My name is Dallas Clayton. Dallas, Dallas Clayton. Dallas Clayton. I write kids’ books. I wrote a book called An Awesome Book and another book called An Awesome Book of Thanks. I like to travel around and read to people and tell them stories and try to inspire them to do rad stuff. That’s it. That’s what I do.
I had never written a book before I wrote An Awesome Book and so for me like when you have a kid, people tend to give you books. They tend to give you the same books, you know. And they’re these really powerful, amazing books. It’s like The Giving Tree you get a lot or like, you know, Where the Wild Things Are you get a lot or like any Dr. Seuss you get a lot. And they’re really rad. Little Prince, like killer books. But after my son was born, I was kind of like man some of these books are, you know, 20, 30, 40 years old at this point.
Like where are the contemporary books that still have these like heavy, powerful messages, you know? And so I wanted to try to write something for my son that could — not compete with those kind of books but at least like answer questions on a larger level, you know. And so right around that point I was talking to him a lot about his dreams, which is such a trippy concept to me like the fact that like kids dream, you know. And when you’re kid’s two or three or four or something and they talk to you about how they had a dream that they were on a boat. And you’re like, “You’ve never been on a boat before.”
Like what does that mean? Like what does it mean if you’re dreaming? Like what does it feel like to be on a boat in a dream that you’ve never been to, you know? So that concept to me was really crazy so I wanted to kind of write a book that addressed that idea while simultaneously talking about the idea of dreaming big.
It’s a bit of a play on words, you know, that idea of like dream the same way that you did when you were a kid. You know, where you could be on a boat even though you’d never been on a boat. Or you could climb mountains and go into space and do all these things that like the older you get become more and more impossible because you’re surrounded by people that are telling you that you can’t, you know. So that was the sort of staging point for the book, for An Awesome Book.
