Everyone’s ‘kind of’ awesome

Crescentwood

Armstrong Point

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/04/2024 (779 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Teachers and students don’t often collaborate on published works but Kind Of, a locally published children’s book by Westgate Collegiate phys-ed and English teacher Karina Fast, with accompanying illustrations by Grade 11 student Manjit Dhingra, recently hit shelves after a long creative process.

Fast, who is also a mother and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in education at the University of Manitoba, began work on Kind Of in December of 2021. It tells the story of a young boy called Ollie, and focuses on the importance of mentorship and care to a developing young mind. It stresses the fact that all young people — from infancy to their teenage years — have brilliant qualities and encourages confidence at the awkward ages of adolescence, when it is often replaced with uncertainty or self-consciousness.

Throughout the book, Ollie is accompanied by a caterpillar, hidden throughout the illustrations, which grows and develops as he does, something kids have already enjoyed during readings, Fast said.

The self-published author said her inspirations are her experiences as a teacher, as well as her personal journey of motherhood — both of which led to specific memories which snuck their way into Fast’s writing.

“When I looked at the words on the page that I had collected and then started to play with, I started reliving a lot of conversations that I had with my own children,” Fast explained. “One of them stems from my son. We had just recently been at a funeral of a young individual and it was beautiful. But the stories were also very authentic and real and didn’t always paint the individual as perfect. It was just authentic and real and raw.

“And I remember when he came home from that funeral … we weren’t extremely close with this individual, but we came home and (were) just heavy hearted. There’s a lot of self-reflection. And I remember I was folding laundry and my son came into the laundry room, and he just looked at me and he said, ‘Mom, am I kind?’”

It’s a question posed in the book itself — simple in its delivery, and meaningful to both Fast’s Grade 1 students and parents, as well.

“I think when I first started in my career, I saw babies and infants, and then all of a sudden those babies were five. And I thought they were so big. Until of course, I had my own. Then when I moved up into teaching high school, I just realized now, at the ripe old age of 49, that they’re all babies in Grade 9. They’re really no different than my kindergarten students.”

Fast said that a difficult, yet rewarding part of being both a teacher and a parent is guiding young people toward achieving their greatest potential. The opportunity to do so presented itself during the book’s creative process, when Fast brought young illustrator Dhingra on board.

Dhingra showed promise with illustrations she had created for the school’s drama program. While it took time for her ideas to come together, the digital creations she eventually created for Kind Of caused Fast to “burst into tears.”

“I thought, ‘Wow,’ and this is a child, at the time. She’s in Grade 11 now, but at the time she was in Grade 9. So yeah, I’m indebted to her because she made this come alive for me,” Fast said.

The book will be launched at Fast’s own turf — Westgate Mennonite Collegiate — on April 30. A launch at McNally Robinson is also in the works, but not confirmed at press time.

Kind Of can be purchased online through the bookstore link at Friesen Press (friesenpress.com) or Fast’s own website: www.karinafast.com