Mother Tongue: Notes on memoirs, maps, and magical thinking.

“It felt like fate. I wasn’t prone to magical thinking, but somehow I was letting that feeling drive me.”

—Christine Gilbert

As my stay on Norway’s Lofoten Islands comes to a close this weekend, I keep thinking back to my first trip here last year—a quick jaunt lasting only five days, which ended in an altogether unexpected way.

It was a cold, dark Friday in February, my final day on Lofoten then. My plan was to catch the 7 a.m. ferry back to the mainland—the only ferry scheduled for the day. In order to catch said ferry, I would have to first catch the 6 a.m. bus to the ferry terminal from the village I was staying in, and in order to catch said bus, my alarm was set for the rather bleary-eyed hour of 5 a.m.

My family and close friends are well aware of my deep-seated resistance to early wake-up calls. For better or worse, I’ve always been an inveterate night owl, and I find rising in the wee hours of the morning an almost painful event to endure. And so, when I woke up on that final morning on Lofoten last year, checked the time on my phone, and saw that it was nearly 9 a.m., I was dismayed to have overslept and missed the ferry—but not entirely surprised at myself.

With the ferry long departed, my only other way of getting back to the mainland was to book a flight on a tiny plane from Lofoten’s equally tiny airport, a flight that wouldn’t leave until later that afternoon. Again, I checked the time and saw that I had several hours to kill before I needed to head to the airport; with the weather howling outside, I decided to spend the morning indoors, staying as warm and dry as possible while getting caught up on my inbox.

I made a cup of coffee, set up my laptop by a window overlooking Lofoten’s rugged coastline, and proceeded to send a few emails. And it was then—as the wind howled, the rain swept against the windows, and a ferry I should’ve been on made its way through the churning Vestfjord sea—that an email arrived which soon set my heart racing.

* * *

Just before leaving the U.S. for Lofoten last year, I spent a week at home with my parents in Virginia. My time there was largely devoted to catching up with family, but I also had some time to catch up on work as well. Several evenings that week, I sat on our living room floor in front of the fireplace, watching movies with my parents while updating my very often out-of-date website.

I was especially focused on updating my illustration portfolio. I added various commissions from the past year, photos of a mural I’d created for Google Thailand in their Bangkok office, and lastly—what I was most excited to add—several hand-drawn and painted maps. Despite illustrated maps becoming a huge passion of mine, none had yet to make it into my portfolio.

One by one, I uploaded several maps, and I even tried to make Google proud by completing each map’s SEO and alt text—the bit of text that helps search engines pull up images. It took a couple of evenings to finish the job and bring it all back up to date, but I was grateful for the downtime in which to make it happen.

Little could I have known then—there in front of the fireplace on my family’s living room floor—that something as simple as updating my portfolio was going to play a direct role in the delivery of a heart-racing email the very following week.

* * *

When a certain unexpected email arrived that blustery Friday morning on Lofoten, I immediately recognized the name of the sender—a well-known blogger and writer named Christine Gilbert.

I’d heard about Christine several years before and had followed her travel blog, Almost Fearless, ever since. I had also wanted to take her blogging course, though the timing had never been quite right with other projects and trips going on. But now here was a personal email from Christine to me, and before my heart started racing, the first thing I felt was merely puzzled—wondering just what the email could hold.

As it turned out, Christine was writing about her forthcoming memoir, which was being published by an imprint of Penguin Random House—the largest trade book publisher in the world. When the idea came up for there to be a world map on the cover of her book, Christine began searching Google Images for inspiration, especially hand-drawn maps. And it just so happened that one of the first maps that came up in the search, which Christine just so happened to love, was one of mine—one of the very maps I had added to my portfolio just the week before (and the one shared above).

In a daze of disbelief, I could just make out one question from Christine: “Would you be interested in working on a book project?”

As my heart started racing, I couldn’t get my head around the synchronicity of it all—that here was a writer I had been admiring from afar for years, stumbling across an illustration I’d only uploaded to my site a few days earlier, writing me an email I shouldn’t have even been online at the time to read…but I was, all because I’d overslept and missed my ferry. It took a great deal of restraint to wait a respectable interval of ten minutes before replying to Christine and saying YES.

* * *

A couple of months passed before the project was officially commissioned by one of Penguin’s art directors. By that time, Christine was traveling through Turkey, while I was spending a few weeks in the Costa Brava region of Spain, with an entirely different coastline and climate outside my new desk window. The fact that we were both on the road, immersed in new cultures, felt even more fitting given the premise of Christine’s memoir.

Titled Mother Tongue: My Family’s Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish, Christine’s book follows her quest to become fluent in three languages around the world, while being based in a country that speaks each language. With her growing family in tow, she sets out to learn Mandarin in Beijing, Arabic in Beirut, and Spanish in Mexico. Her goal is not only to connect with each culture on a deeper level by learning the language, but also to explore the effects of being bilingual on our brains.

The maps I most enjoy creating have small illustrations—or what I’ve come to call vignettes—embedded in the map itself, to represent each place and the meaning it holds. Once I set to work creating Christine’s map, I loved hearing what places had come to hold meaning for her and her family from each key point in their journey—from the gilded stupas of the Wat Phra That temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to the beautiful, blue-domed Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in Beirut, Lebanon.

As I replied to Christine that fateful Friday morning on Lofoten, I’ve come to believe maps are beautiful, malleable devices for telling the stories of our journeys and lives. Creating the cover illustration for Mother Tongue—and by extension, getting to help tell Christine’s story visually—was both a joy and an incredible honor.

* * *

Mother Tongue was officially released this past Tuesday, and it feels equally fitting that I’m back on Lofoten during the book’s launch—back in the very place where the idea for the map on its cover first began.

My copy of Mother Tongue has already been ordered and delivered in the U.S., and I can’t wait to begin reading it (and see the cover in person!) very soon. In the meantime, I’ve been devouring the excerpts available to preview on Amazon, and was especially struck by this passage from Chapter One:

“Suddenly, the way forward seemed clear. What had before been just a few isolated details now connected in a way that could not be unseen. It felt like fate. I wasn’t prone to magical thinking, but somehow I was letting that feeling drive me.”

Along with serendipity and synchronicity, I must confess to being a fan of magical thinking as well, a theory that can be defined as “the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link.”

 

Because for me, the bottom line of magical thinking is this:

We never know when or where or how opportunity will find us.

We never know what effects the simplest of actions can set in motion—something as simple as updating our website or signing up for a conference—and even actions we might initially think of as negative (sleeping through an alarm and missing a ferry are two tiny examples that come to mind…) can lead to good things, putting us in place to meet someone new, head in a different direction, or receive an unexpected email right as it arrives. Sometimes, a Plan B can really be quite magical.

I’ll forever be grateful for the series of small but eventually significant events that led to connecting with Christine last year while I was on Lofoten, and for the chance to return here again this spring—a single place bookending the start and end of a singularly rewarding creative journey.

Mother Tongue is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound—congratulations, Christine!

* * *