Hitch a ride to the moon in a rusty old car and 'The Couch in the Yard'

"Turn to the first page of The Couch in the Yard and you tumble into a small town at sunset. A rusty car sits in a bed of flowers and a family readies for an adventure, securing a spare couch to its roof. They follow gravelly roads "up in the mountains, down through the hollow," past "the stormed-down oaks, and the old scrap heap," writes author Kate Hoefler."

""It's a story about a family's nighttime ritual of loading up an old car and taking a long drive around the rural areas where they live," says Hoefler about her new children's book, which was inspired by her own drives with her children in Ohio's Appalachia. "As soon as you take a drive about a minute out I begin to feel like I'm almost in my own private world," Hoefler says."

"The Couch in the Yard was illustrated by Dena Seiferling who, although she lives thousands of miles away from Kate Hoefler, used to take similar drives to visit her grandparents in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. "There's just all these artifacts of people's lives," Seiferling says she remembers seeing along the road. "And from a passing-by standpoint you might think, 'Oh, it's just garbage.' But from a child's perspective, you're looking at something and you're thinking about the possibilities.""

A small town at sunset opens with a rusty car in a bed of flowers and a family fastening a spare couch to the roof before a long nighttime drive. The drive follows gravelly roads up into the mountains and down through hollows, past stormed-down oaks, an old scrap heap, woods, farmland, and abandoned school buses. Inspiration came from drives through Ohio's Appalachia taken with children, portraying an economically depressed yet beautiful rural landscape full of roadside artifacts. Illustrations were created digitally with pencil to preserve paper texture, emphasize mark-making and movement, and produce an impressionistic, painterly look influenced by similar drives in rural Saskatchewan.

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