- Behind the name: Sara - October 7, 2026
- Behind the name: Manuel - October 5, 2026
- Behind the name: Amira - October 1, 2026
A nod to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the legacy that rippled all the way to this book.
If you read about Amira, you know I promised a Hamilton story. Here it is.
I named Manuel for Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Like a lot of people, I fell hard for Hamilton. But the thing that stayed with me wasn’t only the music. It was the idea the show keeps circling back to: legacy. What we plant that we may never see grow. Whose story gets told, and who tells it.
Lin-Manuel’s work didn’t only reach me. It reached a writer named Maya, who felt something stir when she saw what he had made. She understood that he wasn’t only writing a musical. He was making something that didn’t exist yet but needed to. Moved by that, Maya wrote a novel of her own, Painting Celia.
I met Maya in an online music group and learned about her book. On its surface Painting Celia is a moving contemporary romance about growth, love, and self-expression. But reading it as a therapist, I saw what was underneath: a woman carrying the weight of a painful past, and all the parts of her that had learned to protect her from it. Those same protective parts are what my own book is about, helping children get to know them and meet them with compassion. Maya encouraged me to start my own writing journey, the one that led to this book. She became my publisher through her company, Lingua Ink Books. None of it would exist the way it does without that first ripple.
So when it came time to name a child in the hallway, Manuel felt right. A seed planted in a garden the planter never sees. Lin-Manuel’s work grew into Maya’s, and Maya’s grew into mine. Now it lives in a book that helps children meet their feelings with a little more kindness.
That it started with “Lin” and continues through “Lynn” doesn’t feel like coincidence to me. It feels like alignment.
There is one more nod to Lin-Manuel tucked into this book, growing quietly right inside the illustrations. It came from his craft and from Maya’s love of plants, and it has a story of its own. I’ll share it soon.
Painting Celia and The Hallway of Doorknobs are both available now at linguaink.com.
This is part of a series about how the children in The Hallway of Doorknobs: A Journey to the Feelings Inside got their names.