Caribbean Life · সাধারণ
Local resident releases new children’s book, shares her author journey
১৭/১০/২০২৬
Brett Seigle was always a reader. She has had her head in a book ever since she can remember, and it often annoyed people around her.
“I would read while walking down the street, I would read at the dinner table, I would read during class, I would even take my books to my friends’ homes and read at their houses,” Seigle said.
This is something she still does, even though she’s not sure that she ever thought about being an author as a child. However, as a child, she did want to be a songwriter, and she even won a songwriting contest in college.
She was born and raised in Brooklyn, as were her parents and grandparents. She is the middle child and her parents’ only girl. Her younger brother is still here, as well, and her older brother is living abroad in Vietnam. Her dad grew up in Canarsie and her mom grew up in what we called Old Mill Basin, part of Flatlands.
“My parents met at South Shore and were married 20 years before separating," she shared of her family background. "I grew up in the house that my mom lived in for a few years when she was a child. My maternal grandparents lived around the corner and eventually, when my grandmother was sick, they moved in downstairs."
Growing up, Seigle recalls some of her favorite memories being when she and her best friends Lana and Cathy, who she is still close to now, used to go to the United Artist (now Regal) movie theater in Sheepshead Bay on Saturday nights.
“Growing up in Brooklyn established, for me, a real sense of freedom and independence," she added. "The reason I love Brooklyn and can’t imagine leaving is the diversity. I love living somewhere where every language is spoken, every food is eaten, every culture is celebrated. I’m a Jewish woman who went to Hebrew school and had a Bat Mitzvah but has probably spent more time in church than in temple, for friends' communions and confirmations, to see friends give sermons, for weddings. Brooklyn is the world and there is nothing quite like growing up here."
It wasn’t until grad school at Hunter College, in her first year of earning her Early Childhood Education degree, that Seigle started thinking about writing books. Her favorite class was Early Childhood Literacy.
For the final project, she and her classmates had to create a dramatic play area on paper and find books that fit into the theme of it for that age group (Birth to grade 2).
She spent hours online looking for books written for young children to show them different cities around the world and she found none. Thus she created a travel area, with maps and stamps, passports and cameras, photographs, cultural clothing, postcards, titled "Chat the Cat."
“I got an A in the class. Even then I knew that eventually I wanted "Chat the Cat" to be a series that would show children cities all over the world and create cultural awareness from an early age,” she explained.
From then on the journey to creating the book series was not easy. Soon after this, her dad passed away, and her mom got sick, and both passed away when she was in her 20’s. She also started working, while she was grieving.
Years passed and it was at the back of her mind. In the years since grad school, she continued browsing children’s bookstores, curating a collection for her classroom. She still never saw what she was looking for and she decided it was time. In addition, she dealt with the fear of failure.
After being inspired by friends, she took out a small loan and hired a writing coach. Through working on "Chat the Cat: Paws in Paris" together for 6 weeks, she learned so much about writing children’s books.
“I knew what I wanted the illustrations to look like and I worked with Alec Acevedo who I knew through a mutual friend, and Paws in Paris was born. We both loved what we created and I knew I wanted to make more and Alec wanted to make more and we have now created three books together,” she added.
Seigle had a list of where she wanted the series to go after Paris: Venice, Vietnam, Mexico City and New Orleans. One day, she was walking with a friend who asked, “Why not New York?”
Though she wasn’t interested at first, she thought about it and realized Brooklyn is never really shown, or if it is, it’s just the Brooklyn Bridge, or areas like Brooklyn Heights or Williamsburg. She thought it would be great to show so many other parts of Brooklyn. So then she started thinking about the motivation for getting Chat around and pizza came to her mind. Thus, "Birthday in Brooklyn" was born.
Additionally, Seigle stated, “My goal for these books is to inspire children to see the world, to gain cultural awareness, to build understanding and empathy for people from all over.”
As a teacher, her students are very aware of her passion for books and the journey she’s on as an author. She loves that it has inspired some of them to want to become authors and illustrators.
Seigle has big goals for the series, including bringing it to many more cities worldwide and translating into multiple languages. These books cover a multitude of subjects, art, music, geography, history, architecture, language, they would be a great addition to any classroom.
She also wants to hire a team of teachers to write a curriculum around the books so that the books can be used in classrooms nationwide, or worldwide, to introduce very little children to the world around them.
মূল প্রতিবেদনে যান ↗