Welcome to Seapool
A series of interconnected picture books where the characters from the stories connect, overlap, and appear in the background of each other’s lives.
My favourite picture books are the ones which the adults actually enjoy reading to their children, where the language is joyful, fluid, humorous, where the story moves you, and where the images stay with you after you’ve put the book the down.
A book that can do this a magical thing, but a series of books whose characters interlink, crossover, and become a community in a place that is living… now that would be something I’d love to read.
‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.’
- Ursula K. Le Guin
Fantasy doesn’t need to spin us into illusion. At its best, it can enrich our experience of the real world, whilst at the same time blowing on the embers of imagination to evoke a longing for what might be possible.
As a father bringing up children in a deeply troubled world, I want the stories they read to be as vivid and imaginative as possible, to make them laugh and touch their souls, and to show them that magic is very much alive.
Each of the Seapool stories centres around one of the young people who call this place home. The characters have their own special interests, but in the background of each story we gradually see the dilapidated village of Seapool transforming. There are pop-up schools being made, homes being repaired, workshops being set up, and old rituals being revived.
The first five stories have already been written. One them is in the hands of an artist, whose identity will be announced shortly. If you’re reading this in the Spring of 2025, then you’re one of the first people to know it exists. Weclome! Well met.
Over the next few months I’ll be sharing little insights into how it’s taking shape, how the books link up to be more than the sum of their parts, and how you can participate in breathing life into this imaginal place.
If you like the sound of what we’re doing then please subscribe and share the project with anyone you think will like it. This helps let us know that there’s a desire for something like this to exist, which in turn puts the wind at our backs.
Thanks for reading. More coming soon…