The Girl Who Was Born with Glue in Her Brain is about a girl with a handful of thoughts that keep her from being able to enjoy life as much as she would like to, and what she eventually decides to do about it. Keep an eye out for the release in October!
Bio: Jessica Laurel Kane is the author-illustrator of three books for children: The Butterfly Who Was Afraid to Fly and Other Stories, Feed It to the Worms, and A Book of Hearts. Jessica has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has worked as a stop-motion animator, a special effects make-up artist on Broadway for such shows as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and as a commissioned sculptor. She is the recipient of a 2018 LARAC Artist grant and lives in Brant Lake, New York with her husband and little boy.
Author Introduction
Once, many years ago, I heard a voice in my head. Since then, I’ve heard many. Some people say it’s crazy to hear voices in your head. I think what these people are trying to say is that no one is talking nearly enough about all these voices in all of our heads. We hear voices in the world, and we also hear voices in the world of our head. Sometimes the voices from the world get into our head and it’s hard to tell which voices are ours and which belong to others. This is where the suffering begins, especially for some of us who are very good hearers. Some people have 20/20 vision, and some people have 20/20 hearing. I think the people with 20/20 hearing have a gift—they can hear the wisdom they were born with and then share it to remind others of their own. But so often, these people are never told they have this kind of hearing. And because they are not celebrated for this, they hear only what the people in the world say is wrong with them, and they go with that.
I remember growing up and hearing wonderful words of inspiration from my heart. But the problem was, I had a lot of loud people in my life who said very different things. My own voice said, “Share this poem.” The voices around me said, “Who are you to share this poem?” My own voice was loud, but theirs were louder. My own voice needed quiet to hear; their voices interrupted my quiet. Thankfully the loud voices in my world liked to punish me by sending me to my room all alone. They didn’t realize that in this silence, I was tuning into my own voice, my friend within. But it took many years before I began to believe my own voice was more valuable for me than those other voices. And it took many more years to realize that these other voices weren’t really trying to hurt me—they were merely sharing the unpleasant voices that they had internalized from other hurt people.
The Girl Who Was Born with Glue in Her Brain is a memoir of sorts, of my own journey learning to focus the attention of my listening on messages that are life-affirming. I hope if you’re reading this book, you will realize much earlier than I did that the message of your heart is a gift—and that those with 20/20 hearing will value your gift, and they will say thank you when they receive it.
—JLK