It's my birthday

(And this is my first newsletter)

Welcome to the Don’t Forget the Champurradas newsletter, inspired by my first book, MANI SEMILLA FINDS HER QUETZAL VOICE (published March 2024 by Levine Querido)

If you don’t know what champurradas are, allow me to explain. Champurradas are a flat, crunchy and toasted not-too-sweet cookie topped with sesame seeds. They are part of some of my earliest memories of Guatemala City.

In one such memory, I am five, in Zona 11, watching my Abuelita tighten a pañuelo around hair freshly pressed against pink tubos de pelo. Don Zacarías’s small red car coughs and rumbles up the colonia’s cypress tree-lined street (a detail I won’t remember until I return, 30 years later). He opens his trunk, and inside are perfect rows of every pan dulce I could ever imagine.

They talk. The afilo cuchillos carreta roles by. Then the lustro zapatos carreta.

I fill the bag with stacks of champurradas—perfect disks—which I’ll enjoy at the table, with a café con leche, not bothering to correct my Abuelita when she mistakes me for my mom, or a nurse who has come to care for her, or a Jehovah witness who she has invited in purely out of prudencia. As I stuff my face with the third champurrada, she’ll walk me through her skin care routine. And in case you are looking for one, here it is:

First, submerge face in a bowl of water filled with ice cubes.

Second, spread dots of crema Ponds evenly across the face, and then smear, always (always) in an upward motion, toward the sky.

If I ever want to be as beautiful as her, she’ll tell me, that is what I have to do.

Then she leans in, and asks me if I ever met her boyfriend who was killed during the tiempos politicos. Whispers it, like she is saying it for the first time, or like someone could be listening. I have to halt my crunching to hear.

But the story is never finished. It gets cut off, suddenly, by her mind that pulls her on another thread of thought, or from the ya basta’s coming from nearby rooms and the kitchen. Because dio guardia if I ever repeat that to my kindergarten class. But like any thread, it stays there unless you forcefully thread it back out with the needle (at least this is how I imagine it, but what would I know? I can’t even sew my daughter’s socks and she reminds me of this often).

It reminds me of a line (okay a few lines) on pages 82-83 of my book.

“The letters start to change. My dead tía goes from being afraid to not afraid anymore. I read letters where she’s happy, where she and her photographer friend, Maribel, walk through rain forests for days just to interview one person. I wonder how one person’s story can be so important that you spend days in a jungle just to capture their words, from their own mouths. Another where they join a collective of other journalists also covering disappearances, some of whom themselves disappear or end up in jail. She writes about the women she meets, and I feel like I know them. She talks about the colors and sounds of birds and conversations that keep her full for days, like a big bowl of the best sopa de frijoles, and it makes me smile. It’s a side of Guatemala Mami doesn’t tell me about, or maybe she never knew.”

This part of the story, when my protagonist discovers more letters written between her mom and a disappeared journalist Tía, has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s an important moment, because it is the moment when she understands what nuance means, and how a place can have a horrific history of violence, but also be a beautiful place where many great things happen. I have spent a lifetime hearing about the disappeared, and a couple of years reading about forced disappearance for my current work in progress, a Young Adult historical fiction coming of age that takes place at the height of forced disappearances in 1970’s Guatemala. But in my first book, it’s a sub-thread (if you’ll allow me to continue using sewing metaphors) in an otherwise hilarious voice-y middle grade filled with period humor (that’s what some rad librarians said. But don’t go to Goodreads if you want to learn more. The good people at Goodreads didn’t pick up on that thread).

But this current project is different. Writing for an older audience, I’ve allowed myself to be somber, and serious, and lean into the physical and mental stress of being under constant surveillance; a state I only know about from stories and second-hand memories. I’ve allowed bad things to happen to my characters. I’ve allowed them to experience loss, and allowed them to crumble under the surveillance system. I’ve drawn settings, I’ve read book after book about my topic. I was born years after the year in which this story takes place. So I’ve labored through books, information, things I could attach to. Labor. I don’t use this term lightly. With my first daughter, I labored for 50 hours. As one person put it: that’s longer than some people work in a week. And was convinced I would not make it. There were infections, back labor, and dropped heart rates. So yes, I labored through books. Moments in history I could attach my character to, of a time and place I did not live, but that I feel an inextricable connection to. And that’s what shifting to a new voice was like—laboring. Moments when I wanted to be funny, I ask myself: is this authentic?

I still labor over finding my “YA voice”. I haven’t achieved it yet, but each time I sit to write, I get closer. Sometimes farther. But I’ve never threaded linearly (there I go again).

I can’t wait to share more about book no. 2 in the near future. And talking about the future, I hope to also include fun sections like book and song pairings, what my kids are reading, and a list of the highs and lows of writer as a full time mom with a full time job, but this is it for now. A song I’ve been obsessed with writing to these days: “Disfruto,” by Carla Morrison.

And did I mention today is my birthday? If you know me, you know that I love me some odd numbers, and so today is the big 39. I spent the big 29 running my first marathon, at midnight, in arctic Norway, and I spent 9 in the Galapagos Islands, pivotal moments in my life. For my birthday, will you subscribe and share this post with others? Oh and writer nerdas: see prompt below.

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This month's writing prompt, based on my first book. Feel free to share, or let it inspire your next story.

Your character finds a box in the attic. It is filled with letters. They reveal a family secret. What is it?