This book is more than just a cute story to read to your young’uns. I wrote it in an attempt to fill a missing space in our children’s literature. When I was a kid, I loved me some mythology. I rabidly consumed collections of ancient myths and legends meant for young readers, even wading into scholarly tomes that were over my head in places. The stories were a lot of fun, of course, but what fueled my interest in them was the fact that they were more than just stories – they were part of the belief systems of ancient peoples. They were histories and cosmologies and origin stories, all wrapped up together. They are a window into the minds of the ancients, and if you squint hard enough, you can see a glimmer of the prehistoric world in there too.

I was always especially entranced by origin stories, creation myths. These were human beings’ earliest attempts at answering The Big Questions. Our long-ago ancestors wondered: Where do we come from? Where does all of this come from, for that matter? What makes day turn into night and night into day? And without sophisticated rules of reasoning or the collected observations that later people would assemble into what we call the natural sciences, they did what any reasonable person would do when faced with a yawning abyss of questions and no authority to provide answers: they made stuff up.

Everywhere, all around the world, people made up answers to these Big Questions. Calling it guessing would be insulting and reductive: let’s say they filled in the blank spaces with their intuitive imaginations. And over time, their stories evolved with them. The tales mutated as they were passed down among uncounted generations, being adapted to teach lessons and instill values, or warped to accommodate the addition of new stories and figures from new tribes as cultures merged and cross-pollinated.

These ancient myths are invaluable sources of information, but they tell us much more about the people who told them, their values and assumptions, than they do about how the world really works. Our understanding of the universe and how it works is deep now – there are still mysteries, but much of what baffled our ancestors is demystified to us.

I thought, “What if our ancestors had understood, vaguely even, the truth about how animals became what they are, and how we came to be what we are today? What if they’d known about evolution? What would their creation stories have been like?” The question intrigued me, so I set out to write such a story, and Mother Forest and Her Gifts was born.

In the story, Mother Forest is handing out special gifts to each of her children. Each animal gets a gift that will suit their needs, but each advantage comes with a disadvantage or challenge. Nothing is for free with evolution – everything is a a give-and-take. So as each animal voices its concern, Mother Forest gives her advice for how to adjust to the gift. So, the animal’s physical attributes are shaped by their needs, and the animal, or its behavior, is further shaped by its unique physical capabilities.

When the family of apes comes around looking for their gift, Mother gives them hands, and assures them that this gift, while not much to look at, contains all the gifts she has given all the other animals. They’re not impressed, but eventually they start using their new hands to make their own “gifts,” and using their language to teach each other new ways – becoming human along the way.

There are some wonderful books for young children about evolution, but they tend to focus on the process. Understanding the process of evolution requires understanding some foundational key concepts first – the heritability of traits through genes, the change of genes through mutation, the natural selection of traits, and the vast amounts of time that have allowed living things to undergo dramatic changes. All of these are challenging concepts to young children, and all of them are required to understand evolution. In short, a real understanding of evolution is beyond most beginning readers.

Mother Forest and Her Gifts uses the old tradition, going back to the first storytellers, of embedding an important truth in a symbolic story with anthropomorphized characters. It won’t teach a four year old to understand evolution, but it can plant the seeds of the idea that will make it easier to understand when she is a little older. The Big Questions are answered, more or less, in our tale: animals are the way they are because they become what they need to be, to be better at what they do; and we are apes that changed dramatically because of language and tool use.

So that’s where this book fits: it’s a replacement creation story, meant to be entertaining and engaging and heartwarming as good bedtime stories should be, but also an intentional update to the grand old tradition – it’s the creation story we should have had, would have had if we had known better.

It’s a lofty goal, a little arrogant even, attempting to insert a new entry into this most ancient cultural catalogue. I’ll admit it. But before you call me a heretic, remember if you will – these stories are all made up, by somebody. Just because their original authors are lost to time, don’t confuse that with them being handed down from on high. That’s just a marketing gimmick. Nah, whatever the story is that I think I can do better than, it’s just a story, made up by some old geezer around a campfire to settle the kiddies before bedtime. Somewhere along the line, some of our stories got locked down, chiseled into stone and turned all canonical. That’s where we went wrong.

Our stories – the important stories, the stories that matter – need to live and breath, and change. Our ancient ancestors passed down their stories in the oral tradition, heard and remembered and spilled out again, with each teller adding and refining. Those stories were like soft clay, shaped and reshaped to accommodate new wisdom, always accumulating.

When writing Mother Forest and Her Gifts, I pictured the illustrations showing the family of apes becoming more and more human-like as the story progressed. I deliberately did not address this change in the text of the story, only ever referring to them as “the family of apes.” I didn’t want this to be a book explaining evolution; it is a story that takes evolution as read. There will be some people who think this is a weakness of the book: they’ll say that children will be confused when they see the drawings of what are called apes start to look more and more human. I’m counting on it – a slight confusion, that is. This is a natural place in the story where some children will ask what is happening with the apes. That’s where the grownie reading with them answers: “They’re becoming us!” Or, if your intuition tells you the kid is on the verge of it, you could ask: “What do you think is happening?” Evolution is a big concept: some kids are going to just roll with it, the way kids can accept things that give adults trouble. But other kids are going to be confused. Good! Conditionally accepting it, and confronting it with a question – these are just two different kinds of smart.

In the design of the book, we were trying for something that felt a little old-fashioned. The idea is that it’s “the folk tale that should have been” so in our imagination, this is an ancient story that came down to us from the distant past, and has been published and republished in a hundred different ways before. So we wanted it to look like something that had been designed and illustrated in the 30s or 40s, maybe. Just a bit though – we didn’t want to go all the way retro, just a suggestion of it. We wanted it to feel like a reprint of an old classic, a subliminal suggestion that this book belongs on the shelf in the mythology, rather than the fiction section.

So, this is a lot to say about a children’s book. If it turns you off, I’m sorry. I just wanted to explain in full detail why I wrote this book, what it means to me, and what I think it has to offer to children. At the end of the day though, you can scrap all this high-falutin’ nonsense because if you pick it up and read it to a child, it’s a fun and engaging story with some beautiful illustrations (thanks Cara) to look at. I’m not good at self-promotion, it makes me deeply uncomfortable. The best I can do is speak from the heart about what I’ve made and why, and invite you to check it out.