Q&A: Children's Book Author Innosanto Nagara

I live in a cohousing community with four families, and there's been eight kids born into our community, the youngest being my child in 2010. I had been reading a lot of children's books to all these kids as they grew up. When I had my own kid, I realized that I'm going to be reading a lot more books over and over again, and I wanted to have a book that I wanted to read to my kid over and over again. 

We happened to have neighbors who were architects, and they had gifted us some books about shapes and colors, that kind of thing. I realized there's a lot of books about things people do, but the one thing we could not find was a book about the things that our community and family were about. My wife is a community organizer, my housemates are environmental activists, teachers. 

Not really, because I wasn’t planning on distributing it far and wide. I was originally just going to print a few hundred, maybe to give to friends as a gift. Since the only way to print proper board books, it turned out, was to do a minimum of 2000, I developed a plan for distributing and selling them to people within the activist community. I had a five-year plan for paying back the money I borrowed to get it printed! But I sort of underestimated how many people wanted the book, and those 2000 went very quickly, and Seven Stories Press picked it up. We did a round of re-edits for it—I used that opportunity to reach out those that already had the book and get feedback from kids and parents, to see what worked and didn’t work. That’s always been a part of my process.  

I was concerned about some of the topics being something that, if it was to go far and wide, that some people might be uncomfortable with. Surprisingly, it wasn't the things that I was concerned about that got the most pushback. And again, the pushback was mostly from adults. Not every kid loves every book, but the overwhelming majority of the feedback I was getting from the kids was positive. 

I wrote A is for Activist, and at that time, I didn't really plan on doing other books. But then the idea of Counting on Community came up. A is for Activist is about the issues going on, and Counting on Community is about how we live—those are both board books, and at that point, my kid was wanting storybooks. That's when I wrote My Night in the Planetarium, which is about art, resistance and colonialism, but it also follows a storyline from a true incident that happened in my life. After, I wrote The Wedding Portrait, which is also based on a true story, but that's more about tactics, civil disobedience and direct action. M is for Movement is more of a middle-grade fiction—the first book that I wrote that was fiction. 

The other books are about building the movement to make change. Oh, The Things We’re For! is about when people are saying, “You’re against this, but what are you for? What kind of world do you want to live in?” For me, there’s no shortage of solutions, there’s a lot of good books, studies, science around how to build better societies. But we tend to, as activists, talk more about things that are problematic. The purpose of the book is to remind ourselves that there is a world of possibilities, that this better world that we’re envisioning is very practical. 

That was very natural. I didn’t think I was going to be a storyteller, in terms of my books—A is for Activist and Counting on Community are rhymes, poems. Telling a story seemed like a daunting task. But I was at a dinner, telling this story about what happened in my life, and they said, “You should make that your next book.” I was like, “I guess I do tell that story.” 

It’s a story I’ve told before, how it unfolds into a broader history about Indonesia, colonialism, and the role of art in resistance. It ended up coming naturally. 

Because I’ve been doing graphic design for 30 years—which I still enjoy—I think the part I find the most interesting and challenging is the writing. It engages a different part of my brain. I wouldn’t say that any of it is something I don’t like, but I do think the writing part is the most interesting because it involves exercising new muscles.  

It was fun! It’s a reference to Dr. Seuss, sort of a nod to him, so it needed to be in rhyming verse. That poses as a puzzle in and of itself. How to write the book in a way that it says what it needs to say, makes it fun to read… and it rhymes. It was fun learning how to do that. 

I have a couple projects in the works. One is a biography of my father. He died earlier this year, so I’ve been working on more of a comprehensive biography, not a “What happened and when,” but trying to share some of how he thought his work. I’m working on a project around graphic design for social change. My entire career I’ve been a practitioner of that, so I'm trying to put that together as something that's more shareable, so other people can do this. 

In terms of children's books, I have a general thing that I'm working on around the idea of inequality and why that exists, because I think there's a sort of a pernicious undercurrent in American society where kids are taught that success is a product of this so-called meritocracy. The problem with that framework is that then you see that there's rich people and poor people, and you wonder, “Why are rich countries rich and why are poor countries poor?” And then you start thinking, maybe that's because the rich countries somehow are better, did better things, work harder, when in reality a lot of our unequal world is a product of colonialism, and exploitation, and enslavement. Things that could really have generational impacts.