Wilbur's Walk, Rebecca Nash
Written by Rebecca Nash
Illustrated by Daniel Nash
PUBLISHED BY MARY EGAN PUBLISHING; 16 NOVEMBER 2021; RRP: $25.00
“Rebecca and Dan Nash present a world brimming with colour and detail – simply and elegantly – without betraying their love for a good story”
Wilbur and his Mama walk Wally dog by the sea. As Wally chases the pinecone and Wilbur’s buggy bounces, the birds begin to appear, firstly chattering and chirping and then gossiping and philosophising.
Author Rebecca Nash wrote the story when her daughter was a toddler.
“I was so in love with the way she used language. I wanted to imbue the story with toddler logic and ways of speaking. When I used to walk the dog with her in the pram round the bays in Lyttelton, it was so routine, but at the same time, looking at birds and slowing down to kid-speed is kind of magic and beautiful. That’s where the story came from,” says Rebecca.
Rebecca gave the manuscript to her little brother Daniel to illustrate. They shared the same imaginative space as children, and she knew he would instinctively understand the spooky and magical undertones of Wilbur’s Walk.
“I think it’s so cool to see how our creativity intersects; how he sees things in the words and gives them new energy and light.”
The end result is a story of small struggles, small triumphs and really big love.
About the Author: Rebecca Nash lives in Lyttelton with a small child, two dogs, a cat and many non-venomous spiders in the corners of rooms. She has an MA in English from the University of Canterbury, an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Canterbury. She has previously published her poems in takahē, Minarets and Turbine, and on a Phantom Billstickers poster.
About the Illustrator: Daniel Nash is a Wellington-based artist and writer with an MFA from the University of Auckland. His strange and dreamlike drawings for Wilbur’s Walk are inspired by time spent with his niece and the expansive imagination of children. Dan has exhibited sculptural and digital works in contemporary galleries such as Artspace Aotearoa. In 2017, he released To the Roaring Thing Blended, a collection of prose poems and drawings exploring the possibilities of writing in the liminal mind-space before sleep.
