PORTLAND, Maine — The way Tonya Shevenell sees it, she can’t really take much credit for the inspiration that prompted her to write her first book, a handsomely illustrated story for children called “The Maine Birthday Book.”
“I don’t really feel like it was my idea,” Shevenell says. She was out for a walk on a summer day, she remembers, “and it was like the trees whispered an idea. It was on their mind, not my mind, because I wasn’t really thinking about anything. But in about a quarter-mile stretch the idea for this story downloaded...so I ran with it.”
The story introduces readers to various animal characters from all of Maine’s sixteen counties. Each offers a birthday wish while telling the stories of their own birthdays. “Stories are all around us,” Shevenell writes. “Sometimes they’re hidden and you have to look and listen for them.” For her, the listening paid off. Probably no one else would have heard what the wind was whispering on that summer day.
Tonya Shevenell will be at the Maine Mall on Thursday, December 19, at a pop-up kiosk and at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick on Friday, December 20, from 10 a.m. to noon.
You can visit her website by clicking here.