About this episode
Hailing from a working-class border town in Southern California, Matt de la Peña (Last Stop on Market Street, Mexican WhiteBoy, Milo Imagines the World) grew up in an environment that deeply valued strength and stoicism. Instilled with a strong work ethic and the pursuit of opportunities, he followed in the footsteps of the men in his family and community. But still, there was a deeper truth to life within a buried emotional side that he felt compelled to explore.
"Kids are growing up in an interesting time and they're led to believe that if we don't feel happy, we're doing something wrong. I think what I respond to is a deeper truth, which is, happiness is incredible and we should strive for it, but we should also acknowledge that half of our life is challenging or melancholy." - Matt de la Peña
As early as high school, Matt would embrace this side of himself by secretly writing poetry, continuing on this journey to emotional self-discovery throughout adulthood. Now, influenced by writers such as Kate DiCamillo and the late Cormac McCarthy, Matt’s books seek out the deeper and sometimes darker parts of life, teaching kids the invaluable skill of acknowledging melancholy and permitting them to appreciate their emotional complexity.
In this episode, Matt will share his lifelong journey to accessing his own emotions and how his writing teaches kids to do the same.
***
Keep up with Jordan and The Reading Culture @thereadingculturepod and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. Join Matt on social @Mattdelapena.
***
For his reading challenge, Conversation Starters, Matt aims to invoke a sense of pondering in young readers with his curated selection of picture books. You can find his list and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.
This episode’s Beanstack featured librarian is Cicely Lewis, School Library Journal’s 2020 school librarian of the year. She tells us all about her “Read Woke” challenge and how she keeps reading fun and engaging for her students.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - One Side of the Border (2:24)
- Chapter 2 - The Good, Bad, and Masculine (7:20)
- Chapter 3 - The Closet Poet (11:14)
- Chapter 4 - Sutree (14:38)
- Chapter 5 - The Future of Latinx Voices (24:38)
- Chapter 6 - Leaning Forward (27:58)
- Chapter 7 - Writing Up (31:58)
- Chapter 8 - Conversation Starters (33:59)
- Chapter 9 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (34:55)
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
. 
Links:
View Transcript
Hide Transcript
Matt De La Peña:
Kids are growing up in an interesting time and they're led to believe that if we don't feel happy, we're doing something wrong. And I think what I respond to is a deeper truth, which is happiness is incredible and we should strive for it, but we should also acknowledge that half of our life is challenging or melancholy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt de la Peña is no stranger to suffering. Growing up in the Mexican-American enclave of San Diego's National City gave him a firsthand perspective on the sorrows and strengths of working class neighborhoods. As an author, his nuanced portrayals of city life and city dwellers are noteworthy for their empathy and emotion. Yet his own upbringing in a macho culture initially meant that he learned to hide that sensitivity.
Matt De La Peña:
I was a faker when I was young. I pretended to be able to do what the men in my family did, but I was a pretender deep down. I had a lot of emotion.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt is a Newbery Award-winning author, known for Last Stop on Market Street, Mexican WhiteBoy, Milo Imagines the World, among many others. In today's episode, he shares his lifelong journey to access his deep emotions and how he guides young readers navigating similar emotional journeys. He'll also talk about the late Cormac McCarthy's influence on his worldview, and we'll find out what very famous writer was totally unknown to teenage Matt when he got dragged to his first author reading and how that reading redirected his life.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
Also, remember to join the reading culture on Instagram at thereadingculturepod and sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter to hear more from our authors, access bonus content and to learn about exclusive giveaways like author-signed books. All right, onto the show.
So you're from California, but you've been in Brooklyn until recently, right?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, I was in Brooklyn for 15 years. I actually moved from California because I'd never lived on the East Coast and I was curious and I wanted to see snow. And I planned on being there for two years and I met my wife and she messed it all up. And so I stayed there for 15.
So both my parents are from National City. My grandparents came from Mexico, landed in National City, which is really close to the Mexican border. That is where my mom and dad met in high school and where they had me when they were still in high school. So they were very young parents.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you said your mom wasn't raised by her biological parents?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, so she had a tough, tough story. I mean, she was raised by her great-grandmother, but her great-grandmother passed away pretty early in her life. So she had nothing. I remember my dad, he always says, "I thought I was poor until I met your mom, and she was very, very poor." So I think class was the equalizer there. That's where they connected. And they also just had a family early and tried to make it work. And my mom would never let it not work because of how she grew up.
I think my mom... We don't know what her exact background is. She claims to be French. I'm not so sure. I think her identity was like, "I'm going to be a great mother." And my dad's identity was "I'm a Mexican man. I feel like America is out to get me." That was really the messaging that he took in and gave to us. And he needed somebody to save him and my mom kind of did that.
And National City was our whole world. Everybody we knew was there, all my cousins and uncles and everybody. But then my dad, surprisingly enough, he was... We call him the hippie Mexican surfer. He would always surf in a part of San Diego called North County. And they were like, "Well, Matt's struggling in school." Because admittedly I was, because the school system there was really, really struggling and it was hard to reach kids like me who were struggling to read. And so they thought, "Well, Al loves to go here and surf." And the school seemed better and it was still relatively inexpensive. There was actually a Mexican-American community in Cardiff because they call it the flower capital of the world back then.
So anyways, they found a place for us to live. And so that's where I went to junior high and high school. And I will be honest, it was the smartest thing they could have ever done because I started to catch up in school and my sister too. It was literally life-changing to move up there.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Can you talk more about why you were having trouble reading or... Was it primarily the school system or what was the cause?
Matt De La Peña:
It might also be I just had working parents and no books in the house. And also education where I was born is honestly not a focal point. It's in that community, especially as a boy, it was all about working and loyalty and that kind of thing. So school wasn't a priority, if that makes sense. And it was more important to live up to the machismo mentality kind of thing. And I was just exposed to a different world when we went to North County, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, I think it was the first time I ever met kids who had parents who had gone to college. And it just plants a seed in your head of like, "Oh, well, what is this college thing? I wonder if I could ever do that too." So you just start to see possibilities that you weren't exposed to in a different kind of neighborhood.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So when you were younger, what were the things that you felt like... If you can remember, what did you think that your parents wanted from you as a boy?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, I think it was mostly you just get the nonverbal messaging, which is when we're all together, who's the toughest uncle, the most charismatic, tells the best jokes. There's horseshoes in the backyard, tequila, beer. It's just that working class world and you want to live up to that.
And I was the lightest-skinned in my family, so I almost felt like I had to work harder to live up to who our family was. And yet I also had this other complicated factor, which was my grandmother who was our matriarch, my Mexican grandmother favored me in some ways because I was lighter. So it was that complication of guilt mixed with inferiority. And what do you do with that?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow, that's very complicated. Okay, so you're dealing with this and also what you've described as a machismo culture at home. Can you speak to how these factors impacted you throughout middle and high school a bit?
Matt De La Peña:
The one thing that I value so much about masculinity, which, by the way, sometimes I feel like we're looking at a working class masculinity in such a negative way now, but there are so many incredibly positive elements of it. In other words, there are things that I want to have inside me, such as every single morning I saw my dad get up at 04:30 to go to work and he never complained. And I just think that is such an incredible trait that I try to carry into my job. And also just, he was a rock. He was always there. He was a presence. He wasn't always talking, he was very quiet. You could see that there were things that he was probably dealing with and maybe needed to talk them out, but he didn't. He just handled it. And maybe he handled it to give stability to our household, even when we had very little, we were really struggling.
So there's so much that I admire about the machismo culture that I was raised in, but there are a few blind spots that you start to recognize as you get older, and especially as you get much older when you start to have your own kids. But one of them is my dad put an emphasis on work. Even when we were young, high school, you have to have a job, work. And I knew that the sport of basketball was my ticket to college. I knew that that was a way I could go to school for free because I was pretty good. But he thought it was more important that I worked. So he didn't see that me investing time in what he considered to be a game was actually a step to something greater where I could work.
And then of course, this inability to access your emotions, that was just really our reality. You would never see our dad have emotion. Doesn't matter if he got fired from a job, he just sat there like nothing happened. And so that's probably not healthy for him and not healthy for anyone. And so you start to recognize those things and say, "Well, there are parts I want to take and there are parts I want to leave behind." And in many ways my dad's motto for us, and particularly me as the oldest boy... And this is something I'm writing about in my new book. But his basic message was, "You're nobody. You're nothing. You have no meaning in this world."
And he thought that that was important to know because once you knew that, you could do anything, if that makes sense. It sounds complicated and it sounds almost mean, but there's some power in what he's saying because there's a freedom in it. It's like, "Okay, I come from a poor neighborhood." We don't have resources, we don't have education in our background. We're going to acknowledge that. We're not going to pretend anything. We're going to just say, "Here's who we are in this country." But after you know that and you're not pretending anymore, then maybe you can try to do anything because you're not trying to hold up this image that isn't true. You're just saying, "Here I am, and now I go from here."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As if you have nothing to lose.
Matt De La Peña:
Exactly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's interesting. That's a harsh way to say it though.
Matt De La Peña:
Very harsh way to say it. I wouldn't say that to my son.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So growing up in this kind of environment, did you ever feel like writing was something that you would end up doing or even that you were excited about doing? And also were there any books that you read that made you think it might be something that you'd be interested in?
Matt De La Peña:
So in middle schools, that's when I was first exposed to the The House on Mango Street, and that was probably the only book that I liked. Most of the other books, I just couldn't get into them. I felt very distant from the stories and it was also work. I mean, this is why so many kids are reluctant readers because it's work to go through those sentences and build the visual story in your head. That's a lot of work. If you don't have the reps, if it's new to you and everybody else is off reading and you're still slower, you just lose confidence. And I think I didn't have any confidence.
But when I was exposed to The House of Mango Street, first of all, it was a thin book. It was vignettes. There was a lot of white space. But more importantly, it was just the characters were so familiar and I loved that book. So that was probably the only time in middle school that I really read a book, and I read it over and over because I liked it a lot.
When I got to high school, I did start to read magazine stories, usually sports-related, mostly basketball. And I will tell you, I started to really like those essays that I would read about how a player came out of this tough neighborhood and became a professional basketball player. So I liked those narratives. I just didn't translate it to novels yet.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You don't think of it as reading when you were a kid a lot of the time.
Matt De La Peña:
I thought it was actually not reading or bad to be reading that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's like in your Newbery speech you referenced. That's the cutest story of having it hidden behind War and Peace or whatever.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, it's so true. But I will say when I was in high school, I really did start to write poems, spoken word style poems alone in a room, and it was very, very secretive. But here's the strange thing, I liked doing a draft in one notebook and then I would do another draft in that notebook, and then my final draft of a poem I'd put in my special notebook.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting.
Matt De La Peña:
And so in that final draft notebook, every poem would be really revised and clear and I would write super legibly. So there was something in revision and making sentences that I liked in high school. And I don't even know where that came from. I feel like I was a loner kid, so maybe that was my way of expressing myself. So I'd go play basketball all day all by myself, and then maybe that was my outlet to the physical part, but the emotional or intellectual part that I was playing with.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I mean you said you couldn't really share those emotional parts with your family as much, or certainly your dad, and then everybody's busy because they're working. I mean, it's like you can imagine. That's interesting, you said you're a loner. And basketball, it's one of those very few sports that you can just... That's all you need.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah. Grab a ball, go hit a park.
A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair, he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him.
"Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?"
"They'd listen to my death."
"No final word?"
"Last words are only words."
"You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell."
"Well, I'd say I was not unhappy."
"But you have nothing."
"It may be the last shall be first."
"Do you believe that?"
"No."
"What do you believe?"
"I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu."
"Equally?"
"It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Suttree, the late Cormac McCarthy's semi-autobiographical novel released in 1979, follows the fictional life of Cornelius Suttree, a man who has abandoned his family and a comfortable career to live instead as a poor fisherman on the fringes of society. Early ambitions take him on an academic path, but upon attending college, he comes to reject conventional education, ultimately embracing life as a fisherman. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, the story explores themes of suffering and the pursuit of meaning in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Matt's haunting excerpt captures a pivotal moment near the story's end, where Suttree imagines an existential debate between himself and a spot of light on his ceiling. This encounter invites readers to contemplate the weight of human suffering and its universal impact on all living beings. The concept had a deep impact on Matt.
Matt De La Peña:
When I was young, I used to think I had it harder than other people because we struggled financially and because there was just a lot of adversity and I understood how people viewed my neighborhood. But then I became an author and I met a lot of people who went to incredibly prestigious schools, Ivy League schools. And I became friends with them and I just realized that my suffering was not greater than theirs, it was just different than theirs.
And I think that's how I approach my writing too now that I'm more mature, is that we all carry a weight. And it could be the weight of expectations if you grow up in a family that's highly educated or it could be the weight of lack of opportunity if you grow up in a struggling neighborhood. It's not greater or lesser, it's not easier or harder. It's just we all have to figure out how to live our lives. We're all doing this. I love this pari passu, that we all suffer equally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's interesting hearing you read that passage and seeing what you're connecting with in it. And I know you've talked a lot about your admiration for Kate DiCamillo's work, and in fact, we actually read a bit of your open letter to her on my episode with her, but I'm noticing a really interesting similarity between Cormac McCarthy and Kate DiCamillo with these types of themes.
Matt De La Peña:
You know what? I think you are so right. I think there is a connection between their work. I think I'm responding to the same thing. Cormac just has more of a thesaurus kind of diction and adult characters, but I don't think Kate DiCamillo shies away from the truth any more than Cormac does. And I think that's what I respond to in her work. There is a depth, but yet there's fun right next to it. And I love that she can balance the two. I think that's the true gift of writing something great. And when I read Louisiana's Way Home for instance, there's some sadness. There's some real depth of sadness and melancholy, but yet there's also so much fun and humor next to it. And if you can do both, you can write a great novel.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Or great anything, but it's hard. But it's right, it's hard to write something, especially for kids, that makes them want to read, makes them want to turn the page and keep going, but at the same time, it's imparting these thoughts about humanity.
Matt De La Peña:
Exactly. It's hard to do that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, but you're like, "I know."
Matt De La Peña:
But I mean, that's why I think she's... Kate DiCamillo is to me the voice of a generation in children's literature. And I think we might think on the surface it's her big plots with Tale of Despereaux, but I actually think it's the emotion that's holding it all together.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt's own novels and picture books are also built around themes of inner struggle, empathy and the power of emotions. I was curious to hear about how he learned to access and explore his sensitive side despite his upbringing with this emphasis on stoicism.
Matt De La Peña:
Well, I think I was a faker when I was young. I was a pretender. I pretended to be able to do what the men in my family did, but I was kind of a pretender. Deep down, I had a lot of emotion. And I think actually the reason that maybe my greatest weakness as an athlete was that I thought too deeply about things. I sometimes talk about how the best athlete can live purely in the moment, and if they've missed three shots in a row and they're going up for the fourth shot, they're literally just shooting the ball.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Matt De La Peña:
But my weakness as an athlete is if I missed three shots in a row, especially in college, and I was going up for that fourth shot, my brain would do a lot of things like, "Okay, if I miss this, I'll probably be on the bench and I wonder if I wouldn't get in again until the second half." So all these thoughts are going through my head and I wasn't existing in the moment. That's why maybe writing is a better space because it's actually an advantage to think around the moment that you're writing that scene.
And also, I think speaking of this emotion or this depth or melancholy, I think kids are growing up in an interesting time where everything they're hearing from the adults in their life is, "Did you have fun? Are you enjoying school? Tell me your favorite thing about today." And it's all so positive and they're led to believe that if we don't feel happy we're doing something wrong. And I think what I respond to is a deeper truth, which is happiness is incredible and we should strive for it, but we should also acknowledge that half of our life is challenging or melancholy.
I actually think the natural resting place for human emotion is melancholy. That's I think where we mostly sit. And by the way, I could be wrong. But if that's true, think about how challenging it is to be told to be happy all the time. So maybe you can only be happy 30% of the time. That means 70% of the time you might think something's wrong. And you know, look at social media and it perpetuates this idea because everybody posts happy moments, the vacation or the best pose that you did out of 20 shots. And so you're thinking, "Oh, everybody else is living in that happiness space and I'm over here." And that's unhealthy to be told something that's not true.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. There's this podcast called The Happiness Lab. Have you ever listened to it?
Matt De La Peña:
I've heard of it, yeah, I've listened to it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So there's one episode that I'm thinking of where she talks a lot about happiness. Actual happiness is not a state. It's a moment.
Matt De La Peña:
Totally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And you can get there, but the problem is everybody thinks they're going to be there for so long. And really what you might want to try and achieve is contentment, which is a very different thing where maybe you are melancholy or maybe you are ruminating on something, and that's okay because you can also get to this every once in a while but not-
Matt De La Peña:
And then you value those times that you get to that happy spot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In Matt's books, those moments of self-aware contentment are often linked to empathy and connection between characters, their family and community. It's true in Last Stop on Market Street and particularly in his novel Mexican WhiteBoy, which takes heavy inspiration from his real life experiences.
Matt De La Peña:
The interesting thing, and I remember that specific scene in We Were Here where my main character's looking at another kid who looks like him and is just on the other side of the border. And he's selling clay suns and he's just out there and struggling and has nothing. And my character's recognizing that he has so much more just because he was arbitrarily born on this side. But if you go further with that, you don't get to choose what family you're born into or what neighborhood you grow up in. And it really, really changes the way you see the world. So I think every novel is really taking these things that you're born with, these struggles or benefits, privileges. And the novel is answering like, "Well, what are you going to do with it? Where do we go from here?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As a prominent voice within the Latinx author community for almost two decades, Matt De La Peña has consistently challenged conventional notions of Mexican-American identity and shed light on relatable struggles faced by many children. Given his extensive experience and personal journey, I was eager to hear his insights on the industry's evolution and the representation of Latinx voices.
Matt De La Peña:
So when I was in graduate school, I was writing these short stories that were about being mixed race and by the border. A lot of them ended up in Mexican WhiteBoy, but I honestly didn't think anybody would really publish these. I was thinking, or I was almost practicing to write the novel that I would ultimately write, but I would have to write a certain kind of story so it could get published. But then I discovered some people who were doing this and getting published. I remember I read Drown by Junot Díaz, which was a short story collection, and it was the first time I was like, "Oh my God, they publish this stuff?" And it just makes you think, "Well, maybe there is a place for this story." That's such an important feeling to have.
And then I wrote my first book, and I will be honest, I think the temperature at that point was after I signed and I had a book contract, it was almost... And it wasn't specific to my publisher, but just in general, an editor might think, "Oh, I have my Mexican author." In other words, I've checked that box and I'm trying to build an interesting list that isn't all the same kind of book, but it was more like, I have this story now and I have my African American author. So it would be like you check a box. But now it truly does seem like there's an openness to having many voices from the same category.
And I'll also tell you this, an experience I had that I'll never forget was going to UNLV and I was going to meet with a bunch of freshmen there who had Mexican WhiteBoy as part of their... I think it was a freshman composition class. I'm talking to all these students and there were a boy and a girl, probably 19 years old, both Mexican, and they were sort of close to me on the stage while I'm taking questions. And I was watching them and I could tell they weren't feeling what I was saying. And afterwards I went up to them and I said, "Hey, how you doing?" And they were really, really polite and nice. But then one of them said, "I have to be honest with you. Mexican WhiteBoy, I grew up mixed too and that's totally not how it was for me."
And as a pretty young author at the time, your first instinct is to bristle and be defensive, just even in your mind, even if you're not going to be defensive outwardly. But then I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is such an important thing to consider because the mixed race story I'm telling isn't the only version." And I was telling them, I was like, "There are so many versions of this story, and if there's not your experience out there, it's almost your job or somebody like you's job to put it out in the world." And I think publishing is open to that now, which is super exciting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I would love to hear about your visits to schools and any experiences that you've had with kids that especially resonated with you.
Matt De La Peña:
I think the most important thing about having an author in your school is that you see that books are written by regular people and not the geniuses of the world. And there are some geniuses who write books of course, but most of us are just regular people. And I'm a regular person and I was never an outstanding student. And if I stand in front of a group and I tell them who I am and where I'm from, they can see that, "Oh my gosh, this guy is totally normal, and even though I feel normal, this could be attainable because now I see that normal people can do this."
I come from this world, I played sports, I went to college because of a sport, and yet I love books. You know what I mean? And I love trying to write stories, and I think that this is the most important place to spend my time. And I love speaking to everyone, but my favorite thing is to go into an auditorium and see a couple kids in high school or middle school with their hood up in the back, leaning back, not really thinking that this is going to be their thing, and then trying to slowly make them lean forward while I'm talking. So that's my favorite thing about visiting schools, because to me, again, it's like, "You're told that you can't do something like this, but I'm proof that you can because I'm the same as you."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that is so true. And as the mom, I'm the of a 13-year-old boy, and I see how it's really important for him to see authors who he really feels get him. And that can mean all different sides of him. For instance, he really connects with Nick Stone for sure. But to see a male author who plays basketball and still expresses his emotions and loves poetry, I mean, that is really impactful.
Matt De La Peña:
Well, I remember when I was in college, I had a professor invite me to a bookstore to see an author. And I had never met an author in my life, but I was starting to become a reader. And so I go to this bookstore and I'm going to be honest with you, I thought, "This is going to be pretty boring, but I have to go because my favorite professor's asking me to go with a couple other students." So I stood in the back so I could escape if I thought it was really boring. And onto the stage walks this woman and she was much older, different race. And she told these incredible stories about her childhood and she read from one of her books. And I remember being so inspired by her and felt so seen in a way because she grew up in a much poorer environment than I did. And I remember thinking, "God, maybe I could do this." And so that's how I know it's important. And by the way, the author was Maya Angelou, so she was a legend.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Get out. Maya Angelou's your first author you saw?
Matt De La Peña:
My first author I ever saw. And I couldn't believe her command-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh gosh.
Matt De La Peña:
Of the room when she just told random stories about childhood. So it doesn't have to be a male author, but it has to be somebody who there's something that you are responding to in your world that connects to the stories they're telling about how they grew up. So that's important. And it could be a female athlete, some authors who played sports in high school or college, but they grew up as a sporty person. That could work too. It it's not a gender thing, it's more of an experiential thing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's just challenging with their perception of who's writing something or who they're being written for, which now there are so many more stories out there for so many kids.
Matt De La Peña:
So true. It's really changing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Now the father of two young children, Matt says he's more inspired than ever to create picture books. He has two upcoming, including a second with illustrator Lauren Long called Home, and he's really excited about his newest venture into something he's never done before.
Matt De La Peña:
But I'm also just finishing up my very first middle grade novel and I'm really, really excited about it. And I've never taken on that voice other than short stories. I've done a couple middle grade-era short stories, but I've never done a novel and I'm so thankful that I gave it a shot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When you're writing for middle grade, what were the tenets of "Okay, I better do this." Or what did you change to make sure you-
Matt De La Peña:
That's a great question. I didn't curse.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No cursing, no sex, no drugs.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah. Yeah. I just pulled back on the relationship. If there was a romantic interest, it would just be a crush, which is so fun, by the way. So I thought about that. I didn't use harsher language. And I decided to not change anything else, including sentence structure, sophistication of language. I kept everything the same. And I'm going to let my editor tell me where I need to shift into middle grade because I feel like having written picture books, I think the biggest mistake you can make is to write down to the picture book form. I think you actually have to write up to it. So I would rather err on the side of being too sophisticated for a middle grade novel than to try to think I have to simplify language. And-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Kids definitely, I think, can see through that pretty quickly too. I definitely see that-
Matt De La Peña:
Totally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
With my daughter and her reading where she's like, "Okay." I'm not going to name it, but sometimes she's like, "This..."
Matt De La Peña:
Let's name the names. Just kidding.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
From Cormac McCarthy to Kate DiCamillo, books that leave you pondering life are Matt's personal favorites. So for his reading challenge, Conversation Starters, he wants our youngest readers to embrace the pondering with his selection of picture books.
Matt De La Peña:
Good books are vehicles to conversation. There are great books that are just fun, just funny. And so I thought about picture books that are vehicles to interesting and possibly complex conversations. The first one I chose was Each Kindness by Jackie Woodson and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. And this was the first picture book I've ever read that ends on regret. And I thought that was so interesting and I've read it many times with my daughter and always we have such interesting conversations about that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Today's Beanstack featured librarian is one of my favorites. Cicely Lewis was School Library Journal's 2020 School Librarian of the Year. Before she was a client, we were frequently in touch about her Read Woke program, and she's just a joy and a one-of-a-kind librarian. Cicely is a high school librarian and she has an insane amount of engagement with her students and her staff. I asked her about how she keeps the joy of reading front and center, especially in an age of extreme testing. She lit up telling me first about the importance of adults reading for pleasure and sharing about it with our kids. Here's Cicely telling us how she facilitates these conversations at her school and also a bit about a unique celebratory program for her students.
Cicely Lewis:
One of the things that I did with the grant money that I received a couple of years ago, I bought these dry erase boards for the teachers and they said, "I'm currently reading..." And they would read whatever Read Woke book they were reading and they could put the picture there, they could tape it there and write the title and they put them on their doors. And that sparked conversations because the kids were like, "Oh, you're reading that book. I'm reading that book." And then there's conversation and it's a bonding thing for the students too.
Putting the books out in front when they walk in the library, I have a display, the books are right there. I have posters around the school. And then I have my library science students' Book Talk Books. So they have to read books as part of their duties in the library and they have to talk about books and kids like when kids talk about books. So I think they feel like, "I can trust this kid because this is a kid. It's not just Ms. Lewis."
And then another thing that we just started this year, my principal came to me prior to the pandemic and he said, "I want every kid to have a book on their birthday." And I was like, "Yes." And then the pandemic hit and we forgot about it, but this year we just went into it with a game plan. We used our school book-mobile. We found out the kids' birthdays, we sent them invitations, we got cupcakes. We parked the book-mobile outside during all the lunches. And we had them come. And they came, they were like, "What are we here for?" And we said, "It's your birthday. It's your birthday month. Get on the book-mobile and get a free book."
Even some of my library kids, like, "Miss, they're not going to want a book for their birthday." But they were wrong. These kids were happy to be acknowledged for their birthday. They were excited, they were coming up, "My birthday's next month, is the book-mobile going to be here next month?" And I said, "Yes it is." And I remember one boy getting off the bus and he said, "These books are brand new." He said, "Do I have to bring it back?" I said, "No, it's a gift for your birthday." And we're talking about some kids who may not even get a birthday gift or they may not even get acknowledged for their birthday. But just knowing that we did that, we celebrated them and then we follow up on social media and we say, "Hey, did you get a book from the book-mobile? Tell us about it." And you could get a prize. So we're following up with them, connecting with them and celebrating them and just getting them excited about reading. And so that was one of the things that really was powerful this year, sparking that joy of reading.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Matt De La Peña. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub and If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson.
If you enjoyed today's show, please show us some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and it really helps, especially on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights.
Also be sure to check out the Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lampor and Lower Street Media and script-edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.
Kids are growing up in an interesting time and they're led to believe that if we don't feel happy, we're doing something wrong. And I think what I respond to is a deeper truth, which is happiness is incredible and we should strive for it, but we should also acknowledge that half of our life is challenging or melancholy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt de la Peña is no stranger to suffering. Growing up in the Mexican-American enclave of San Diego's National City gave him a firsthand perspective on the sorrows and strengths of working class neighborhoods. As an author, his nuanced portrayals of city life and city dwellers are noteworthy for their empathy and emotion. Yet his own upbringing in a macho culture initially meant that he learned to hide that sensitivity.
Matt De La Peña:
I was a faker when I was young. I pretended to be able to do what the men in my family did, but I was a pretender deep down. I had a lot of emotion.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt is a Newbery Award-winning author, known for Last Stop on Market Street, Mexican WhiteBoy, Milo Imagines the World, among many others. In today's episode, he shares his lifelong journey to access his deep emotions and how he guides young readers navigating similar emotional journeys. He'll also talk about the late Cormac McCarthy's influence on his worldview, and we'll find out what very famous writer was totally unknown to teenage Matt when he got dragged to his first author reading and how that reading redirected his life.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
Also, remember to join the reading culture on Instagram at thereadingculturepod and sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter to hear more from our authors, access bonus content and to learn about exclusive giveaways like author-signed books. All right, onto the show.
So you're from California, but you've been in Brooklyn until recently, right?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, I was in Brooklyn for 15 years. I actually moved from California because I'd never lived on the East Coast and I was curious and I wanted to see snow. And I planned on being there for two years and I met my wife and she messed it all up. And so I stayed there for 15.
So both my parents are from National City. My grandparents came from Mexico, landed in National City, which is really close to the Mexican border. That is where my mom and dad met in high school and where they had me when they were still in high school. So they were very young parents.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you said your mom wasn't raised by her biological parents?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, so she had a tough, tough story. I mean, she was raised by her great-grandmother, but her great-grandmother passed away pretty early in her life. So she had nothing. I remember my dad, he always says, "I thought I was poor until I met your mom, and she was very, very poor." So I think class was the equalizer there. That's where they connected. And they also just had a family early and tried to make it work. And my mom would never let it not work because of how she grew up.
I think my mom... We don't know what her exact background is. She claims to be French. I'm not so sure. I think her identity was like, "I'm going to be a great mother." And my dad's identity was "I'm a Mexican man. I feel like America is out to get me." That was really the messaging that he took in and gave to us. And he needed somebody to save him and my mom kind of did that.
And National City was our whole world. Everybody we knew was there, all my cousins and uncles and everybody. But then my dad, surprisingly enough, he was... We call him the hippie Mexican surfer. He would always surf in a part of San Diego called North County. And they were like, "Well, Matt's struggling in school." Because admittedly I was, because the school system there was really, really struggling and it was hard to reach kids like me who were struggling to read. And so they thought, "Well, Al loves to go here and surf." And the school seemed better and it was still relatively inexpensive. There was actually a Mexican-American community in Cardiff because they call it the flower capital of the world back then.
So anyways, they found a place for us to live. And so that's where I went to junior high and high school. And I will be honest, it was the smartest thing they could have ever done because I started to catch up in school and my sister too. It was literally life-changing to move up there.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Can you talk more about why you were having trouble reading or... Was it primarily the school system or what was the cause?
Matt De La Peña:
It might also be I just had working parents and no books in the house. And also education where I was born is honestly not a focal point. It's in that community, especially as a boy, it was all about working and loyalty and that kind of thing. So school wasn't a priority, if that makes sense. And it was more important to live up to the machismo mentality kind of thing. And I was just exposed to a different world when we went to North County, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, I think it was the first time I ever met kids who had parents who had gone to college. And it just plants a seed in your head of like, "Oh, well, what is this college thing? I wonder if I could ever do that too." So you just start to see possibilities that you weren't exposed to in a different kind of neighborhood.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So when you were younger, what were the things that you felt like... If you can remember, what did you think that your parents wanted from you as a boy?
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, I think it was mostly you just get the nonverbal messaging, which is when we're all together, who's the toughest uncle, the most charismatic, tells the best jokes. There's horseshoes in the backyard, tequila, beer. It's just that working class world and you want to live up to that.
And I was the lightest-skinned in my family, so I almost felt like I had to work harder to live up to who our family was. And yet I also had this other complicated factor, which was my grandmother who was our matriarch, my Mexican grandmother favored me in some ways because I was lighter. So it was that complication of guilt mixed with inferiority. And what do you do with that?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow, that's very complicated. Okay, so you're dealing with this and also what you've described as a machismo culture at home. Can you speak to how these factors impacted you throughout middle and high school a bit?
Matt De La Peña:
The one thing that I value so much about masculinity, which, by the way, sometimes I feel like we're looking at a working class masculinity in such a negative way now, but there are so many incredibly positive elements of it. In other words, there are things that I want to have inside me, such as every single morning I saw my dad get up at 04:30 to go to work and he never complained. And I just think that is such an incredible trait that I try to carry into my job. And also just, he was a rock. He was always there. He was a presence. He wasn't always talking, he was very quiet. You could see that there were things that he was probably dealing with and maybe needed to talk them out, but he didn't. He just handled it. And maybe he handled it to give stability to our household, even when we had very little, we were really struggling.
So there's so much that I admire about the machismo culture that I was raised in, but there are a few blind spots that you start to recognize as you get older, and especially as you get much older when you start to have your own kids. But one of them is my dad put an emphasis on work. Even when we were young, high school, you have to have a job, work. And I knew that the sport of basketball was my ticket to college. I knew that that was a way I could go to school for free because I was pretty good. But he thought it was more important that I worked. So he didn't see that me investing time in what he considered to be a game was actually a step to something greater where I could work.
And then of course, this inability to access your emotions, that was just really our reality. You would never see our dad have emotion. Doesn't matter if he got fired from a job, he just sat there like nothing happened. And so that's probably not healthy for him and not healthy for anyone. And so you start to recognize those things and say, "Well, there are parts I want to take and there are parts I want to leave behind." And in many ways my dad's motto for us, and particularly me as the oldest boy... And this is something I'm writing about in my new book. But his basic message was, "You're nobody. You're nothing. You have no meaning in this world."
And he thought that that was important to know because once you knew that, you could do anything, if that makes sense. It sounds complicated and it sounds almost mean, but there's some power in what he's saying because there's a freedom in it. It's like, "Okay, I come from a poor neighborhood." We don't have resources, we don't have education in our background. We're going to acknowledge that. We're not going to pretend anything. We're going to just say, "Here's who we are in this country." But after you know that and you're not pretending anymore, then maybe you can try to do anything because you're not trying to hold up this image that isn't true. You're just saying, "Here I am, and now I go from here."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As if you have nothing to lose.
Matt De La Peña:
Exactly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's interesting. That's a harsh way to say it though.
Matt De La Peña:
Very harsh way to say it. I wouldn't say that to my son.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So growing up in this kind of environment, did you ever feel like writing was something that you would end up doing or even that you were excited about doing? And also were there any books that you read that made you think it might be something that you'd be interested in?
Matt De La Peña:
So in middle schools, that's when I was first exposed to the The House on Mango Street, and that was probably the only book that I liked. Most of the other books, I just couldn't get into them. I felt very distant from the stories and it was also work. I mean, this is why so many kids are reluctant readers because it's work to go through those sentences and build the visual story in your head. That's a lot of work. If you don't have the reps, if it's new to you and everybody else is off reading and you're still slower, you just lose confidence. And I think I didn't have any confidence.
But when I was exposed to The House of Mango Street, first of all, it was a thin book. It was vignettes. There was a lot of white space. But more importantly, it was just the characters were so familiar and I loved that book. So that was probably the only time in middle school that I really read a book, and I read it over and over because I liked it a lot.
When I got to high school, I did start to read magazine stories, usually sports-related, mostly basketball. And I will tell you, I started to really like those essays that I would read about how a player came out of this tough neighborhood and became a professional basketball player. So I liked those narratives. I just didn't translate it to novels yet.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You don't think of it as reading when you were a kid a lot of the time.
Matt De La Peña:
I thought it was actually not reading or bad to be reading that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's like in your Newbery speech you referenced. That's the cutest story of having it hidden behind War and Peace or whatever.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah, it's so true. But I will say when I was in high school, I really did start to write poems, spoken word style poems alone in a room, and it was very, very secretive. But here's the strange thing, I liked doing a draft in one notebook and then I would do another draft in that notebook, and then my final draft of a poem I'd put in my special notebook.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting.
Matt De La Peña:
And so in that final draft notebook, every poem would be really revised and clear and I would write super legibly. So there was something in revision and making sentences that I liked in high school. And I don't even know where that came from. I feel like I was a loner kid, so maybe that was my way of expressing myself. So I'd go play basketball all day all by myself, and then maybe that was my outlet to the physical part, but the emotional or intellectual part that I was playing with.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I mean you said you couldn't really share those emotional parts with your family as much, or certainly your dad, and then everybody's busy because they're working. I mean, it's like you can imagine. That's interesting, you said you're a loner. And basketball, it's one of those very few sports that you can just... That's all you need.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah. Grab a ball, go hit a park.
A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair, he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him.
"Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?"
"They'd listen to my death."
"No final word?"
"Last words are only words."
"You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell."
"Well, I'd say I was not unhappy."
"But you have nothing."
"It may be the last shall be first."
"Do you believe that?"
"No."
"What do you believe?"
"I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu."
"Equally?"
"It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Suttree, the late Cormac McCarthy's semi-autobiographical novel released in 1979, follows the fictional life of Cornelius Suttree, a man who has abandoned his family and a comfortable career to live instead as a poor fisherman on the fringes of society. Early ambitions take him on an academic path, but upon attending college, he comes to reject conventional education, ultimately embracing life as a fisherman. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, the story explores themes of suffering and the pursuit of meaning in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Matt's haunting excerpt captures a pivotal moment near the story's end, where Suttree imagines an existential debate between himself and a spot of light on his ceiling. This encounter invites readers to contemplate the weight of human suffering and its universal impact on all living beings. The concept had a deep impact on Matt.
Matt De La Peña:
When I was young, I used to think I had it harder than other people because we struggled financially and because there was just a lot of adversity and I understood how people viewed my neighborhood. But then I became an author and I met a lot of people who went to incredibly prestigious schools, Ivy League schools. And I became friends with them and I just realized that my suffering was not greater than theirs, it was just different than theirs.
And I think that's how I approach my writing too now that I'm more mature, is that we all carry a weight. And it could be the weight of expectations if you grow up in a family that's highly educated or it could be the weight of lack of opportunity if you grow up in a struggling neighborhood. It's not greater or lesser, it's not easier or harder. It's just we all have to figure out how to live our lives. We're all doing this. I love this pari passu, that we all suffer equally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's interesting hearing you read that passage and seeing what you're connecting with in it. And I know you've talked a lot about your admiration for Kate DiCamillo's work, and in fact, we actually read a bit of your open letter to her on my episode with her, but I'm noticing a really interesting similarity between Cormac McCarthy and Kate DiCamillo with these types of themes.
Matt De La Peña:
You know what? I think you are so right. I think there is a connection between their work. I think I'm responding to the same thing. Cormac just has more of a thesaurus kind of diction and adult characters, but I don't think Kate DiCamillo shies away from the truth any more than Cormac does. And I think that's what I respond to in her work. There is a depth, but yet there's fun right next to it. And I love that she can balance the two. I think that's the true gift of writing something great. And when I read Louisiana's Way Home for instance, there's some sadness. There's some real depth of sadness and melancholy, but yet there's also so much fun and humor next to it. And if you can do both, you can write a great novel.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Or great anything, but it's hard. But it's right, it's hard to write something, especially for kids, that makes them want to read, makes them want to turn the page and keep going, but at the same time, it's imparting these thoughts about humanity.
Matt De La Peña:
Exactly. It's hard to do that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, but you're like, "I know."
Matt De La Peña:
But I mean, that's why I think she's... Kate DiCamillo is to me the voice of a generation in children's literature. And I think we might think on the surface it's her big plots with Tale of Despereaux, but I actually think it's the emotion that's holding it all together.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Matt's own novels and picture books are also built around themes of inner struggle, empathy and the power of emotions. I was curious to hear about how he learned to access and explore his sensitive side despite his upbringing with this emphasis on stoicism.
Matt De La Peña:
Well, I think I was a faker when I was young. I was a pretender. I pretended to be able to do what the men in my family did, but I was kind of a pretender. Deep down, I had a lot of emotion. And I think actually the reason that maybe my greatest weakness as an athlete was that I thought too deeply about things. I sometimes talk about how the best athlete can live purely in the moment, and if they've missed three shots in a row and they're going up for the fourth shot, they're literally just shooting the ball.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Matt De La Peña:
But my weakness as an athlete is if I missed three shots in a row, especially in college, and I was going up for that fourth shot, my brain would do a lot of things like, "Okay, if I miss this, I'll probably be on the bench and I wonder if I wouldn't get in again until the second half." So all these thoughts are going through my head and I wasn't existing in the moment. That's why maybe writing is a better space because it's actually an advantage to think around the moment that you're writing that scene.
And also, I think speaking of this emotion or this depth or melancholy, I think kids are growing up in an interesting time where everything they're hearing from the adults in their life is, "Did you have fun? Are you enjoying school? Tell me your favorite thing about today." And it's all so positive and they're led to believe that if we don't feel happy we're doing something wrong. And I think what I respond to is a deeper truth, which is happiness is incredible and we should strive for it, but we should also acknowledge that half of our life is challenging or melancholy.
I actually think the natural resting place for human emotion is melancholy. That's I think where we mostly sit. And by the way, I could be wrong. But if that's true, think about how challenging it is to be told to be happy all the time. So maybe you can only be happy 30% of the time. That means 70% of the time you might think something's wrong. And you know, look at social media and it perpetuates this idea because everybody posts happy moments, the vacation or the best pose that you did out of 20 shots. And so you're thinking, "Oh, everybody else is living in that happiness space and I'm over here." And that's unhealthy to be told something that's not true.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. There's this podcast called The Happiness Lab. Have you ever listened to it?
Matt De La Peña:
I've heard of it, yeah, I've listened to it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So there's one episode that I'm thinking of where she talks a lot about happiness. Actual happiness is not a state. It's a moment.
Matt De La Peña:
Totally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And you can get there, but the problem is everybody thinks they're going to be there for so long. And really what you might want to try and achieve is contentment, which is a very different thing where maybe you are melancholy or maybe you are ruminating on something, and that's okay because you can also get to this every once in a while but not-
Matt De La Peña:
And then you value those times that you get to that happy spot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In Matt's books, those moments of self-aware contentment are often linked to empathy and connection between characters, their family and community. It's true in Last Stop on Market Street and particularly in his novel Mexican WhiteBoy, which takes heavy inspiration from his real life experiences.
Matt De La Peña:
The interesting thing, and I remember that specific scene in We Were Here where my main character's looking at another kid who looks like him and is just on the other side of the border. And he's selling clay suns and he's just out there and struggling and has nothing. And my character's recognizing that he has so much more just because he was arbitrarily born on this side. But if you go further with that, you don't get to choose what family you're born into or what neighborhood you grow up in. And it really, really changes the way you see the world. So I think every novel is really taking these things that you're born with, these struggles or benefits, privileges. And the novel is answering like, "Well, what are you going to do with it? Where do we go from here?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As a prominent voice within the Latinx author community for almost two decades, Matt De La Peña has consistently challenged conventional notions of Mexican-American identity and shed light on relatable struggles faced by many children. Given his extensive experience and personal journey, I was eager to hear his insights on the industry's evolution and the representation of Latinx voices.
Matt De La Peña:
So when I was in graduate school, I was writing these short stories that were about being mixed race and by the border. A lot of them ended up in Mexican WhiteBoy, but I honestly didn't think anybody would really publish these. I was thinking, or I was almost practicing to write the novel that I would ultimately write, but I would have to write a certain kind of story so it could get published. But then I discovered some people who were doing this and getting published. I remember I read Drown by Junot Díaz, which was a short story collection, and it was the first time I was like, "Oh my God, they publish this stuff?" And it just makes you think, "Well, maybe there is a place for this story." That's such an important feeling to have.
And then I wrote my first book, and I will be honest, I think the temperature at that point was after I signed and I had a book contract, it was almost... And it wasn't specific to my publisher, but just in general, an editor might think, "Oh, I have my Mexican author." In other words, I've checked that box and I'm trying to build an interesting list that isn't all the same kind of book, but it was more like, I have this story now and I have my African American author. So it would be like you check a box. But now it truly does seem like there's an openness to having many voices from the same category.
And I'll also tell you this, an experience I had that I'll never forget was going to UNLV and I was going to meet with a bunch of freshmen there who had Mexican WhiteBoy as part of their... I think it was a freshman composition class. I'm talking to all these students and there were a boy and a girl, probably 19 years old, both Mexican, and they were sort of close to me on the stage while I'm taking questions. And I was watching them and I could tell they weren't feeling what I was saying. And afterwards I went up to them and I said, "Hey, how you doing?" And they were really, really polite and nice. But then one of them said, "I have to be honest with you. Mexican WhiteBoy, I grew up mixed too and that's totally not how it was for me."
And as a pretty young author at the time, your first instinct is to bristle and be defensive, just even in your mind, even if you're not going to be defensive outwardly. But then I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is such an important thing to consider because the mixed race story I'm telling isn't the only version." And I was telling them, I was like, "There are so many versions of this story, and if there's not your experience out there, it's almost your job or somebody like you's job to put it out in the world." And I think publishing is open to that now, which is super exciting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I would love to hear about your visits to schools and any experiences that you've had with kids that especially resonated with you.
Matt De La Peña:
I think the most important thing about having an author in your school is that you see that books are written by regular people and not the geniuses of the world. And there are some geniuses who write books of course, but most of us are just regular people. And I'm a regular person and I was never an outstanding student. And if I stand in front of a group and I tell them who I am and where I'm from, they can see that, "Oh my gosh, this guy is totally normal, and even though I feel normal, this could be attainable because now I see that normal people can do this."
I come from this world, I played sports, I went to college because of a sport, and yet I love books. You know what I mean? And I love trying to write stories, and I think that this is the most important place to spend my time. And I love speaking to everyone, but my favorite thing is to go into an auditorium and see a couple kids in high school or middle school with their hood up in the back, leaning back, not really thinking that this is going to be their thing, and then trying to slowly make them lean forward while I'm talking. So that's my favorite thing about visiting schools, because to me, again, it's like, "You're told that you can't do something like this, but I'm proof that you can because I'm the same as you."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that is so true. And as the mom, I'm the of a 13-year-old boy, and I see how it's really important for him to see authors who he really feels get him. And that can mean all different sides of him. For instance, he really connects with Nick Stone for sure. But to see a male author who plays basketball and still expresses his emotions and loves poetry, I mean, that is really impactful.
Matt De La Peña:
Well, I remember when I was in college, I had a professor invite me to a bookstore to see an author. And I had never met an author in my life, but I was starting to become a reader. And so I go to this bookstore and I'm going to be honest with you, I thought, "This is going to be pretty boring, but I have to go because my favorite professor's asking me to go with a couple other students." So I stood in the back so I could escape if I thought it was really boring. And onto the stage walks this woman and she was much older, different race. And she told these incredible stories about her childhood and she read from one of her books. And I remember being so inspired by her and felt so seen in a way because she grew up in a much poorer environment than I did. And I remember thinking, "God, maybe I could do this." And so that's how I know it's important. And by the way, the author was Maya Angelou, so she was a legend.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Get out. Maya Angelou's your first author you saw?
Matt De La Peña:
My first author I ever saw. And I couldn't believe her command-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh gosh.
Matt De La Peña:
Of the room when she just told random stories about childhood. So it doesn't have to be a male author, but it has to be somebody who there's something that you are responding to in your world that connects to the stories they're telling about how they grew up. So that's important. And it could be a female athlete, some authors who played sports in high school or college, but they grew up as a sporty person. That could work too. It it's not a gender thing, it's more of an experiential thing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's just challenging with their perception of who's writing something or who they're being written for, which now there are so many more stories out there for so many kids.
Matt De La Peña:
So true. It's really changing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Now the father of two young children, Matt says he's more inspired than ever to create picture books. He has two upcoming, including a second with illustrator Lauren Long called Home, and he's really excited about his newest venture into something he's never done before.
Matt De La Peña:
But I'm also just finishing up my very first middle grade novel and I'm really, really excited about it. And I've never taken on that voice other than short stories. I've done a couple middle grade-era short stories, but I've never done a novel and I'm so thankful that I gave it a shot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When you're writing for middle grade, what were the tenets of "Okay, I better do this." Or what did you change to make sure you-
Matt De La Peña:
That's a great question. I didn't curse.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No cursing, no sex, no drugs.
Matt De La Peña:
Yeah. Yeah. I just pulled back on the relationship. If there was a romantic interest, it would just be a crush, which is so fun, by the way. So I thought about that. I didn't use harsher language. And I decided to not change anything else, including sentence structure, sophistication of language. I kept everything the same. And I'm going to let my editor tell me where I need to shift into middle grade because I feel like having written picture books, I think the biggest mistake you can make is to write down to the picture book form. I think you actually have to write up to it. So I would rather err on the side of being too sophisticated for a middle grade novel than to try to think I have to simplify language. And-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Kids definitely, I think, can see through that pretty quickly too. I definitely see that-
Matt De La Peña:
Totally.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
With my daughter and her reading where she's like, "Okay." I'm not going to name it, but sometimes she's like, "This..."
Matt De La Peña:
Let's name the names. Just kidding.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
From Cormac McCarthy to Kate DiCamillo, books that leave you pondering life are Matt's personal favorites. So for his reading challenge, Conversation Starters, he wants our youngest readers to embrace the pondering with his selection of picture books.
Matt De La Peña:
Good books are vehicles to conversation. There are great books that are just fun, just funny. And so I thought about picture books that are vehicles to interesting and possibly complex conversations. The first one I chose was Each Kindness by Jackie Woodson and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. And this was the first picture book I've ever read that ends on regret. And I thought that was so interesting and I've read it many times with my daughter and always we have such interesting conversations about that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Today's Beanstack featured librarian is one of my favorites. Cicely Lewis was School Library Journal's 2020 School Librarian of the Year. Before she was a client, we were frequently in touch about her Read Woke program, and she's just a joy and a one-of-a-kind librarian. Cicely is a high school librarian and she has an insane amount of engagement with her students and her staff. I asked her about how she keeps the joy of reading front and center, especially in an age of extreme testing. She lit up telling me first about the importance of adults reading for pleasure and sharing about it with our kids. Here's Cicely telling us how she facilitates these conversations at her school and also a bit about a unique celebratory program for her students.
Cicely Lewis:
One of the things that I did with the grant money that I received a couple of years ago, I bought these dry erase boards for the teachers and they said, "I'm currently reading..." And they would read whatever Read Woke book they were reading and they could put the picture there, they could tape it there and write the title and they put them on their doors. And that sparked conversations because the kids were like, "Oh, you're reading that book. I'm reading that book." And then there's conversation and it's a bonding thing for the students too.
Putting the books out in front when they walk in the library, I have a display, the books are right there. I have posters around the school. And then I have my library science students' Book Talk Books. So they have to read books as part of their duties in the library and they have to talk about books and kids like when kids talk about books. So I think they feel like, "I can trust this kid because this is a kid. It's not just Ms. Lewis."
And then another thing that we just started this year, my principal came to me prior to the pandemic and he said, "I want every kid to have a book on their birthday." And I was like, "Yes." And then the pandemic hit and we forgot about it, but this year we just went into it with a game plan. We used our school book-mobile. We found out the kids' birthdays, we sent them invitations, we got cupcakes. We parked the book-mobile outside during all the lunches. And we had them come. And they came, they were like, "What are we here for?" And we said, "It's your birthday. It's your birthday month. Get on the book-mobile and get a free book."
Even some of my library kids, like, "Miss, they're not going to want a book for their birthday." But they were wrong. These kids were happy to be acknowledged for their birthday. They were excited, they were coming up, "My birthday's next month, is the book-mobile going to be here next month?" And I said, "Yes it is." And I remember one boy getting off the bus and he said, "These books are brand new." He said, "Do I have to bring it back?" I said, "No, it's a gift for your birthday." And we're talking about some kids who may not even get a birthday gift or they may not even get acknowledged for their birthday. But just knowing that we did that, we celebrated them and then we follow up on social media and we say, "Hey, did you get a book from the book-mobile? Tell us about it." And you could get a prize. So we're following up with them, connecting with them and celebrating them and just getting them excited about reading. And so that was one of the things that really was powerful this year, sparking that joy of reading.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Matt De La Peña. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub and If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson.
If you enjoyed today's show, please show us some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and it really helps, especially on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights.
Also be sure to check out the Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lampor and Lower Street Media and script-edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.