Last July, right around my birthday, as I was settling into a new life that includes spending half my time in New York City again, I took one of my shirts to a dry cleaner on 72nd Street. It was the first time I’d brought anything to a dry cleaner in NYC in sixteen years. It was one of my favorite shirts, a shirt I’d worn to Book Expo and to dinner with T. J. Shay and to a Society of Illustrators party. It was a shirt that made me feel a little bit chic. I dropped it off, along with a jump suit a close friend of mine had given me for my birthday—the jumpsuit was just a little big around the top and I needed it tailored. When I left the dry cleaner/ tailor, I looked at my receipt and the shirt wasn’t listed. I thought to go back, but was already on my way with other errands and I believed that the lovely lady who had taken care of me wouldn’t forget.

A week later, I went back to pick up my stuff and there was no record of the shirt. I told the man behind the counter that the shirt had to be in the store somewhere. He started yelling at me, and I yelled at him, because the shirt was more than a shirt to me—it was a symbol of the warmth of friends and the comradery of the publishing world, it was a symbol of what makes me happy . I realized quickly that I had no leverage, no receipt, and I began to let go of the shirt, right in that moment, because I had no proof and it was his word against mine and he owned the shop. I considered the fact that I had worn it at least two dozen times, and I could see that I’d be okay without it, it was still just a shirt.

I let it go. And I never went back to that dry cleaner again . . .

. . . until last Thursday night.

I received a phone call in the afternoon, and it was the lady from the dry cleaner who had tailored the jump suit, asking me why I hadn’t picked up my shirt. She told me that she’d had it for four months. I told her about the man who insisted he had never seen it and that he didn’t have it.

She told me she would be there till 7 and I should come get it. So I stopped there after work and came face to face with the man who had screamed at me about the shirt four months prior.

He used his long extension hook to pull the shirt down. I looked him in the eyes and I asked him if he was sorry.

He looked at me and said, “yes.”

I said, “I forgive you.”

On November 25 I will ask forgiveness of myself and of the world once again. It will be the 39th anniversary of the fatal collision I was in as a 17 year old. The accident that informed my life, where I drove through a stop sign and killed another person, severely injured her husband. I will remember this day by sitting quietly and contemplating what it means to forgive, to forgive oneself, to forgive friends, to forgive strangers . . . forgiveness.

I have begun working on a book about this subject, with someone I love who has her own story of forgiveness. We like to listen to Trevor Hall’s song FORGIVE, in which he says, “And let all of your mistakes become all of your greatest gifts.”

Whatever it is that you regret, whatever accidents have happened, whatever mistakes you’ve made . . . forgive yourself, and maybe something beautiful will come from it.

With much love,

Holly

LISTEN will be out in the world tomorrow, September 3!

VERDICT: Readers of all ages will love this poetic, gentle book about understanding and appreciating the universe for both its individual components and how they are intertwined with one another.–Mary Lanni, formerly of Denver Public Library, School Library Journal

Here are some events Pascal and I are doing to celebrate—mostly in New York and Maplewood, NJ—

all are welcome!

Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person in the world, because I love what I do as a literary agent and founder of Pippin Properties, Inc., and as a writer, and as a mom of three fierce kids. I talked about “writing for your life” years ago, in a NaNoWriMo pep talk, and I still believe, from the core of my being, that writing saves lives. LISTEN, my new picture-book collaboration with Pascal Lemaitre, is about being quiet and listening with your heart, which is more than all the other senses combined, and it’s about the interconnectedness of all of us. My wish for the world, and especially for the children, is to somehow take the time to listen with our hearts, and to act from there, and that by doing so, we can make this place a little better.

Please come celebrate with us at Rizzoli on September 3 at 6 p.m. if you are in the New York area; it promises to be an amazing evening.

xox Holly

On September 3, 2019, my new picture-book collaboration with Pascal Lemaitre will be published, and I am so happy to share the story of how the book came to be, and a little bit about what the book means to me and Pascal. 

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

—Vincent Van Gogh 

At the Rizzoli launch party in New York City for Pascal Lemaitre’s and my collaboration Come with Me in 2017, Matt Dillon joined us on stage to talk about Pascal’s mother-in-law, Yvette Pierpaoli, a humanitarian who devoted her life to refugees. Matt had been close friends with Yvette, and that night, Matt said, “Her eyes were as big as her ears.”

I wrote down those words, because they felt huge to me. Just the idea that you can hear with your eyes, that we all can do that, resonated powerfully with me. And as I thought more about those words over the next months, I began to see that not only can we listen with our ears and eyes, but we can listen with all of our senses—we can take in the sound of our own feet, the smell of the air, the taste and sharing of the food we eat, and the earth in our hands . . .

 And we can listen with our hearts, too.

It was Antoine de Saint-Exupery, in The Little Prince, who said, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  

Pascal paid homage to Vincent Van Gogh as he colored this book; Van Gogh was always in a quest for light, outside light and inner light, and Pascal was inspired by not only Japanese prints beloved by Van Gogh, but also by fields of sunflowers near Yvette’s home in the South of France . . . sunflowers were beloved by Van Gogh, too.  

Listen is a story about love, about the earth, about how we are all connected, like trees through their roots . . . and Pascal and I hope that our youngest readers can discover how it feels to listen and act from the very center of their hearts, and by doing so, find joy in each other and the natural world, too.  

With much love,

Holly & Pascal 

Last fall, my picture book COME WITH ME, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre, came out—my publisher also printed postcards, carrying the message of the book: Because as small as it might seem, your part matters to the world. I gave away a lot of postcards, and they were used in a variety of ways by teachers and librarians and students. The picture below is from Patrick Andrus, an amazing 4th grade teacher in Minnesota who used the cards for Unity Day at his school. He asked each of his students to write a postcard to someone who had made a difference in their lives; Patrick told me it was an incredibly moving experience, and if you’d like to read more about it, you can do that on his blog.

Through watching teachers like Patrick, I also wanted to do something to make the world a better place, more than just writing the book itself . . . the opportunity came last June, when my friend Julie Burstein asked me if I wanted to partner with her to create raisingourvoices.today. I am both a writer and a literary agent, and our agency represents some of the most distinguished artists working today—Julie and I wanted to use art to bring attention to the asylum-seeking families in detention camps. What better way than to ask the artists I knew to create powerful images that would immediately communicate our message? So Julie created the site, and I reached out to many of my artist friends—their images came in fast and loud and beautiful, and from these graphics, anybody can download and print posters, like the ones below. Julie’s and my mission has just two rules: no money  passes through our site (all of our images are donated by our artists and free to download). As well, all of our campaigns focus on bettering the lives of children. Our first campaign, the Families Belong Together campaign, went better than we possibly could have hoped for, and people carried our posters around the world on the day of the #familiesbelongtogether marches, June 26. We are still offering these images on the site, as the terrible problem of children being separated from their families continues to grow.

So I thought I’d let everybody know about our new campaign, which is called Dear Neighbor Please Vote. We are offering lawn signs and postcards, all with beautiful, gentle images by children’s illustrators, to encourage everybody who is eligible to vote in the mid-term elections on November 6. Inspired by the Come with Me postcards, we are hoping that children will hand-deliver these postcards to their neighbors and remind them to go out and cast their ballot. The lawn signs take about two weeks to arrive, so if you would like one,  you should order soon. Below are some of the images that are available, with many more on the site. You could even have a postcard party within your community or at your school. In fact, Julie and I are hosting one in collaboration with the Maplewood Memorial Library in New Jersey on Wednesday, September 26, at 4pm.

I hope these beautiful non-partisan images inspire you as they have inspired me—if you’d like to hear a little more about us, you can listen to this podcast that aired last night on Publishers Weekly Insider.

And if you want to help spread the word, please use these hashtags: #votenov6 #dearneighborpleasevote #raisingourvoices

Biggest thank you of all to the extraordinary artists who created images with such enthusiasm and love. You can read about them here.

Our oldest left for college last fall . . . and her sister, whose room was designed as a baby nursery attached to the master bedroom, moved into her room. We’d allowed Oldest to write on her walls throughout her childhood; her pen of choice was Sharpie. I loved reading her poems and quotations and learning about who she was and what was important to her.

But now it is Younger Sister’s room (apparently they had agreed to the swap a few years back over email, and Oldest felt obliged to honor the agreement). And the very day Oldest went to college her sister cleaned out that room, with a vacuum and 409 and rags . . . when she finished she said she also wanted to paint the walls.

I felt sad at first, because these walls filled me with a sense of awe. Sometimes I would go in Oldest’s room when she wasn’t around and marvel at the breadth and depth of her mind; she was so young but so old too—she’d lost a great deal of her childhood to a devastating illness, but had come out strong.

After I had photographed every word on those walls and filed the images in a google drive, I was able to say “okay” to painting. I had preserved them, yes, but I also knew in my heart that every word Oldest had ever written on those walls would be there for always, right beneath the surface. And I understood that Younger Sister needed space to spread her wings.

It took five coats of primer to cover that Sharpie . . . with every coat, I wondered what other layers were beneath Oldest’s, layers I couldn’t see but nevertheless were there, like the layers in all of us.

The walls are now Diamond White, the choice of Younger Sister, and I don’t think she plans to write on them. My loss. But also my gift, because the act of painting over these words gave me space to reflect on Oldest, how much hope I have for the world because people like her are out there in it now, ready to make it better with their gifts.