Mary Jane Begin's PING MEETS PANG

I love this book about diversity and acceptance told through the viewpoints of a Giant Panda and a Red Panda by Mary Jane Begin. She stopped by to talk about Thinking Creativity:


FOCUS
By Mary Jane Begin
      I’ve always been an ambitious human, with goals, agendas and missions to accomplish. I could wall paper an elementary school with the lists I’ve made, crossed out one by one, and redrawn on a fresh sheet of paper. But nothing has pushed my lens into sharper focus than the pandemic. In every way, my reason for making, teaching and being my best human self, have become crystalline. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot of alone time in the past year and a half, or maybe it’s because the world seems precarious, uncertain and a bit fuzzy. Whatever the reason, it’s time not to waste time, with ideas, people and projects that I don’t deeply care about. I want what I make to matter, both to me and to the world.
My latest book was accomplished in break neck speed (for me), a mere 7 months! I had the pandemic to thank, as I had so few interruptions, and the state of the world to thank for its theme of otherness, as I’ve watched people polarize and condemn one another for their differences. In this confluence, a story was born. My book, Ping Meets Pang is about two pandas- one a giant panda and the other a red panda- unable to see each other’s panda-ness. The story was inspired both by a trip to one of China’s panda sanctuaries, and by witnessing our incredible human ability to see differences in others instead of celebrating what we have in common. My hope is to open the smallest of eyes, and encourage them to see with a fresh lens and to focus on what binds us together, instead of what pulls us apart. I choose to celebrate my new found spectacles, rose colored and rainbow tinted, not alone in my house but out in the world as the sun starts to peek from behind the clouds of a darker year.