Friends, Out of the Blue

A branching-stories, edu-taining picture book intertwining read and play for kids 6-100+

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Hey! If you are redirected here after visiting poliandorki.com, let me explain. While finishing writing and getting into production, I included in the book a link to its website. However, I hadn't finalised the website yet, and a domain named poliandorki seemed like a good idea. So, after creating poliandorki.com, this website, as a more stable home for my writings, came to be as well. And thus, poliandorki.com is redirected here. Thanks for being here.

What is the ‘Friends, Out of the Blue’?

Friends, Out of the Blue is an experimental picture book, combining read and play and exploring the resilience that personal recovery demands in the face “broken” or “heavy” hearts and can be expanded to emotional breakage as a whole together with ocean literacy and interpersonal skills.

Tender and rooted in honesty, Friends, Out of the Blue is a love letter to the value of embracing vulnerability when forging meaningful friendships with oneself and our loved ones – a marriage of overcoming fear and imagining a seemingly impossible feeling of belonging.

A few spreads from the "Friends, Out Of The Blue" book, Image credit: Déspina Kortesidou

What is the story about?

In a time when the changing ocean makes life harder and harder for sea animals, this book tells a tale of friendship between Poli, a young polar bear, and Orki, an orca whale. As no two animals see life the same way, in this book, you can follow both stories as they unfold from the Poles to the Tropics and back again.

The day Orki lost her pod, she ended up in an enclosure between two icebergs. Luckily, Poli happened to pass close by and help her back into the sea. After ‘breaking the ice,’ the two of them stuck to each other like barnacles on boats. A rare friendship grew between them; polar bears and orcas aren’t usually the best of pals. However, when Orki reunited unexpectedly with her pod, she chose to join them on their journey to the Tropics. This sudden departure separated the two friends and hurt each one deeply. But no two creatures swim along life’s reefs and trenches in the same way. From the Sargasso Seas to the Arctic Pole, apart and together, Poli and Orki explore their hearts and heal their sadness.

Why does this book matter?

Some human people will make you believe that life is all golden kelp and delicious clam juice, that you will always surf the best waves and that you will never get hurt. And if you do get hurt, you should hide and forget it, pretend it didn’t happen, and feel embarrassed; if the glass breaks, you can always see the crack they will tell you. Friends, Out of the Blue will tell you that it's not if you break, but when. Everyone breaks. Breaking is not the exception but the rule.

Every book comes with a "map" excerpt. Through this "map", we invite our young readers to follow the characters' footsteps and explore their feelings and sadness too. Images credit: Moriz Oberberger

"The Golden Repair"

Do we have to throw away everything that breaks? Certainly not. Even if a fragile plate or bowl breaks, with enough care we can put it back together. For centuries now, ceramic artists in the human land of Japan have been doing exactly this, giving a new life to broken ceramics. They call it kintsugi.

So what’s kintsugi? The human experts say that it’s the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with golden or silver lacquer. Cracks are transformed into shining, precious ribbons as the broken piece comes together again. This way, breaks and fixes are treated as part of the object's history rather than something to hide. As for me personally, I’ve found some additional applications...

Kintsugi art is not only for ceramics

Some kintsugi artists see the technique as a tool for healing the pain and hurt that can break one’s heart. Everyone will break one day, but you can’t throw yourself away now, can you? We can put the precious pieces back together. Bit by bit, we build hearts of gold.

Friends, Out of the Blue explores friendships’ happy and sad moments, being good friends to each other and oneself. There are many ways to be sad and the book follows how Poli and Orki mend their broken and heavy hearts and bruised feelings to create something new and become better friends themselves.

All this in a background of a changing ocean, which breaks the circle of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ circle of not caring for what we don’t know or we have never seen.

Screen- printing the cover and riso-printing the book. Image credit: Moriz Oberberger

How did we make it happen?

This 152-pages art-book is made in Amsterdam by a bunch of local artists and friends:

Written by Déspina Kortesidou (IG: @despinakortesidou) and illustrated by Moriz Oberberger (IG: @morizoberberger)
Book riso-printed (with 3 colors; federal blue, mint and sunflower) by Hugo Rocci of Terry Bleu (IG: @terrybleu)
Cover is screen-printed to match the mint and federal blue riso colors by Brent Dahl of Darling Services (IG: @darlingservices). Each cover has a unique mint-blue gradient; a little glimpse of Northern lights.
Huge huge thanks to Elli Paliothodorou and Haris Paliogiannis, for advising on the books’ emotional waves and the marine insider info, respectively.

In 2021, while being knee deep in figuring things out and getting to learn the characters, I wrote Sea of Stories: Ocean Literacy for Kids, an article about the book's ocean literacy elements, as part of the 2021-2030 United Nations Dacade of Ocean Science and Sustainable Development online publication. Read it here

This book project is supported with a development grant by the Stimuleringsfonds. Thank you for believing in our project and supporting us in realising it.