Biloongra to PediTales: Twenty Years of Learning How to Listen to Children
I didn’t set out to build anything. In the late 2000s, in Houston, I was doing what I was employed for, pediatric emergency medicine: long shifts, clinical and academic/research competence, the steady rhythm of a life that made sense on paper. And yet, something was off. Not broken. Not dramatic. Just... hollow in places I couldn’t quite name. I was busy, productive, advancing, while feeling, quietly, that the work was losing its soul. Or maybe I was. Around that time, without fully understanding why, I started writing stories for children. Not to teach. Not to intervene. Just to speak plainly and gently about things that had become too loud and technical in adult language. Fear. Illness. Change. Courage. Curiosity. The small, interior weather of a child’s mind that often gets flattened in clinical encounters. That’s where Biloongra – the kitten, the child, the me - came from. It began with a simple instruction. While I was in Houston, wandering through questions of purpose and...