The Heart-Strong Friendship

A little over a year ago, I didn't know Tremayne Seymour. We met through a painting. I bought his piece, called Mother Earth, at a silent auction and reached out through a prison messaging app just to say thank you. That thank you note grew into a friendship. The friendship grew into an art show called FROM WITHIN. Now it's becoming a children's book.

It's called The Heart-Strong Friendship. I wrote it, and Tremayne is illustrating it. The book imagines what our friendship might have looked like if we'd met as kids. Little Tremayne lives in Brooklyn and loves to draw. Little Jeremy lives in the Maine woods and loves to build. They both love trees. A lost sketchbook brings them together, and a friendship grows through letters.

Making this book together is hard. Tremayne is incarcerated in Virginia. I can't email him a manuscript. I have to mail it, and the rules can change without warning. This summer, a package came back rejected because the page limit had quietly dropped from 5 to 3. Then the photos I took of his sketches on video calls cost him his video privileges for a month.

For my other children's book, I'm working with an illustrator in France. Reaching her is far easier than reaching a friend a few states away. These small cuts add up, and they make me wonder how we expect people to heal inside a system built for disconnection.

I could hire a professional illustrator and make this easier. Instead, I'm choosing to make it with Tremayne, because it's our story. Love is doing hard things because they're hard. The book is what we're making. The friendship is what we're building.

This past Sunday, I shared the unfinished book in public for the first time, at a service I led at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick.

Read the full piece on Substack.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org