Turn to the first page of The Couch in the Yard and you tumble into a small town at sunset. A rusty car sits in a bed of flowers and a family readies for an adventure, securing a spare couch to its roof.
They follow gravelly roads "up in the mountains, down through the hollow," past "the stormed-down oaks, and the old scrap heap," writes author Kate Hoefler.
"It's a story about a family's nighttime ritual of loading up an old car and taking a long drive around the rural areas where they live," says Hoefler about her new children's book, which was inspired by her own drives with her children in Ohio's Appalachia.
"As soon as you take a drive — about a minute out — I begin to feel like I'm almost in my own private world," Hoefler says. There are woods and farmland, but also abandoned school buses. "There's a yard that I love where there are sheep living in it, but then a bunch of random objects. And I always wonder what the sheep think of the car that they live next to. It's an economically depressed area, and it is also a gorgeous area."
The Couch in the Yard was illustrated by Dena Seiferling who, although she lives thousands of miles away from Kate Hoefler, used to take similar drives to visit her grandparents in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. "There's just all these artifacts of people's lives," Seiferling says she remembers seeing along the road. "And from a passing-by standpoint you might think, 'Oh, it's just garbage.' But from a child's perspective, you're looking at something and you're thinking about the possibilities."
Seiferling illustrated this story digitally, with pencil. Her goal was to maintain the same kind of paper texture that comes from drawing by hand. "I'm trying to get a flow with it," she explains. "I try and create like, movement with the marks that I made on the page." It lends her artwork a bit of an impressionistic, almost painterly look.
She also says she wanted to touch on stereotypes of Appalachia in the images. "In terms of color, it starts out pretty monotone," she explains. "When you first look at it, you may see it as limited or like lacking color or something. And then, as you flip through the book, it starts to become more alive and more colorful."
The biggest challenge, though, was illustrating a story that takes place entirely at night, while keeping the pictures warm and inviting. "I'm trying to capture the glow and the light" from the moon, says Seiferling. There's a point in the story where a tire goes pop! and the car is stuck. The moon seems to turn off like a lightbulb, and it gets really, really dark. But there's still light.
"You can just see little glimmers of what's going on," — car headlights dot the page, illuminating the tall grasses and hopping rabbits, explains Seiferling. And then the car takes flight — "lighter than porch moths, they flutter and drift," Hoefler writes. The family is headed straight for the moon, where they unpack their couch and settle in for some celestial stargazing.
"It's kind of a dream-like world," says author Kate Hoefler. "That dusky nighttime atmosphere where you're half-awake and half-asleep… it kind of gives readers more space to imagine." Imagine the possibilities in overlooked objects. And imagine where a rusty car and an old couch in the yard can take you.
Text copyright © 2025 by Kate Hoefler. Illustrations copyright © 2025 by Dena Seiferling. Used with permission from Holiday House Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
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