Blog / 2025 / Not for Ourselves Alone Are We Born

It was a simple gesture, from one shocked and despairing person to another, like reaching out to hold my hand, but in the form of an email from across the world. Vivian messaged me the morning after Trump’s election last November to ask how I was holding up.

We’d met online a decade earlier when Vivian contacted me to ask if she could translate my book, Crime Against Nature, into Chinese, and we’ve kept in touch over the years.

Vivian does a lot of translating in both directions, including this English audio version of the famous 16^th century Chinese novel The Journey to the West that makes the story accessible to those who do better listening to a story rather than reading it.

When she emailed me last fall, Vivian explained that she was putting together a video reading of Crime Against Nature and she wanted to know if I had an updated message to go with the book—something to put the project into context now that Trump was going to be POTUS again. Until that moment, I had no inkling that I wanted to make a new version of the book, but I suddenly knew that was exactly what I needed to do.

Vivian’s desire to connect in these troubled times provided me with a project to work on as I waited for Trump to take over. It gave those unbearable months some focus as I wrote the new preface, remade the paintings of the reindeer and the mole, changed the formatting and layout of the book, and redesigned the cover.

None of this would have happened without Vivian’s thoughtfulness, which is why I’m reminded of the elephant painting from Crime Against Nature. Among these African pachyderms, the females live in multi-generational groups of related and unrelated individuals raising the calves together.

It’s a beautiful demonstration of the Cicero’s famous assertion:

“Not for ourselves alone are we born; our country, our friends, have a share in us.”

And we have a share in them—no matter what country they happen to be born into and no matter what awful leaders take over that country.

Art doesn’t get made by an artist toiling away by themselves in their studio. Hundreds of people have supported me in countless ways over the last two decades—from being what I call “gentle clients” and buying prints of my art to cheering me on when I’m doing something especially vulnerable and reaching out to hold my hand as Vivian did.

You can download the new version of Crime Against Nature for free or even purchase a copy for your local library—they prefer hardcovers when it’s a book for kids.

Get the book!

If you’re on social media, you can also share these image-and-text cards. Just save the individual full size digital cards to your computer or phone by grabbing the images below!

I’m not on Instagram or Facebook anymore, but I know those platforms can always use a good dose of inclusivity and science. Here’s some text you could share along with these images: