If my brother had wanted to become a carpenter, he wouldn’t have been able to; not because my craftsman grandfather’s death occurred unexpectedly, but because my grandfather wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to teach him. He didn’t have a workshop, or the raw material (wood) to work, or a way to obtain it.
I’d never given thought to those jobs. I’d never even asked myself who takes care of the trees in my city, or what’s the name of the man who passes by at dawn, sweeping the street clean of what others have tossed on the ground.
I neither have nor need a pretext for my desire to write about the things that weigh on me. It must be something like this when one has cancer. That’s not my case, but I imagine that it’s a constant pain in the affected organ, so that even as you tell your friends that everything is okay, you only do so gritting your teeth.
I developed a logo, a slogan and a style manual. I came up with a response to each of the barriers that I might encounter. I registered the business in my name and we began to work on a few stories for children in which beauty, creativity and diversity went hand in hand.