My transition from-- somebody just showed me that they have
one of my old prose novels that I wrote for adults way back
in the early '90s, mid-'90s.
My transition from writing prose for grown-ups
to writing verse novels for young people
came at this stage.
When I was struggling to write about Juan Francisco
Manzano, who is known in Cuba el poeta slavo de Cuba,
the poet slave of Cuba.
That's a real nickname.
I won't say that he's incredibly famous there,
but he is well known.
But he was unheard of in the US, and I
wanted to bring his story to American readers.
And I tried writing for grown-ups.
I tried writing in prose, and I will
admit that I tried for 10 years, and I basically
hit my head against the prose wall for 10 years
until he reached down from heaven
and hit me on my stubborn head and said I was a poet.
And I swear that from the moment I remembered
that he was a poet, I switched to writing about him in verse.
And from that moment on, the words flowed.
I fell in love with the first novel form
and I've never gone back.
Maybe someday I will try writing prose again.
But right now, I'm just passionate about the verse
novel form as a vessel for historical and personal stories
where the poems can link to tell a longer story.
And yet where they can present a very friendly,
open, unintimidating page to a young reader who might not
want to read, or a young reader who might think
they're too busy to read.
Or a young reader who might think that in order
to read a book quickly, they're going
to have to choose a baby book.
Oh, I better choose a really short book.
Well no, you don't have to choose really short book.
You can finish this one in what?
Two hours.
So I hope that a librarian, or teacher, could say oh, come on.
Give it a try.
You can do this.
And I also hope that librarians and teachers won't say
poetry is hard to understand.
Because I'm convinced that my first novels are not
hard to understand.
I think they're very simple.
I think they're very straightforward.
I intend them that way.
At the beginning of The Poet Slave
Of Cuba, I wrote about wanting to tell
two stories at the same time, one of suffering
and the other of hope.
But I wrote it in Juan Francisco Manzano's voice,
my imaginary version of his voice.
I did not write the subtitle, A Biography
Of Juan Francisco Manzano, because it's
biographical fiction.
It's not a non-fiction biography.
That was added by a marketing department.
But after that, I did receive so many headaches
from librarians objecting to the subtitle
that I was able to keep the word biography off
of future subtitles.
And for The Surrender Tree we did the unthinkable.
My editor and I decided, let's just
be straightforward in the subtitle
and call it Poems About, and everybody
said you can't put poems on the cover of a book.
That's the kiss of death.
Nobody will buy it.
Nobody will read it if it says "poems."
But we did it anyway, and there's no harm
in telling the truth, right?
It is poems, but they do link to tell a long story.
The Surrender Tree is the one that has the first Newbery
honor received by any Latino.
But it distills a very complex historical situation
down to its emotional essence.
Or I hope it does.
That was my intention.
And I think that's one of the distinct advantages
of the verse novel form for trying
to write about something like, not just
what we call the Spanish-American War,
but Cuba's three wars for independence from Spain.
And not just writing about the wars,
but I wanted to write in particular about Rosa la
Bayamesa, a woman who was born into slavery,
was set free at the time when Cuban planters in 1868
freed their slaves and declared independence from Spain.
And then went to war against Spain, former owners
and former slaves fighting side by side.
It's as if you took the Revolutionary
War and the Civil War and put them in one package with no 100
years in between.
That's what happened in Cuba.
So fighting side by side for a common cause,
there was a very different relationship between the races
from that point on.
But it's not a story about race, and it's not a story about war.
It's a story about Rosa la Bayamesa's decision
to heal the soldiers from both sides of the war using
wild plants.
She hid in caves in the wilderness, in the jungle,
and used her knowledge of herbs as a self-taught nurse
to heal the wounds and fevers of Spanish soldiers
that were found in the jungle, as well as the Cuban rebels.
And the reason that's so impressive to me,
the reason I admire her courageous decision so much,
is that the Spanish soldiers would
have kept her in slavery, would have returned her to slavery.
Whereas the rebel soldiers acknowledge her freedom.
And yet she decided to heal both.
And to me, that's something so amazing
that I feel like she should be better known.
I love to write about people who have been forgotten by history.
Sometimes that might mean that I'm
writing about somebody who is already well-known in Cuba.
Rosa la Bayamesa, like Juan Francisco Manzano,
was not super famous.
It's not like writing about José Martí.
But she is certainly better known than in the US.
And I wanted to bring her amazing story
into the realm of English.
And I was very fortunate to be able to talk the publisher
into a dual-language edition.
so there's not only the original English hardback
but there's also this book where the first half is in English
in the second half in Spanish.
And that's kind of amazing for a book for older children,
ages 12 and up, I'd say, into the teenage years.
There are some bilingual picture books,
but, very few bilingual books for older kids
with mature topics.
So some of the advantages that I see for this verse novel format
are being able to distill complex historical situations
down to what I think of as their emotional essence.
How did it feel to live in that time and place?
How did it feel to be faced with a difficult decision?
I also feel free to experiment.
I feel free to explore, to combine
poetry and storytelling, poetry and history, poetry
and science, because I do bring my botanical background
into it.
I feel free to combine historical and fictional
characters, nature and culture, the US and Cuba, and English
and Spanish.
I love the free flow of characters' thoughts
and feelings that can be put into this format.
I love the freedom to actually write
as if I'm inside the character's head,
in that friendly, uncrowded page that I showed you.
Inviting reluctant readers, and writing about the themes
that I feel are important.
Freedom, peace, hope as well as the courage
and compassion of individuals.
It's a form that requires meticulous research.
I have to read everything I can find
about a historical subject, and then I
have to leave 99% of it out of the book,
because it's not going to fit.
But I need to know these things.
I have to have read the facts, and figures, and the dates,
and the names of the generals, and all these things.
But I can't fit it all in, and because I can't fit it
I have to ask myself, what's really important to me?
And those are the things that I fit.
So poetry forces me to be brief.
I have to choose which details will
go into the final manuscript.
For authenticity, I need obscure research materials.
It sounds like I'm describing a way of making my job just
harder and harder.
And it really is, because for authenticity, I
feel like whenever possible, I need first-person accounts.
I need to read diaries, and letters,
and for more recent topics, maybe interviews.
Most of those diaries and letters
are not available in a digital format.
And it means actually finding antique books,
either through interlibrary loan,
or buying them through a rare books dealer.
There are some disadvantages, there are some limitations.
The biggest limitation is just knowing that chain bookstores
aren't going to carry them.
That's limiting in the sense that publishers
wish chain bookstores would carry your books.
But I don't let that limit me.
I just go forward, anyway.
The other limitation is that I personally
feel that dialogue in a verse novel
is a little bit awkward if you use quotation marks.
I'm not comfortable, in general, with using quotation marks
for dialogue in poetry.
So I try to find other ways for characters to communicate.
I guess kind of like my parents not speaking the same language,
find some other way for them to communicate than actual--
once you experiment with putting conversation
in quotation marks, it starts to sound like prose.
And I lose some of the rhythm that I
want in the poetry format.
So my basic writing process is daydreaming.
That follows the year, or two years,
or whatever of meticulous research.
Then all of a sudden, I'm free to daydream on paper,
experimenting with the rhythm.
And I feel like the rhythm of free verse,
for me, is very similar to the rhythm of walking.
I love the outdoors.
I love nature.
I like to walk.
I like to hike.
And often, portions of poems come to me as I'm walking.
So the rhythm of walking may be in there.
But I think of it as the scribbling stage.
This daydreaming, I think of it as scribbling,
and it lasts about a year, probably.
Then revisions, where it becomes teamwork with an editor.
And that's the really scary hard work stage.
It's overwhelming.
I can't do it.
I have to move indoors to a computer,
because my first drafts are always
handwritten with pen and paper, often in beautiful surroundings
outdoors.
So I have to really focus.
It's my last chance to improve.
I can't give up, as hard as it is.
And on top of that, there's a deadline for revisions.
Often, the editorial letter arrives on Christmas Eve,
and is due in February, because editors
clear their desk in December.
And it moves into the kind of back in the writer's court
at that stage.
And then it's due in February, if the book's
going to come out the following April
for National Poetry Month.
So even though there's more than a year left,
my part of that more than a year isn't very long.
So deadlines are the scariest part for me.
It's under pressure.
And yet, it's all still my last chance
to make the book as good as it's going to be,
my last chance to improve.
My creative writing professor, Dr. Tomas Rivera,
taught me to write from the heart
without worrying about publication.
Some of you may know him as a poet and a writer.
But he was also the first Hispanic chancellor
of the University of California campus.
And I took his graduate creative writing seminar
while supposedly completing my PhD in botany, which I never
finished.
And I did get in trouble for taking a course
outside of my specialty.
But I treasure what he taught me, to write from the heart
without worrying about publication,
without thinking about publication,
without thinking about being judged.
All of that comes later.
Of course I want to be published,
and I know I have to be judged.
But during the first draft is not
the time to think about that.
During the first draft, you are just a free spirit
and you can do anything you want,
and nobody can tell you not to, because they
don't know about it.
It's still a secret book.
So my advice to young writers, if you're
working with students in the schools,
is to encourage them to read a lot.
Because they'll get ideas by reading,
and to relax a lot, because poetry
flows into the quiet places in one's life.
Poetry doesn't flow into your video game.
It doesn't flow into your smartphone
while you're doing this.
It flows into those moments when you make room for it,
I think of it as a mood of quiet discovery.
And then you can move into that exploring and scribbling stage.
So in that first draft, I feel like it's
important to just let the words flow without stopping
too much to make corrections.
Let it be fiery, not snuffy during the first stage,
and you can come back later for grammar and punctuation,
and to see if it makes sense.
There are all sorts of things that the first draft
is going to need changes.
But the first draft, as an explorer,
is your exploration of uncharted territory.
And I don't think that there are any shortcuts.
I do think that you need to explore.
Caminante, no hay camino.
Se hace camino al andar.
You know that poem?
Machado.
Walker, there is no road.
Roads are made by walking, the great Antonio
Machado from Spain, from Proverbios y cantares.
So you're in uncharted territory,
and you want to trail, you better
start walking and make a trail.
I claim the right to no rules.
I do not feel like I have to follow any particular format.
I keep experimenting.
So there are no rules, and there are no shortcuts.
Again, I'm making my job harder.
There is no technological substitute
for the slow, gradual process of seeking and finding.
And when you work with young people with students,
you need to remind them also that writers need practice.
Musicians and dancers rehearse, athletes train,
and writers need to practice.
We can't expect our first drafts to be perfect,
and we can't expect 100% of our work to be publishable.
We have to only show our best work to editors.
So to summarize that statement, what I've said
is explorers need courage.
When you go into uncharted territory like that,
you do need courage.
While you're writing, the emotions can be scary.
After publication, the critics are scary.
But I love to travel, and, I, need to explore.
My other books are primarily on other aspects of Cuban history,
tropical secrets.
Holocaust refugees in Cuba is about a time when
in the late 1930s, ships turned away from New York and Toronto,
took German Jewish refugees, often
children traveling alone trying to be reunited
with relatives in New York.
When they were turned away, the ships anchored in Havana Harbor
and waited through a complicated process for refugees
to receive asylum.
Most of them did receive asylum.
And I think of this story as a tale about the kindness
of strangers, and asking ourselves
about modern-day refugee situations as well.
In The Firefly Letters, one thing
that happened while I was researching both The Poet
Slave Of Cuba and The Surrender Tree,
and, really reading everything I could get about 19th century
Cuba, I continually came across references
to the work of Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish woman who
left the most complete known record of daily life
on the island at that time.
And I kept going why a Swedish woman?
Well, I need to come back to that later and find out
why was she the one who knew the most about Cuba's daily life.
And it turns out she was a woman's rights activist,
and a very early travel writer, who
traveled around the world writing
about the lives of women.
And it just fascinated me.
So I read all of her diaries and letters,
and learned that in Cuba, the Swedish consulate assigned
a translator to her.
And the translator was actually a slave girl born in Africa
who had been taught English, not Swedish.
That would really get complicated to find
a Swedish translator in 19th century Cuba.
But they found someone who could translate into English for her,
which, she knew.
She knew English.
She actually reached Cuba after traveling through the US.
And the relationship between her and her translator
was a beautiful one of friendship that fascinated me.
So I wanted to write about that.
Hurricane Dancers, the first Caribbean pirate shipwreck.
This is not a Johnny Depp story.
These are not the cute, funny pirates.
These were failed conquistadors who
had worked all the Indians on their land grants to death,
and were facing debtor's prison after going bankrupt
unless they did something.
So the first Caribbean pirate hijacked a ship, stole a ship,
took the governor of Venezuela hostage,
and then was shipwrecked during a hurricane
on the South Central Coast, which is
where my mother's hometown is.
And their first encountered in that part of Cuba--
Columbus had gone to northern Cuba,
but on the South Central Coast, the first encounter
with Spaniards was the shipwrecked pirate
and his hostage.
And it's hard to say which one of them was more of a bad guy.
But I wrote it from the point of view
of the first generation of mestizos,
half Spanish, half Taino.
And while I was doing the research for this book,
the farther back in time I go, the harder
it is to do the research, because there
are no first person written accounts
by Tainos, only by conquistadors and by priests.
Fortunately, there was a priest who
was very dedicated to trying to save the Tainos.
And his first person accounts, Bartolomé de Las Cases', are
useful.
But while I was doing the research for this,
and I had to imagine many details.
Because only 200 words of the language
had been recorded by the Spaniards.
So even imagining the Taino language was very limited.
The only recorded nouns, no verbs.
But I was invited to become a subject of the Cuban DNA
project.
And when my results came back, some of you
may have seen the Family Tree DNA project on National
Geographic Channel, it's that same-- it's
a branch of that same project.
When my results came back they came back
with Haplogroup A, which is the same genetic marker
for maternal Amerindian ancestry that's
found in the Plains Indians and on up through the Bering
Strait, and it shows the pattern of migration
down into the Caribbean.
A lot of Puerto Ricans have known for a number of years
now that they carry Haplogroup A. The reason
that for someone of Cuban ancestry,
this was such an amazing experience,
I was already emotionally involved
with my mestizo character.
But this made it even more personal.
For 500 years, every Cuban has been
taught that the Taino were extinct, from 1520.
By 1520, there were no Indians left.
And every history book you look at states the same thing,
even history books published within the last few years.
Whether they're for children or for adults,
they'll say the Cuban Indians are extinct
and they'll use that word.
And I knew that there were survivors
I knew there were survivors because I was
writing the story of survivors.
But then when I got the proof of it, with that Haplogroup A,
I knew what I was writing about my own maternal ancestry.
It proves that we don't know history.
We're exploring history.
We're discovering history.
Once something has been stated in a history
book for the next 500 years, other historians
are going to repeat it, whether it's true or not.
That's just how it works.
And you could say the same of Wikipedia.
Once it's been on Wikipedia, that your name is
such and such, it's going to be repeated on Wikipedia.
You know?
So some of these things just can't be taken at face value.
The Wild Book is inspired by stories my grandmother told me
about her childhood growing up in Cuba during the early 1900s,
right after the period in The Surrender Tree.
And the older she got, the more she told these stories.
She not only lived in turbulent times,
right after the US withdrew having occupied Cuba
after the Spanish-American War, so that it
would be as if when we pull out of Iraq,
you would expect chaos.
There were bandits in the countryside,
and they were threatening to kidnap
farmers' children unless ransom was paid in advance.
My great-grandfather had so many children
that he got one of these ransom notes,
and he said I have too many, I can't pay for them all,
and I'm not going to choose.
So I won't pay for any.
So my grandmother lived in fear of being kidnapped,
but she also had dyslexia and struggled
with the inner turmoil of trying to learn to read and write.
The Lightning Dreamer is biographical about Gertrudis
Gómez de Avellaneda, one of Cuba's greatest poets as well
as abolitionists and feminists.
She combined her writing of an interracial romance
novel, which was published 11 years before Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and was much more daring, because it
proposed in the form of a simple melodramatic story--
it proposed not just abolition, but intermarriage,
and just completely normal mixed-race society,
full equality in every way.
She combined that with a campaign
against arranged marriage for girls.
The age of betrothal was 14 for Cuban young ladies
of the middle and upper classes in the 1800s.
And she regarded that as the marketing of teenage girls.
She was actually forbidden to read and write too much
by her mother, because girls who were smart
lost value on the marriage market.
Nobody wanted to marry it an uneducated girl.
You were to learn embroidery, play the piano,
tell entertaining stories, and just be generally pretty
and pleasant, but not read and write.
So she destroyed her early work.
She burned it.
From the age of 10 on, she was writing
not only poetry, but vampire stories, and stories
of giants 100 heads high.
And she burns them so that her mother wouldn't find them.
But she also did something very interesting,
because within the church, there was
this group of women who were allowed to read and write
as much as they want, the nuns.
And so when she would go to the convent to volunteer, still
as a child, she was young herself,
but she would volunteer to do theater for orphans.
And there she was free to put her stories into--
I just want to mention real quickly
I'm going to run out of time if I
spend too much time on each individual book.
But I do want to mention that because she
was such a great poet she actually escaped
two arranged marriages herself.
She defied her family, refused arranged marriages,
at the age of 15 was banished to country estate,
where she's thought to have met the characters who became--
met the real people who became the characters
in her interracial romance novel.
It was banned in Cuba because there was censorship.
You couldn't write about slavery in Cuba.
The big difference between Cuba and the US,
in terms of writing about abolition,
is there was no free North.
The entire island was a slave state.
So there was no place to go to speak freely.
You could not become a lawmaker, or an orator,
you had to be a poet.
You had to veil your opinions with metaphors.
And all the greatest Cuban abolitionists were poets.
So this is just an example of a poem from the book.