A Sneak Peak of “Leaf Town Forever,” a new book from Kathleen and Beth Rooney

Although Beth and I have read what feels like a million picture books—both when we were kids and to her kids Rose and Luka—we had never written one before, and the learning curve of Leaf Town Forever has been a fun one.

Above all, writing a picture book is an exercise in compression and collaboration. Leaf Town Forever has just 423 words, and the rest of the story—about a group of children creating, defending, and sustaining their own elaborate city in the woods—unfolds by way of our illustrator Betsy Bowen’s images.

To achieve the conciseness we knew the story needed and to give the illustrations space to do their thing, as well as to emphasize the book’s themes of seasons and harmony within nature, we settled on telling the story in haiku. Once it was fully composed, our publisher, University of Minnesota Press, connected us with Betsy and sent our words along to her.

This is just one example of how she interpreted our text and brought it to visual life. The second haiku in the book reads:

Friends gather. Plans hatch.
The town would last forever,
Leaf Town forever.

Here is the image she created with no text:

And here is the image with the text pasted in:

And once everyone—we, Betsy, the press—were pleased with how the pages had turned out, everything was finalized, color-corrected, and typeset.

“Make them stop you”: An Interview with Sarah Schulman about “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity”

The cover gives a sense of how it all looks now, polished up and ready to reach the hands of kids and their parents and guardians and teachers:

Having a brilliant artist interact with our words in this way is one of the coolest things that has ever happened to us, and we can’t wait to hopefully do it again.

Leaf Town Forever will be published on October 14, 2025 with University of Minnesota Press: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917371/leaf-town-forever/ The Chicago release party will be held on Sunday, October 26 at Colvin House at 2:00 pm with sales by the Book Cellar, and Beth and Kathleen will be doing story times and readings throughout Chicagoland and the Midwest this Fall: https://www.leaftownforever.com/news-and-event.