Another Year Around the Sun by Katrina Germein, illustrated by
Alice Lindstrom
Affirm Press, Simon & Schuster
Another Year Around the Sun – Creators’ Inspiration
Katrina Germein
In thinking about the inspiration for Another Year Around the Sun, I can’t pinpoint one moment; even revisiting my drafts doesn’t help. It’s just there. A story about a child’s year spent playing outside through the changing seasons with family. I often find the heart source of my stories easier to unpick afterwards. Many small memories make up the whole. My subconscious does the work.
At 73 words, Another Year Around the Sun, is one of the shortest manuscripts I’ve written to date, and the challenge of that held much of my focus. Even on their own, the rhyming words make sense to tell a story of a child outdoors, from one birthday to the next. Craft wise, it was a satisfying book to write. As the story grew, I wanted to show the many opportunities Australian children have to connect with nature in an urban environment; you don’t have to live in the country or travel hours from the city to find joy in nature.
Reflecting on the words now, I see more of where the story came from. The child splashing in the waves, is my own children during our summers spent at the beach, but the daydreaming child, is me as a girl exploring rockpools on my own. The child leaping across the oval is also me with my grandfather, but maybe I only think that now because of Alice’s gorgeous kite-flying illustration, and I remember flying kites with Pa. The adorable dog that Alice has gifted to the story through the illustrations, is, in my mind, our late family dog, Mango, who joined us on picnic dinners like in the book. Alice didn’t know she’d placed Mango in the story, and neither did I at first. To readers, that little dog will most likely represent their own pup. And isn’t that a wonderful thing about picture books? Two creators bringing their stories together to make one so that readers can build something new again.
Alice Lindstrom
When I first read the manuscript for ‘Another Year Around the Sun’ I was struck by the grace and simplicity of the words and the universality of a child’s early exploration of the world against the backdrop of the changing seasons. At the time I began working on it my own children were under 2 and 4 years of age. Katrina’s text evoked everyday moments with them, that while ‘ordinary’ are also luminous and profound; throwing leaves in Autumn, splashing in puddles in Winter, running downhill on a clear Spring day. In this way, the text spoke directly to me.
In early conversations with the editor at Affirm, Coral Huckstep, Coral and I both agreed that central to the story was the child’s confident exploration of the world within a loving and secure family unit. I was eager to depict this bond which I felt was at the heart of the story. Originally I considered adding a younger sibling to the story, but Coral and I decided that would be a distraction, and I settled on a dog, a companion that could join the main character on most of the excursions throughout the story. My early drafts had depicted interior scenes however Coral suggested that the family was always depicted outdoors. I am very grateful for Coral’s insights early on in the illustration process. It now seems obvious that the story needed to be grounded in the outdoors and nature. In my second round of sketches I leant into the depiction of the family outdoors.
I used colour to bring the seasons to life and in each spread I tried to convey forward motion and movement. In terms of medium I used collage and drawn components rather than sticking purely to collage as I have done with other books. I felt I wanted illustrations that were lighter in tone and conveyed more movement than collage alone could.
I hope readers young and old feel an affinity with this book, recognising moments from their own childhood and sensing the feeling of joy and togetherness with which I tried to suffuse the illustrations.
Another Year Around the Sun at Affirm Press, Simon & Schuster
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