What if an email changes everything?

Behind the scenes of Dandelion Seeds: Part 1

Today I’m excited to kick off a new series — only in place of a new illustrated essay, I’d like to invite you behind the scenes of Dandelion Seeds.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll explore how I got started creating illustrated essays, my process of putting them together, and finally, why I love making them.

The beginning of January will mark one year of Dandelion Seeds, and as I loved sharing with you a few weeks ago, I’m currently pregnant with Elena’s little sister, who is due to arrive sometime around Christmas. I’ve been wanting to write this series for a while now, and with both of those milestones coming up, this felt like a perfect moment to do so.

And now, without further ado, here’s part one: The Spark.

With love,
Candace

I’ve been working for myself for nearly my entire adult life — first as a freelance travel writer, now as both a writer and illustrator. And one of the things I love most about this path is the way a single email has the power to send me in a new direction. 

Sometimes that direction is a literal, geographic one. I’ll never forget an email I got in the summer of 2012. I was about to move to India, where one of my projects would be working on the Rickshaw Run — a loosely organized adventure that has teams driving a rickety auto-rickshaw 2,000 miles across India.

I did the Rickshaw Run myself the year before, and now my job was to document everyone else crazy enough to do so.

Then, one morning that summer, I got an email from the organizers, asking if I would be interested in traveling to Indonesia for them as well, to work on another Rickshaw Run they were planning there.

And I’ll always remember the spark I felt in that moment — the way my heart began to race, and how the name of the country itself felt like an invitation:

Indonesia.

---

But what I love even more is when an email sends me in a new direction creatively.

Like the time I was hired to create a full-color mural for Uber in their new regional headquarters in Singapore. I was thrilled at the opportunity, but it also meant I had to suddenly teach myself how to paint with acrylics and move beyond my comfort zone of watercolors (which don’t quite lend themselves to murals). 

Acrylic inks are now my favorite medium to paint with, all because of that project and the impetus it gave me.

I share all of this as a bit of background, because it just so happens that I can also trace my love for creating illustrated essays to a single email. 

It arrived from an editor of the storytelling site Longreads. Her name was Cheri Lucas Rowlands, and I’d been reading her own writing for years, though we’d only connected online briefly once before. 

But in the spring of 2017, Cheri reached out to me again about pitching a story to Longreads. Specifically, she said they were looking to publish more personal essays rooted in places, as well as more illustrated pieces; in her words, stories that were “long, illustrated, and fun.”

By the way my heart started racing, you would’ve thought I’d just been invited to travel to Indonesia again — and in so many ways, it felt like I had.

---

I began thinking about ideas for Longreads immediately, and at first, my mind went in one direction. 

I’d published illustrated stories before, for places like BBC Travel and National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel site, and those pieces always followed a similar style. They featured long chunks of narrative writing, interspersed with the occasional full-scene sketch or illustration. 

They didn’t look all that different from the more traditional travel articles I also wrote at the time, only with artwork in place of photos.

Sketching on assignment for NatGeo in Peru.

So when I sent through my first pitch to Cheri, I envisioned following that style again, simply because it was all I knew. 

But in her reply, Cheri casually mentioned the work of another writer and artist named Hallie Bateman, and she linked to an illustrated piece that Hallie had recently published in The New York Times. It was called “A Eulogy for Crayola’s Dandelion,” and there was nothing traditional about it. 

There was no full-sized artwork — only small, vignette-style illustrations.

There were no long blocks of text — just single lines, and sometimes, a single word.

And the best part? Every word of her piece was hand-lettered. 

It was like nothing I’d read or seen before, let alone created myself.

It felt personal and immediate, and I was especially drawn to how Hallie had married the text and illustrations, weaving them together so much more frequently than I’d ever done up until that point.

It was an entirely new style of visual storytelling for me, and one that I couldn’t wait to try out.

At a different sort of finished line, with a new set of illustrations for Longreads.

The result was my first-ever illustrated essay. It was called “Home is a Cup of Tea,” and it told the story of my search for home through the different teas I had discovered while traveling.

It was shared almost 10,000 times on Facebook alone, and last year, Longreads selected it as one of their ten favorite original essays from the past 13 years. But the thing I’m most grateful for about that story is the new direction it opened up for me creatively — even laying the groundwork for Dandelion Seeds all these years later — and I’m grateful for the email that started it all.

---

Every time such an email arrives, it feels like the universe and I are in conversation.

Like it’s been listening, taking note of where I am on my path, and that it knows right when to send a new spark my way.

And whenever the universe does, the funny thing is that I’m somehow always ready for it. That without even realizing it, it’s as though I’ve been cutting and stacking firewood, scrunching up balls of old newspaper — just like my dad used to do on cold winter nights — and tucking them between little pieces of kindling.

The spark may come from someone or somewhere else, but there’s always a new creative fire inside us, waiting to be lit.