Rocky roads the book is a translation of Flo’s and Juliët’s process of cancer and lyme into 132 pages full of illustrations, poems and personal stories. These forms describe how they successfully faced similar challenges through different diagnoses, and how they both started expressing as artists again. Rocky roads shows the beauty of the ever-changing road, and how it is full of sweet surprises.
About the book
The first step of making Rocky roads, was Jules writing the poetry. We decided that we wanted to share how we went from de-pression (pressing ourselves and our emotions down) to ex-pression (releasing the pressure on ourselves and our emotions) and with that idea the basis of the book was set. Flo made the illustrations based on the feeling of the poems. This was another way of seeing how many similarities two different journeys can contain. After a few months, Jules finished the 53 poems that the book contains. In the year after that moment, Flo made the 51 illustrations using mixed media. Each poem and illustration expresses a different part in the process, and describes the parts that we were depressing, the parts we were able to embrace, as well as the parts where we truly felt like we could express ourselves completely.
In addition to the poems and illustrations, we share our moment of diagnosis, and what storms we encountered through stories. As our sub-title, the journey from living on the edge to the center of life, describes, we started a journey. In the book, we describe what ‘living on the edge’ and ‘the center of life’ means for us by writing about our experiences on how we relate to these subjects.
In May of 2021, everything was finished and with our bags full of content for the book, we went to the graphic designer. Together, we worked on things like the look of the cover, the paper we use in the book and the placement of the illustrations and texts. We had a look at the printing house and learned what journey the paper goes through to transform into a book. On September 4th 2021, we have self-published Rocky roads the book.
About the title
The title ‘Rocky roads’ describes the surprises we can face when we decide to let go of who we think we are and face the beliefs we have been collecting over the years from when we are young. How do we really see ourselves? What is hidden underneath our perspective of relating to the world? Why do we wake up feeling not as energized and excited for the day as we want to? Questions like these invite us to face the answers we might not want to see. But walking the rocky roads makes us realize that life can be way sweeter than we thought. And don’t the surprises make it more fun anyways? 😉
Read more about Jules & Flo here, or check our products page to make Rocky roads your own.