Some Families walks you through a photo album filled with personal photos of multicultural families across the world. Showing that everyday families do not all look or act alike, but yet are still all filled with love. This book gently offers an opportunity to converse with your child about the many different family structures of people across the world.
Letter from the author
Dear adult reader, Children need to feel they matter, and that their families matter. All families are equally important and special. They are where we belong. I wrote this book for them. I hope you and your children will enjoy finding families like your own and those of your friends in this book.
More about the Author
Kimi Hall BEdEC was born and raised in the metropolitan city of San Francisco California in 1981. Being raised as a biracial child of a single-parent home, and surrounded by many different family structures and ways of life, she learned to accept these many differences in people as normal. Growing up, she was fascinated with the arts, and creative writing and later studied performing arts until the early 2000s. She is now a devoted teacher and burgeoning author and illustrator of quality children’s literature. Her goal now is to create children’s books that help children feel represented in the world. The kind of books she would love to have in her own classroom. Her first book A Mother’s Journey is a story about infertility and the journey a mother embarks on toward achieving her dream child through donor sperm insemination. Her new books are The Missing Things & Some families. Two very different children’s picture books, although they both help introduce difficult conversations with children in a non-confrontational manner.
Interview With Kimi Hall, author of Some Families
What was the hardest part of your journey in creating this book?
I originally hired an illustrator for the book but after sketching most of my ideas he backed out of the project. I was forced to learn, very quickly, how to transfer those sketches into fully illustrated photos and then turn those photos into pages of a photo scrap album.
It took longer than I thought to complete, but since I was independently publishing I could finish at my own pace. Luckily due to Covid-19 lockdowns in Australia, I was able to work on it exclusively and finish in the same year I started.
What was the most inspiring part of your journey in creating this book?
I was inspired by my resourcefulness and tenacity to be able to finish the book on my own. I generally try to be positive in all aspects of my life and when the illustrator backed out I took a minute and thought "Here’s an opportunity to truly see what I can do. Let’s do it!" I’ve been happily surprised to find so many books that are also self-published and aimed at showcasing diversity and inclusion now available to young readers. When I wrote the book, my goal was to create a book that I wish existed for my students, myself, and my future child. And now I’m seeing that others had the same idea and I’m so glad. I’ve recently heard of the phrase ‘any child books’. Books that showcase a diverse set of people, for example, people of color, as ordinary characters without focusing on their diversity.
This is exactly what we need and what I try to do in my books. My stories don't focus on what makes people different but rather on what makes people similar. Those differences can be seen in the images instead.
Who helped or inspired you through your journey as an author?
This is an interesting story. I’m a teacher. And while I teach children, I never had a dream of being an author of any sort. In 2019, I decided to teach myself how to cartoon during the Easter break. When I returned to school I turned this experience into a social-emotional learning lesson that spanned the whole term. We practiced how to cartoon and focused on having Growth Mindsets and improving as we went along. The kids loved it.
This led to my decision to illustrate my own coloring book based on the lesson, but the project never got off the ground. I struggled with the writing part and thus put the book on hold.
In 2020, I began fertility treatment in order to have my first child. I wanted to find a book that explained to my future child how they were conceived and my Journey to achieve my goal of having a family on my own. I only found a couple of books that were focused on single mothers having children through artificial insemination but found the choices available didn’t truly fit my needs. That’s when I decided to create my own. That project got me through my first IUI cycle and turned into my labor of love through 2 more cycles. The more I wrote to more ideas I had for other books. That’s when the roller coaster started.
What's Next?
I’ve already written a follow-up book to Some Families, titled Some Kids. It's focused on all the things kids do or don’t and the images reflect the differences in children's abilities, races, gender, etc. It’s a great little book and I can’t wait until I can publish it.