THIS ONE IS SO SPECIAL TO ME I FEEL SO MANY FEELINGS WRITING ABOUT IT HENCE CAPS LOCK FOR THE INTRO OKAY HERE WE GO:
If it's not obvious by now, I’m low-key but also high-key obsessed with Jessie's storytelling.
Once upon a time on a drive along Anzac Road in Sydney, she told me about Never. I’m not entirely sure what it was named at the time but I was heart, soul, chest, soles of my feet engrossed in this story.
I have two magical memories in my life, one was sitting at a caravan park at the beach when I was on school holidays. Sitting on a picnic chair watching a storm roll in, reading the illustrated version of the Folk of the Faraway Tree.
Another was sitting on a balcony on another beach with this enormous moon that I will never forget reading the illustrated Narnia series.
Hearing NEVER was like those two moments colliding, I got to experience it all again as an adult.
I remember being on summer holidays (now many years later) reading an early draft of NEVER and I just inhaled it, it was everything I dreamt it would be from when she first told me about it.
Then I got to illustrate the cover - she sent me this reference of two kids standing at the edge of the universe which got the concept rolling, then as I was working, Jessie sent me a video from her and her family at Disneyworld as the sun was setting in Florida and the grass was GREEN and the sky was PINK and there we have it, those became our colours and this became our NEVER.
The funny thing about the map being the endpaper is that I don’t think either of us even knew what an “endpaper” was (maybe you did Jessie but this was new to me). We felt a book about Neverland deserved a Neverland map because we’d grown up obsessing over them and one Christmas I made this artwork for Jessie below.
In 2023 in October as we were both living in LA, I put the finishing touches on the map on the floor of her living room while she built Lego and to celebrate the release we went to Disneyland and it was one of the best days of my life.
This will forever be a very special project to me, and just WAIT until you read book two.
All my love,
Emmy xx
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