A year on the road with the Busload of Books
One humid early evening last August, a passionate throng of Chestertown residents and many friends stood outside Stam’s Luncheonette on High Street holding colorful handmade signs that said, “Welcome Home!” They were waiting patiently for an even more colorful school bus to arrive. A school bus that would return a young Chestertown family home after being on a year’s-long road trip.
As the bus pulled into town, it was first greeted by a police escort, lights a-blazing, that would accompany it along the final leg of its journey. The throng became noisier and more animated as it approached and then parked outside Stam’s—because this was not just any school bus, or any standard road trip.
This bus was returning from a trip that took a decade to conceive. It involved making a minimum of 50 stops along the way, one in every state and the District of Columbia. This trip was not a traditional vacation or sightseeing excursion, however. This was an advocacy-based trip, with built-in opportunities for family bonding.
After many congratulations, hugs from the crowd, and cones of some of Stam’s famous ice cream, the family retired around the corner to the converted barn loft that they call home to begin reflecting on that advocacy trip. The journey that had husband and wife, Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr on a quest designed to further a literacy-based outreach initiative they had started years prior by visiting under-resourced schools like the grade school Robbi attended growing up in Kent County.
A Collab of Creative Passions
Years prior to those Kent County visits, the couple was living traditionally appropriate, post-college lives with careers in creative arts, each having eventually landed positions at a Baltimore design firm, where Robbi was an illustrator, and Matthew, an advertising executive.
While the couple had initially met in college, they were not personally involved until they ran into each other again a few years later. Theirs was a collaboration of shared dreams and creative passions. She wanted to one-day illustrate children’s books and he wanted to publish, “…big, fat, ponderous novels.”
And so, they embarked on their first journey; the one where they marry and eventually have kids, and then come to a profound realization: They’re so efficient in their demanding professional roles, they will probably never have the opportunity to work toward the aspirations they’re most passionate about.
“So, we said to heck with this, and we quit our jobs,” Swanson says. “We sold our house and most of our belongings, and we moved to Chestertown into the hayloft,” referring to Behr’s parents’ converted barn around the corner from the luncheonette.
The couple gave themselves a year to embark on paths that would help them realize their dreams of being a children’s book illustrator and a novelist. It was during this most free-form time in their lives when they were able to start self-publishing their first books, after Swanson decided he would be the one to give a voice and narrative to his wife’s amazing illustrations.
“We spent a glorious year making self-published books in the hay loft of that barn, and we thought we’d have to stop. But right before the year was up, I got a call from my old boss offering my old job back working halftime from home. So, that allowed one year to turn into two years, and two years to turn into ten,” says Swanson.
With titles like Everywhere Wonder and Babies Ruin Everything, Swanson and Behr started getting noticed for their work.
“Slowly, our books got out into the world. In part, thanks to Tom at The Bookplate,” explains Behr, referring to Chestertown’s beloved local bookstore. “So, ultimately, luckily, our books found their way into the hands of some editors at big publishing companies.”
With the larger publishing world on board, the couple would be offered some new opportunities to interact with readers. (The couple had already been making the rounds at the behest of high schools and colleges who wanted them to talk about the ins and outs of the self-publishing world.) Behr explains that they were then offered the chance to speak at elementary schools as visiting authors.
“But hosting an author or illustrator is expensive,” she says. “We noticed that we were only getting invited to private schools or really well-resourced public schools. Places where the kids had plenty of enrichment opportunities already.”
Swanson says they hoped they would be able to pinpoint schools that were traditionally under resourced.
“We realized that there was a huge group of kids we were not serving, and they were probably the kids who would most benefit from having an author visit,” Swanson says. “For example, our own Garnet Elementary School right here in Chestertown, is an amazing school full of wonderful teachers, and a warm and loving environment. However, you may not know that 88-percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. So, quite understandably, hosting authors is not the highest priority.”
Swanson and Behr knew the key to making this advocacy effort as valuable and relevant as it could be, was to design and push for a program geared specifically for Title I school kids.
It Took a Village…and 10 Years
Cue the crowdfunding, partnership-building, and logistical portion of our narrative. Fortunately, the couple visited enough schools by this point, that they had already built a following and sense of aspiration and anticipation about their visits.
Anticipation, because Swanson and Behr unwittingly created a secret sauce in the advocacy space. They inspired young students with a unique, agency-building approach to their presentation that exposed the kids to all the steps in the creative process of producing a book from concept to cover. It also provided a unique opportunity for the kids to see a man and a woman who love what they do professionally, and who truly care about them, working together as presenters.
Just a look at their Instagram account provides an amazing insight into how the couple captures and holds the imaginations of pretty much anyone who wants to follow along—and these kids certainly want to. The engagement by the pair in these sessions with the kids and their teachers is robust, heart-felt, and genuine.
The pair would soon devise a plan to take their act—and family—on the road with the goal of visiting one Title I school in each state and the District of Columbia, over the course of a year. They set up an online crowdfunding site to help them support the effort financially. The Kent Cultural Alliance, a local arts nonprofit, would step up to act as a fiscal sponsor. The couple is, to this day, humbled and grateful for the overwhelming support they received from the public.
So inspired, the couple continued to write and illustrate children’s books and foster the partnerships that would help provide the logistical and research-related support that would facilitate and validate the entire endeavor. The creators would go on to produce their now wildly popular Cookie Chronicles series during this time.
Interestingly enough, the effort to get on the road began with the hope of purchasing a standard recreational vehicle to accommodate the family of six as they traveled. Behr describes that experience as demoralizing since the sticker shock at the RV show they attended proved palpable. And then, their good friend, Brian Thompson of Red Door Remodeling, suggested that they get a decommissioned school bus and rehab it to house and transport a family—a family with many books—across country. He then volunteered to do the interior rehabilitation for them, so that box was checked.
And so, the story grew with more and more people pitching in in any way they could to see this mission come to fruition. Chestertown’s own Washington College provided the research team that would collect the data and document the experience from an academic point of view.
“We feel incredibly glad that Sara De Reza at Washington College approached us to add this whole other layer of meaning and significance to the tour because it gives it a much longer legacy,” says Swanson.
And then there was the matter of the books, thousands upon thousands of books, that would need to be printed, warehoused, and then delivered to the right schools at the right time, a tremendous effort in itself. (Upon further examination, the space in the bus was already spoken for, and therefore they would need help transporting a year’s worth of books.)
“We had built a really important partnership with the national nonprofit First Book, who handled a few logistical things from dealing with sourcing the books, shipping the books, warehousing the books, and providing the names that we used to run a national search for the schools we visited,” Swanson explains. (First Book is the largest online community of educators that serve the needs of kids who live in poverty with the goal of building a path out of poverty through educational equity.)
Scheduling would be another hurdle to overcome, as one bus with four children, eventually two dogs, zero on-bus bathrooms, and a very defined goal of being in certain regions and then certain cities or towns at certain times of the year, would provide a year’s worth of gauntlets to run. One of the dates would even need to provide time for the family’s other enterprise, summer-time salmon fishing in Alaska. Yes, we said salmon fishing in Alaska!
Along with the kids’ sports, activities, their bill-paying jobs, and various volunteer community pursuits, this couple with their four kids, ranging in age from 6 to 15, go to Alaska every summer to work as commercial salmon fishers until mid-July. The couple described this facet of their lives as another story in itself and left the rest to our imaginations—for now.
And then there were the tremendous contributions that they didn’t even see coming, like the people from national retailer, Build-A-Bear Workshop. Along with providing the funding for 125,000 books, the retailer’s Build-a-Bear Foundation developed a “Read Teddy” reading buddy bear for children as part of their partnership with First Book. The couple initially received 20,000 Read Teddys that they could present with each book to each child. Over the course of their endeavor, they would receive thousands more.
While every town visit was special in its own right, their own kids’ learning experience included stops to the French Quarter in New Orleans, Devils Tower in Wyoming, lobstering in Maine, and helicoptering into the Grand Canyon to visit a school in the remote village of Supai, where the Havasupai people have lived for more than 800 years. The family also made it to the tropical shores of Hawaii; the bus patiently awaiting their return on the mainland.
That Awesome Bus!
Yes! Two adults, one 1st grader, one 6th grader, one 8th grader, one high school sophomore, and one pet dog (joined by another adopted dog somewhere down the road) all cohabitated on this school bus which measures 23-feet long, 8-feet wide, and 11-feet by 6 inches high (when the rooftop pop-up is not in use) for one entire year. Artist and mom, Robbi, and her friends at Garnet Elementary School spent months painting a mural on the exterior, creating one fantastical, colorific, home-away-from home on wheels.
Afterthoughts & Take-Aways
At the time of this writing, the Swanson family has been home for two months and has not even scratched the surface of their post, bust-trip experience. “So, when we look back from these very short two months removed from this experience, we’re so gratified that things went as smoothly as they did,” Swanson says. “We had predicted much calamity for ourselves, whether the bus was down, or schools not being able to host us, or getting sick, or any number of things that can go wrong.”
But the real takeaways, they say, resound with experiences that transcended the basics of providing books to kids who otherwise might not have them.
“Yes, the books are great, but the books are kind of subsidiary to all of these other things that are coming from the fact that we are here in the community with our bus, with our dogs, with our kids, with our energy and effort,” Swanson says. “And that’s what meant the most to the teachers.”
The teachers, explains Behr, perhaps conveyed it best when they simply said, “Thanks for loving our kids.”
“And that’s ultimately what the kids took away—is these people came to my school and that makes me feel differently about myself,” Swanson says.
And what of the future?
“We are preparing for the next round of it,” Swanson says. Not a full-blown, year-long tour, but a continued, concerted effort based on an ongoing literacy initiative in which they plan to combine a more limited number of in-person school visits with widely available online assemblies to Title I communities so they can offer different types of support more widely.
“We both plan, we [both] want to do the tour again at some point, but really we blame our children for wanting to go to school, and play soccer, and have friends,” Swanson cheekily says as to why the family will now take a bit of a breather before getting back on the bus.
Want to learn more about the Busload of Books Tour? You can re-live this trip (and get updates on the next phases of the project) via Robbi and Matthew’s Instagram page @robbi.and.matthew and on the bus’s website at busloadofbooks.com.
