showed aptitude in math and science. Following the direction of the adults in his life, who were educators, he took a practical approach to his future and completed studies in math and science followed by engineering. But during a backpacking trip through Europe Wong realized he had no interest in thinking about space or buildings. “That was a hard realization,” he recalls. “But it also came at a time when I was travelling, and I fell back in love with going to art museums and looking at art.”

  Wong left engineering behind and pursued his bachelor of fine arts at NSCAD University in Halifax. His fine-art skills led him to his first experimentation with children’s illustration, The Brightest Night. The gallery installation, combined with a series of live and online readings, was presented as part of Visual Arts Nova Scotia’s Mentorship Program Exhibition in 2020. “I was finding ways of drawing with detail and richness, but at the same time, not making it so overly realistic or overly bogged down that it didn’t still have that childlike joy and sparkle to it.”

  Illustration: Jack Wong

  It’s this joy that Wong brings to his picture book When You Can Swim, which was born out of the sketches he made and poetry he wrote sitting on the sidelines during camping and hiking trips with his wife and friends. “I was looking back at all these things I captured in nature, and the scenes and the passages about water just kind of jumped out at me,” Wong says. “Even more than that, it started turning itself into a book about swimming because it was so much about the water and the enjoyment of being in the water.”

  Each page shows the reader what can be experienced if they take a dive into natural waters – “landscapes as foreign as the moon” and a “million pebbles telling of countless days.” For Wong, who is not a particularly strong swimmer, When You Can Swim is about finding the courage to swim, finding the wonder that overcomes fears and anxieties. “It was neat because while I was writing this for a young reader, it was the pep talk I was giving myself to do more research, which involved swimming and getting into the water,” Wong says. “The fact that it’s an encouraging, uplifting book came about organically because it was actually what I needed.”

  The text, which was derived from the humble notes Wong took while in nature, came about organically, too. “The feeling comes in little phrases. Even if I were to try to flesh it out and do a full scene taking those little fragments I’d get in my head,” Wong says. “That little phrase that popped in my head while I was walking is great just the way it is, and I can’t even improve it.”

  Illustration: Jack Wong

  The aspect that Wong did improve upon was the illustration. Preferring to draw from life rather than photographs, Wong found his pastels difficult to handle on his excursions. So, he developed a new way of working: he took different mental notes while in nature and drew the scenes from memory back in the studio. “The overall purpose of that way of working is that even as you’re trying to replicate reality or replicate a natural phenomenon, it also goes through a transformation process,” Wong says. “You’re not getting it exactly like nature. You’re inventing little ways of translating what the real thing is. It permanently shaped what the pictures look like.”

  As is true for many immigrant families, Wong wasn’t exposed to camping or hiking as a child. It was after his move to Halifax, where nature lovers surrounded him, that he cultivated a relationship with the natural world. His experience as a first-generation Asian Canadian is part of all the work he does.

  Wong believes that swimming is something we have the agency and the right to discover, but is keenly aware that people of colour, Indigenous people, immigrants, and people of a lower income are all either actively discouraged or disadvantaged, or not able to see themselves swimming. For Wong, part of creating When You Can Swim, which depicts children of many different heritages and backgrounds, is “to allow them to see themselves in the book. In case they were ever made to feel otherwise, they can see someone like them enjoying swimming,” Wong says. “It’s not only about swimming, but also about being in nature. It’s about being encouraged to look closely and discover the wonder that’s everywhere.”

  Jack Wong: Nicola Davison

• Picture Book Builders - https://picturebookbuilders.com/2023/10/the-words-we-share-interview-with-jack-wong-a-giveaway/

  THE WORDS WE SHARE – Interview with Jack Wong & a Giveaway!
  Andrea Wang October 3, 2023

  Here’s the book description: “A young girl helps her dad navigate life in a new country where she understands the language more than he does, in an unforgettable story about communication and community.

  Angie is used to helping her dad. Ever since they moved to Canada, he relies on her to translate for him from English to Chinese. Angie is happy to help: when they go to restaurants, at the grocery store, and, one day, when her dad needs help writing some signs for his work.

  Building off her success with her dad’s signs, Angie offers her translation skills to others in their community. She’s thrilled when her new business takes off, until one of her clients says he’s unhappy with her work. When her dad offers to help, she can’t imagine how he could. Working together, they find a surprising solution, fixing the problem in a way Angie never would have predicted.

  A gorgeously illustrated picture book from up-and-coming author-illustrator Jack Wong that is at once a much-needed exploration of the unique pressures children of immigrants often face, a meditation on the dignity of all people regardless of their differences, and a reminder of the power of empathy.”

  Andrea: Welcome to Picture Book Builders, Jack! I love THE WORDS WE SHARE so much – as I said in my blurb for your book, “As a daughter who also translated for her parents, this book made me feel seen and cherished as part of a community.” Can you tell us what your inspiration was for this story?

  Jack: Hi Andrea! Thank you for having me, and thank you for offering a blurb for THE WORDS WE SHARE. It was a thrill to have you preview the book, and then such an honour to read your words.

  Many scenes in this book were inspired by my own childhood experiences: when my family moved from Hong Kong to Canada, both my sister and I (at ages 8 and 6, respectively), picked up English very quickly and translated for our parents in a variety of situations.

  Jack: In your blurb, you mention feeling “seen and cherished as part of a community” by the book… and I have to say that these feelings are shared by another reader: my big sis! Sharing this book with her was like “comparing notes” on our childhood memories; even though the plot is largely fictionalized, I was glad that some of the core emotions — like the way the main character Angie feels at turns proud, frustrated, and even wronged about having big responsibilities at a young age — were true enough to my sister’s experience that she can feel it’s her story, too.

  This is all the more special because my sister is now an ESL (English as a Second Language) assessment coordinator at her school board. Through her work, she interacts with children like her younger self, and perhaps a little bit like Angie. She even agreed when my publisher engaged her to write an educator’s guide for the book (lucky me, she’s the perfect person for the job!) In turn, I’m very proud of the position she holds as someone who lived through the experience of coming to a new country, and now stands to create positive experiences for others.

  I read in the author’s note for your book, Luli and the Language of Tea, that your parents played this role in their own ways after your family immigrated to the United States. Without ever having met them, I can still say a sincere thanks to them and countless others for having paved the way for those after them, like me.

  Andrea: How awesome that your sister is an ESL assessment coordinator and wrote the educator’s guide for you! Yes, both of my parents tried to help immigrants, either by teaching ESL or coaching them to take professional certification exams. They were great role models for me.

  The relationship between Angie and her dad is so wonderful. Angie has learned English at school while her father still struggles with the language. In the book, she says, “A lot of things are harder for Dad here in our new country.” She matter-of-factly goes about speaking and translating for her father, to delivery people, in restaurants, and at the store. The book captures another facet of the complicated immigrant experience that we perhaps don’t often see in books – that new and difficult situations can also beget empathy and humor. Was this a deliberate decision? Could you talk a little about your process while writing this book?

  Jack: I’m so gratified to hear that you enjoyed the relationship between Angie and her dad. During the lengthy revision process, my (brilliant) editor Katie and I kept coming back to the idea that this story is really about the love between a parent and child, before it’s ever about language, or immigration, or child-entrepreneurial mishaps.

  I’m technically what they call a “pantser” when it comes to writing — so the story’s development was never as neat and linear as I’m about to describe it — but it really came down to knowing my main characters first, then putting them into a scenario to see how they would react based on their individual personalities, and how they care for each other. The scenario happens to be moving to a new country and learning a new language, but the book is ultimately not just about those things. This mindset and approach was extremely important, in my mind, to crafting a story that might resonate with all readers, whether or not they’ve personally been touched by the experience of immigration or multilingualism.

  Jack: It’s also gratifying to hear you point out the moments of humour in the story! As a good example of what I mean in the above, I really felt that Angie would feel annoyed at her dad every once in a while — it can’t be happy-go-lucky all the time. My publisher and I were on the same page for the most part, but I had to push for Angie’s eye-roll to be extra when Dad is buying shampoo at the store (I’m glad I did, because multiple readers have said to me, “Yeah, I know that face!” and it’s their favourite illustration in the whole book!)

  Andrea: I confess to having rolled my eyes at my parents countless times! I love how you approach writing through “knowing [your] main characters first” and “seeing how they would react.” That’s a great way to incorporate emotional honesty.

  Andrea: There are a lot of layers in the book, both in the text and the art. For the text, you included Chinese characters for the Chinese speakers, with English translations in italics underneath. Sometimes the dad’s dialogue is only shown in italicized English, while Angie’s narrative and dialogue are shown in English. When Angie encounters another language barrier with Mr. Chu, the laundromat owner who speaks a different Chinese dialect than she does, there are no Chinese characters – he communicates “in his English, which is quick and jumpy.” Later, she describes his native speech as “musical sounds.” (I love that, btw!) Could you talk a little about your process of incorporating elements of language? What are you trying to convey to young readers?

  Jack: The biggest technical challenge of this story was incorporating the third language/dialect that one of the characters (Mr. Chu) speaks, which sets off the central external conflict. The story would almost benefit from having a voiceover soundtrack, so it’s crystal-clear who’s speaking in what language to whom!… but in lieu of that, it was important for me to be aware that what might make sense to me may not be self-evident to the reader. The best antidote was careful copyediting by fresh eyes (thank you to the many keen people, first critique partners, then the team at Annick Press, who did so!)

  Still, it drives home again why I felt the emotional arc of the story was more important than the narrative arc: if the reader can readily understand how Angie and her dad feel at each given point, that helps to bridge an understanding of what’s going on in the plot. For instance, a feeling that comes right at the climax is Angie’s confusion — given this, it’s alright if the reader feels, for the moment, a little confused too, before the specifics settle in. That, after all, is also part of the real experience of immigration and multilingualism!

  Andrea: A lot of times, I’m trying to be as clear as possible when writing, so it’s a great reminder that sometimes it’s okay if the reader is confused, too, as long as it relates to the story.

  Jack: Your question also touched on the other big theme I wish to convey to young readers. Where the book describes Mr. Chu’s accented English as “quick and jumpy”, I was originally going to write “warbled”. However, my eagle-eyed agent Wendi alerted me of an existing Chinese expression, 鸟语 (bird language), which can be used to pejoratively label Chinese dialects other than the speaker’s own; when I thought about it, “warbled” could indeed be read as derogatory, even before associating it with that expression!

  Implicit connotations like this were so important to carefully assess throughout — some of them, when they were purposeful, were intentionally kept, because the book is also about those implicit assumptions and judgments we all make. In the course of the story, the reader is challenged to encounter many characters who appear and act differently than they might expect, and hopefully they come to appreciate that there’s always more under the surface. This is the core of Dad’s arc, where we see that someone shouldn’t be written off simply for not having the means to communicate how we’re used to. It’s a universal idea that I hope any reader can take away from the story.

  Andrea: You’re not just the author, you’re also the illustrator. The illustrations in THE WORDS WE SHARE are fantastic. Yet they’re very different from your debut picture book, WHEN YOU CAN SWIM, which was published earlier this year and won the 2023 Boston Globe – Horn Book Award (congrats!!). What was your approach to the artwork in this book, and how did you settle on the style and media that you used?

  Jack: Thank you for the congratulations! It’s actually really interesting to compare notes with an author of multiple published books. You’ll have had the experience of your publisher painstakingly matching a different illustrator with each of your stories, given its subject and tone — as an author-illustrator, I’m actually stuck with just myself!

  Because WHEN YOU CAN SWIM and the current book have such different styles of writing, it was never a given that I should illustrate them the same way. Still, as a solo act, it’s hard enough to have one art style up your sleeve — I definitely didn’t have a second one. So the artwork in THE WORDS WE SHARE was the result of experimenting to find a whole new style for the story. That might explain the blend of traditional and digital media, which emerged from a kitchen-sink approach — I just kept throwing things at the wall until something stuck! The final art was created by first making swatches of texture and colour (with acrylic paint or with printmaking ink rolled on paper), and separately, line drawings in pencil or crayon, which were then all scanned and digitally collaged in Photoshop.

  Jack: I should note, with much admiration, that the process I just described happens even when you’ve hunted down the perfect illustrator for the job — at the best of times, the illustrator is still responding to the text and being pushed to new places. I loved reading the artist’s note for Watercress, where your collaborator Jason Chin describes how he brought influences of Chinese brush painting into his existing watercolour approach — but even more interesting is how he started off exploring in pastels! That must’ve been exciting to see develop.

  Andrea: I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had amazing illustrators for all of my books! I didn’t see a lot of Jason’s early sketches – just hints on his Instagram account. It’s interesting to think about how different a book Watercress would be if he had stuck with pastels or brush and ink. In your case, I think the kitchen-sink approach worked out great!

  In your author’s note, you explain how the Chinese version of the title translates to something like, “The Same Heart in Different Languages.” I honestly teared up a little reading that; it resonated so deeply with me. Could you tell our readers why you chose a title that is different from the English title, and what it means to you?

  Jack: I will have to tell my mother this — she was the one who created the Chinese title!

  I only have a conversational level of Chinese, which meant I needed the expert help of my mom and other good friends for the translations in the book. As someone who’s lived with both English and Chinese, I did have the implicit and subconscious expectation that the title couldn’t be translated directly… I suspect it comes from (often painful) experience, communicating with my family for example, that the more abstract ideas are typically not really translatable. Perhaps the final result resonated with you because some of this is baked right into the words “The Same Heart in Different Languages”! The title certainly means a lot of unexpressible, intangible things to me, too.

  The task that I gave to my mom was to come up with a four-character title — this is the standard form of Chinese idioms called 成语 (“chéngyŭ” in Mandarin, “sing yu” in Cantonese). Like idioms in English, most 成语 are of historical origins, but it’s also common practice to imitate their conventions, such as a symmetrical pairing of ideas (the first two of four characters typically form one idea, the latter two form its counterpart) and grammatical brevity (e.g. doing away with prepositions and conjunctions) to get to this really density compacted, poetic nugget. So I essentially handed her the Herculean assignment of inventing the perfect idiom to capture the story — and she delivered! To do so, she had to reflect on the story as a whole, not just the English title, which is why it’s almost more of an alternate title than a translation.

  Andrea: OK, coming up with an original chéngyŭ sounds nerve wracking. Kudos to your mom! And kudos to you on another amazing book! I’ve really enjoyed learning more about your process and THE WORDS WE SHARE. What’s next for you – do you have more projects in the pipeline?

  Jack: My next book, ALL THAT GROWS (Groundwood Books) recently went to press, and comes out in March 2024! I’m also working on illustrating a PB bio about Yo-Yo Ma (Abrams Books for Young Readers), written by the wonderful James Howe — it’s an honour to be gleaning so much wisdom from both the author and the subject of this project. Finally, I’m working on a second book for Scholastic, who published my debut WHEN YOU CAN SWIM. It’s still in its early stages, but is shaping up to again touch upon the immigrant experience, this time through a microcosmic look at one animal.

  But before I really get to all that, I’m having so much fun promoting THE WORDS WE SHARE! Though I now live on the east coast of Canada, I was raised in an area of Vancouver with a particularly large immigrant presence, so I felt it would be meaningful to return home to launch the book with events there (but really, it’s all an excuse to be the star visitor at my nieces’ school).

  Jack: In the US, the book comes out on October 10th, so a pre-order campaign is still on, with perks including a raffle for an original piece of art by yours truly — please check it out via my social media (Jacquillo_ on Instagram or Twitter)!

  Andrea: Wow, all of this sounds great. Plus an amazing pre-order prize! Jack, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation! PBB readers, don’t forget to pre-order from either Bookmarks or Linden Tree Books before October 9th to enter the raffle for Jack’s original art! Jack is also giving away a copy of THE WORDS WE SHARE to a reader — comment below by Tuesday, October 17th, to enter. This giveaway is open to both U.S. and Canadian readers. For more about Jack and his work, go to https://jackwong.ca/.

  JACK WONG is based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Jack creates stories indelibly marked by a first-generation Asian Canadian experience. His first book, When You Can Swim, won the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Picture Book Award.

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  Home Fiction picture book ALL THAT GROWS by Jack Wong
  ALL THAT GROWS by Jack Wong
  Andrea Wang March 19, 2024

  I love the first line of Jack Wong’s new picture book, ALL THAT GROWS. “Magnolias smell like lemon cake,” the protagonist informs the reader, recounting what his older sister has told him. It’s both an inviting and a surprising line — I found myself trying to remember what magnolia flowers smell like to me and if they really do smell like lemon cake, then why? Do the pollinators love lemon cake as much as I do? I’m immediately pulled into the protagonist’s world, which is lush and full of growing things — not just plants but also a growing sense of wonder.

  The boy’s older sister is a gardener and a naturalist. She shows him the beauty of the plant life around them and gives him interesting facts along the way. In this way, he becomes more observant of the natural world around him.

  She also enlists his help with her vegetable garden and the siblings pull weeds together. The boy discovers that seedlings of weeds are really hard to tell apart from vegetable sprouts. Even after his sister has given up on one patch, his curiosity makes him “keep watering it to see what grows.”

  He continues to wonder — “…why only some plants are called vegetables…”

  and “why we have to keep pulling up the new saplings that come from our neighbor’s Norway maples.” He’s a little reluctant to pull up both the dandelion leaves and the tree seedlings, thinking about how he likes yellow dandelion fields and how nice it would be to have a little forest of his own.

  His sister seems to have all the answers. But before the boy falls asleep that night, his curiosity leads him to bigger and bigger questions — what kind of tree is outside his window, how do we know which stars belong to which constellations, and mostly, how does his sister know so much? He doesn’t have the answers, but he realizes that he’s okay with that. The wondering is enough. When a plant with white flowers grows in the weedy part of the garden that his sister doesn’t recognize, she offers to look it up in one of her books for him. “Maybe later,” he says. “Right now, I ask her to help fetch more water for my garden.”

  That’s it. The last two lines of the book. It surprised me, just as the beginning line had. I wanted to know what the plant with the white flowers was. I wanted to know if it was edible or smelled like another kind of cake. I needed closure! So I asked Jack, “Would you say that the ending is a little ambiguous?” Here’s what he said:

  Jack: “So yes, when you said that the ending is ambiguous, I completely agree. That’s a really great way of describing it. And it really is key to the theme of the book, which I think is about a boy or a child discovering for the first time a level of complexity to the world that they weren’t aware of before. And in this boy’s case, it’s about plants and gardening and flora. But I think, metaphorically, it could apply to any time when a child, for the first time, invests themselves into an area of knowledge or an area of interest and passion and then realizes how big that thing is and how each thing they learn is kind of like a drop in the ocean. And the more things they learn, the more things they realize. The more they learn, the more they realize there is to learn, and the more they realize that there’s still more they don’t know. So, the book is really about this child recognizing that for the first time and understanding that there will always be things that we don’t know and can’t know. And it’s really how you deal with not knowing that counts. In this case, the ending of the book is the boy resolving that maybe it’s okay to live in uncertainty, to not know what the flowers are, but to tend to them, to see them grow, and to hold out that kind of open space for them. And so yeah, that really is part and parcel with the central theme of the book.”

  (Andrea here:) Personally, I find that the ending of a story can often be the most difficult part to write. As picture book writers, we’re often told to have the ending circle back to the beginning, or show how the conflict was resolved, or at the very least, answer any remaining questions. So I find Jack’s approach to be fascinating — he is able to leave the ending of the book open to interpretation because that is what the book is about. The journey towards the unknowable. Jack shared a little more about his process in crafting that ending:

  Jack: “Something I thought I might share is that even though I knew the ending should be open-ended and ambiguous. Ambiguity kind of speaks through its silence or speaks through the words it doesn’t say. So, it’s really, I felt, hard to get right, and the things I left out had the potential to have other meanings, or the few words that I could use had the potential to have different connotations.

  So the first version of the ending was actually, “Maybe there are more flowers out there than I’ll ever know. But this little bit of soil, that’s my garden.”

  So that was my original ending for it. We workshopped it with my critique partners a little bit. And it had this connotation of, “that’s my garden.” And “my garden” is still included in the final, but this version of it seemed to emphasize possessiveness. So what the boy seems to be learning is that it’s okay if he doesn’t know what the flowers are as long as he owns them or as long as it’s within his domain and that didn’t sound quite right.

  The second version of the ending was, “I asked my sister what the new flowers are.” / “Never seen those before,” she shrugs. / “I wonder what I’ll name them.”

  So this was the ending I had for a little while and it ended with “I wonder what I’ll name them,” and it seemed to open this idea that we might not know what something is and we can then apply our own judgments and our own interpretations. But it still seemed that it wanted to pin down exactly what something is and… kind of funneling down towards certainty rather than keeping that kind of openness towards uncertainty. So, I kind of liked the fact that he’ll invent his own name for the flowers, but it also wasn’t quite the right message. So the final ending is really about he doesn’t know what the flowers are. His sister offers to look them up, and maybe later they will because he is curious. But right now what the flowers need, or what he can do, is to tend for them, even despite not knowing exactly what they are.”

  (Andrea here again:) I love this peek into Jack’s thought process. And even though I’ll never know what those white flowers are in the boy’s garden, I’m okay with that now. They can be whatever I want them to be, or whatever any reader wants them to be, and that is, perhaps, the best ending of all.

  ALL THAT GROWS, written and illustrated by Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Jack Wong, released on March 5th and is available wherever you buy books.

  Jack Wong was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. He left a career as a bridge engineer to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in beautiful Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he now lives with his wife and two cats. All That Grows owes to all of the above — to taking the leap to learn new things, and to the sanctuary of big neighborhood walks in a small city, especially during the first spring of the pandemic when the sees of this book were planted. Jack is also the author and illustrator of When You Can Swim (Boston Globe–Horn Book Award) and The Words We Share.

• NSCAD University website - https://nscad.ca/governor-general-literary-award-winner-jack-wong-talks-about-his-path-from-engineer-to-artist/

  Governor General Literary Award-winner Jack Wong talks about his path from engineer to artist
  November 27, 2023
  Author-Illustrator Jack Wong
  There are two stories Jack Wong tells to explain his journey from engineer to children’s author: One rises out of the types of projects he worked on in his hometown of Vancouver leading up to the Olympics circa 2008. “A lot of those projects were controversial—relocating vulnerable populations, widening all the highways to increase vehicle capacity, perhaps at the expense of public transit,” he says. “Outside of my job, when conversations came up about what I did, I found myself avoiding questions about it. It was troubling that I was lying about my work, not because I knew what I was doing was negative, but because I didn’t have the critical capacity to actually form an opinion. When I started having those feelings, I knew I was in trouble.” The other is how when he was a kid, he excelled at both drawing and math, leading grown-ups around him to urge him towards an architecture career. When he graduated engineering school, he visited Europe with the intent to draw iconic structures en plein air to create an architecture portfolio, “then had the realization… I didn’t actually like buildings! For so long I’d gone on other people’s assessment of me based on aptitude alone.” he says. “I went to Europe telling everyone I was preparing to apply to architecture school, and I came back wanting to go to art school.”

  He moved to Halifax in 2010 to pursue his BFA at NSCAD. His debut children’s book, When You Can Swim, received both the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award. His third book, All That Grows, is out in March and can be pre-ordered now wherever you buy books (Wong likes Woozles in Halifax).

  What made you choose NSCAD from the other side of the country?

  I wanted to shake things up—I’d lived in Vancouver most of my life. In February of 2010 I went to Portfoilo Day at NSCAD and visited the other campuses in major cities. Halifax was the most different I could get while still being in Canada. I loved it as soon as I got here. After the visit, Bryan Maycock sent me a hand-calligraphed postcard telling me to apply to NSCAD. I ultimately took Foundation Drawing with him, and had the pleasure of working with him for several years at the NSCAD Drawing Lab.

  I can’t even imagine the differences between engineering and art school.

  It’s so night and day in every aspect. I went from a lecture hall with 100 students and never finding anything in common with the person in front of the class, to having instructors that encouraged one-on-one interactions. If I had any questions, I had someone to talk to. Having professors to go to not only for the content that’s being conveyed in the class, but everything outside of it—from career-planning to getting settled in Halifax.

  And what were your career goals?

  I came into NSCAD with a fairly conventional view of being someone who made painting or drawings for galleries. By third year, a lot of those ideas were challenged and I also found it a lot of fun to work in installations and performance art. So at the end of NSCAD I was thinking about everything from making imagery to being a curator and finding my place in the artist-run centre ecosystem.

  Cover of Jack Wong's book When You Can Swim.
  Cover of Jack Wong's Governor General Literary Award winning book, When You Can Swim.
  Do you have kids?

  No.

  So how did you end up a children’s book author and illustrator?

  As you get older you have more kids in your life, so I was reading to my nieces or friends’ kids. And several chance encounters I had with kids’ books were some of the most impactful aesthetic experiences I’d had in a long time—just by opening a kids’ book I had a private gallery in my hands.

  Do you physically draw the illustrations or is it a digital process?

  I am physically drawing for a lot of it. Making art at an institution like NSCAD is so cerebral, and yet it’s still just about getting materials to cooperate at the end of the day. How the physical world isn’t behaving in ways you want it to—paint isn’t drying the right way—always served as some sort of indirect but profound parallel for the problems we face as a whole: a housing crisis, for example, needs to be solved politically and intellectually but we can’t forget that it’s fundamentally physical when someone doesn’t have a place to lie their head. I’m not saying digital takes away the real-world connection, but I’m always reluctant to put away the physical aspect because of the way it speaks to something larger. If I didn’t have that in my practice—if I wasn’t just constantly frustrated at a layer of paint not being opaque enough or something—I don’t know what else I would have!

• The Needle and the Knife - https://www.theneedleandtheknife.com/home/2024/3/5/a-conversation-with-jack-wong

  Mar
  13
  A Conversation with Jack Wong
  creator conversations

  Jack Wong, photo by Nicola Davison

  Jack Wong (黃雋喬) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. In 2010, he left behind a life as a bridge engineer to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in Kjipuktuk / Halifax, Nova Scotia; he has called the east coast of Canada home ever since.
  A self-declared actual Jack-of-all-trades, he has also tried his hand at bookkeeping, teaching art, managing a psychology research lab, and running his own bicycle repair shop, just to name a few—a real education for creating children’s books, if you ask him!
  Working as a children’s author/illustrator, Jack seeks to share his winding journey with young readers so that they may embrace the unique amalgams of experiences that make up their own lives.
  Jack’s debut picture book, When You Can Swim (Scholastic), received the 2023 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in Picture Books, the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature – Illustrated Books, and was a finalist for the Ezra Jack Keats Award. His second picture book, The Words We Share (Annick Press), is currently a nominee for the Ontario Library Association’s Blue Spruce Award. His other forthcoming titles include All That Grows (Groundwood, 2024), and an untitled picture book biography on acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma (with author James Howe, Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2025).
  I’m so excited to share my conversation with Jack, who I believe is one of the strongest, most interesting picture book makers working in Canada today. Both his writing and his illustrations reflect a deep commitment to craft and artistry and an immense respect for his readers. Given that he is currently busy launching his beautiful, much anticipated new book, All That Grows, I was so honored that he made the time to speak with me, and I’ve been thinking about our conversation and the candid, thought-provoking insights he shared ever since.
  While my recent interviews and features have mostly been conducted via email, this one takes me back to my earlier practice of speaking with creators over Zoom. As a result, it’s a bit of a longer, looser read, but I so hope you won’t let that stop you from diving in. And if you don’t yet know Jack’s warm and wonderful work, I hope you’ll seek it out. With the daffodils and chives just beginning to poke their heads out of the dirt, this would be a perfect time to share All That Grows with the budding gardeners and naturalists in your life. Signed copies are available from Jack’s beloved local kid’s bookstore Woozles. Regular copies are available everywhere, but of course Jack and would encourage you to find it at your local independent bookstore if you can!
  Ok, let’s jump in!
  KJL: I love your idea of structuring this as a conversation about our plant books, but is it ok if we start with a few rapid-fire questions as a warm up?

  JW: Okay.

  KJL: What picture book was most important to you as a kid? What’s your favourite picture book currently?

  JW: (Laughing) That’s not a rapid fire question!

  KJL: It totally is.

  JW: I didn’t have one. I’ve been thinking more about this recently. After a while of being, like, did I just not have good reading habits as a kid? I realized that because I immigrated with my family when I was six, and there was this whole time of—I don’t want to call it chaos— but just a lot of stuff going on, I think I missed picture books. I went from whatever I was reading in Hong Kong, which I don’t remember at all, to trying to read as many early readers and chapter books as I could. So, I have these gaping holes in my picture book knowledge.

  My favourite picture book now is called Stories of the Night. It’s by a French Belgian author-illustrator named Kitty Crowther.

  KJL: I don’t know that one.

  Obviously I immediately ordered Stories of the Night. When someone like Jack gives you a book recommendation, you don’t sleep on it!

  JW: It’s three fairy tale-like stories that are written in a style that’s all her own. Whenever I feel like I’m too caught up thinking about what everyone else is doing, I just look at that book and think about how she very clearly did something completely her own.

  KJL: I love that answer. That’s a great rapid-fire answer! Next question: What’s your favourite hour of the day to write?

  JW: Around 8 o’clock.

  KJL: At night, or in the morning?

  JW: In the morning.

  KJL: Do you tend to work for the full day, or you do an hour or two and then a take a break and do something else?

  JW: So, now that I work full-time as an author-illustrator, it’s fairly regimented. I have to do the writing and illustrating before everything else under the big umbrella of ‘administration,’ which is just managing your own career and business. I feel like the administrative monster is always trying to grab your attention— that reply you should send to an email because you don’t want to keep the person waiting. Whereas your book is always a deadline five months from now, so it always gets pushed down the line. So, I have a very regimented drawing block in the morning, then an administrative block in the middle of the day, and then another writing and drawing block in the afternoon.

  Jack in his studio.

  KJL: This next one is a two part question. Part one: coffee or tea?

  JW: Coffee.

  KJL: Correct! Part two: what snacks do prefer while you’re writing?

  JW: When I’m working, I go into this state where I often forget to eat and come out of it extremely hungry. So, I don’t really snack, but when it comes time for breakfast and lunch, I’m famished. Recently, I’ve gotten really into grits. I visited New Orleans for the first time last year and had shrimp and grits, and it was the best, so now I’m trying to replicate it for breakfast.

  KJL: Nice. Ok, next question: If you could have an imaginary dinner party with any three people from the book or art world, who would they be?

  JW: Are we talking just the living?

  KJL: Any, living or dead.

  JW: Okay, I shouldn’t have asked that, because I’d have been fine with just the living, then I would have had a small pool to choose from. Hmmm. . . . Kitty Crowther, the author of the book I mentioned earlier. And then Annemarie MacDonald and Toni Morrison.

  KJL: Very nice. Okay, last rapid fire question: Is there a type of book or medium that you haven’t made yet that you’d love to tackle?

  JW: I want to do a graphic novel, but I don’t want to draw a whole graphic novel, so I was starting to toy with idea of doing a hybrid that’s half graphic novel and half chapter book. Like, with the prose on one side of the page and graphic panels on the other.

  KJL: That’s such a cool idea. The illustrations in your second book The Words We Share make sure beautiful use of a graphic style, with that inked linework. I would be so excited to see a book where you moved further into that world.

  Jack’s book The Words We Share is currently a finalist for the Blue Spruce Award, part of the Ontario Forest of Reading program.

  JW: I also want to do a community project at my local community center.

  KJL: Amazing! Do you have a specific project in mind?

  JW: Yeah. It’s kind of a secret invention that I want them to be involved in, so I can’t say too much.

  KJL: That’s ok. I like that it’s a secret. Ok, let’s move on to talking about your new book, All that Grows, which launches so soon, and is unbelievably beautiful. As I mentioned your last book, The Words We Share utilized more of a comic style of illustration, whereas this book returns to something closer to your first book, When You Can Swim. Not that the art is the same— this book is pastel, while When You Can Swim was paint, I think?

  Jack’s first book, When You Can Swim, one the 2023 Governor General’s award, the 2023 Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and is a finalist for the 2024 Ezra Jack Keats Award. Like, no big deal.

  JW: When You Can Swim had pastel and some watercolor.

  KJL: How do you choose what medium and illustration style you’re going to use for each of your projects?

  JW: I have this rule for myself— rules you make for yourself are the worst, because they’re arbitrary, but once you set them, you forget they’re arbitrary. I really like each book to not be limited by what I’ve done before, partly out of a kind of artistic pursuit of finding the right medium for the right story, and then partly, again, because it’s a rule I’ve set for myself, which I really should ditch one of these days if it doesn’t work out. So, that explains in part why the three books I’ve put out so far are in three different styles.

  When You Can Swim is a very gentle text about the splendor of nature, so I wanted a style that captured that. The Words We Share is so much more about the characters going about their day, and that line work and kind of comic style matches the speed that they’re going at. The backgrounds are a little less the star of the images.

  The style of All That Grows, as you said, is kind of like When You Can Swim, but also a little different. It’s a bit looser. That was for two reasons. One was that the looseness goes with this sort of Springtime haziness, the light you get in late winter that’s still very low. Things aren’t very sharp and defined yet. Secondly, thematically speaking, the character is dealing with a lot of things he’s unsure about, so the looseness kind of fits that as well. Whereas, in When You Can Swim, there’s a lot of certainty, at least for the speaker of the story—they’re telling the child, these are some of the things you’ll find, and they’re beautiful, and they’re waiting for you.

  KJL: That actually touches on something else I was going to ask about. I love that in this new book, the character goes on a journey, not from uncertainty to certainty, but from uneasy with uncertainty to a comfort with it. In the middle of the story, there’s this beautiful spread where they’re laying in bed fretting about how their sister knows all of these things about plants that they don’t know, wondering how a person is supposed to learn it all. But by the end of the story, we see the character ask the older sister a question about the plants, and the older sister says they could look it up, but they decide they’re fine to just wait and see what happens.

  JW: Yeah.

  KJL: Thinking about what you said about the adult narrator in When You Can Swim having this tone of certainty, it makes me think about how there’s this dynamic in that book of a parent or other caring adult supporting a child while the child tries a new thing, something that pushes their boundaries maybe. Like, the child is making a leap, but it is bumpered by this reassuring adult voice that gives a sense of safety.

  All That Grows is different in a way that reflects the difference between the parent/child relationship and the sibling relationship. The character is desperate to know everything the big sister knows about plants, but then, in the end, they develop a different relationship to the natural world, one that’s all their own. They are more interested in observing in wonder while the lives of plants unfold around them.

  JW: Yeah, yeah.

  KJL: It’s really lovely. Did you start out wanting the story to land there, or was that something you ended up with as the result of process?

  JW: It came from real experience. In this case, the story and how I wanted to tell it kind of developed hand in hand. I’m really gratified and thankful that you’re immediately talking about these themes, because of of the ways in which a book like mine—and yours as well—could be marketed is in terms of its STEM appeal, how kids can learn about plants and all the better if there’s a bunch of back matter. Whereas for me, it was always about the emotions around being a beginner.

  In this case, my real life inspiration also became the subject for the book. My wife is the gardener in our family, but she’s also fairly new to it, so I watched her learn to deal with the complexity of it. You think you need to learn about one thing, like the growth cycle of a tomato, but then you have to worry about companion plants, and plants that shouldn’t be planted together, and it just balloons into 10 other things you never realized you didn’t know. So, I saw her having that experience and then I also had that experience more directly myself when we would walk the neighborhood and she was able to tell me things about the plants we saw. So, it’s a combination of my perspective as a learner, and watching her as a learner. In any case, it’s a story that uses gardening and natural flora as it’s entry point, but it’s really about an emotional learning topic. Which is why I thought we’d get a great conversation, because I saw all those elements in Beatrice and Barb, too. I was curious, for example, if you learned something about Venus flytraps and then as you were developing a story about it, the emotional learning subject matter came about. Or did it happen the other way around? Did you have this emotional subject matter you wanted to drive home—which I believe can be crudely summarized as the difference between The Golden Rule and The Platinum Rule, where Golden Rule is treating people as you’d want to be treated and The Platinum Rule would be treating people they’d like to be treated—and you were just looking for a vehicle for it?

  KJL: That’s such a great question. I think the answer is neither. It sort of started as a visual joke that popped into my head. My kids have always loved to name and anthropomorphize things. Like, I remember once being asked to make clothes for a Pyrex measuring cup named Susan. When my oldest daughter was a toddler, I thought it would be a fun project for us to cultivate a sour dough starter together. We talked a lot about how it was alive. She named it Toot, and started to talk to it like a pet. This image popped into my head of a kid taking their pet sourdough starter for a walk. I thought it might be a funny premise for a book. I quickly realized, though, that a blob of beige dough wouldn’t be that dynamic in terms of illustrations. So I started thinking about house plants as an alternative. Fly traps seemed like an obvious choice, because they seem more animal-like than another plants, so I started researching them and was blown away by how fascinating they are. They’re only native to one habitat in the Carolinas. It’s area where there are a lot of forest fires, so the soil is depleted and ashy and the water is very acidic, so, they’ve developed this extraordinary evolutionary mechanism that allows them to survive in this very difficult landscape. The flip side of that is that is they struggle under the conditions where normal plants would thrive. So, the emotional core became that idea that caring for someone requires you to really know and understand them for who they truly are, not whom you assume them to be.

  Which is a long winded way of saying that I didn’t come to the story as a flytrap expert, or with a clear message I was trying to convey; those things both evolved organically through the writing, which is what I prefer. Honestly, I’m still not an expert. I would call myself, a flytrap enthusiast. I’ve never really figured out how to keep them alive. It’s a bit of an open secret that I’ve killed so many Barbs in the last four years.

  KJL: One thing I’ve been thinking about is this fundamental way in which your character’s journey is different from mine’s. My protagonist, Beatrice, is on a journey to become a caregiver for her plant in the same way one would care for a domestic animal or another person, which is to say having to take responsibility for that being, being precise and responsive in meeting their needs. On the other hand, you story deals with wild fauna, and with gardening, which is sort of this liminal space where wild and domestic landscapes push up against each other. Because of this, it is more a story about that ethic of uncertainty and experimentation and curiosity, which is related in that it’s still about care and paying close attention, but it’s also a different thing. With a house plant, there are rules that must be followed or your plant will die, and it will essentially be your fault. Your character, on the other hand, gets to wait and see what nature does on it’s own.

  JW: That’s interesting. The idea of a garden being like a borderland between those two worlds, the wild and the domesticated. At the end of the story, my character is making a choice to move a little more into the wild, both figuratively and literally.

  But another thing that was really interesting as you were talking about the Venus flytrap is that you were a beginner. And as you were learning about them, the story was growing in your head at the same time. And that was really quite similar to my experience. For example, learning that our neighbors maples are actually an invasive species. That made it into the book. The story comes from a place of non-expertise. A lot of writers, I can only assume, would feel like they can’t write about a thing unless they’re an expert about the topic, but there’s a lot of activity that happens in the act of learning. That’s where the factual stuff in both of our stories feeds the emotional content. I don’t know if that rings true to you. Does it?

  KJL: It definitely does. When I was reading your story, I was also thinking about my own trajectory with plants, and how, when I first wrote my story, I was in a very place in my life. I had just bought my first home and had my first baby. I was thinking a lot about the value of domestic tasks, and of care work in particular, how it involves really, profoundly understanding who the being in front of you is, what they need. Really watching and listening. In the years since, I have had another child, who is about to turn nine. We got a dog along the way, and he is a very anxious, neurotic soul who requires a lot of patience. I have also begun caring in a significant way for my parents as they age. So, my life is full of care work, and I feel like, most days, I do it pretty well. But I’ve also learned that there’s a limit to how many living things I can take responsibility for on that level. I no longer have the bandwidth to have that kind of relationship with plants.

  JW: Hmm. Yeah.

  KJL: When we started out in this house, I built these big raised veggie beds, and I was learning about companion planting, and I was going out every morning to water and weed. And it all seemed so easy. I didn’t understand that part of the reason I was having so much success was that the soil was fresh, and the truly annoying pests like currant worm and squash beetle hadn’t had a chance to establish themselves yet. I was a little smug about it all. And then the years go by, and the soil deplete, and the pests start to overwinter in the soil and suddenly your kids are in 78 extracurricular activities, and your aging parents have so more needs, and suddenly I felt like the whole things was so stressful. I felt so bad about having written this book about the beauty of caring for plants when I had become such a neglectful gardener.

  But, I live in a suburban neighborhood that has lots of green spaces. We’re right on the Grand River and I walk my anxious dog three times a day.

  JW: Mmm.

  KJL: What I’ve become interested in is watching how these wild plants change day to day, how these common place weeds that we never see grow to their full scale in our gardens because we pull them out can take over an empty lot and grow into these towering, majestic things. I’ve become more and more like your character.

  JW: Yeah, yeah.

  KJL: I find so much peace, now, being part of an experience of plants that is bigger than me, that goes on with or without me. I can just be a witness.

  JW: That’s how I like to relate to plants.

  KJL: Did you grow up with plants? Were you parents gardeners?

  JW: My parents were gardeners in a very specific, cordoned off, partitioned kind of way. There was a little garden in the back, but as a kid, I don’t think I even knew about it. I knew the back of the garden was where they would spend an hour every once in a while. And I knew that my mom liked flowers, and she would plant them in the front of the house. But, yeah, they took it on as more of a chore. I don’t want to say they didn’t approach it with joy, because they might have, but they never had enough of a surplus of joy to share with us, at least.

  KJL: Shifting gears, I wanted to talk a little bit about how your frame your images, how you move your camera in this story. There’s a wonderful shot where the character is in bed looking at the window. They occupy one side of the frame, and they’re sort of in shadow. The other side of the frame is taken up by these gorgeous shafts of moonlight. Something about the way it’s framed seems to give it such emotional power. It’s a moment where, it seemed to me, the character was feeling small in a big world. Towards the end, you have this gorgeous arial view of the garden. Because of the perspective, the sisters look almost the same size. The protagonist is walking very confidently, and we see that she has come into her own in the garden space. Can you talk a little bit about your process for how you come up with, for lack of a better term, your shot list?

  JW: I’m going to use that. I’m going to refer to it as a shot list from now on. I do use the language of cameras and shots quite a lot. With all three of my books, I’ve approached it first and foremost, from the fact that it really brings me a lot of pleasure to find the right view. Let’s say I’m drawing a scene with a tree. I can either draw it from the ground looking up at the big tree, or I can drop within the tree and look down at a tiny character on the ground. Both of those images actually do speak of a big tree. And I would draw both, or multiple variations of both, and just one of them will feel more right than he rest. That brings me a lot of satisfaction.

  There will be key scenes that I’m really called to do in a certain way, and then with the rest of the scenes, I won’t have a strong a feeling that, intrinsically, it should be done this way or that way. I just ended up varying it so I end up checking off boxes. I want to make sure I mix it up so there aren’t two scenes in a row that are too similar. So, once those key scenes are in place, the rest kind are kind of decided by process of elimination.

  KJL: I see.

  JW: I do want to get a way from that a little bit. Not to worry so much if, for example, two spreads in a row are repeating a certain way of framing if it just really works for both spreads. I don’t want to get so caught up about making sure that it is so consistently varied. The way you’re nodding makes me thing you get what I mean, about reaching a point where you’re just checking off boxes.

  KJL: I think writing the text for a picture book can start to feel like that for sure. You’re thinking about which spreads you’ve created lend them selves to single spreads, to doubles, to spot illustrations. You ask yourself if you’ve distributed those in a satisfying way. Or, maybe you have places where there are little cliff hangers that propels the reader to turn the page, and you want to make sure you’ve spread those out—that you’re not over playing that trick. Even though I don’t create the images, and I try really hard not to overload my manuscripts with illustration notes, I’m constantly thinking about what kind of shots I’m implying, or inviting the illustrator to create. Which seems, now that I’m saying it out loud, a little sneaky. I might be better off to think less about that. I don’t know.

  I so wish I had any illustration talent at all. I sometimes get eaten up with jealousy about the moves that author/illustrators are able to make. I consciously seek out interviews by creators who are true masters of writing text-only manuscripts—people like Mac Barnett—who make such an art out of leaving space for the illustrator and also for the reader. Consciously reflecting on the special beauty of that collaborative relationship between author and illustrator, the magical leap of faith that is required of non-artists, is my way of dealing with the fact that I am not in control of the full artistic process.

  JW: The next book I’m working on is a picture book biography of the Yoyo Ma, written by author James Howe. It’s the first book that I’m illustrating that I didn’t write.

  KJL: And how are you finding that?

  JW: A lot of author-illustrators will talk about, well, what you were saying about this thing where they have full authorial direction of the thing, and it becomes this kind of masterpiece of word and text together. For me, even though I think I achieved what I set out to do with all three of my previous books, I don’t think they relied very heavily on that sort of directorial mode. It wasn’t until I started illustrating this next book, written by somebody else, that I started to understand certain things, like the distance between what the words on the page say and what the images show. It seems to be the case that a lot of author-illustrators figure that out while they’re working on their own projects. They’ll want to write half of the scene and then illustrate the other half, and that’s how they’ve arrived at this kind of synergy. For me, for my first couple of books, I would say I probably did illustrate just what the words said a little more than I could have, and it wasn’t until I’m illustrating a book for someone else that I finally have a productive tension between words and images. It’s a beautiful text. I’m in a kind of adversarial relationship with this text, where so much of what I can draw isn’t in the the text, and struggling with that is what has really taught me how to enter that mode of illustrations telling their own story.

  KJL: It’s like you’ve unlocked a new level of artistry.

  JW: Yeah. For some reason I wasn’t able to crack that nut while I was just working on my own books.

  KJL: I love that term you just used—productive tension. I feel like so much of picture book writing is just calibrating the tension between opposing elements and impulses. Even, for example, that balancing act between a sort of poetic compression, where every word must earn its place, and the desire to maintain a sense of looseness, a feeling of spaciousness and ease. Whenever I’m struggling to crack a text, it’s usually because I’m trying to get that balance right. You’re always pulled in two different directions. Which is what makes it such a maddening form to master, but also why, when it works, it’s magically able to do so much more than 400 or 600 words should be able to do.

  JW: Yes.

  Before we end, can I ask you one more question?

  KJL: Of course.

  JW: So, in the case of All That Grows, the place of not being an expert was a really nice space from which to generate a story, but it’s kind of scary, because one of these days, this book is going to be in front of a gardener. I started to think, what if this is all stupid and inaccurate, and whatever. So, it took me a while to step out and be able to find the quote-unquote community that this book belongs to, or to identify with that community. Because my wife is a gardener, she had a connection with the local urban community farm. The final scene is that overhead shot of the garden you mentioned earlier. Each bed has recognizably different things growing in it. I drew up a garden plan, and I ran it by the director of the community garden. She gave me suggestions based on what time of year this was supposed to be depicting. I told her this scene is happening in July, and asked her all sorts of questions about how tall things would be, whether there would be fruit yet, and so on. She was so generous and answered all those questions.

  I was really curious because I saw in your Instagram post about how you had the involvement of, I believe, Gold Leaf Botanicals. I wondered whether that was a community that you were already connected to, or an expert who was already invested in the subject matter of your book? Did you already know them, and if not, what was the process for reaching out?

  KJL: I did a few different launch events at different independent book stores and libraries, but my main launch was at my local branch. I knew I wanted to do something really special for that one, something involving a community partner. I had this idea that a local plant shop might come and do a pop-up shop, so that any families that wanted could purchase a small plant pet of their own to take home. Even though I have bought a lot of plants at local greenhouses over the years, I had never been into Gold Leaf Botanicals. I really loved their Instagram account, though, because they had such a focus on plant education, and seemed so community minded.

  So, I went into the shop with my youngest kid, intending to ask them if they wanted to partner with me, but I chickened out and just bought a plant. I did that a few times, and then finally got up the courage to ask. That was a really important aspect of launching my first book—learning to be braver and more resilient, to risk people saying ‘no.’ I don’t tend to be great at that stuff, but if you publishing a book, particularly with an indie publisher, you have to be willing to shout about your work.

  Jack: For sure.

  KJL: So, I finally did pitch them the idea of doing a pop-up shop, and they said “yes,” which was such a relief. But then I didn’t really hear from them for a while. I started worrying that maybe they weren’t going to come through. Then, on the big day, Brian showed up with 60 fly traps, which he gave out for free to every single kid. It was magic. I didn’t know before I put this book out what a draw carnivorous plants would be for kids. Seeing their joy and awe that they got to take a real, live flytrap home was my favorite launch memory.

  Now, as the release of my next book creeps slowly closer (so slowly!), I have started to figure out what the flytrap factor is going to be for this one. What is the thing I’m going to hang the presentation or the class visit on? Do you think about that?

  JW: I’ve been lucky enough that for each book, I landed somewhere that I’m comfortable with. I won’t say they’re amazing presentations, but I have battles, like, being comfortable enough to stand up there and do your spiel and not feel like, ‘this is stupid.’ I’ve only been doing this for a little bit, but I always feel that the presentation is this opportunity to do the thing you’re not supposed to do when you write the books, which is to tell people what it’s supposed to be about! You’re supposed to stay mum on that, and I’ve always thought presentations were this kind of amazing loophole where you have this captive audience with kids and you get to tell them how to interpret your book.

  So, with that in mind, for When You Can Swim, I talked a lot about how I’m actually not a very strong swimmer, and how I was able to write the book anyways. So, again, I really like driving home the point that you don’t really have to be an expert to share something as long as you share authentically. Because, as we’ve talked about, that book ended up having this adult narrator who provides a tone of assurance, but it’s also also so tentative, and it’s able to capture this tentativeness. I hope the trepidation of being at the edge of the water comes through, because that’s how I felt about it myself. I tell my audience that the book would be a very different book if it was made by someone who likes to jump into the water any chance they get with no inhibitions. And that other book would be valid for that person; what’s important is to stay true to that and not pretend.

  So, in that presentation, I tell them a little bit about that before I start reading and I asked them to guess which of the scenes was extra scary for me. I told them one them was so scary, I almost didn’t want to do it it, and it’s the scene where they’re jumping off the bridge. As I’m reading, I hear all these gasps of kids thinking they’re too excited to keep it in that they think this is the one because I said I’m gonna ask them afterwards.

  For All That Grows, again, I get to tell people what the book is about, so for the presentation, I really don’t focus on plants. I focus on being a beginner. I have them write down one thing they really want to learn, but is kind of overwhelming. Before I do this, we talk about the word overwhelming, what it means, what those big feelings are like. So, they write that down, and then we do a bunch of exercises about the things they are experts about. Then it comes around full circle, being able to say “look at how you’re experts of all these things, whether it’s math, or Roblox, or Minecraft, or whatever it is. Then they kind of draw the line line between this new thing and the thing they’ve already experienced, and all the feelings that once came with being a beginning.

  I found it kind of interesting when I landed on this approach. I really didn’t want to do a presentation about plants-- about how to draw a dandelion or design a garden. That didn’t seem true to me.

* WONG, Jack. All That Grows. illus. by Jack Wong. 32p. Groundwood. Mar. 2024. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781773068121.

PreS-Gr 2--Dreamy, earth-toned pastel drawings and quiet, spare text are used to great effect in this lovely book about a boy's curiosity and wonder about the natural world. A boy and his older sister, both with brown skin, are shown walking around their neighborhood smelling magnolia blossoms, admiring a quince tree, and gathering a bunch of daffodils. Then it's off to her garden to weed out the crabgrass and clover, while leaving the fledgling vegetable sprouts to continue growing. Through it all, the boy wonders why some plants are vegetables, some flowers, and others weeds, and how his sister knows so much. (When they encounter an unknown plant, the sister offers to look it up in one of her books--a novelty in this digital age!) The pictures are almost cinematic, as the point of view changes from page to page: the characters are shown from above, below, up-close, far away, and as shadowy outlines in one spread, perhaps reflecting the boy's journey from wonder to experience. A delightful addition to any library's collection, perfect for those with an interest in plants and gardening. VERDICT A thought-provoking book about the joys of the natural world, with a sprinkling of kid-friendly philosophy; this gentle book could be slipped into the gardening shelves or left out for browsers as curious as the main characters.--Sue Morgan

KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | BL Bilingual | SP Spanish

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Morgan, Sue. "WONG, Jack. All That Grows." School Library Journal, vol. 70, no. 3, Mar. 2024, p. 75. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786340652/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9a35e9fc. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

* All That Grows

By Jack Wong

PICTURE BOOK

A boy and his sister wander their quiet neighborhood and admire the life bursting into color around them. The boy's sister tells him about the burgeoning flowers and trees they pass, dropping small seeds of curiosity that take root in the boy's mind.

As the season blooms into summer, the siblings tend to a garden. Though the boy loves to help his sister nurture and weed the vegetable patch, he also ponders the weeds themselves: Why are some plants cultivated, while others are yanked from the ground before they're given a chance to thrive?

Award-winning author (When You Can Swim) Jack Wong's All That Grows (Groundwood, $19.99, 9781773068121) is a delicate but powerful ode to curiosity and the delights to be found in the natural world. There is an eloquent simplicity to the story and its contained focus. Wong's narrator, the unnamed boy, is quiet and thoughtful as he describes his surroundings and experiences in vivid, sensory ways: "Overnight, the trees go from bare to

bursting with leaves, turning the streets into enormous green caverns." In a way, the writing feels like a photographer's macro lens, homing in on the tiny universes unfurling inside something bigger.

Wong's illustrations parallel this idea as they zoom in and out of the book's verdant, sun-dappled setting. The beautifully textured pastel drawings are realistic, but they also possess a subtle whimsy in their decidedly childlike perspective. Whether it's the way everything seems to glow at the edges or the exclusion of adults (save one lone glimpse), the effect is potent. In some near-intangible way, Wong has evoked the soft haze of childhood summers where a small stand of trees might be seen as a huge forest, and a field of dandelions offers magical, unfettered possibility.

--Mariel Fechik

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
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"All That Grows." BookPage, Mar. 2024, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782322144/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7b1b37cf. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

All That Grows

by Jack Wong; illus, by the author

Primary Groundwood 32 pp.

3/24 9781773068121 $19.99

e-book ed. 9781773068138 $16.99

Nature walks and gardening result in an introspective child thinking small (and big) thoughts about the natural world in this quiet, poetic account, effectively told in the first person. The narrator's sister, experienced and knowledgeable about many things leafy and blossoming, makes grand statements about the plants and flowers they encounter. "Magnolias smell like lemon cake," she announces, causing her sibling self-doubt because "they just smell like flowers to me." Her confident observations about quince trees, dandelions, and maple saplings have the narrator wondering how she knows so much, while our protagonist cannot grasp the complexities of goutweed or even name the big tree outside the window. Wong deftly plays with perspective throughout, often showing the children from overhead as they walk through the woods or pull weeds in the garden. Heavy on greens, his pastel paintings have a serene, hazy feel, evoking the season of spring. One striking sequence shows the child lying in bed at night, looking with curiosity out the window at the sparkling stars in the sky. Wong brings the action to a satisfying close when the child finds a plant that even confounds the older sister. They will look it up in one of her books, after they tend to the garden. This book emerges as both a celebration of nature and of a loving sibling bond.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
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Wilson, Brian E. "All That Grows." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 100, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789719387/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=39eb1c84. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Wong, Jack THE WORDS WE SHARE Annick Press (Children's None) $18.99 10, 10 ISBN: 9781773217970

Angie uses her English skills to help her dad and other Chinese immigrants in their neighborhood.

When Angie and her dad arrived in Canada, they knew very little English. But now that Angie has been going to school, she is able to help Dad, who still speaks only Cantonese, talk to strangers, read menus and labels, and even create signs for the office building where he works as a janitor ("Please do not carry your coffee up and down the stairs," "Please don't leave food to rot in the fridge"). This ability inspires her to start a sign-making business for the Chinese-owned shops in the neighborhood. But when the owner of the laundromat complains that the instructions she wrote for the machines are wrong, it's her dad's turn to use his language skills to help Angie. Cartoon-style art in natural colors and fine detail offers an expressive and compassionate glimpse into the struggles immigrants face but most clearly shows the love between Angie and her father and their mutual respect for each other's skills. While Angie's first-person narration is in English, Cantonese speakers' dialogue is printed in Chinese as well as in italicized English, giving readers an authentic experience of what the conversations feel like. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A sweet story of immigrant connections. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wong, Jack: THE WORDS WE SHARE." Kirkus Reviews, 25 July 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758848188/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fdb5b2fe. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Wong, Jack THE WORDS WE SHARE Annick Press (Children's None) $18.99 10, 10 ISBN: 9781773217970

Angie uses her English skills to help her dad and other Chinese immigrants in their neighborhood.

When Angie and her dad arrived in Canada, they knew very little English. But now that Angie has been going to school, she is able to help Dad, who still speaks only Cantonese, talk to strangers, read menus and labels, and even create signs for the office building where he works as a janitor ("Please do not carry your coffee up and down the stairs," "Please don't leave food to rot in the fridge"). This ability inspires her to start a sign-making business for the Chinese-owned shops in the neighborhood. But when the owner of the laundromat complains that the instructions she wrote for the machines are wrong, it's her dad's turn to use his language skills to help Angie. Cartoon-style art in natural colors and fine detail offers an expressive and compassionate glimpse into the struggles immigrants face but most clearly shows the love between Angie and her father and their mutual respect for each other's skills. While Angie's first-person narration is in English, Cantonese speakers' dialogue is printed in Chinese as well as in italicized English, giving readers an authentic experience of what the conversations feel like. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A sweet story of immigrant connections. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Wong, Jack: THE WORDS WE SHARE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A760508412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56129335. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

* When You Can Swim

by Jack Wong; illus. by the author

Primary Orchard/Scholastic 48 pp.

5/23 9781338830965 $18.99

e-book ed. 9781338830989 $18.99

With poetic text and gorgeous, inclusive illustrations, Wong invites readers to learn how to swim--to conquer fear of the water, and also to reclaim aquatic spaces for Brown, Black, and differently abled bodies. We first meet a young Asian girl suited up in a rainbow-striped one-piece with goggles perched atop her head; a female caregiver tells her of all the wonderful things that can happen "when you can swim." Then the book segues to scenes of such wonderful things: we see varied groups of people of all colors and ages and sizes in ponds, lakes, and oceans, and splashing under waterfalls. The culmination is a four-spread sequence showing a woman and child setting out from shore with bright orange swim buoys, heading to a little island that looks "close enough" but "proves farther at halfway." Yet: "rising, floating, daring, conquering, we'll make it." Pastel and watercolor illustrations play with perspective, showing the world through swimmers' eyes: looking at the trees while floating on their backs, diving into tea-colored waters. The afterword delves into the author's journey to discover and reclaim swimming as a welcoming pastime for all. This isn't just a book about swimming but also "about our ideas of the world"; it's a manifesto that "this belongs to you, too." JULIE HAKIM AZZAM

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
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Azzam, Julie Hakim. "When You Can Swim." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 99, no. 4, July-Aug. 2023, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758442998/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3c800a3f. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Picture Book

In When You Can Swim (Orchard, $18.99, 9781338830965), readers explore the joys of swimming in various bodies of water--oceans, ponds, lakes, rivers and more--in a text set primarily in conditional statements (the "when you can swim" of the title), as spoken by a parent to a child. This phrase is a refrain that conveys the abundant possibilities and delights of moving in the water: the "clinking / of waves passing in and out / of a million pebbles," the ripples on a pond, the whitecaps on a river, "the smoke on the lake" and much more.

In Jack Wong's breathtaking watery landscapes, strong currents surge beneath rushing waterfalls, and sunlight shimmers on ocean waves and the surface of a river. Text and illustrations merge seamlessly to illuminate the ways in which swimming animates all the senses, and Wong writes with beguiling lyricism: "When you can swim, / you'll reach landscapes as foreign as the moon / no spaceship required / except the craters are squishy and filled with reeds / ready to swallow loose sandals / but like good explorers, we'll leave only footprints."

Wong's playful perspectives are captivating. In one spread, from the perspective of lying on our backs in the water, we see "treetops drift by" and a dragonfly buzz near. In another, we turn the book for a stunning vertically oriented image of two girls who dive down after breaking the surface of a lake. A rich apricot-colored light adorns the top of the spread with darkness below, and Wong describes "tannin-soaked lakes / pitch dark from tree bark / like oversteeped tea." The book's ending features the same child in the book's opening, ready to take swimming lessons at a public pool.

An appended note from Wong, striking in its tenderness, explains his hesitancy as "an immigrant kid" in Canada to swim at public pools and his desire to tell a story with "differently colored characters" because "representation is power"--a point he makes incisively and beautifully in this splendid picture book.

--Julie Danielson

By Jack Wong

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 BookPage
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Wong, Jack. "When You Can Swim." BookPage, June 2023, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A749521766/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6541d65c. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Wong, Jack WHEN YOU CAN SWIM Orchard/Scholastic (Children's None) $18.99 5, 2 ISBN: 9781338830965

Debut author Wong celebrates the freedom and joys of swimming.

With endpapers that depict an Asian child gazing uncertainly at their own reflection in a pool, this book offers beginning swimmers both reassurance and compelling promises of adventure and discovery that will ensue "when you can swim." Images portray adults sharing the gifts of the water with their young ones, from shallow waters perfect for lazy afternoons to the otherworldly landscape of watery depths. Wong's beautiful watercolor-and-pastel illustrations demonstrate a mastery of light and shadow, creating a textural quality that makes each page dance with life and movement. Combined with the lyrical text ("When you can swim, / we'll bend like boulders / beneath rushing waterfalls"), each frame immediately immerses readers in the sights, sounds, and sensations of summer. Swimmers who are diverse in terms of body type, age, skin tone, and ability can be seen enjoying the natural world. In his author's note, Wong shares his own experiences with swimming as a young person of color, explaining that this conscious representation is an affirmation that swimming is for everyone: "Yes, this belongs to you, too." The title is bound to inspire all swimmers to embrace nature, no matter where they are on their journeys. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A gorgeously rendered love letter to swimming and the magical experiences that it can unlock. (Picture book. 4-8)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Wong, Jack: WHEN YOU CAN SWIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748974282/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=829ca847. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Morgan, Sue. "WONG, Jack. All That Grows." School Library Journal, vol. 70, no. 3, Mar. 2024, p. 75. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786340652/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9a35e9fc. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. "All That Grows." BookPage, Mar. 2024, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782322144/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7b1b37cf. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. Wilson, Brian E. "All That Grows." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 100, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789719387/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=39eb1c84. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. "Wong, Jack: THE WORDS WE SHARE." Kirkus Reviews, 25 July 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758848188/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fdb5b2fe. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. "Wong, Jack: THE WORDS WE SHARE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A760508412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56129335. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. Azzam, Julie Hakim. "When You Can Swim." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 99, no. 4, July-Aug. 2023, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758442998/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3c800a3f. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. Wong, Jack. "When You Can Swim." BookPage, June 2023, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A749521766/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6541d65c. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024. "Wong, Jack: WHEN YOU CAN SWIM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748974282/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=829ca847. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

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