It’s called Basketball & Pizza. It’s about my son Ravi, who is three and a half, and his obsession with the Harlem Globetrotters and Costco pizza nights. It’s live on Amazon. I’m proud of it. You can read it here for free.

I was a doctoral student in English Education, a twenty-year high school English teacher, and someone who came to fatherhood late and unexpectedly. Ravi arrived in the hardest year of my life. So did this imprint.

We are Little Hollow Books — Penhollow | Studiolabs. We make picture books about real moments.

We also just re-released Bambantay Tuturod: The Mountains Stand With Us — our Ilocano heritage title set in the mountains of Northern Luzon. The visuals in that book are the most deeply Filipino work we’ve produced. Together, Basketball & Pizza and Bambantay Tuturod give you the clearest picture of where we’ve been — and where we’re going.

Our next book is different.

Ibinglay tayo ti lawag — The Light We Share is a 48-page picture book about a boy named Lino, a parol he builds for his cousin traveling from America, and the storm that carries it away before she arrives. It moves through Simbang Gabi, through community, through eight mornings of the same quiet prayer. It’s about diaspora. About the light that holds families together across oceans.

It was co-authored by my wife Kathleen, a native Ilocano speaker from San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte, Philippines. Her parents arrived from Hawaii last week. This book knows what it’s about because the family it comes from knows what it’s about.

We’re targeting a mid-September release, ahead of Filipino American Heritage Month in October.

And we need an illustrator.

Here’s what I want to say honestly, because I think it matters:

I’m not looking for a contractor. I’m looking for a collaborator — someone who wants to build something with us across multiple books and multiple years. We have a Little Spark series in development. We have heritage titles in progress. We have stories that are going to keep coming because we have a family that keeps living them.

And if you know someone whose hand belongs on this book, please send them this.

The light always knows the way home. We’re just looking for someone to help us draw it.

— Avi Penhollow Little Hollow Books | Penhollow Studiolabs

There is a compliment Filipinos give each other that isn’t quite a compliment.

Ang ganda mo — you look so mestiza. You speak English so well. You don’t seem like you’re from the province. These are offered warmly, without malice, as genuine admiration. And they are. That’s the problem. The admiration is real, which means something underneath it is real too — so thoroughly absorbed that it no longer feels like a judgment. It feels like taste. Like refinement. Like simply knowing what is better.

There is a hierarchy in the Philippines that most Filipinos have absorbed so completely they no longer notice it.

The city is progress. The province is quaint. And the mountains — the highlands, the rice terraces, the communities that have farmed and sung and prayed in languages older than the colonial record — the mountains are backwards.

This isn’t stated outright. It doesn’t have to be. It lives in the way certain accents get corrected. In the quiet embarrassment some families feel about where their grandparents came from. In the word dialect.

Kathleen is my wife, my co-author, and a native Ilocano speaker. She grew up in Ilocos Norte — not a remote province. It has highways and universities and a coastline that draws tourists. But even there, the orientation was outward. Toward Manila. Toward English. Toward the things that signal arrival in a world shaped by centuries of colonial preference.

The mountain peoples — the indigenous communities of the Cordillera, the farmers who tend the terraces that have been called a wonder of the world — were not the aspirational image. They were the past. Something to acknowledge on a school trip, maybe. Not something to claim.

We have been thinking about this a lot while making these books.

When we put Ilocano on top and English below, we are making an argument. When we build a book around a folk song that belongs to the mountains, we are making an argument. When Lola stands in the doorway watching the children walk toward the peaks — her gaze extending past them, toward the geography that will hold them — we are making an argument.

The argument is this: the mountains were never backwards. The wisdom that lives there — in the songs, in the language, in the relationship with land that doesn’t treat it as property — that wisdom has something to say to all of us. Including the people who were taught to look away from it.

A word about terms, because they matter here.

When we say indigenous, we mean all the peoples who belong to this land before the colonial record begins — and that includes Ilocanos. This is worth saying plainly because many Ilocanos don’t think of themselves that way. The Igorot, the Ifugao, the Kalinga — the highland tribal communities of the Cordillera — are often understood as the indigenous ones. The traditional ones. The ones who stayed. Ilocanos, with their cities and coastlines and long history of migration, sometimes place themselves in a different category. But that distinction was handed to them. All of these peoples are native to this land. The hierarchy between them is not.

AntiBlackness is a term that sometimes stops people because it sounds like it belongs to a different conversation — an American one. But it describes something that shows up wherever colonial power took root, which is most of the world. It isn’t just about race in the broad sense. It’s about the specific devaluation of darkness itself — dark skin, dark geography, rural and traditional ways of life — as signs of being behind. Less refined. Less desirable. Less. You may not have had a word for it before. But if you grew up Filipino, you have felt it. In the compliment that isn’t quite a compliment. In the mountains being called backwards.

A picture book can’t dismantle that. But a picture book can say: these children are beautiful. This song is worth singing. These mountains are worth claiming.

That’s what we’re trying to say.

Nu kayat mo gayyem ket umay ka
Umay ka diay bantay a nalawa
If you want, my friend, then come along —
come to the wide and open mountains.

The song has been saying it all along. We’re just passing the invitation forward.

If this is the kind of conversation you want to keep having — about language, about what gets passed down and what gets lost, about what it means to raise a child who knows where they come from — stay with us. Our next piece goes deeper into mother tongue education and what happens to children when the language of home is treated as less than. We think it will stay with you.

The first sign of the obsession wasn’t a basketball. It was a Wiggles song called “Bouncing Balls” — Ravi running around the house with every ball he could find, moving rhythmically, absorbed entirely in the sound and motion of things bouncing. Volleyballs. Plushie balls. Anything that moved when you hit it.

Basketball arrived later, through a television screen. The Harlem Globetrotters. The spectacle of them — the tricks, the crowd, the percussive choreography. He watched a video of the Globetrotters performing with Stomp and reenacted it. Repeatedly. With a required audience.

The obsession was always about rhythm, sound, and spectacle. Basketball was the container.

This distinction matters for how you read the book.

Basketball & Pizza is not a book about learning to dribble. It’s not a book about making the team or practicing until you get it right. There is a moment — one moment — where Little Spark misses a shot, and the book says: that’s okay. Try again. And then we move on. Because that is not what this book is about either.

The book is about what it looks like when a child is inside their obsession. The rituals. The vocabulary they absorb and make their own. The way they recruit everyone around them into the world they’re building. The insistence on things being done in the right order.

Little Spark doesn’t just love basketball. He has a system. The plushies — Gigi the giraffe, Peter Rabbit, Matcha the green bunny — are the crowd. They have to be arranged. The confetti bucket trick has to be done correctly. Pizza night has a specific sequence that cannot be altered.

This is not quirk. This is a child’s inner life made visible.

His favorite Globetrotter is Ace — a female player, number 1, who performs a low rapid dribble with a distinctive head movement. Ravi imitated the move by putting the ball on the ground and shaking his head while moving it between his hands. He couldn’t dribble fast enough to do it correctly, so he made it his own.

This detail is in the book. It’s also real.

He chose number 1 for his jersey because Ace wears number 1. He told his father: “I’m number one. You’re number zero.”

That’s in the book too.

The title came from a correction. Avi said “pizza and basketball.” Little Spark — the real child behind the character — said no. Basketball and pizza. The order matters. Some things just have a right sequence and a child who knows his obsession knows which one comes first.

The title of this book belongs to him.

By the end of Basketball & Pizza, the crowd has gone wild three times — first the plushies, then the family, then a dream of something larger. The book closes with two parents leaning over a sleeping child, the basketball court quiet, the night done. It is an ordinary sacred image. The kind that doesn’t announce itself.

That’s the whole book, right there.

Basketball & Pizza: A Story About Big Dreams, Family, and the Best Nights Ever is available now at littlehollowbooks.com.

She called Ilocano a dialect. I pushed back.

"If you speak Ilocano to someone who only speaks Tagalog," I asked her, "would they understand you?" She thought about it. "No." "Then it's not a dialect. It's a language."

She'd been told her whole life that Ilocano was a dialect of Filipino. That Tagalog was the real language. That the tongue she grew up speaking in Ilocos Norte — the one her grandmother sang in, the one her mother whispers prayers in — was a regional variation of something more important.

That's not linguistics. That's a power structure.

I came to this understanding through graduate work in Hawaii — studying language ideology, mother tongue instruction, and what researchers call linguistic agency: the capacity of a speaker to see their language as worthy, as complete, as theirs.

What I kept finding in the research was that when children are educated primarily in a language that isn't their own, literacy suffers — and by literacy I don't mean the ability to decode words on a page. I mean the full capacity to make meaning: to think complexly, to see themselves in a story, to know that their way of understanding the world is legitimate. Not because the children aren't capable — because the foundation isn't there. You can't build a house in the air. 

In the Philippines, the school system conducts most instruction in English. For millions of Filipino children, that means learning to read in a language that isn't woven into their home, their meals, their songs, their grandmothers. Mother tongue instruction exists. But the cultural pressure — decades of it, centuries of it — tilts toward English. Toward Tagalog. Toward languages that signal upward mobility, assimilation, arrival.

Ilocano is what you speak in the province. What you carry quietly. What you call a dialect.

Kathleen didn't grow up thinking of her language that way to be small. She grew up that way because that's the water she swam in. Most people don't question the water.

I'm not pointing this out to make her the subject of a lesson. I'm pointing it out because she is one of the most intelligent, perceptive people I know — a native speaker of a language spoken by millions — and it took an outside perspective to name something she'd been living inside her whole life.

That's what internalized colonialism does. It doesn't announce itself. It just makes you call your language a dialect.

When we started making books together, we made a choice: Ilocano on top, bold. English below, in italics. Not "here is the real version and here is what it means." Both languages on the same page, in the same breath, as equal partners.

That's not just a design decision. It's an argument. It's saying: this language belongs here. It doesn't need to be translated out of existence to be understood. It doesn't need to apologize for being itself.

Our son Ravi is three. He already knows the word Bambantay. Not because we drilled him. Because the song is in our house, and the book is on his shelf, and one afternoon at a coffee shop near our home, he pointed at the mountains and said it out loud to a child he'd just met.

That's the whole project, right there.

Little Hollow Books is an imprint of Penhollow Studiolabs. Kathleen and Avi Penhollow's Filipino/Ilocano heritage series includes Bambantay Tuturod: The Mountains Stand With Us and Let's Go, Intayon! — available now at littlehollowbooks.com.

Not likes it. Not enjoys it. Finds it. The way you find something you didn't know you were looking for but recognize immediately when it arrives.

For Little Spark, it was basketball. The sound of a ball on hardwood. The spectacle of grown people moving through air with impossible grace. The language of it — splash, slam dunk, hydraulics — words a two-year-old absorbed and repeated because they matched something he already felt.

The obsession wasn't about basketball. It never really was. It was about a child encountering a container large enough to hold everything he needed to express.

Every child has one. Or several, in sequence. The thing they go all the way into — not because anyone told them to, not because it was scheduled or encouraged or optimized, but because something in them recognized it and said: yes. This.

We don't talk enough about what that recognition is. We call it a phase. We manage it, redirect it, hope it transitions into something more practical. We buy the equipment and half-listen to the explanation of the rules and we think we are being good parents because we showed up.

Showing up is not the same as paying attention.

Basketball & Pizza is a book about a child who is fully alive in something. Little Spark is a Filipino American, who happens to love basketball and pizza, who happens to live in a house where a Monstera plant gets knocked over by errant balls and a grandmother's language lives quietly in the back matter.

He is not any one child. He is every child in the moment before the world tells them what to care about.

That's what the name means. Not metaphorically — actually. Every child arrives carrying something. A warmth, a knowing, a brightness that is entirely their own and entirely connected to something larger than themselves. The spark is real. It just needs someone to notice it before it gets managed into something more convenient.

The books are about noticing.

There is a story I carry. A toddler asked to be alone with a newborn sibling. When the parents finally agreed and listened at the door, they heard the older child whisper: "Tell me what it's like. Because I'm forgetting."

I don't know if this story is true. It doesn't matter. It's true in the way that the best stories are true — it names something we recognize before we have words for it.

Little Spark is the child who still knows. The books are an attempt to stay in that room a little longer before the forgetting is complete.

Basketball & Pizza: A Story About Big Dreams, Family, and the Best Nights Ever is available now at littlehollowbooks.com. Little Hollow Books is an imprint of Penhollow Studiolabs.

I said pizza and basketball.

He said no. Basketball and pizza. He was two years old and he was absolutely certain and he was correct.

Some things have a right order. You know it when you feel it. The obsession comes first. It always comes first. The celebration follows naturally once you’ve done the thing you came here to do.

He knew this at two. I needed him to correct me before I understood it.

The title of this book is his. Most of what’s in it is his — the rituals, the vocabulary, the plushies arranged as an audience, the confetti bucket trick, the insistence on exactness. I shaped it into a story. But the story was already there. I just paid attention long enough to see it.

That’s what Little Spark is. Not a character I invented. A child I watched closely enough to write down.

Every child is like this. They arrive already knowing something. The job — the whole job — is to pay attention before the knowing fades.

Basketball & Pizza is what happens when a parent does that. Just that. Nothing more complicated than that.

Basketball & Pizza is available now at littlehollowbooks.com

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