The Sparks
Every story on this site started somewhere, and that somewhere is almost always the same: a kid I love had an idea.
This page is for them. The sparks behind the stories.
Adam (a.k.a. Dumi)
The very first spark.
Bambalina was born on a porch swing at my parents’ house. Adam and I were swinging together, the sun was doing that thing where it makes everything look a little magical, and I started telling him a story. I didn’t know it then, but a lot of what found its way into that first story came from the “mini adventures” I used to take Adam and his brother on, through the fields around their grandparents’ house.
Adam has a wild imagination. The kind that always seems to be reaching for the next adventure and, honestly, a fair bit of chaos along the way. He didn’t just like the Bambalina story. He held onto it. He asked for it again, and again, and again, until I finally sat down and wrote it out so he could have it whenever he wanted.
Most of the strange turns and the slightly chaotic moments in Bambalina’s world started as one of Adam’s ideas. He’s the reason this whole thing exists.
Leonardo (a.k.a. Leo)
The quiet observer.
Leo is contemplative in a way that’s rare in a kid his age. He notices things. He wonders about them. He picks up snails after it rains and studies them like a tiny scientist, completely absorbed.
He’s the reason this site has more than just stories on it. Watching Leo’s curiosity about the natural world — the patient, careful kind that wants to actually understand — made me want the books to do more than tell a story. They could share a little bit of the real world too: a video about something a character sees, a fact about something they find, a small window into how the world actually works.
When you come across the videos tucked into a chapter, that came from Leo.
Elsa (a.k.a. Luca)
The co-author.
Elsa has a creative mind that’s always moving, and a fascination with storytelling that matches my own. She charmed me, patiently and insistently, into writing a chapter just for her. And then she didn’t just wait for it, she helped build it. We invented characters together. We decided what happened to them together.
LuLu, the wolf, came straight from Elsa, from her love of wolves and her spunky, fiercely caring personality. There’s a lot of Elsa in LuLu, and there’s a lot of Elsa in the chapter that’s hers.
She’s my first official co-author, and I have a feeling she won’t be my last.
If you’re a kid reading this and you have your own wild idea for a story, hold onto it. Tell someone. Sometimes that’s how whole worlds get started.