Wander Long, Wonder Strong

Wake with the sun. Eat fresh berries. Relax in the shade provided by trees. Repeat. Every day is the same for Dayo until a change in the sky confuses everything Dayo once knew. Through events as unexpected and varied in feeling as the music which inspired this story, join the journey as Dayo poetically branches out into a new world.

This project uses the original music from Pictures at an Exhibition as an inspiration and foundation for a new children's story. Antonia Royal-Whitmore, founder of Mind of Gold, with a mission to promote literacy in the Black community with representative literature, creates the story of Dayo, a wanderer in search of something that's gone missing in the sky. Through events as unexpected and varied in feeling as the music which inspired this story, Dayo poetically branches out into a new world. Kory Wells, poet, writer, and advocate, adds a literary depth to the story through her verses of poetry used in conjunction with each of the Promenades. She listened over and over to the promenade to discover the two "voices" which have a sort of dialog in the verses she wrote. The poetic meter of her lines closely matches the meter of the music, and the repeated patterns in the promenade inspired her to frequently repetition-through alliteration, internal rhymes, and other poetic devices. Both of these authors used illustrations created by local digital artist Christian Young to shape an inclusive story that parallels the creativity of both Hartmann and Mussorgsky. We thank Christian for sharing selections from his extensive portfolio for this project. You will find that each page of this book has the corresponding movement from Pictures at an Exhibition listed beside the page number, so that the reader can both read and listen to our story for a more complete experience. It is our hope that this book, read alongside an orchestral performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, will help inspire the imagination and artistic exploration of all ages.