Iron, bricks or wood are the usual materials used to build a bridge, but one children's book illustrator is using common, household paper.

The Bookworm Beat recently caught up with Jeannie Hunt, from Northampton, Massachusetts who was in Bermuda to give workshops about using the arts to bridge the gap between different communities.

"Being a Baha'i for 25 years, the basic premise is we are moving towards the time when the world will come together into a common awareness that we are one family," said Ms Hunt. "We dedicate a lot of our efforts towards bringing that about. I am doing my part towards this goal through arts in education work."

In 1996 she received an arts degree from Smith College in Northampton where she was a part of the Ada Comstock Scholars programme.

"I studied art and got involved in the world of book arts and studying calligraphy and printing and different kinds of art," she said. "My background had been more with children's books, as an illustrator, a little bit as a writer, but I would still call myself an aspiring children's book illustrator."

She has worked on several projects for the Baha'i Publishing Trust, and In 1998, she received a grant to travel to Guatemala to research indigenous textile and paper arts and to create a series of artists' books related to the culture and the landscape.

"So I kind of brought that world and some of my training as an illustrator into the world of book arts," she said.

Mrs. Hunt was in Bermuda to give a workshop at the Baha'i National Centre and visit her brother, who lives here.

She became interested in using book arts to promote diversity after being part of a group called The Institute For The Healing Of Racism.

"It is a group that started at the grassroots level," she said. "The purpose was to bring black and white together to have dialogue. It was on a small intimate basis. We invited one speaker per month and tell their story. Then we would have discussion about some of the issues that were brought up."

Working with this group, she discovered an unconscious hesitation to interact with people who were different from herself.

"Within the context of the Baha'i community, I was bumping into people all the time who came from different cultures, but that is a different context somehow," she said. "Out there in the community it was a little different."

To help others, particularly kids, get over similar unconscious "hesitations" she created a project called 'Intersections, A City of Stories' which combines book arts and oral history.

"We had seventh graders interviewing local immigrants," she said. "First they played this game called the United Neighbours Game and they had to reach out to people who were different, talk to them a little bit about where they came from and try to get signatures.

"They got points if they could get signatures from people from all parts of the world. That encouraged them to go out and meet people."

Then the students were given some basic interview training and sent out into the community to talk to immigrants to find out what their journey had been about. Later the students used the stories they'd collected to make special books that are a Jeannie Hunt trademark.

Some of Mrs. Hunts creations turn a story into a three dimensional house, or make an accordion book that folds out to look like a road. In the City of Stories project, students put four projects together and created a city block. Multiple city blocks made up a city.

"We created a number of these," she said. "The school library became the city of stories. People could go around and read the stories of immigrants in their community and how they came to be there.

"The kids really got a lot out of it. I think they came to understand a lot more about immigration and that journey," she said. "Part of what happened was, during the process of training them to be interviewers, we invited a few guests into the classroom. We did group interviews and critiqued how the questions went. One of the staff members at the school interviewed her grandmother who came through Ellis Island. She did a little role play.

We got to hear a little bit about historical immigration, and then we invited the English as a Second Language (ESL) students who usually have their classes separated, until their language skills are stronger.

"We invited them into the classroom and paired them up with our kids. These were the kids they bumped elbows with in the cafeteria. You could tell none of the other students had ever asked them about what their journey was about and where they had come from. It was very profound."

Mrs. Hunt has coined her own term for what she does, 'creative literacy'. She is interested in how children use images and words to tell their stories and also how they can use the book structure to tell part of the story.

"It is usually the adults who say, 'I have to warn you, I can't draw,'" she said. "I tell them that everyone has deep within them an attraction to beauty. It comes with your basic ingredients. Using the arts, playing with the arts, visiting museums, looking at the arts, strengthens that attraction to beauty."

She said it is important to recognise the beauty in anything from a scientific equation, to a whale in the ocean to art in a museum.

For more information about Mrs. Hunt's work, and also a teachers guide, go to www.oneheartarts.com.

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