Edmonds 7-year-old publishes children’s book featuring ‘Drippey’ the bee

EDMONDS — Oliver Popa’s teacher sent his assignment back with a note.

That note, written by his first-grade teacher, Joy Ness, told Oliver’s mother, Whitney Popa, that he should try and turn his assignment — a short story about a anthropomorphic bee planting a garden — into a book.

At the time, Ness didn’t know that Whitney Popa was a publisher herself. A year later, with the help of his mom, the 7-year-old living in Edmonds turned that story into a full-fledged children’s book.

The first page of Oliver’s story, “Drippey Plants a Garden,” is dedicated to his teacher.

“Teachers will tell you, you know, you always live for these ‘a-ha’ moments,” Ness said Tuesday. “And this was a big ‘a-ha’ moment for me to see that with Oliver.”

Ness told students in Oliver’s first grade class at King’s Elementary — a private Christian school in Shoreline — to write a short story, just a few sentences, about planting a garden. Most went through the basics, explaining how to dig the dirt, plant the seeds. But Oliver’s story focused on a humanoid bee named Drippey, living on the planet Honeymoon, who planted his own garden.

“Well, when I thought about gardens, I thought about flowers. And when I thought about flowers, I thought about pollinators, and the first pollinator that came to mind was bees,” Oliver said.

Why a humanoid bee, then?

“Well, if he wasn’t a humanoid bee, he probably wouldn’t be able to do all this,” he said.

His mother, Whitney Popa, had recently started a publishing company when Oliver brought home the assignment with his teacher’s note. She decided to work with him to publish the book as a gift she could give to him.

“I feel like I talked myself out of a lot of the things I wanted to do art-wise because I wanted to be more practical,” Popa said. “So why not start at 7 really believing that you can? I thought, ‘Let’s go all-in on this.’”

Oliver spent over a year fleshing out his original story. Popa’s company published the book last week.

When Oliver was born, Popa expected his son to spend his time running around, running into things, playing with trucks and getting dirty. But he has always been different, very methodical, she said.

Ness agreed. In her class, Oliver would be very deliberate about writing and keeping things neat.

“You can tell he’s got so many ideas, he doesn’t know which ones to get down on paper,” she said.

Oliver said he’s working on ideas for other books, too. His new stories could be about lots of things, but we won’t know what’s in his head for a while. For now, his ideas are secrets, he said.

Part of the reason for publishing his story was to inspire others to utilize the creativity Oliver showed in his original story more than a year ago, Popa said. After all, there’s no reason you couldn’t write a book as well.

“People at any age can do this,” she said. “You could be 7, too.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.