Brendan Martin
Olivia Dybik and her grandfather, Steve Doherty
Olivia Dybik, a pupil of taekwondo, can hold her own in a fight. But don’t worry; she’s not flinging fellow students across campus. Instead, she strikes at the heart of bullying.
Dybik attends taekwondo class twice a week with her grandfather, Steve Doherty, at New Albany’s Oriental Martial Arts College. While taekwondo does teach combat skills, it’s more about inner strength and self-control.
“Taekwondo is a workout of the mind and body of the life principles,” she says. “Some kids, when they joined, didn’t know the life principles. And our job as instructors and taekwondo students is to help them learn respect, discipline, self-control, patience and many more (values).”
It is these principles that inspired Doherty to start creating the Little Tiger books. Doherty had previously written four historical fiction novels, but this was his first time writing for children. One day, he asked his granddaughter to come over and take a look at his draft.
“She turns to me and goes ‘Papa Steve, you can’t write to a first-grader like you do to a high school student,’” says Doherty, “and I go ‘Oh, did I do that?’ And so, I said, ‘Can you fix it?’… When she was through, I sat through and read it all and said, ‘You’re my co-author,’ because she just totally re-wrote them. She made them so simple and instead of four or five lines of sentences she brought it down to a sentence.”
They plan to release a total of 10 Little Tiger books. The pages are filled with bright colors and friendly cartoons to capture the eyes of children. Their first book, Little Tiger – Respect, was published on Dybik’s birthday in 2019 and teaches the meaning of, you guessed it, respect. The idea was born after a real-life situation when Dybik dealt with a rowdy student who didn’t understand the concept.
Little Tiger - Guardian of Peace was published in December. With two down and eight to go, the duo already feels that the overall goal of minimizing bullies and showing kids different skills, such as peacefulness to stop them in their tracks, is already making an impact.
“What it means to be a guardian of peace is to never start a fight,” says Dybik. “When you are a guardian of peace, you want to try to stop a fight between two people.”
Dybik used to be bullied at school. Even though she is a skilled taekwondo student, she has never lifted so much as a finger toward another student. With the Little Tiger books, Dybik wants to show that you never have to resort to violence.
“For me, being a leader means you have confidence and you have a plan of what you are going to do,” she says. “If a student were to come up to me saying that they were getting bullied, I would figure out a plan to stop (it), help them figure it out on their own or try to talk to another person if I’m not sure of the answer.”
The first two editions are available at www.littletigerbooks.org and on Amazon. Keep your eyes peeled for future books, because this little tiger is on the move and ready to stop bullies without using violence, just like Dybik.
Brendan Martin is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
