- HOME
- Teachers/Librarians
- Authors/Illustrators
- Reviews/Awards
- About Us
- Cart
 |
 |
 |
How can one begin to appreciate the remarkable story of how this world came to be? How do you behold the beauty of its journey over eons? Just as the movie Journey of the Universe succeeded in conveying magnificence to a general adult audience, Dana Lynne Andersen also succeeded in conveying magnificence to children when she illustrated the three-part Universe Trilogy picture book series authored by Jennifer Morgan. “The universe’s story has two important parts and both need to be addressed,” she said in a recent interview. “There is the rational, scientific part of the story, and also the mythical, emotional part of us that came into being when the universe came into being. . .
[ Read More ]
Journey of the Universe – Now As a Movie, Too!
– by Jennifer Morgan
The stars are our ancestors! That’s the main message of my picture book trilogy for children, and now also the newly-released movie Journey of the Universe, which aired on PBS stations nationwide in December. The movie is a documentary exploring the human connection to Earth and the cosmos, produced by Yale historian of religions Mary Evelyn Tucker and narrated by the mathematical cosmologist and story teller extraordinaire Brian Swimme.
Together, the movie and the picture books offer a wonderful parallel message. The movie does for adults what the Universe trilogy does for children—and the child in all of us. It evokes a sense of profound wonder for our universe and the energy that poured forth over billions of years to create the universe we know today.
In the movie Dr. Swimme walks through an open air market on the Mediterranean Island of Samos, colorful vegetables are piled high on every table. He picks up a beet. “Every carbon atom in this beet was fused inside a star.” Soon we see a colorful meal of vegetables from the market sliding into an outdoor oven . . . the carbon atoms about to become part of the humans who eat them. “Journey of the Universe” is about seeing everything anew, “ablaze with cosmic creativity,” inside the spectacular 13.7 billion-year story of the universe.
In the story for children, I used the storytelling technique of becoming the universe itself and telling “my” story, my “autobiography.” Illustrator Dana Andersen powerfully and evocatively brings the story to life (see Artist of the Month). As told in Born with a Bang: The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story: “Like you, I started as a tiny speck. About 13 billion years ago, or so, I was smaller than a piece of dust under your bed. It’s hard to imagine that I started out so small. But I did. . . . Like you, I couldn’t stay small. I was bursting with wild and dazzling dreams . . .” My life as a universe, I explained, was one of both chaos and creativity. Time after time I nearly perished, but somehow I turned disaster into opportunity and created even more interesting, complex forms.
[ Read More ]
Shop with confidence on the Dawn Publications website.