Ellen Potter set out to write a book that focused on a hidden world. With her Big Foot and Little Foot series, she found the perfect way to teach kids about welcoming people who aren’t necessarily like them.
“I began to think about sasquatches and Bigfoot. What would it be like it if there were communities of sasquatches hidden and maybe all over the place? And what if they lived in these giant caverns with sophisticated structures where they had schools for the sasquatches, and they learned things like how to walk through the woods without being seen by humans?”
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She had fun creating this world where the mythical creatures made their own ink from blueberries, sourcing everything in their lives from their surroundings, and eventually gave the characters a subterranean downtown area with everything from a post office to a bakery.
She wrote in the character of a lonely young boy who lived in the middle of nowhere, obsessed with finding a sasquatch. A friendship is born—and the plot unravels—when a young sasquatch desperate to get out of his cavern community meets the boy.
It is through this friendship that the book’s bigger meaning emerges—the idea of “the other,” or when we subconsciously consider people who are different from us, lesser than us.
“Each community, the human community and the sasquatch community, just sort of eyeball each other with suspicion and fear,” Potter says. “And there is this beautiful friendship between the two characters that challenges both communities and forces them to look at each other in a very deep sort of way.”
Potter believes the children’s book works on two levels. It appeals to both kids with its stories of adventure and friendship. But she also hopes the book “becomes a springboard for adults and teachers to talk to young readers about how we look at people who are different than us. Instead of approaching those differences with suspicions, to approach them with curiosity.:”
Hear Potter read from her latest, The Squatchicorns, at 3 p.m. March 20 at Left Bank Books.
