Magical musings

PALMER — When Carol Nash Reed looks at the opening pages of her first children’s book “Musk Ox Magic,” the pastel illustrations drawn by her teen-age daughters take her right back to the Lazy Mountain farm where she was raised in the 1950s.

“I can picture the laundry hanging in the field and the bears playing by the road,” she said. “It was just like ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or something. It was pretty rugged. But it certainly provided a lot to draw on for the story.”

The bears, wolves and moose roaming the nearby woods provided the sinister backdrop for Reed’s mythical dreamscape in the book featuring her brother John’s young triplets Nathan, Maddy and Makayla on the same 220 acres that is now the Windy Valley Musk Ox Farm.

A former Frontiersman reporter in the 1970s who had never really entertained the idea of writing her own book before, Reed said she was approached by John about two years ago to come up with a book based on his musk ox farm. He and his wife, Dianne, owned a Skagway boutique that sold clothing items made from musk ox fur, or qiviut.

Intrigued by the idea of incorporating the prehistoric creatures into a children’s story, Reed knew she wanted to draw on the fantasy world from the classic “Where the Wild Things Are,” and the idea of children imagining monsters under their beds and in their closets.

The twist of “Musk Ox Magic,” however, has three friendly, wildly colorful musk ox sporting names from her brother’s farm in each of the children’s rooms, protecting them from the scary animals in their nightmares.

“A dream bear lumbered into Makayla’s dreams and smacked his lips,” the story goes. “‘I’m going to gobble you up!’ he growled. Makayla ran away, with big dream jumps as fast as she could go.”

Next, Nathan is visited by a dream wolf with red fire in her eyes, threatening to eat him for dinner. He, too, ran away with huge dream jumps.

Finally, a moose charged into Maddy’s dreams, “snorting and shaking his antlers.”

All three kids ran through the dream field with giant, leaping dream jumps, the story says.

As the triplets dashed into the musk ox pasture for safety, “the musk ox mamas wheeled around with lightning hooves and made a strong circle to protect them.”

The two-page illustration of that scene by daughters Karen, now 15, and Sara, 18, was particularly challenging for them, Reed said.

Karen, now an eighth-grader at Palmer Junior Middle School, was drawing all the people in the story, while Sara, a Colony High School graduate now living in Belgium, was in charge of creating most of the animals.

Although Karen had been drawing people since she was able to hold a pencil, she wanted to capture her cousins’ faces as realistically as possible while also making sure they blended with both her mother’s story and her sister’s depictions of the musk ox.

When all was said and done, however, Reed was very pleased with it.

“It looks like a nativity scene to me,” she said, adding she had created a storyboard of each page after she’d written the story and the girls sketched out different possibilities on each one until they were all satisfied with the overall layout.

Settling on which colors to use, however, was a bit of a struggle, especially when it came to the animals and their backgrounds, Reed said.

For instance, Sara wanted the musk ox on the book’s cover to have more bright reds, while her mother thought it made it a little too scary for young children.

“I wanted calmer colors on the front,” Reed said, explaining why there are more greens and blues there.

Conversely, the bear toward the end of the book was originally colored all pink by Sara and Reed added dark blue strokes to it to make it appear more mature and menacing.

“It wasn’t always a happy process,” Reed laughed as Karen nodded. “I don’t think the girls realized what they were getting into when I asked them to do this.”

Reed said that when she first agreed to write the book, she tried to find other local artists to illustrate it, but everyone seemed to be too busy with other projects.

She then realized she had her own artists in-house.

“The girls have always been artistically talented, so it really wasn’t a stretch to consider them,” she said. “I just had to convince them that it would be fun.”

Karen admitted she wasn’t too enthusiastic about the project at first.

“I had other stuff I was doing,” said Karen, who was 13 at the time. “But it was kind of exciting when Sara and I started doing it. It helped that we did it together.”

Years of homeschooling also helped the family find the time and discipline needed to actually sit down and work on it every morning, Reed said.

While the story itself was banged out in about 30 minutes, the more arduous process of getting illustrations to match it took the three more than a year altogether, she said.

Dedicated to the memory of Reed’s parents John and Sylvia Nash — “true Alaskan pioneers” — the 30-page, glossy paperback the size of an average coloring book was self-published by Reed with her own Snowstorm Press and printed in Seoul, Korea, last October through Alaska Print Brokers in Anchorage.

She had 2,000 copies produced and is selling them for $9.95 at Carrs/Safeway and in Wal-Mart, as well as during a book signing with Karen at Fireside Books in Palmer Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m.

Proceeds will go toward the girls’ college funds and back into the pot for future projects.

Reed already has written another children’s book, “Polly’s Quest,” but has yet to get commitments from her daughters to provide the art for the story about a chicken.

“At least they would go into it with their eyes wide open this time,” said Reed, whose inspiration for that book came from the family’s own seven chickens living in a pen with a turkey outside their front door near the road to Hatcher Pass. “I’m just so proud of them for doing this first book with me. How many mothers can say they published a book with their kids?”

Reed can be reached at snowstorm.press@gmail.com.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.