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I sometimes talk about Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business, the corporate fable I co-authored with Matt Emmens, who is now the CEO of Vertex and chairman of the board of Shire. I explain the book to those who ask as an Alice in Wonderland-esque fable about the power of the imagination in corporate America. The story features a character named Moira, who wears read shoes and fine, striped socks as she winds her way through a sclerotic bureaucracy in search of a way to make a difference. In the process, she inspires those she meets—a character named Hedger, for example, characters named Nod and Bolt and Snort—to help revitalize a corporate giant called Zenobia.

Published by Berrett-Koehler in 2008, the book has gone to live and breathe in many countries, sometimes adapting the original illustrations (which were created by my husband) and sometimes unveiling entirely new graphic universes. I thought of this book last week, during the readergirlz chat, when Hipwritermama and Maya Ganesan and others asked if I'd ever consider writing fantasy.

Zenobia is the closest I've yet come.

It seems like a long time ago now that Matt Emmens, then the CEO of Shire (and now its chairman), called me into his office and asked if I'd ever seen "that book" about mice, change, and cheese. Technically I'd seen it. I hadn't, though, actually read it, but that, as it turned out, proved immaterial. Matt was wondering, he said, if I might like to embark on a small journey—on the co-authoring of a book that wouldn't be about cheese or mice or hamsters, even, but about, say, the role of the imagination in corporate America. About risk, adventure, and dreams. I gave him one of my funny looks, then scurried away for awhile. Reread Calvino and The Little Prince, a few chapters from Alice in Wonderland. Began to conjure up a place that became, in time, Zenobia—an architectural wilderness, a corporate behometh, a case study in brokenness and ruin and its ultimate (in this case magical) repair. Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business emerged as a fable, a fantasy; its illustrations were entrusted to my partner. And all of this became an odd little book, published one year ago by a house that took (shall we say) a risk. A house known as Berrett-Koehler.

Old news. History. Brought up only now because my mail box has been filled of late with the most interesting concoctions—Zenobia done over in Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese (the complex characters). It's a wonder to see the same book unveiled in so many different colors, with so many reconvened titles, with extraordinary new illustrations that feature clowns and one-eyed men. Moira, our heroine, mostly gets to keep her bright red shoes. But her hair changes color, and it flows, a reddish brown, and I'm thinking that she's had her bright eyes Lasiked, because how else might you explain the sudden absence of her big-framed spectacles?

I am delighted by these renditions which I cannot read and wish I could. I am desirous of a bigger brand of knowledge that would enable me to know how a story has gotten told in languages that look like wash and wonder to eyes such as mine, which have seen too little of this planet.