Amid the political unrest spurred from the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, a little girl named Marisol immigrated to the United States, bringing only a single dress and a single doll. That dress — a simple white dress with heirloom lace and hand-stitched sewing — stayed in Marisol’s family, passed down to her daughter and then to her granddaughters. Now, it’s the subject of a children’s book, written and illustrated by her daughter Emily Ozier.
“I wrote this little story when my oldest was the same age as Marisol in the book,” Ozier says. “And it was the first time that I really realized what my mom had gone through. I wrote it just to help my own child understand, build empathy, but it also was an exercise for me in understanding my mom. I didn’t know if anything would ever come of it.”
Before writing this short story, Ozier had never written creatively before, but after Marisol’s Dress debut in November, it was the number-one release on Amazon in the children’s section. She says, “I have spent hours pouring over children's books because it’s my favorite thing to share with my children. … I have spent the past 18 years reading, reading aloud to my kids, so I just think children’s books are some of the best pieces of literature.”
Photography Courtesy Emily Ozier
By trade, Ozier is an impressionist artist, known as EMYO professionally, but in late 2021, she was approached by an editor about doing a children’s book. Marisol’s Dress happened to be the perfect fit. With refugees consistently arriving in the U.S. and in Memphis, Ozier says, stories like Marisol’s can help readers understand the immigrant and refugee experience on a human level — a cause near and dear to Ozier, not only because of her mother’s story but also because of her recent volunteer work.
After seeing her first child of six off to college in 2022, Ozier began volunteering with World Relief Memphis’ Good Neighbor Team program, where volunteers assist a recent refugee or asylee family in adjusting to American life. “I’m walking alongside a newly arrived family [from the Democratic Republic of Congo],” she says. “This family was with my family for their very first beginning ‘Welcome to America.’ It's been really special to walk alongside them. The first thing we did after they got resettled in their little apartment was we went and got library cards.”
In 2022 alone the U.S. has resettled over 25,000 refugees, but with divisive news stories and politicized narratives, it can be hard to recognize that, at the core of these numbers, are thousands of individual stories of families in need. But, as PJ Moore, executive director at World Relief Memphis, says, “when you engage in the neighborhoods and communities that we get to be a part of, at World Relief, you see that there’s actually really a lot of curiosity, a lot of resilience, a lot of kindness.”
With that in mind, storytelling holds a unique power to bridge that gap between the data points and the human experience, and for Ozier, children’s books, though often underestimated, can be the perfect fit for that purpose. The artist even cites a quote by A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L’Engle: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
“That really started my heart because this book that came out is the book that needed to be written,” Ozier says. “This is something from the past, but it's also very much something from the present. And it does deal with difficult subject matter and it deals with loss and grief, and then it also deals with creativity.”
Photography Courtesy Emily Ozier
Indeed, within Marisol’s Dress, after Marisol reaches the U.S. accompanied by her grandmother, she makes the best of her hard situation by turning to creativity and creating paper dolls to fill her loneliness. “Her creativity becomes a tool,” Ozier says. “I mean, that’s my story. That’s any creative’s story. That’s someone who’s a writer that has turned to writing to understand the world around them. It’s the person who knits after losing a loved one. It’s the person that works with their hands in the middle of deep grief and sorrow and finds such solace and comfort in that.”
For Ozier, writing and illustrating Marisol’s Dress allowed her to process her mother and her family’s loss. “Imagine how different it would’ve been to have not have had to experience that,” she says. “Like the holidays and my life and all things — I probably wouldn’t be here, I guess.”
With the story green-lit, all that was left was for Ozier to illustrate the pages. “What’s interesting about the creative process is that this was the time for that story to be told because my art needed to develop over all these years,” she says. “When I write, I try to distill down to the very fewest number of words possible to say what I wanna say. … In a children's storybook, you have to distill the words down to just the very essence of what's most important. … And I do that in my paintings. I try to paint in such a way that I’ve distilled the information down to the most necessary.”
Photography Courtesy Emily Ozier
One of those necessary components, Ozier says, was “the sense of vitality and beauty and connection and celebration that [Marisol] had in Cuba. I was looking at family photographs and asking her stories and all the art kind of came from there.” Ultimately, these joyful experiences in Cuba only deepened the sense of loss once her family was forced to flee.
Even the color palette conveys this shift as it transitions from bright colors in the beginning to deep navies and grays in the middle, adding another layer to the narrative when words can only do so much. “It's an unusual color palette for a children’s book,” Ozier admits, saying that it’s a bit more sophisticated than other illustrations. “But when you serve a child something that may be a little bit more sophisticated, they can rise up to it and totally understand it. It’s art for all people of all ages.” And so is the story, Ozier adds.
Marisol’s Dress can be purchased at Novel, with a portion of sales going to World Relief Memphis. The original canvas paintings within the book are now on display at the Dixon through January 8th. Admission to the Dixon is free through 2024.