Author: Josh Wondra
Located in: Corpus Christi, TX
Submitted: January 25, 2021
Tell us a little about yourself. I'm just a 30 year old guy who enjoys teaching new things to people and has been blessed with the opportunity to present y'all with this book.
I plan to go back to Asia again soon and get back to teaching or linguistics work and to my life. But for now it's quarantine time and I'm stuck in south Texas.
I'm sort of an autodidactic learner and have a wide variety of amateur expertise across a number of diverse fields. Basically, I'm a little bit good at a lot of different stuff. I'm pretty much only truly great at making words fit together and finding patterns in things.
What was your motivation behind this project? Literacy. Yes, it's a bible, but it's also a language learning and vocabulary-building tool. I was motivated just as much by watching my three-year-olds (before this book happened, I taught preschool in S. Asia and Kazakhstan) learn math or pronounce things like "February" as I was by the need for yet another picture bible. The rhythmic musicality of it is a feature, not a bug; just as Bollywood movies are a godsend for learning Hindi because the diction is so much easier to wrap your head around when everything is a song, so too with this.
Kids will get to learn English and develop proficiency in English while also learning about God. Its studying that feels like fun rather than work.
What do you hope folks will gain from this project? I just hope that people enjoy reading together as a family. Or alone even. I hope they learn that words can be fun and that children are intelligent and can easily grasp even rather challenging concepts if presented in an approachable way. Learning should be second nature and a joy, it shouldn't be torturous drudgery. Why should learning about the super awesome world God made for us to live in and all of the intricacies that make it function be a monstrous chore?
How were you personally impacted by working on this project? Oh man. Well, reading Genesis INTENSIVELY as was necessitated by the making of this has been super interesting. "What did Moses REALLY mean when he said this? What was the POINT? And can I convey that point in twelve syllables that rhyme with Nimrod somehow?" It's a unique challenge that forces you to think about scripture in new ways. And also it helps you notice the import and impact of seemingly minor details. Because you run into this question a lot: "Can I leave this part out? Because, wow, would it ever be so much easier to make all the words fit if I could just skip this one tiny detail." But no. The tiny detail always ends up being important and needing to be there.
Who are your influences, sources of inspiration or favorite authors / artists? On this particular series? Dr. Seuss, Moses, and God. Mostly God. All of the especially good or interesting ideas that made it into this are His. I'm just the monkey pounding away on the keyboard.
In general: N.T. Wright (his New Testament and the People of God is phenomenal. Even if I disagree with his overall thesis , his framework and his methodology are excellent). C. S. Lewis. I actually like his space trilogy more than Narnia though. Well, actually, no I don't. I like Out of the Silent Planet most, then Mere Christianity, then Voayge of the Dawn Treader, then everything else..
My list of favourites could literally go on forever, but I shall stop there.
Actually, no. I'll add a third so that we end on a prime number. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", by Claude E. Shannon. Most brilliant paper ever by arguably the most brilliant man ever. The paper itself is art. The mathematics underlying the paper is also art. It's just so good, all of it.
Anything else you'd like readers / listeners to know: This first book only covers Genesis. But I am assured that if sales do well, they will allow me to finish the rest of the series. There's 4 others in various states of partial completion already. So if you want to read Jonah, Exodus, Ruth, or Esther, and to eventually have every book in the canon, please buy this one so that those can happen.
