'We Miss You, George Floyd' is a picture book by a Minneapolis writer that aims to start conversations with kids

But the book — one of just two of her many books that Gibney says poured out of her in roughly its final form — is not just for Black kids and parents.

“I think for the moral and psychological health of white children, they also need to talk about this stuff with caregivers and teachers and parents and caring people in their communities. That’s part of what I really hope this book can do: give all those folks I just mentioned some sort of place to start, to develop a shared language to talk about this stuff,” said Gibney (who sometimes reviews books for the Minnesota Star Tribune).

The writer and teacher has spoken with kids about their concerns in visits to Bancroft Elementary School, which Marwein attends and Boisey attended. Gibney met kids whose families had been directly affected by the unrest after Floyd’s murder, including having their businesses burned. Her experience was that while these kids knew about the murder and were curious about its aftermath, many of them remain traumatized by things that happened when they were too young to process them.

“There’s a line in [the book] about how we can imagine a world without police violence because we can imagine a world without police. Some kids really seized on that: ‘We can’t have a world without police. We have to have police to stop crimes.’ And I would say, ‘Do police really stop crimes?’ ” Gibney recalled, adding that kids saw many possibilities. “One kid said, ‘We could take all that money and put it into housing and food.’ And these are third graders!”

Even before its release, writing the book was an act of healing for Gibney, who thinks of writing as a sacred way to work through her experiences and feelings. She began work on “We Miss You” four years ago.

“It feels like, for me, you work with something for a while on your own and then, if you’re lucky, with one or two other people — a good editor and, for children’s picture books, a good illustrator. Again, if you’re lucky, it goes out into the world and other people encounter it and interpret it and experience it through their own lenses,” said Gibney, who can’t wait to find out what readers make of her new book. “It’s this beautiful process. It comes back to you, but it comes back different. I love that process so much.”