About Grandfather’s Journey

In the spring of 1986, while I was walking in a park in San Francisco, a complete story came to me in what seemed like a minute or two. It ran through my head like a speeded-up silent movie, with subtitles. I rushed home, made thumbnail drawings, and wrote the text that afternoon. I called it A Photo Album.
I was a photographer then, and between shooting assignments I painted some of the scenes from the sketches, but they were not what had flashed in my mind. I shelved the book.
A year later, a happy accident sent me to Boston, where I visited my editor Walter Lorraine in his office and told him the story. He asked if I was trying to write a novel, and I showed him the postcard-size dummy, which I was carrying in my pocket. He looked through it without a word, closed it, and said, “Let's do it.”
But I wasn’t ready for the book. I was like an architect of little houses who is suddenly asked to design a grand museum. So I worked on three other books before taking on the big job. I began in early 1991, and two years later the finished book, now named Grandfather’s Journey, left my studio like a child leaving home for college.
It has been twenty years since the book began its journey. And in that time it has visited more places and met more people than I can imagine. I am now six years older than my grandfather was when he died at age seventy. The thought that his spirit as a book will continue to wander about the world after I am gone brings a smile to my face.
— Allen Say