Fox Lights
Fox Lights is my first venture into the land of children books. It is aimed at kids of about 7 years old and above. It started when my father asked me to write a fairy tale for my nephews. I began with a very vague idea of what it is going to be about, and from there the characters and the events started to come to me themselves. I was very excited about this, since I remembered one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin, saying:
"It’s like this, in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end. I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way, and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself…"
Fox lights is a concept that appears independently in Japanese and Finnish folklore. In my story, I spinned it to represent the idea of universal oneness. This idea was very dear to me, as an antithesis to all sorts of divisions: ethnical, political, cultural, economical.
For the illustrations, I drew inspiration from another one of my favorite artists, Hayao Miyazaki (a nod to whom you can see in the foxbus). I also followed the technique and the gentle style of Finnish artist Heikala, and like her, used Bombay inks.
Here, you can find the English translation of my story. It was self-published online in Russian and was received quite well by the readers. I'm working towards publishing it in a paper form as well.
