Now and then I get asked to talk to about the need for diversity in young adult literature. These days, when the need for diverse books is being so prominently discussed, I have tried to understand why these talks are so hard for me. I have the sense when I show up that there’s nothing new I can say. Doesn’t everyone already know how vital is to for a young person to see him/herself in the books he/she reads? Isn’t it obvious how much we need all young persons to see how we are all the same deep down? Surely, everyone understands how empathy, how living in the mind and life of another, destroys racial and ethnic stereotypes. What more is there to say about the need for diverse books? So I talk about my birth in Mexico, my crossing to the United States when I was nine, my growing up in El Paso Texas, to explain why I naturally write about young Mexican-Americans. My characters are good role models, I think, despite (or because of) their human frailties. I’m sure their existence has helped kids, Latino and non-Latino, to understand themselves and others, but do I really have profess out loud that this is one of the reasons I write? Can I just say that I write about Latino kids because that’s what comes out? Ismael, Hector, Marcelo, Pancho, Vicky, they are just there, first as small seeds and then they grow slowly over the years in my mind and then they are born. I’m just the Stork here. I don’t create my characters. I simply deliver them. And sometimes, the characters that I deliver are white kids like D.Q. and Wendell and, I confess, I don’t do a lot of research about their culture to make sure I get them right.
These talks are so hard because there’s so much about what is being discussed that I don’t know. I’m just trying to write some stories. To a lot of the questions that I get at these talks I have to say, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Why aren’t there more books about and by Persons of Color being published? I don’t know. The literary agents and the publishers and editors I personally know all love good diverse books and they go out of their way to find them. Some of them, as was (and is) the case with me, are willing to spend the effort and time needed to develop a book with potential into a good book. Is it a question of money, then, as so many seem to say? POC books don’t sell. I don’t know. My wife had a group of her Wellesley College students over to the house for lunch and I asked them: Do you think the Harry Potter books would have been less popular if Harry had been a Person of Color? The white students mostly said no, the Latino kids said yes. I don’t know. And if J.K.Rowling decided to re-publish her series but this time Harry’s parents were African, what else would she need to change besides Harry’s skin color? His speech? The way he thinks? Would he still be brave? So much of the diversity discussion is, ironically, divisive. Us. Them. You can’t possibly understand. Ironic because what good literature does best is unite by revealing glimpses of the soul that is the same in all. In the end, it comes down to you and me. What can I do? What can you do so there are more good diverse books written and read? That’s what I end up saying at my diversity talks. What I Francisco Stork can do is try to write good books, try to write books that will last, try to write books with the kind of characters that come naturally to me, that are in me waiting to be born, try to write books that speak to all. I can encourage kids of color to work seriously, patiently, at the craft of writing. I can, time permitting, help young writers with their manuscripts. And maybe, I’m not sure about this at all, but maybe, I need to keep on talking to groups, hard as it is, about the need for diverse books.
May 11, 2014
The Diversity Discussion
May 27, 2008
El Paso, Texas
I was invited last week to talk to the 7th and 8th graders of Indian Ridge Middle School in El Paso, Texas. I work hard during the year trying to get invited to at least one El Paso school. First and foremost is the food. Mexican food restaurants on every corner. All of them with a grandmother or two cooking in the back. I grew up in El Paso and the setting for Behind the Eyes (at least the first part of the story) is in El Paso. A large part of my first novel, The Way of the Jaguar also takes place in El Paso. So it makes perfect sense to have someone like me spend a couple of days with El Paso kids. Now I have to tell you right away that these speaking engagements are hard work. At Indian Ridge, met with seven group of kids each day (each group for an hour). There was half an hour off for lunch where, you guessed it, I had tacos. What I try to do during these little talks is talk a little about my life and my books and how the two play off each other, how something actual gets transformed by the imagination into fiction. My favorite part, however, is when I get the kids to write for a few minutes. We pretend that we are writing in a journal that no one will read. I’ll read what they write but I don’t know them so it’s like writing for themselves. The question that elicits the deepest responses is this one: “What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.” I tell them to write for five minutes without lifting their pencils from the paper, without thinking. Just write. Sometimes, one or two will volunteer to read out loud what they wrote. I bring the hundred of sheets of paper home and I read them. I read about death and divorces. I read about abuse and addiction. I read about rejection and failure. Their writings are a reminder of to me of what a young person of fourteen and fifteen is capable of thinking, feeling, enduring. Their writings are a reminder to me of why I write.
April 17, 2007
On Being a Latino Writer
At a recent conference at Rutger’s University, one of the students asked me if I ever felt restricted by being a Latino writer. Funny that the first thing that came to my mind was to say that I did not consider myself a Latino Writer. I went on to say that the main characters in my novels were Latino and that I thought that the main characters in all future novels would be Latino (more specifically, Chicanos or persons of Mexican ancestry) and in that sense reflect issues peculiar to the Latino community in the United States. But later, on the long train ride back to Boston, I reflected on my answer. I’m not really sure what I would call myself. I was born in Mexico of two Mexican parents (later adopted by Charles Stork, a naturalized American citizen born in Holland). I came to the United States when I was nine and have been here ever since. I have one remaining aunt (on my mother’s side) and two cousins left in Mexico. I suppose then that I fit under the definitiion of a Latino writer. Why then the quick negative response? It wasn’t a negative, defensive, I’m-offended kind of response. I am very proud of my heritage and culture and the peculiar tugs and pulls that course through my veins by virtue of my birthplace, my native language, my genes, my culture and history. The quick response, I think, was due to a flash interpretation that the question “do you feel limited as a Latino writer” meant “do you feel constrained to write about “Latino issues” whatever they may be. And my “I don’t consider myself a Latino Writer” answer really meant: I don’t feel that I should or that I am only able to write or that I am somehow for the sake of publication, more inclined to write about “Latino issues.” Latino issues are what? The alienation and disenfranchisement of immigrants; stories that describe the food we eat and the fiestas we celebrate? I think that if I want to be a good Latino writer I have to be a good writer first. My interest is the human soul and the human condition. My main characters will be Latino but they haven’t always been poor people struggling to survive across the border. Some of them have been successful individuals who like many other successful individuals have come to realize that success is not all it is cracked up to be. Whatever good I can achieve for the social problems that affect Latinos will come as a result of being a good writer – someone who portrays Latino characters as believable human beings. To recognize ourselves in the soul of another – isnt’t that a good to be valued? And so yes, I am a Latino writer although I don’t see myself as one. And yes, I would like my books to be read and perhaps to inspire young Latino kids because many of them are like me and many of them need good role models, but still, I’m just someone trying to tell a good story and, if I’m fortunate, maybe I will bring a flicker, glimmer of truth and beauty to our world.
