Magic is all around. Slow down, notice.
Treasures are everywhere.
Take, for instance, the gorgeous weave of stories and art filling the pages of local youth publishing house Believe in Wonder’s soon-to-be-released collection of magical realism stories, The Magic We Miss.
The title is number 21 from husband-and-wife team, Brian and Josie Parker. The pair steadily pump out beautiful books and coloring books together, many co-authored and all illustrated by Brian.
“It’s hard not be inspired on a project when you’re working with Brian hand Josie,” said John Slovacek, a Tigard-based author who contributed to the anthology.
The dynamic creative duo has an infectious energy, say their contemporaries in the Metro-area literary scene.
Like other titles in Parker’s catalog, The Magic We Miss takes young readers – in this case the middle grade to middle school set – into worlds that stretch their imaginations and fuel curiosity.
Brian Parker has been putting his fantastical stories and the accompanying illustrations on paper for as long as he can remember.
“When I was a kid, I used to tell huge lies. I was a liar from the day I was born,” he said in the award-winning 2023 documentary Believe in Wonder. Brian’s mother responded to his magical, tall tales with paper, crayons, markers, and colored pencils, asking him to write and draw them so she could see and understand what he was talking about.
His stories and illustrations didn’t stop flowing, and his cast of characters kept growing.
These days, Brian fills a couple of sketchbooks a year with elves and ogres, fey and fairy creatures of all manners, and page one of every book is always a drawing of the same very real human woman: Josie.
The Parkers met as teenagers and quickly connected over phone calls, letters, and a shared love of stories. Most of their books are collaborations. In Believe in Wonder, they’ve created a children’s press that publishes stories populated with something the sci-fi and fantasy books they read as kids almost universally lacked: characters of color.
The couple and their two adopted sons, Victor, 10, and Kamari, 7, live nearby in Beaverton’s Bridge Meadows. Their multi-generational housing community is one of a handful around the country developed to create connections between foster and adopted children, their families, and senior citizens.
Brian and Josie’s boys, also known as Believe in Wonder’s Chief Inspiration Officers, are just two of the 14 children the couple had fostered. They appear as the alternate egos along with Brian and Josie in Believe in Wonder’s picture book series, The Pawsons.
Their press publishes titles filled with stories sometimes drawn from their lives and always spun through a web of magic.
The Magic We Miss is their first foray into publishing other authors. The collection is filled with fantastical tales and magical realism inspired by the idea that magic is happening all around us every day.
“The premise of the story collection is centered around this concept of magic existing parallel with us,” Brian said. “You know that we’re living in these communities of magic, but at the same time, people don’t notice it.”
Set locally, the book begins with a wide-eyed young girl on her first solo MAX ride who notices something very unusual about a nearby passenger.
“She’s sitting on the train, noticing all these people and noticing that they’re not looking at her or looking around, and then she sees this troll, this giant broad-shoulder troll reading a newspaper,” Brian said. “She’s a talkative kid, so of course she has to ask questions, and the troll is very reticent.”
The troll, quick to exit, leaves behind his paper, which the girl discovers is not The Oregonian or Willamette Week but a collection of stories for fairies, feys, and magical people detailing their brushes with humans.
Inside, she finds stories of a sentient winter ice storm that targets a Tigard family (Slovacek’s contribution), a girl who befriends the Burnside Bridge after noticing the Portland landmark abandons its post on the river to go wandering at night, and another about a girl who befriends Portland’s iconic Elk Statue, taking on his duty of caring for area wildlife when he steps away for repairs – Tigard-based author Kate Ristau’s contribution.
The Parkers laid out the premise, setting up the framework for their authors, then gave them carte blanche to create the content for Troll’s newspaper.
“The stories that came in are wildly different,” he said. “I kind of love that about it, because each one has a very unique approach to how magic can exist right here with you.”
The Magic We Miss is set for release on Saturday, Nov. 30, with a 3 p.m. reading and signing in Portland at Powell’s City of Books, 28 NW 11th Ave, Portland.
For more information or to pre-order The Magic We Miss visit beleiveinwonder.weebly.com or Powells.com.
