Finding Direction in the Waves

A marine science class inspires two seniors to publish a children’s book

Last year, Anna Doherty ’26 had a busy summer, balancing serving up smoothies in a shop near her home in Hampton, New Hampshire, with an internship at Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation’s Discovery Center, where she worked educating guests. She also spent a lot of time at the beach with her cousin Susie, tidepooling along the ​​North Beach Seawall. “At low tide, the tidepooling there is the best in all of the New England seacoast,” she says. In both her internship and in talking with Susie about sea life, Doherty took hard topics and put them in simpler terms — a practice that inspired her to try to reach more young people and teach them the importance of caring for the ocean.

Doherty decided to write a children’s book. She reached out to Joshua Xiang ’26, a student artist she met as a classmate in her junior year Honors Marine Science class taught by Science Department faculty member Mike Lefebvre. Together, the two wrote, illustrated, and published My Blue Ocean, the story of a young girl named Susie — after Doherty’s cousin — who meets a mermaid and learns simple ways to protect the ocean. “It was my first writing venture,” Doherty says. “I’m much more of a STEM person. But just like I had to simplify marine science lessons for my cousin, I was able to do so for the book.”

When Doherty first toured Govs as a prospective student, she was most impressed by the Bill ’67 and Peter ’71 Alfond Coastal Research Center, a facility on the Great Marsh where students in every grade immerse themselves in nature through real-world data and projects. The center includes an aquatic laboratory fed by water drawn from the Parker River, with four state-of-the-art tank systems, including a 500-gallon touch tank, allowing students to observe saline, fresh, and estuarine environments. “We’re so lucky to have this here at Govs,” Doherty says. “I would have never had access to this at my public school, or probably any other school around New England.”

Doherty credits Lefebvre and his Honors Marine Science class with turning her interest into a true passion. “Mr. Lefebvre has been my inspiration,” Doherty says. “I learned so much. I started doing research on corals in the tank at the Alfond Center and practicing coral husbandry. That has been an amazing experience.” Lefebvre says he hopes to give his students an understanding of how the marine world works, centered around a common theme of human impact. “How are we losing really important ecosystem services because of that impact?” he asks his students.

Xiang felt similarly inspired by Lefebvre’s Honors Marine Science class. “We did tons of experiments,” Xiang says. “I’m a big nature guy. Every day we can touch crabs. We have fish in our tank, and we can get really close to them. You start to notice all the nuances in the ocean.”

When Doherty emailed Xiang to ask if he would be involved in the book project, he agreed. “We all now feel like we know so much more about nature,” he says. “We have a responsibility to protect the environment.”

Xiang was born and raised in Shenzhen, China, before moving to the United Kingdom for middle school. When looking at boarding high schools in the United States, he was attracted to the Academy's visual arts program. “I’ve always had a passion and talent for art,” he says. “I started doing drawings, paintings, plasticine making, and Lego building when I was very young. Just anything to do with creative stuff that is fun for kids.” But Xiang’s interests were more widespread. “I’m not exclusively into arts,” Xiang says. “I use art as a medium to explore other subjects. That’s why I decided to do this project with Anna, because I like marine science, too.”

Much of Xiang’s art portfolio is large-scale oil paintings, but to illustrate My Blue Ocean, he used the technique of digital painting with an Apple Pencil on his iPad. “Digital art allows you to produce bold, strong colors in a really fast, convenient way, which would be hard in oil and acrylic paintings,” he says. “I’m not that big into digital art, so it took me a long time to find my style.” Eventually, Xiang found an oil painting stroke in Procreate that resembled the texture he usually employs. “It took me a while to find figures, style, and color I felt comfortable with because I didn’t want to make myself into an AI generator,” he says.

Once Xiang was on board, Doherty sent him the first draft of the text. “She researched how many pages should be in a picture book and what size I needed to make everything,” he says.

“She made it very convenient for me.” Doherty included 14 paragraphs, each with a bracket of what she was envisioning for the page. Xiang admits his style of art is usually a little more mature, so ensuring his paintings were child-friendly was front-of-mind. “I made a storyboard for her, and she was like, ‘This looks amazing,’” he says.

Doherty self-published the book through Amazon, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to the Blue Ocean Society, and 50 percent to the Surfrider Foundation, at Xiang’s request. On September 29, 2025, the pair hosted a reading for faculty and staff children in the Cobb Room on the Academy’s campus. “There were so many kids there,” Doherty says. “It was an amazing experience to have them all listen to us. They seemed so interested, and some of them asked us to sign the book, which was so cute.”

Lefebvre is proud of the way Doherty and Xiang have transferred their studies into a project to motivate young people. “There are many self-starters here at Govs, but what they’ve done is pretty special,” Lefebvre says. “At least in the science department, this stands out. I love how they took a really STEM-focused part of their studies and brought it into a creative place with the intent of inspiring young kids.”

Next year, Xiang will attend Columbia University to study visual arts, while Doherty plans to study Ocean or Environmental Science at the college of her choosing. “I don’t think I would have ever majored in environmental science or marine science if it weren’t for this class at Govs, and Mr. Lefebvre,” Doherty says. The experience has also made Doherty consider whether she might enjoy working with children in the future. “I’m not sure if I would be a teacher,” she says, “but I would love to get involved in some things on campus, community service-wise, working with local communities, and maybe in schools.