You Are Amazing Like a Rocket (Library Edition): Pep Talks from Young People Around the World

From the creators of PepToc, the virally popular telephone hotline featuring pre-recorded life advice from children, comes a heartwarming collection of 50 handmade motivational posters created by kids from around the world.

This warm hug of a book harnesses the love and inspiration we all need to navigate our increasingly complex and difficult world. Following the immense success of their hotline, Peptoc creators Jessica Martin and Asherah Weiss invited youth from around the globe to make posters with messages of encouragement, hang them up in their communities, and submit photos of their work to share. The result is this collection of disarmingly earnest, often hilarious advice that only children could give.

Whether it’s the California kindergartener who advises his neighbors to ＂be grateful for yourself＂ or the 8-year-old from Alaska who suggests, ＂If you’re frustrated, go get your wallet and buy ice cream and shoes＂--one of these wise youngsters will prompt even the jaded reader to pause, reflect, and see things in a new light.

A tangible reminder of our human capacity for hope amidst hardship, this colorful collection makes a thoughtful, uplifting gift for anyone who could use a pep talk.

Asherah Weiss is a community artist and interdisciplinary educator based in Northern California. She holds her California teaching credential for art, and taught full-time through the early pandemic at a public middle school. Before and since she has worked as a creativity mentor and facilitator with folks from a diverse range of abilities and ages. Her work focuses on discovery and play, and continues to expand all the time. Most recently, she has been exploring improvisational theater as a student and teacher.

Asherah has been the co-creator of many emergent spaces for creativity. She founded and ran womb space collaborative arts, a living room for creative community engagement. She also co-created Open Envelope, which set up public spaces for people to hand-craft notes of love and send them in the mail, including ＂Love Letters to Santa Rosa,＂ a response to the first catastrophic fire in Sonoma County.

Asherah is currently the Programs Director at Artstart, an educational arts non-profit that mentors youth while creating beautiful murals, mosaics, and more in the community.

Jessica Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in Northern California. Her artwork, community public art projects, and education programs focus on our relationship to creativity and joy.

Jessica studied Anthropology at Vassar College and did her field work in Madagascar and France. She received her MA at California College of the Arts. Jessica has been Artist in Residence for Google, and her work has been shown throughout the Bay Area and abroad, including at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, ProArts, Amelie Maison Paris, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, TedX, and national film festivals. Her work has been awarded grants from the NEA, Creative Sonoma, and California Arts Council.

In addition to her work as an artist, Jessica is the founder of Roving Venue (RV), an itinerant gallery that produces innovative temporary public art projects in rural Sonoma County, California. She is also the arts program director and lead teaching artist at West Side Elementary, where she and Asherah Weiss launched the Peptoc project.