The first rule in my classroom was never memorize this or cite that.

Think about who wrote it.

Think about who paid for it.

Think about who benefits if you believe it.

It was meant to make them awake.

It means every institution has incentives.

Researchers chase publication and tenure.

News outlets chase ratings, clicks, and ad revenue.

Corporations chase profit.

Advocacy groups chase outcomes.

Politicians chase votes.

Even nonprofits chase donor approval.

But pretending bias does not exist is its own kind of dishonesty.

Not because every institution is compromised.

Not because truth cannot be found.

Structures matter.

Human beings are shaped by the systems they inhabit and the rewards those systems offer.

There is a basic inversion in how we talk about privacy in this country, and it has been upside down for so long that many people no longer notice it.

People sometimes ask how I managed to publish sixteen books in two years, as if I’d suddenly turned into a machine. The truth is far less dramatic.

What I had was not speed so much as accumulation. I had twenty years’ worth of drafts and fragments sitting on a hard drive, pieces written in quiet hours when no one was looking. Pages half-finished. Ideas half-formed. Lines that waited years for the right home. I also had the kind of financial reality that teaches a person to be practical. Not “tight on money” in the abstract, but poor in the plain monetary sense, where hiring editors or illustrators is not a normal line item. It is the kind of luxury you do not even let yourself daydream about.

But I am Generation Jones, raised analog and adapted digital, and I learned how to make technology work for me.

I could not have shaped this much material fifteen years ago, or ten, or even five. The tools were not there yet. Now they are, and I use them. AI helps me edit. AI helps me illustrate. I describe what I need, refine what misses the mark, and keep moving. Some people will criticize that, and that is their right. But many of those same people have never had to choose between paying a bill and paying an artist. Necessity has a way of stripping theory down to its bones.

Still, the practical explanation is only part of the truth.

Underneath it is something deeper, something I do not always say out loud.

I was never medically able to have children. There will be no one carrying my name or my stories forward by blood. And over the years, I have watched dementia take pieces of the people I love—my mother, my father, my grandparents—until the memories that made them who they were began to thin and drift. That leaves a mark on a person. It changes the way you think about time. It changes the way you think about what remains.

I do not know what time has planned for me, but I know what it can do.

And so I write.

I write while I still can. I write because these memories, these observations, these small truths from a life lived in Iowa soil and Midwestern weather, are what I have to leave behind. I write because a life does not have to be famous to be worth recording. Ordinary people carry entire worlds inside them. Most of those worlds vanish quietly. I would like some part of mine not to.

This is my legacy.

Not a lineage, but a record. Not children, but stories. Not permanence, but the hope that someday, somewhere, someone will read a line I wrote and understand a little piece of who I was.

When I put Seamus Ailin’s Sailing Thoughtward together, I did not want it to feel like a stack of unrelated poems. I wanted it to read like a voyage.

The poem layout follows that same philosophy.

The book’s four main sections were chosen to reflect four major doorways into wonder.

The second section, Sounds of Sounds, shifts from the world we observe to the world we hear. I wanted music to have its own territory because sound is one of the earliest and most natural ways children experience pattern, emotion, and memory. This section moves through instrument families, voice, choir, stage, and performance because music is both art and structure. It teaches listening, but it also teaches relationship: how separate sounds become something larger when they work together. That felt important enough to deserve its own current in the voyage.

Dear Parents, Grandparents, Educators, and Fellow Explorers,

Welcome aboard! Seamus Ailin’s Sailing Thoughtward was created with one simple hope: to spark wonder. Within these pages you’ll find poems about soil and stars, rivers and rockets, music and milestones. Each poem is an invitation for kids to look a little closer, listen a little deeper, and ask one more “why?”

This collection is meant to be read together. Some families may share a poem at bedtime; teachers may use them to start classroom discussions; curious kids may simply enjoy them on their own. However you choose to use this book, know that every rhyme is a door to a bigger conversation.

You’ll notice short Fun Facts paired with many poems. These little asides give real-world context to the verse, connecting playfulness with knowledge. Some poems also include Seamus Sidenotes: sometimes a bonus fact, sometimes a personal memory from the author. Both are meant to make the leap from poem to curiosity seamless. Today’s giggle over penguins or percussion could become tomorrow’s science project, family story, or lifelong interest.

Most of all, this book is an invitation to curiosity. Encourage young readers to ask questions, follow their wonder, and share their own stories. Did a poem about oceans remind you of a beach trip? Did a verse on music make you think of school band, choir, or a favorite song from childhood? Tell those stories. Kids may remember the facts, but they treasure the connection.

Thank you for being a co-explorer. Thank you for guiding young minds toward wonder. And thank you for joining me on this poetic voyage through sounds, seasons, and stars.

Cross posted from http://www.allencraftsllc.com/blogs/post/seamus-ailin-s-sailing-thoughtward-a-journey-through-sounds-seasons-stars

Originally posted 2026.03.17 4:57 PM

Cats, Dogs & Critters with Tales began, honestly enough, as one book. That was the plan. One warm, whimsical volume full of animals, imagination, and the kinds of observations that sneak up on you when you are paying attention. But somewhere along the way, the project did what kids do: it kept growing. What first looked manageable in one set of covers kept stretching at the seams, then outgrew them entirely — like a child suddenly standing there in jeans that fit just fine a month ago and now somehow stop halfway to the ankle. The more room the project needed, the clearer it became that this was not one book trying to stay small. It was a series asking for space to become what it actually was.

Volume 1 became the home for younger readers — bedtime-ready tales filled with warmth, playfulness, harmless trouble, and creatures who think big thoughts in gentle little worlds. It is the most openly child-centered of the four, built around kindness, curiosity, and the simple joy of letting animals carry a story. This is the volume where the series first introduces its heart: that every creature has a point of view, and every small tale matters.

Volume 2, The Ones We Serve, turns inward toward the animals who live beside us and make homes of our homes. These pieces are still playful, but they carry more tenderness and weight. They are about joy, care, companionship, loyalty, grief, and the quiet truth that loving animals often means learning from them while we imagine we are the ones doing the teaching. If the first volume is about delight, this one is about devotion.

Volume 3, Watching the Wild, widens the lens. Here the focus shifts from household companions to the larger animal world — not as spectacle, but as teacher. The pieces in this volume are rooted in attention: slowing down, watching closely, and noticing that the wild does not explain itself, perform for us, or ask for applause. It simply goes on being watchful, persistent, strange, funny, and often wiser than we are ready to admit.

Volume 4, Natural Thinking, takes one more step outward — or maybe inward by way of imagination. This volume asks what might happen if the natural world were allowed to think out loud. Not in a textbook sense, and not to replace reality, but to tilt it just enough that wonder has room to speak. Animals notice things. Landscapes hold opinions. Quiet moments lean toward thought. It is less about instruction than attention, less about answers than curiosity. In many ways, it is the series at its most reflective and most free.

Taken together, the four volumes feel less like a split project and more like a natural unfolding. What began as one book became a fuller little world: first for younger readers, then for those who love the animals beside them, then for those who watch the wild, and finally for those willing to imagine that nature itself has been thinking all along. Sometimes a book does not fail to stay one book. Sometimes it simply grows into the shape it was always meant to have. 

I only learned the term Generation Jones a few minutes ago, and it immediately rearranged the furniture in my head.

Not because I needed another label, but because this one finally names the weird hinge I’ve been trying to describe for years: the analog childhood that raised me and the digital adulthood that swallowed me whole. The last generation to grow up without screens, and the first to be expected to master all of them. The cohort that remembers boredom as a physical state and now lives in a world where boredom has been hunted nearly to extinction.

Generation Jones is the group that grew up feral in the analog world—unsupervised, unarchived, unoptimized—and then had to become digitally housebroken. We learned to fix things with pliers, and then had to learn to fix things with passwords. We remember when privacy was the default, and now live in a world where privacy feels like a subscription tier. We were raised on paper maps and now get scolded by GPS for missing a turn. We were the last kids who could disappear for hours without anyone panicking, and the first adults who were told that constant availability was a virtue.

There’s something clarifying about realizing you’re part of a transitional species. Not quite Boomer, not quite Gen X, not quite anything the internet has a meme ready for. A generation that grew up believing the future would bring flying cars and instead got infinite logins. A generation old enough to remember the Cold War, yet young enough to help build the scaffolding for the digital world younger people now treat like tap water. A generation that didn’t ask to be the hinge, but became it anyway.

For me, the term explains why so much of my writing circles the same themes: improvised childhoods, latchkey logic, and the odd sensation of watching your own youth get treated like a historical period piece. It explains why I still wear an analog watch as jewelry even when it’s an hour off after the time change. It explains why I can navigate a rotary phone in my sleep, but still have to Google how to silence notifications on a new app. It explains why I can feel both older and younger than I am, depending on which part of the world I’m standing in.

Generation Jones may be the last cohort that remembers what it felt like to be unreachable. Maybe that’s the real hinge. We grew up in a world where you could vanish for an afternoon, and now live in one where vanishing looks suspicious. We learned self-reliance because there was no other option, and later learned digital fluency for exactly the same reason. We became bilingual in scarcity and abundance, boredom and overstimulation, analog patience and digital urgency.

Maybe that’s why the term hit me so hard. It doesn’t just describe a birth range. It describes a posture. A way of moving through the world with one foot planted in the past and one hand reaching for the latest update. A generation that remembers how things used to feel and is still trying to make sense of how things feel now.

And maybe that’s the work.

To write from the hinge, not as nostalgia, but as anthropology. To map the strange terrain between the world that raised us and the world we are still learning to live in. To name the quiet, unglamorous resilience of being the generation that had to translate everything—childhood, adulthood, technology, culture—without ever being handed a guidebook.