Mermaid Queen – CASSIKA

Hello and welcome to Week 25 of the Wise Not Withered Character Showcase! Today I am thrilled to present the LAST character of the project: Cassika, our 86-year-old Mermaid Queen!! Cassika's writer is Jumleni, from New York, and her illustrator is Marina, from Egypt!

I found Jumleni on Instagram, while searching for some kind of hashtags about poetry. Her words grabbed at me and I was so excited when she responded positively to my cold DM inviting her onto the project.

And Marina was one of the very first people I recruited onto the project, after finding her on UpWork! It's very fitting that both of these artists' names are Marina (the illustrator's first name and the writer's middle name), and they both gravitated toward the Mermaid Queen character. I'm not sure how I thought of the name Cassika, but it came to me somehow, and it stuck!

Cassika's story's plot came to me all at once one night. I had been sending emails back and forth with the illustrator Marina, trying to come up with some ideas, and this whole thing just poured out of me.

Read the full transcript of this episode on wisenotwithered.com!