Dan Santat: Hello. My name's Dan Santat and I am the author and illustrator of "After The Fall." This was a deeply personal project for me. My wife had suffered from a lifetime of anxiety and she also had a family history of depression. I wanted to write something for her as a love letter. I was always playing around with this idea of Humpty Dumpty and the possibilities of recoveries from an accident. When you talk about Humpty Dumpty, you automatically think of the fall. If I just say, "Humpty Dumpty" he is synonymous with falling. I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the healing of a part of your body that people don't see. And so, in this case, the story fast forwards a couple weeks after his fall and you find out that he has been fully patched up, but as a remnant, he has a fear of heights, which would be a natural thing for anybody that's had such a traumatic experience.

As you're going along in the story, you're realizing that Humpty Dumpty has made all kinds of changes to his life, so basically see fear of heights has completely overcome his entire lifestyle. He's not content because he's denying himself of who he truly wants to be. What happens is that you find out that the reason why he's on top of the wall is because he's an avid bird watcher. He loves birds and being at the top of the wall just happens to be the best place to go bird watching.

So, now my wife, she used to love playing tennis. When I met her in college, she played tennis all the time. She was watching tennis on T.V. After we had our first child, what we didn't realize is that she was going through post-partum depression. She just took all her emotions and all her feelings and she internalized them and she just shut herself out from the rest of the world. It really affected our marriage to the point where it was hard because I felt all alone. It's hard to maintain a marriage when both people aren't feeling right. So, I asked her to go seek help, and I remember she was very resistant about it. And really, with anxiety existing in her entire life, it was the only feelings that she ever knew.

So, for the sake of our marriage, she agreed to go see a doctor, and the doctor prescribed her some medication. I remember four months into it, the medication started working. It started taking an edge off of all the anxiety, but it actually had the opposite effect. Where you would think that she would realize that the drugs were working, and instead she had this feeling like the drugs were doing harm to her because her entire life she only knew anxiety. She felt that her body was doing itself a disservice by not telling her that there was danger around every corner. But she made that decision to stick with the meds for the eight to ten weeks that the doctor had suggested. By that time, she became a completely different person and she became this person that I fell in love with in college that I hadn't seen in years because she'd just fallen into this pit of depression and it was just really hard for her to dig herself out.

Now, going back to "After The Fall," we have this point where Humpty Dumpty has to make this choice to overcome his fear. So, he chooses to climb the wall. When he finally gets to the top, he not only is proud of himself for overcoming that fear, but he also starts hatching. Pieces of his shell start to break off. Underneath, gold feathers are coming off, the feathers that resemble the paper airplane that he made. And then these wings spread and he flies off, and you realize that Humpty Dumpty has hatched and turned into a bird, and that is symbolic to me in a way. After my wife overcame her anxiety, she evolved into this new person where they continue living their life to what it was meant to be. She picked up a tennis racket again, she started signing up for tennis tournaments.

That's really what the essence of "After The Fall" is. It's about overcoming your anxiety or whatever obstacles you may face and overcoming them and being able to become more of a person after facing that fear. If anybody were to ask me what my favorite book I've ever worked on, I think most people would probably think that it would be "Beekle" because it won the Caldecott Medal, but truthfully, my favorite book that I've ever worked on is "After The Fall."