Skip to main contentEmu dads raise babies all on their own, incubating eggs for eight weeks, but ruby-throated hummingbird moms take care of their offspring solo. Lots of baby black swans grow up with two dads while Laysan albatrosses have two moms.
A new children’s book by first-time Portland author Fern Wexler explores such family diversity in the bird kingdom as a way to normalize different family structures. Families of a Feather (Penguin Random House, 32 pages, $18) was published last month, about four years after Wexler, 22, originally wrote the text. The book is illustrated by Corvallis artist Kelsey Buzzell.
The message that families can look different but are all based in love is close to Wexler’s heart. Wexler, who is transgender and bisexual, wrote Families of a Feather to be the type of message that he would have liked to read as a child. The book is aimed at children ages 4 to 8.
“I’ve met so many kids now that are younger than I was when I figured out I wasn’t cis or straight—they feel like there is something wrong with them,” Wexler says. “I don’t want them to feel that way because I remember the way it felt. I wanted to provide something for these kids.”
In addition to writing the book, Wexler works in outdoor education for children at summer camps hosted by the Bird Alliance of Oregon and Trackers Earth Portland. The book is dedicated to his teachers at the Cottonwood School of Civics and Science, a charter school he attended on South Bancroft Street. It was of the utmost importance that the illustrations in the book not be anthropomorphized—Buzzell’s work is stylized and inviting, but realistic.
Learning about gender and family diversity in animals was helpful to Wexler when he was coming to terms with his own identity, he says.
“It doesn’t matter in the natural world like it matters to humans,” he says.
GO: Fern Wexler reads Families of a Feather at Annie Bloom’s Books, 7834 SW Capitol Highway, 503-246-0053, annieblooms.com. 7 pm Monday, April 7. Free.
