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Description Place Made. Provenance Gifter. Title Item Name. Source Full Text. Contributor Full Text. Subject Organization Full Text. Subject Person Full Text. Object Type. Rendered HTML output. My mother used to sing me all these old, ancient, medieval ballads to put me to sleep, and I loved listening to these words, some of which I understood and some which I did not, but which had such a resounding charm to me. And my grandmother used to sing me verses that she put her own music to. And my own father, who was not very musical, he would still sing me songs.
And all of these words I kept during the day, and I kept remembering them. I memorized them. My grandmother taught me poem after poem that I memorized when I was very young, so finding them in books, then, was a revelation.
It was like, "I can hold on to them; they are here, for me. I came first to the United States when I was And I came to Pennsylvania to a girls' school for summer, where I learned some English.
And then when I was — when I finished — I was 17 when I finished high school — I was able to get a scholarship to a college in Colorado, where I was asked to be the assistant to the Spanish department teachers, who knew the language grammatically and knew a lot of the literature, but really had not the fluency with it.
And it was — this is pre- language labs technology, so they wanted somebody that would actually read the lessons and practice the exercises and give a pronunciation model to the students. And that was my first experience on becoming a teacher, because as fate would have it, the sweet nun that was supposed to be the professor of the course had a stroke a couple of days before classes began, so they didn't have a replacement, and they said, "Well, let's put the Cuban girl there to just take over the classes for a few days until we get somebody.
It's been such a blessed life, but it's happened - you know, now I have - I've written more than children's books. I mean it's — and it's even a little bit scary to say that. But I never set out to do it. I never said, "I'm gonna be an author. I — it was all organic. I wrote the first books, because I wanted my students to have that material. I wrote these sort things. I wanted my daughter to have it and then other children to have it, and — and it has all happened a little bit at a time.
It's like — and I tell kids when they comment on this, and I go, "Look, I never set out to be a grandmother of nine kids.
I can tell you I first had a daughter and then a son and then another. And, you know, today, here is where I see myself. And it's the same with these books. They — they were all born out of real experiences. I mean you take Gathering the Sun on the table, which is one of my most well known and most beloved books. These were poems that I would write at night when I came from working with field — farm workers in the fields in California, and I would just — these ideas would just come, and I would write.
And I wrote other poems that were far more complex and I haven't made those into a book. But one day, I was given the opportunity to put these poems together, and they got shortened so that you could have it in two languages when you need two languages on a page, and because I wanted these wonderful illustrations of Simon Silva.
But the reality is that I never set out to do this. I did it a bit at a time — one here, one there. And that's true of so many other things. I write when - when I get an idea, and sometimes I don't even know I'm making a book. And it's a story that was very difficult to get published. Most publishers told me that American children would not be interested in such a story. I have all this series of rejection letters, but eventually Athenaeum picked it up, and then they published it, and it won the Christopher Award.
And that really opened doors for me to be able to submit other manuscripts for publication. But it's a story that just came to me one night after working with farm working parents, talking to them about the importance of education, what they could do for them — and all of that late at night, because it was summer, and they work on the fields until ten o'clock.
I'm returning by myself, through the fields, on my car, and I began seeing this story as if you were seeing it in a movie on the windshield. I mean the story was just there, passing by. It was just all there. So, I cried all the way home. When I got home, I went to the basement, where I had my desk, and I sat down and wrote the whole story and just left it there, because I knew I would forget, otherwise.
And I went to bed and went to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, I said, "Last night I had a dream of a story. I only wish I could remember what it was. And it was, you know, all there. Well, I have written very different kinds of books. It seems part of it is the fact of being bilingual.
For example, poetry and writing poetry is one of my most significant creative things, but I can only do that in Spanish. I can't really do poetry in English, so I have a world of poetry with many books, an A, B, C — an animal A, B, C — which has poems about animals whose name begins with the letters, but poems about the letters themselves, which is very well known among the Spanish-speaking children.
And whenever I go, they will tell me back their favorite, and they know them very well. I have another A, B, C of the ocean that was recently published. I have just collections and collections of poems in multiple anthologies, so that the author in me. But in English, I found that I needed to depend more on the story — on the power of the story, because I can't do the playful things that I do with the language in Spanish, the puns, the rhymes, the alliterations — those things.
I don't have that skill in English, so I need to depend on strong characters, strong plot, a good narrative, a good pace to get the kids interested. So, then I become a different person and a different writer in the other language, and that's, you know, part of the richness of being bicultural.
The folktales have been a source of unity.
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