What It's Like to Birth a Book

A 47-year-journey in ~1000 words

It feels simply bananas that my first book for adults — “Raising Awe-Seekers: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive” — comes out Tuesday. I’m in a reflective mood this morning, thinking about circuitous paths that weave together to build a life.

It helps that it’s raining. Rainy days send me inward.

When people ask about the book’s origins, I usually start in 2021 when I wrote an article for the Washington Post about kids and awe. But there are few real starting lines in life. So I’m taking the timeline further back.

1977

My mom gives birth twice — once to me and once to her first book, a novel based on her experiences as a young missionary in France. A book she wrote while raising four children under eight (I was the fifth).

The 1980s

Look, a lot happens from ages 3-to-13 in a household with five kids, two parents, two grandparents, a few pets, lots of mental health issues, and a healthy dose of neuro-spiciness. And a lot of it was wonderful.

• Summer evenings spent playing “nightgames” with neighborhood kids.

• Camping trips with my dad and brother (that involved a lot of star gazing and a lot of getting lost in the deserts of southern Utah).

• Hours spent wandering the foothills, exploring the neighborhood gully, trapping fruit flies with my dad on a remote mountain range (he studied their DNA),

• An amazing to Japan (age 12! by myself! first plane ride!) to stay with some cousins. That trip opened the borders of my world.

1986

My fourth grade teacher, Miss Andrus, tries this brand new pedagogical thingy called “Writer’s Workshop.” After years of prompt-based writing, I’m dizzy with the freedom of options. She nominates me to attend a Young Writers Conference at a local university. Suddenly, I’m dreaming of becoming a real author.

1993

I’m the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, The Thunderbolt. The advisor goes on maternity leave for most of the year. She tells the sub, “Just let Deborah run the class.” So I do. And I run a fourth-grade writing class at the elementary school. And I get HOOKED on teaching. I’d already applied to Boston University as a journalism major. I switch at the last minute to elementary ed and English.

1998

My first classroom. Seventh grade humanities. I run a Writer’s Workshop and write alongside my students. It’s all such a rush. Child and adolescent development become my life-long passion project. Still. Even now. It’s my favorite thing.

The 2000s

Remember those early days of blogging? I helped start a group blog (it’s still going strong without me) and my own blog about children’s literature (that’s long gone!). I write poetry. I teach fourth grade, middle school and then high school English. I marry a fellow teacher. Brief stint as a school administrator — where I discover I really love helping parents help their kids and want to get better at it. So at night, I get my graduate degree in counseling psychology.

2011

Child #1 is born. I take a break from schools. Love mothering. Feel lost professionally. Really really lost. I’m not even writing much.

2014

Child #2 is born. Still love parenting. Still lost professionally. A good friend reaches out and says, “Let’s write an article together — where should we pitch it?” I say, “My FAVORITE publication is MindShift — but that’s way too much of a long shot.” She pitches anyway. They accept. Article goes viral (what?!). Someone reaches out about turning it into a book. I’m not ready or confident enough. I say no.

2015

I start teaching English part-time and read psychology journals to feed my hungry brain. On a random April day, I suddenly get an idea for an article about preschoolers & emotions, drop everything, and write for three hours — like an out-of-body experience. MindShift accepts the article. It (really randomly) goes viral, too. Like seriously viral. PBS KIDS reaches out. “We are starting an only blog for parents and saw your piece,” they say. “Would you like to be a columnist?”

2015-2019

Parenting. Teaching. Cross-country move. Writing over a hundred articles for PBS KIDS, MindShift, and other publications. Interviewing brilliant people. Learning from them. Feeling humbled by their willingness to talk to me. I move into parent education, giving workshops on emotional development. Still cannot fathom writing a book for adults — it feels too big and too hard.

2019

But I can fathom writing a picture book. And I write one — I Love You All The Time — based on a bedtime mantra. And then get a contract to turn it into a series.

2021

Here’s where the :official story” picks up again — and for this, I’ll quote from the intro of “Raising Awe-Seekers.”

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A school had reached out, asking for a parent presentation on “resilience and stress management.” Resilience is crucial to psychological strength, and it’s a topic I normally enjoy presenting on for parents, but I just couldn’t muster my usual excitement.

For a year and a half, since the start of a global pandemic, it seemed like all my articles and workshops had been focused on how to help kids and adults “navigate these unprecedented times.”…. But I was tired, and the other parents I knew were tired too.

Staring at this school’s email invitation, I froze up. I don’t want to talk about stress and resilience again, I thought. I want to talk about . . . hope. But what would that look like?

That same week, I was finishing edits on my picture book “You Wonder All the Time,” which celebrates young children’s innate curiosity. Somehow, I stumbled upon a forty-five-page white paper called “The Science of Awe” from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper summarized fifteen years of research, much of it research from the Center’s founding director, Dacher Keltner.

Sitting at my computer, reading the research on awe for the first time, I got goosebumps. I remember how the light filtered in through the office window as I read. My brain whirred, connecting these findings with decades of child development research. I laughed, scribbled notes, and texted the paper to a dozen friends and colleagues. I was awestruck.

Over the next several weeks, I devoured every article and academic paper I could find on the benefits of awe and wonder. And then I called Keltner to interview him for a Washington Post article about how parents can help their kids experience these emotions. In the days that followed the article’s publication, I watched the response from readers. Awe seemed to be resonating with everyone.

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2023

Signing the contract to write this book was exhilarating and terrifying. Because I still didn’t quite believe I could do it. But deadlines are deadlines — and that’s something I did understand from years in the journalism world. So I made dozens of deadlines and checked them off one by one by one until . . .

2025

Well, until here we are and here this is:

TLDR: It’s been a helluva ride, this writing life.

Cheers,

Deborah

P.S.

Want to help spread the word about this book? Share this newsletter or my website with others!

P.P.S. I’m so grateful for all to good coverage of my book this month. Here are a few places you can tune in!

• Good Day DC: Surprising Sources of Awe

• NPR’s MindShift: How Experiencing Wonder Helps Kids Learn

• Edutopia: 4 Ways to Facilitate Awe in the Classroom

• Greater Good Magazine: How Moments in Nature Help Kids Thrive

• Library Journal: Starred Review

• Edit Your Life Podcast: Raising Awe-Seekers with Deborah Farmer Kris

• Parent Venture: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive

• Publishers Weekly: Q&A with Deborah Farmer Kris

• Tilt Parenting Podcast: Harnessing the Power of Awe in Our Parenting

• Beautifully Complex Podcast: Build Resilience and Joy with Awe and Wonder

• ChildBuilders Podcast: Raising Awe-Seekers

• Balanced Parent Podcast: Why Awe and Wonder Matter for Kids and Parents