After relocating from Detroit to Chesapeake, Virginia, to care for her parents, both of whom had Alzheimer’s, Pulitzer-nominated journalist Desiree Cooper was determined to make time to write.
She just never expected to write a children’s book, let alone one named a New York Public Library Top 10 Children’s Book of 2022.
Told through the eyes of a little boy named Jax, “Nothing Special” explores the 6-year-old city kid’s disappointment that his grandparents don’t want to go to the movies or get cheeseburgers. Instead, he and his PopPop go crabbing, fly kites, and husk corn. By the time they cuddle up on the porch to count fireflies, Jax wishes for nothing more than “nothing special.”
Jax is a real person — Cooper’s grandson, now age 9.
“He thinks he’s a star,” Cooper said, laughing.
The first draft of the story flowed out in 2019 at a writing retreat over about 10 days. Cooper planned to write about her experiences as a caregiver for both her own parents and her three grandchildren, but found herself blocked.
Another writer at the retreat, well-known poet and children’s book author Marilyn Nelson, had challenged her to consider writing for children. The surprising friendship that had sprung up between her father and her grandson came to mind.
“My dad wasn’t the mushy ‘I love babies’ type growing up. He’s a military guy,” Cooper said. “So it was just a wonderful surprise late in life, to see that happen.”
While there’s universal appeal to the nostalgia of an annual family visit or connecting with older relatives, “Nothing Special” has its roots in the Great Migration, the period between 1910 and 1960 when over 6 million Black people fled the Jim Crow South.
Cooper feels the experience of her father’s generation, who began to see the military as a viable option after it was desegregated in the late 1940s, is a less widely known chapter of the Great Migration story.
For her generation, she said, no matter where you really lived, the South was home.
“We were very clear that we were leaving oppression, but not our family, not our culture, and definitely not our land if we could help it,” Cooper said. “And so this is what I call Black nostalgia, is about that trip every summer ‘back home.’”
Part of what makes “Nothing Special’s” depiction of this story so powerful and visceral are its unique illustrations, created by Bec Sloane, a production designer and prop fabricator who works primarily with repurposed textiles and other materials.
Sloane and Cooper originally met while working on a short film about Sarah Elizabeth Ray, a Detroit-based civil rights activist who in 1945 took a discrimination case against a ferry company all the way to the Supreme Court, and won.
When Cooper’s publisher, Wayne State University Press, started looking for an illustrator, Sloane was a top candidate.
Although Sloane can illustrate in pen and ink or paint, she also put together a proposal to convince the small university press to take a chance on her particular style.
“It creates a certain nostalgia when people see these textures,” Sloane said. “This story, especially as a cross-generational story, I feel like it lends itself so well to this medium.”
Every illustration in the book is actually a photograph of three-dimensional stop-motion sets, handcrafted down to the individual flower petals. Sloane spent dozens of bus ride commutes cutting out 50 leaves at a time on her lap.
“It’s a lot, but to me, that affects how it feels and looks in the end,” Sloane said. “I appreciate every single little bit of movement.”
One benefit to using her medium for illustrations, Sloane said, is the amount of collaboration possible right up until the last minute. If the author or publisher didn’t like a two-dimensional illustration, the artist would have to start over. But in this case, after the initial months of construction, Sloane could reposition the characters, just like on a movie set.
The characters of Jax and his grandparents were built from repurposed materials, using layers of braided wire, twine, cotton and cloth – and that’s before adding clothing.
“It has a physical weight to it,” Sloane said. “That’s done with intention, and I don’t think I can do things without intention, without being invested in the story or in the characters that I’m working on.”
To build Jax, PopPop, and Nana, Sloane asked for photos, but especially for stories. Though she and Cooper did all of the work for the book remotely and Sloane never met her subjects in person, she captured their mannerisms and personalities in the characters she built. She now uses those characters on the book’s Instagram, @nothing_special_book, which she manages.
“They and the story can have a life beyond the book,” Sloane said.
This is especially poignant because Cooper’s father died in 2020. He never saw the book.
Cooper still cares for her mother and has custody of her three grandchildren, making her part of the “sandwich” generation of caregivers – or as she likes to call it, the “hero sandwich,” since her household spans four generations.
“There’s only room for two things, and that’s them, and writing,” she said.
After a life spent fighting to legitimize her desire to write in her family’s eyes, as well as her own, and to carve out a career beyond being a daughter and mother, Cooper finds her life now ironic, frustrating and beautiful, all at the same time.
“Our national policy toward ushering people with dignity out of this world and bringing them with dignity and hope into the world is, get a girl to do it. And if you can, get the girl to do it for free,” she said. “I hate that. It makes me angry every day of my life.”
At the same time, moving “home,” accepting an identity as a caregiver, surviving the pandemic and losing her dad have changed her perspective on what’s important.
“Loving the generations and the people you’re around and loving what is good about yourself is about all we’re here to do,” she said.
No wonder that the story she needed to share was “nothing special.”
