But I'm going to leave that book now to show you just some
of my picture books.
Summer Birds is about Maria Merian, one of the first women
scientists, explorers, and scientific illustrators.
Mountain Dog and When You Wander--
Mountain Dog's middle grade.
When You Wander is a picture book for younger children
about search and rescue dogs.
My husband is a volunteer search and rescue dog trainer
and handler, so our dogs at home go out
to find lost hikers in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
And Tiny Rabbit's Big Wish is a Cuban folktale
that just came out on time for Easter,
and he's a little rabbit who wants to be big.
Aw.
I love to share the story of the search and rescue dogs
with children.
It's so much fun to have them all raise their hands
and tell me that they have a dog, too,
and then we can trade dog stories.
But this shows just the selection and training
of search and rescue dogs.
What you look for in a search and rescue dog is play drive.
This is from my daily life in California.
We've left Cuba behind, obviously not historical,
but it was really fun to write Mountain Dog
in a modern California setting.
The child's voice in that book is Latino,
but it's not a Latino history topic.
It's just about discovering wilderness and learning
from dogs and learning kindness to animals because he's
a city kid who was not raised in an atmosphere of kindness
to animals but in an atmosphere of dog fighting.
My job with our search and rescue dogs
is officially titled volunteer victim.
I hide in the forest so that the dogs can practice finding.
This is true.
I mean, I have paperwork.
I had to go through--
I'm FEMA approved for hiding for search and rescue dogs
so that they can practice finding someone.
And there's a lot of science to the dog nose
that's fun to share with children,
but the most important thing in choosing a search and rescue
dog is playfulness because the dog's play drive can be
trained to become a work drive.
Dogs don't distinguish between work and play.
It's all fun.
They each have their own favorite reward.
Chance likes round things.
He likes to chase balls, and if you take him for a walk
and forget to bring a ball with you,
he'll pick one off an orange tree.
When I talk about my books about Cuba
not just to children but also to adults,
I feel like I have to show a map and some pictures
because the children definitely don't know where Cuba is.
The two countries have been isolated from each other
for so long that it's easy to forget that we're neighbors.
My mother's hometown of Trinidad is a World Heritage site
with the colonial architecture restored and preserved
by UNESCO.
It's a very beautiful town.
It's a popular tourist destination
for Canadians and Europeans.
This is the town square where my parents met
on the terrace of a colonial palace on Valentine's Day
after my father saw those National Geographic pictures.
The photograph is actually taken from the terrace
where they met.
And these are the typical streets with the cobblestones
and the tall windows.
Those bars are actually called celosias, jealousies,
and they're the only place where a father would
allow a daughter to flirt, was through that window.
There were two ways in traditional Cuban society,
pre-revolutionary Cuban society, so pre-1959
where girls could flirt.
They could flirt through these windows
or during a paseo when, say, on Sunday evening
after church, the girls walked one direction around the town
square, and the boys walked the other direction.
The girls had a chaperone.
Even in my mother's youth, the girls had a chaperone,
and if you made eye contact, that was getting serious.
But the landscape outside of the town, the farmland,
and the wilderness was really--
as a child, I fell in love with because I lived in the city,
and I didn't have the chance to run around
tropical nature like this except during summers.
Here's my parents right after they met,
and this is the earliest picture I have of me as a child on one
of those summer visits in Cuba.
The family farm was a small cattle ranch, a dairy farm,
and it was actually purchased with pirate gold
because one of my ancestors was a pirate.
And he's the reason that I became
interested in writing Hurricane Dancers,
but I couldn't get enough information about him.
And I got sidetracked to write about a different pirate,
so the research process is unpredictable.
My favorite part of summers in Cuba was horses.
That's another thing I didn't have
in the city of Los Angeles, the chance to try--
you can see that I am not a great rider, and my older
cousin there doing rope tricks.
He's not really trying to hang me,
but I was just so envious of the cousins
who got to stay in Cuba and ride horses year round.
And I thought I could ride a horse because I
had read The Black Stallion.
You can tell from my posture that you can't learn everything
from a book.
This is my great-grandmother with her favorite donkey
and my grandmother who a dove happened to land on her head.
A large family group from when my mother was young--
she's the one with the big bow on her head,
and it just shows the size of Cuban families.
This is just a handful of her 200 first cousins gathered
together and some uncles and aunts.
An antique book fair in Havana, one
of my sources of research materials,
a traditional colonial mailbox where you put the letter
through the monster's mouth.
And one of the things that I've loved in returning as an adult
has been reconnecting with family, some of the younger
family members, and also seeing the source of storytelling
in Cuban society.
These children are very obviously sitting on a dog,
but they call it a caballito.
And if they want to call it a horse, they can.
Why not?
That's the power of storytelling.