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How
and when did the three of you meet?
Six
years ago we met as adult students in Vermont Colleges Undergraduate
Program. The program is attended at a distance and students come to
the Montpelier Vermont campus twice a year. Ann was Lisa's admissions
counselor and they hit it off from the start. When Lisa came to campus
every six months they would visit, and one day during her second semester
she came in and said, "Ann, there is this Puerto Rican poet you
HAVE to meet her!" The three of us had dinner together, and the
friendship grew. We stayed in touch after each of us graduated.
Since then we have three, soon to be five graduate degrees among us.
Jane went to SUNY Binghamton for her M.A. in creative writing and is
working on her PhD now, Lisa went to Goddard College to get her MFA
in interdisciplinary arts, Ann earned her M.A. and is now working towards
an MFA in fiction at Vermont College of Union Institute & University.
Did you get together in person to write Sister Chicas, or was it
done electronically?
We were never in the same room (or state for that matter) from conception,
to sale, to completion! Most communication was done electronically or
by phone.
How did the idea for the story of the book come about?
Ann had heard through a Latina writers' listserv that Razorbill was
looking for young adult Latina fiction. On the drive home she started
wondering, what if the three of us had met when we were teenagers? She
contacted Lisa and Jane and they loved the idea of doing a project together.
They drafted a summary and sent it to Razorbill and heard back almost
immediately: they wanted to see more. They wrote three chapters, got
an agent and sold to a different division of Penguin for a crossover
novel.
Where do the three of you currently live?
Lisa lives in Chicago, Jane is in Binghamton, NY at SUNY, and Ann lives
in Morrisville, Vermont, just north of Stowe.
To what extent is Sister Chicas autobiographical?
The short answer is that the characters are based on our own stories,
but are fictional. The long answers follow:
Lisa's character Graciela is a first generation Chicana, who like Lisa
started working and volunteering in her teens. Lisa always knew she
was a writer and tried to create with the character of Graciela, a young
woman poised on the brink of self-discovery, yet passionately committed
to her family, her friends and her community. As a working-class artist
and feminist, Lisa believes in the transformative power of storytelling,
and of claiming yourself. She hopes Sister Chicas will be both a mirror
with which young Latinas see themselves clearly and window for all readers
to see a slice of life from the vantage point of our community.
Ann's Character Leni is based on her own experiences growing up in a
mixed ethnicity household (however it was her mother that was Puerto
Rican and her father was of Swedish descent, not Irish), and she did
in fact lose her father to ALS at 8 years old. She welcomed the opportunity
to share those feelings and experiences in the hope of reaching other
young women who might have lost parents at a young age. She was also
a punk rocker at the tail of the punk movement in NYC so those aspects
of Leni's story are based on her own experiences in that world. Ann
didn't really identify with her Latina heritage until she was 30, the
year she lost her mother, and decided to have Leni struggle with this
identity at a younger age as she wishes she had and imagines many Latinas
in the country do.
Like Taina, Jane was shy growing up, a crippling shyness which prevented
her from making friends with other girls her age. She spent her days
reading, searching for escape or camaraderie in a novel's characters.
And though her favorite books highlighted characters whose own personalities
prevented them from being popular and outgoing, those same books were
hardly mirrors of Jane's complex childhood: none of the girls spoke
English at school and Spanish at home, none of the girls had a soldier
father who would leave the house one day and never look back. And none
had Jane's vibrant mother and grandmother, who told her stories, kitchen-stories,
Puerto Rican myths and fables, tales that would ferment in Jane's imagination
like mavi root. It wasn't long before Jane was writing her own narratives
on long-hand college-ruled paper. It was the perfect early education
which one day would bring Taina to the surface. Jane hopes that young
women and their mothers will rediscover the prisms in Sister Chicas,
as it is the book that a young Jane, a Latina learning about her place
in the world, would have wanted given to her, a tender, yet wild-rollercoaster
of a gift.
What writers were you influenced by along the way?
There are too many to mention, but the Latina writers who through their
talent and hard work opened the door for us: Nicholasa Mohr, Isabel
Allende, Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Elena Pontiatowska,
Julia Alvarez, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia de
Burgos, Gloria Anzaldúa and Esmeralda Santiago.
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