The tropical nature of the beautiful green, very wet,
rainy surroundings that were so different than my big city
surroundings were what really captivated me as a child.
I loved nature.
The first time I went back to Cuba as an adult
and I made contact with my cousins
and visited the people I hadn't seen since childhood, one
of them opened the door, took one look at me, and said,
I remember you.
You're the one who played with tarantulas.
Because I was that kind of a kid,
I was the kid that didn't mind getting dirty, running around
out in the mud, looking at bugs, and playing with plants.
And I ended up being a scientist.
I studied botany and agriculture because of my fascination
with tropical nature.
These are my parents when they first met.
And that's the youngest picture of me that I have from Cuba.
I think I was probably about two on one of our earliest summer
visits.
And you can see the cattle in the background.
The family farm was a dairy farm.
But the cattle weren't kept cooped up like they are here.
They were wild, so my cousins got
to around them up every evening and bring them into a corral
so that they could be milked the next morning.
And to me, that was the ultimate thing I was looking forward to,
was being old enough to someday participate in the roundup.
This farm was actually bought with pirate's gold
because one of my ancestors was a pirate.
My cousins could do rope tricks.
And as you can see, I wasn't a very good rider.
But I loved horses.
I still love horses.
And I just loved the idea of riding.
And I had read the Black Stallion book,
so I thought I knew how to ride because I thought you
could learn anything in a book.
The truth is, it takes practice.
That's my great grandmother with her favorite donkey
and my grandmother with a dove on her head
that just happened to land there that day.
This is a big family group from earlier from when
my mother was a child.
She's the one with the big bow in her hair.
And my grandmother, great grandmother
are also in this picture, and lots
of my mother's first cousins and aunts and uncles.
When I go to Cuba, I always look at the antique book
fairs and antique bookstores because
for the historical research like the surrender tree,
believe it or not, everything is not available on the internet.
A lot of these older books have not yet been digitized.
And I do need the actual, physical antique book in order
to read what's in it.
And the things I look for in that research are,
in particular, what I love the most,
is to find something written by a person who lived at that time
and experience those things.
Now, Rosa La Bayamesa did not leave a diary.
We don't know of any written work by her.
Other people wrote about her.
But for many of my other books, there
have been diaries and letters written by the people
that I want to know about.
And that's where I find--
what do you think you find in a diary?
You find how people felt. You find their emotions.
You also find out what they had for breakfast
and the daily routines that aren't available in the more
traditional history books that just deal with the big events.
I like to know about those small daily events.
This is a typical mailbox in the colonial parts of Cuba
that you put your letter through that monster's mouth.
And these are some of the very young cousins and my cousin's
children in Trinidad.
You can see the church bell tower behind them and.
They're sitting on a dog, right, a statue of a dog.
But they call it a caballito, a horse.
And my mother called it a horse when she was little.
And every generation of children who sit on that dog
call it a horse.
And that just shows the power of imagination in storytelling,
that if you want to believe that dog is a horse,
you are free to believe that.
You can choose.
Music is such an important part of Cuban culture.
Everywhere you go, there are always street musicians.
I found this little dog hiding in a store that was all drums.
And one of my books coming out next year
is about a 10-year-old girl who was
the first female drummer in Cuba, less than 100 years ago,
in the 1930s.
Can you believe that until the 1930s, on this island where
music is so important and so popular,
they thought only men should play drums?
Girls, how does that make you feel?
It's kind of amazing, isn't it?
And then reverse it, boys, how would you
feel if you were the ones not allowed to play drums?
So that book, it's a picture book.
It's really gorgeous illustrations.
And it's called Drum Dream Girl.
Some of my other works in progress--
now, this monkey hanging from the boat,
he actually came onto our boat while I was in Panama doing
the research for silver people, my new book
about the Panama Canal.
And he was begging for food on the boat.
But the orangutans, I visited recently a couple of years
ago a refuge in Borneo, which you'll have to look at a map
when you get back to class.
Borneo is close to China.
I visited a refuge where orangutans
were being rescued as the rainforest was cut down
to plant palm oils, which goes into all your junk food.
Palm oil is an ingredient of junk food.
And as the rainforest is cut down,
the orangutans would die if they weren't rescued.
So they were being rescued and returned into rainforest homes
where they can survive.
And I've written a book about the orangutans.
So as you can see, I really love to explore.
I love to experiment.
I love to try lots of different kinds of writing and lots
of different topics.
It's pretty amazing to see orangutans up close.
And when you travel, when you explore,
you just never know who you'll meet.
This sea turtle, when I held this sea turtle,
I learned that if you face the water while you're holding
a sea turtle, it will paddle.
But if you turn your back to the ocean,
it stops because, instinctively, it
knows that it can't swim unless it's facing the ocean.
So again, just traveling and learning
is always so fascinating.
Cuba is one of our closest neighbors.
The people are very friendly.
And I hope that you will have a chance to meet them someday.
I hope that you will not have the travel restrictions
that we've had up until now.
I'd like to just talk a little bit about how
I studied writing.
Remember I said I became a botanist and agronomist?
I studied agriculture in botany.
I was a scientist.
I did a lot of scientific writing.
But I also still love to write poetry
because I had done that since childhood
and I wanted to do both.
Well, I studied creative writing with Tomas Rivera.
Have you read anything by Tomas Rivera in your classes?
He was one of the great Mexican-American poets
and novelists.
And he was also the first Latino leader
of a University of California campus,
so he was a great educator.
And he encouraged me to write from the heart,
exploring things that are important to me
without worrying about whether anyone else likes my words.
Not worrying is the greatest challenge for a writer.
Don't expect perfection, just let the words flow.
You can always go back and make corrections later.
Teachers, forgive me, but if you're
writing poetry, grammar and punctuation and spelling
can be done later.
It doesn't have to be in the first draft.
The first draft is your heart on paper,
and that has to flow you.
You can't constantly interrupt it with details.
You need to practice if you want to write.
Musicians and dancers rehearse.
Athletes train.
Writers also need practice.
Would any of you go out on a soccer field
without ever having practiced?
Would your coach let you?
Yeah?
Would you play in an orchestra without ever rehearsing?
I don't think so.
It's the same for a writer.
So you don't want to get discouraged
when your poem, you don't think it's good enough.
Don't let it discourage you because it's not
your final work.
You have years ahead of you to practice.
And each failure or what feels like a failure
is a chance to start over.
Our stories are all different.
But we also have certain things in common.
And when we tell our stories and we
listen to those told by others, we fly back and forth
between minds.
Reading about other lives helps us
begin to understand each other, turning neighbors into friends.
So thank you and gracious and greetings
from your neighbors in Cuba who hopefully you
will meet someday.
I'd be really happy to answer any questions
that your teachers might have in mind
and to take a closer look at those costumes.
[APPLAUSE]