Dear Mr. Roth,

Thank you for your recent submission of the manuscript The Flamingo of Cape Cod. While we are not accepting it for publication, we do endeavor whenever possible to provide feedback to aspiring authors of children’s books such as yourself.

The inspiration for the book—the first ever sighting, in the summer of 2024, of a wild flamingo on Cape Cod—is a promising one, and well captured in your simple title. Appreciated too is the context in which your story places this event: we at Candlewax Press are certainly also concerned about climate change, witnessed both by our efforts to use recycled paper in production and by the content of some of our recently commissioned books, which attempt to reach young minds before cynicism can set in.

We are less certain, however, about the story’s early representation of online skepticism that pictures of the flamingo on a beach in Dennis are real. While we acknowledge that this did in fact happen, we have found over the years that a more selective filtering can sometimes better capture reality.  Our own sense is that children do not understand sarcastic invocations of “fake news,” and that attempts to mock the phrase instead only encourage it. Similarly, the fact that flamingos have previously been seen on Cape Cod, but turned out to have escaped captivity rather than being wild, felt shoehorned rather pedantically into the story. (Apologies if we are blunt!  As writers ourselves, we find direct feedback most useful.)

We come now to the specific arc and pacing of your manuscript. The idea of having the flamingo venture from place to place on the Cape is just the kind of departure from strict documentary truth that we think can work. It cements the flamingo itself as the central character of the story, and we like the suggestion to any artist you might work with to illustrate a revised manuscript that its flash of pink be visible on every page (and of course the cover). At the same time, the traveling flamingo allows you to include various landmarks and a cast of secondary characters from scene to scene. One of us remembers enjoying some Crowe’s Pasture oysters, but who knew there really is a vineyard, where you have the growers discussing what appears will be an unusually robust harvest, on the Outer Cape?

Some of these scenes struck us as a little too on the nose, however: the binoculared bird-lovers viewing the flamingo from what you say should be pictured as a truly huge SUV still belching exhaust while parked at the Wellfleet Audubon Sanctuary; the couple happily distracted for a moment by the overflying flamingo from talking to an insurance agent as he inspects their summer cottage collapsed into the surf by a recent storm (we’re also not sure any artist could capture the subtleties of that full situation in one image). Children can handle moments of adversity and tension in stories, but our experience suggests that they—and the still young at heart, like us—relate most to a simpler emotional arc ending in a heart-warming moment of redemption.

This brings us to the most important writing choice of the manuscript. While there is certainly precedent for a children’s book organized around the repetition of one phrase, we are not sure about the specifics of your chosen one. This is because, in the end, we were left unsure who you imagined the audience for your manuscript to be: children or, following the prominent success of certain satirical and even profane picture books, parents. Surely adults do not need to be informed, even through a memorable anecdote such as a flamingo sighting on Cape Cod, of the reality of climate change. Rarely does a day pass when NPR, always on in the background here at our offices in Somerville, doesn’t inform us yet more deeply of the pressing seriousness of the problem! But we worry that children, if they understood it, would find frightening (perhaps even nightmare inducing) the final page of your story, in which, as you describe it, the pink of the flamingo is suddenly gone, and only one of its legs remains visible, sticking out of the grinning mouth of a great white shark as it repeats for a final time the mantra of the story: “well, climate change does have its upsides!”

While your manuscript is not a fit for us here at Candlewax Press, we do wish you the best of luck with your writing.

Sincerely,

The Editors

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Ben Roth teaches philosophy at Emerson College. Among numerous other places, his fiction has been published by Santa Monica Review and North Dakota Quarterly, his criticism by AGNI and North American Review, and his academic writing by the European Journal of Philosophy and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has been recognized for excellence in teaching by Harvard’s Bok Center and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.