developed such a tenderness for my Mom’s younger self – this child who would steal her father’s horse and race and then fall off.
It
was a fantastical world to me, growing up in Manhattan – stories of chopping mangoes and climbing trees and her father driving oxen. And later, after they moved to the city, selling lottery tickets in his smart slacks and hat from among the oranges in the back of a fruit cart. And that’s where the impulse came from: I want to chronicle too. As a child I just loved it, and also my grandfather’s riddles and stories, which he would tell me every day.’
Photo by Stephanie Ifendu
contrast, in prose because ‘there are too many characters, too much dialogue and the setting changes half way through’.
Running through Camino’s story is the threat of a sexual predator. ‘As I was writing it I kept thinking about this guy who was kind of stalking me in high school and I was too afraid to tell my parents because I thought it was my fault’. She used the idea that ‘sometimes teenagers don’t realise this might be a moment you have to ask for help’ and also that ‘often we don’t consider that a community has the answers’.
Acevedo, who identifies as Afro-Latinx, herself first went to the Dominican Republic when she was about eight. Her mother, who grew up there, was one of 15 children, so Acevedo met 60 first cousins, and ‘all of these aunts’. ‘I would get shuffled from house to house and it was incredible’. Like Camino’s father, she spent her summers in DR every year. Now, she says, the family has to hire a hall to have Christmas parties. ‘We’re 200 people’. ‘I think what the Dominican Republic called up in me was wonder. With all that word carries, including the big identity question mark: “can you claim a place that doesn’t claim you?” I am still working through that.’ Her novels, she says, revisit themes and are ‘conversations with each other’.
Acevedo’s mother left DR for Puerto Rico in the 1970s, and officially moved to the US in 1979, rejoining her family in New York. Acevedo’s father, who had been an accountant in the Dominican Republic, lived in the house opposite. Theirs was a very formal courtship, as he sat with the family, listening to music. ‘It was adorable’.
Acevedo grew up with both parents, and two elder brothers, always in the same apartment in Manhattan. Her parents ‘are still there, 40 years on’. Her mother worked first in a button factory and then, when Elizabeth was five, became a childcare provider. Her father worked at an envelope factory. ‘It was very blue collar all my life.’
Her experience with her parents, she says, ‘most closely reflects The Poet X’: ‘This father who is there, but maybe doesn’t always know how to be involved.’ Her mother, though, would tell stories of growing up in the countryside in the Dominican Republic. ‘She’s an incredible storyteller.
It’s so rich, the things she remembers. I Books for Keeps No.242 May 2020 9
Her mother was ambitious for her. ‘She wanted me to be famous, and would enrol me for acting and modelling’. Acevedo trained as an actor, which was ‘almost always a vehicle for me to perform my own work’. In order to ensure that she ‘knew how to craft the stories I wanted to craft’ she took sociology and anthropology courses in her degree, from George Washington University, and has an MA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. Interested in hip-hop, she performed poetry and then, through a creative writing workshop, found a connection which led to publication of her first poem in 2013. Poems and stories were published, and then her first novel, Poet X, won awards in the US as well as the UK and became a New York Times bestseller. She has now read her own books on audio and is working on an adult novel, and on a screenplay for With the Fire On High, which has been optioned for film.
Acevedo spoke in her Carnegie acceptance speech about writing for readers in her classes who felt their stories were not being told. Asked about her audience, she said that one of her first readers is her best friend: ‘not someone I would consider a voracious reader so if I hook her I have something’. But mostly her audience is her main character: ‘That’s the person I am imagining reading the book. It requires me to be really gentle. If my reader is a teen parent, or has lost a parent, or has complicated sibling relationships, am I approaching this with the integrity and honesty it deserves, in such a way that it will honour that experience?’
Her current experience, though, is unlikely to inspire a book. ‘Corona,’ she says, ‘is not a muse’.
Books mentioned: Clap When You Land, Hot Key Books, 978-1471409127, £7.99 pbk With the Fire on High, Hot Key Books, 978-1471409004, £7.99 pbk Poet X, Electric Monkey, 978-1405291460, £7.99 pbk
Nicolette Jones, writer, literary critic and broadcaster, has been the children’s books reviewer of the Sunday Times for more than two decades.
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