Zoraida Córdova

Zoraida Córdova:
Why am I fighting this? Why am I fighting the thing that I want to write? For who? For a teacher that I haven't seen in five years or 10 years? For a critic who I don't know?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Zoraida Córdova doesn't just write about love and fantasy and sci-fi, she also likes to write her own rules. Zoraida's a storyteller who defies expectations, embraces her creative freedom, and remembers to have fun.

Zoraida Córdova:
Just let me write my zombie short story, and if you want to read into it, an allegory about society, you can do that. But I'm just writing a zombie short story with a romance in it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Zoraida is an award-winning author known for her genre-blending magic stories, like Labyrinth Lost the first in her Brooklyn Brujas series, which won an International Latino Book Award. Her range is wide, from writing adult literary fiction and YA fiction to editing anthologies about vampires, mermaids, and fairies, and bringing a bit of romance to the Star Wars universe. In this episode, Zoraida reflects on rejecting expectations placed on her, talks about the importance of writing for yourself, and details her tween years as a green-haired Wiccan, screamo punk. Yeah, that was a thing.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. This show is made possible by Beanstack, a leading solution for motivating kids to read more. Learn more at beanstack.com, and make sure to check us out on Instagram @thereadingculturepod, and subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.

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All right, Zoraida, let's start with this because I've been thinking a lot about it recently. When you sit down to write, who are the people that you are channeling?

Zoraida Córdova:
One of my really good writing friends, Leanna Renee Hieber, who writes very atmospheric gaslamp fantasy, she gave me a talisman a long time ago and she gave me a Gabriel García Márquez medallion with his face on it. And I carry it with me wherever I go, not because, I try not to put a writer on a pedestal. I think that there are a lot of problematic things in his work, but it's more of a mindset of a time period as opposed to, and a history of the colonization of America in A Hundred Years of Solitude. But A Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that is very special to me because I read it every year. So he's sort of like one of my godfathers.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Mm, yeah, and what about, speaking of people you bring with you, I also want to talk about your family. So I think your family moved from Ecuador, right, to the US when you were six and you set up in Queens, Hollis, Queens. So what was that like?

Zoraida Córdova:
The building that we lived in, it was, a lot of our family lived there, so my aunts and uncles and my grandmother's brothers also lived with us in the same building. So we all lived in the second floor of this building in different apartments. And for a period of time, we all lived in the same apartment until we were able, my mom, and my brother, and I ended up in a studio, and then my dad remained in Ecuador because he couldn't come.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you had a community raising you. What was your reading life like, both at home and at school, growing up?

Zoraida Córdova:
At home, my book and reading life was more in the oral tradition. So my grandmother would tell stories and I had a lot of books in Spanish that we had brought with us from Ecuador, which were fairy tales from around the world, and poems, and oh my god, tongue twisters. I was like, what's the word in English? Tongue twisters and tricksy things.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What is tongue twister in Spanish, by the way?

Zoraida Córdova:
[Spanish 00:05:11].

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.

Zoraida Córdova:
And so when I got to elementary school in New York, a lot of teachers would give me The House on Mango Street, and I know that so many people like that book, means so much to so many people and it's a beautiful book. I finally read it when I had a Latin American literature class, and so I finally read it and I'm like, "This is a beautiful book," but every teacher I ever had, very well-meaning-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:05:40] here.

Zoraida Córdova:
... handed me that book because it was like, here, it's about a-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
See yourself.

Zoraida Córdova:
See yourself, and that's the thing-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"Yourself" in quotes, yeah. Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
Mm-hmm, and that's the thing I was like, "Well, I'm not Mexican. I didn't grow up this way." We grew up very working class poor, but my mom worked, single mom. I was raised by mostly my aunts and uncles. It almost like it should have been the book where I saw myself, but it wasn't because the thing that was missing from that was the magic. And I, from a very young age, was a kid who just really wanted a magical story, and I couldn't explain what it was until I found books about witches, and vampires, and other realms. But if I had a dime for every time a teacher was like, "Here, this book is for you," I'd have a few dollars.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why fantasy though? What was it about those alternate, magical worlds that attracted you so much as a little kid?

Zoraida Córdova:
It would be very easy to be like, "Oh, I just wanted an escape or something like that," but I think that it's more of boredom of the mundane life. But also because growing up on my grandmother's ghost stories and fairy tales, that was very early on, stories of ghosts. I always felt immediate attraction to the supernatural, and so I think that that's an extension of that. That would be my primary guess.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Was your family religious though?

Zoraida Córdova:
My family's Catholic, like most Latin American families, but we went to church sometimes and I had a first communion. But then when I turned 10, I wrote in my diary, "Dear diary, I'm now a Wiccan," and I don't actually remember where I found the term, Wiccan.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When you were 10, that's amazing.

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, I just knew that Catholicism for me. I do enjoy a lot of the trappings of Catholicism, like-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
... saints and the Virgin Mary, all 700 iterations of her in every Latin American country. But the rest of it was just never for me, and I knew that, I was very confident in that at a very early age and my mom was always like, "Oh, you'll grow out of it." And I am now 37 and I have not grown out.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's fascinating [inaudible 00:08:08] think, 10 years old, you had a real streak, like you knew-

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, I knew who I... Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, like a self-assuredness or something, it seems like, like you knew yourself early. I think a lot of kids, it seems like, go through... I have two kids who are at that phase now, that middle school, little bit later, all of a sudden I have one kid who I feel like is finding themself, and another who I think has always known who they are. But yeah, it is very interesting thing when there's just, when a person really knows who they are from a young age.

Zoraida Córdova:
For sure.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So when you were in school, what was school life like? What was your vibe, your aesthetic?

Zoraida Córdova:
I was super, super shy, which I had to stop being shy when I entered the workforce of Manhattan nightlife. You either stand up for yourself, or you get run over real fast. So for a long time I was very shy, I was extremely introverted. I think I preferred watching, even with my friends, I felt like I would write down conversations and things like that, like an anthropologist observing the habits of 16-year-olds in Hollis, Queens. So I think that that was really just me. I was always the teacher's pet. I loved talking to my teachers. I was an unofficial English department mascot. The head of the English department, Mr. Shea, who recently passed away, I always think about him because he bought all these art supplies for me to paint literary scenes on the wall.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What?

Zoraida Córdova:
So I did Romeo and Juliet, and the Mad Hatter tea scene, and The Scarlet Letter, and then Edgar Allan Poe mural. I don't even know if they're still there because I haven't been to my high school in many years. I was that kid. I was the odd one of my friends that liked, at the time, is screamo rock music.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
And I think I've always felt out of place, like I personally went through a different door and walked into Hollis, as opposed to liking the same things that some of my friends liked. And then I found my group of people, the other Black and brown kids who were also into screamo, and dyeing their hair green, and wearing 17 neon jelly bracelets. I think my generation is now having children and their classic music is not Aerosmith and Stevie Nicks, it is blink-182 and Green Day.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Oh my god, a little bit frightening, and what about what you were reading? Who were you reading a lot of back in your screamo days?

Zoraida Córdova:
I didn't start reading for joy until I was 13, and those people were Holly Black, Libba Bray and Francesca Lia Block. And those were the three authors, and I would just go into that fantasy section in the juvenile room, right? It wasn't called YA back then, and I would take out any of those books. And so those really were the books that shaped the way that I saw writing as in, oh, this is not the books that they give me in school. That means that I can write anything. I can write whatever I like about the world, and these books were fairies, vampires, mermaids, and I'm like, "I don't have to write this John Steinbeck." I've read John Steinbeck in elementary school, [inaudible 00:12:14]-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In elementary school.

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
[inaudible 00:12:16].

Zoraida Córdova:
Well, for extra credit, The Red Pony, which is basically a short story. And I remember being so sad that that fricking horse dies at the end, and it-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
[inaudible 00:12:26]. A lot of depressing themes.

Zoraida Córdova:
And I'm like, "Oh, John Steinbeck is depressed because it's the depression."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. Makes sense.

Zoraida Córdova:
So anyway, so I was like, "Oh, I don't have to write this. These other books are also possible." And so knowing the possibility, these authors just opened up a new door for me. And so when I write, I'm like, "What would Holly Black do to her characters? What would my favorite authors do to their protagonists and their worlds?" And if books are in conversation with each other, I think I'm in conversation with the books that made me a writer.

The vampire myths are so confused that it is easy to see that they were created by mortals. Some myths are true. My reflection is faint and older ones in my line have no reflection at all. As for the other myths, there is little truth and many lies. I do dislike the smell of garlic, but if your sense of smell was 20 times stronger than that of an average bloodhound, would you not dislike it as well? Holy water and crosses do not bother me, indeed. I have been to Christian services since I died, though I no longer look for solace in religion. I wear a silver ring set with a garnet stone and the silver does not burn me. If someone hammered a stake through my heart, I suppose I would die, but I do not play with humans, stakes or mallets.

Since I am speaking about my kind, I might as well say something about myself. I was born to the name Rachel Weatere in the year 1684, more than 300 years ago. The one who changed me, named me Risika, and Risika I became, though I never asked what it meant. I continued to call myself Risika, even though I was transformed into what I am against my will. My mind wanders back to the road, to my past, looking for a time when Rachel was still alive and Risika was not yet born.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That was an excerpt from In The Forest of the Night by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. So let's see, we've got a character detailing all the ways in which she does not conform to people's stereotypical expectations, who also happens to be a cool, aloof outsider, accustomed to observing from a distance, almost like an anthropologist. I figured I didn't need much more explanation for why this passage was so important to young Zoraida, but subverting my expectations, adult Zoraida explained that it wasn't actually Risika, the vampire, that blew her mind as a teen reader. It was about the author blurb on the back page.

Zoraida Córdova:
I had this book as an [inaudible 00:15:14] project, and when I had to write a, just to write a summary about a book that you check out from the library, and I picked In The Forest of the Night by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. And when I looked at her biography, it says, "Amelia Atwater-Rhodes is 14 years old and lives in Concord, Massachusetts. She wrote The Forest In the Night when she was 13. In The Forest of the Night is her first novel." That's her entire bio. And excuse me, Amelia is now they, them. And so when we talk about we're windows, and mirrors, and whatever, and that theory, there's nothing in this book that is Latin, or immigrant, or anything, but at that time, I'm seeing a 14-year-old kid publish a book with a real publisher. And I was like, "Whoa." My entire way of seeing things changed because I didn't know that was a job option.

When you're a kid, it's like, do you want to be a fireman? Do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to be a doctor? And as an immigrant, do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. [inaudible 00:16:25].

Zoraida Córdova:
Do you want to be something stable? Do you want to be an accountant? When you come from a place of turmoil, right, socio-economic turmoil, you come to this country seeking stability even though you don't really know that this place is unstable too.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, right.

Zoraida Córdova:
And so it's like the promise of the American dream, it's different for everybody.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And for you, because you have a lifelong love of mermaids, but was this also your gateway into vampires and another side of fantasy and other realms?

Zoraida Córdova:
Oh, for sure.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did that spark something else for you too?

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, and then I went and looked for other vampire books, right? So I would take the bus to the branch of the Queens Public Library, and just take out books, and load up my backpack if it was about fairies or anything supernatural. And I didn't read the classics. I didn't read Dracula until I took a gothic literature class in college, and then I was like, "Oh, okay, this is it?"

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This is it.

Zoraida Córdova:
It's gay panic-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Amazing.

Zoraida Córdova:
... dressed up as vampirism. Great. Cool.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I see sometimes on social media, you also still have a love for vampires, New Orleans, that type of, that world, you feel, I don't know, as you are further away from this moment of your childhood, how have those realms and the ways in which you developed them changed for you and their meaning? And when you're putting together your anthology [inaudible 00:18:12]... I forget what it's called, I have it right here actually.

Zoraida Córdova:
Vampires Never Get Old.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Vampires Never Get Old. How has that, the meaning of those different realms, and those other worlds, and everything, shifted and everything for you, as you've claimed that? Independence is far behind you now, how has that shifted for you?

Zoraida Córdova:
I think that the shift is embracing the things that you want to see in the world. So I think, especially for aspiring writers, it's very easy to want to chase a trend or want to chase some other person's career. And Vampires Never Get Old really came about from me and Natalie Parker. We were in a pool at a writing retreat and I was like, "You know what I miss? Vampires. We should put an anthology together." And I was like, "We should call it Vampires Never Get Old." And it was just like synchronicity.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
We had this synergy, and then after we did vampires, I was like, "You know what would be good? Mermaids." And then the titles just immediately came to me, because sometimes titles come to me first and then I'm like, "That would be a cool story." And so the titles came to me first from mermaids and fairies as well.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You started in school, started in college, but then you started writing and you didn't finish, right? You went and you published, you started working on your book and you... That's very brave for anyone, but going back to the expectations of an immigrant kid to make that choice and to just take that risk. I think that streak is really strong.

Zoraida Córdova:
Thank you. It wasn't a hard decision at the time. I think I wish that I had just stayed a little longer, but at the time I was working full time and I was working night shifts. I was a money manager, so I managed all the money in some New York City nightclubs. And then some days I would write when I came home from work, which was usually 5:00 a.m, and then go to class. And then sometimes I had a morning class, and that sucked so much. And I knew something had to go, and the thing that went was school, and that's because I started interning at a literary agency when I was 18.

I just answered a Craigslist ad, but because I already had three years of the publishing insight, I was like, "Oh, I can do this. We can sell a book." And then I just worked, and then worked and wrote for another few years until I published Labyrinth Lost in 2016, and that's when I quit my job because they wouldn't give me time to go to festivals. And I felt like I had to prioritize that, and I was like, "I'm going to give myself a year to see if I can make this work full time," and I did, barely, very barely, but I did. And every year I tell myself, "All right, we're doing this for one more year."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I hope you're not still telling yourself that now.

Zoraida Córdova:
I am.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really? Okay.

Zoraida Córdova:
I actually am.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really? Okay.

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, I do. I'm like, "All right, Well..." But now it's not a year, now it's, all right, one more book. And so sometimes the book takes two or three years, and so I'm still making my way through this business, one book at a time, because you keep writing as long as people keep reading. I will always keep writing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
If Zoraida's, we'll-see-if-they-like-the-next-book approach seems a little modest to me, it's because so many of the stories she's told me show her phenomenal confidence, changing religions at age 10, boldly jumping into the publishing industry as a teen. Clearly, this is a woman who has little fear of defying expectations. She's also unafraid of blowing up outdated definitions of what fine literature should be, and that's exactly why she's never going to stop writing gushy romance into her novels.

Zoraida Córdova:
So the other day I went to my storage unit because it's New York, so you have to have a separate closet.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, yeah, [inaudible 00:22:31]-

Zoraida Córdova:
So I went to my storage unit to downsize because I've been trying to go through things. I'm like, "Oh, I actually haven't worn this bedazzled skirt in 10 years."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you might.

Zoraida Córdova:
But I might. I feel like-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No, I'm sorry I said that. No, you won't wear it. Get rid of [inaudible 00:22:49]-

Zoraida Córdova:
So the youths now are taking things from Charlotte Russe and Forever 21, from 20 years ago, and being like, "This is vintage." I'm like, "Girl, that cost me $4."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, right? Yes.

Zoraida Córdova:
This looks great on you. So anyways, I've been going through, and I went through some of my journals, and I wrote everything down. I wrote to my journals, in my teenage years, as if somebody's going to read my memoirs one day.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I love this. Okay, yes. You knew. You really knew yourself. Listen to that.

Zoraida Córdova:
The amount of times I had a new crush, and I was like, "I don't even remember having a crush on this person," but I had a new crush, a guy I saw on the subway, a guy I saw on the bus, the boy in my class that joined the Marines in my senior year, and he went off to the Marines and I was so dramatic. I'm like, "He doesn't even know who you are." So I think I really, really loved the fantasy of romance. When I was an English major in college, I really fought my love of romance because we were reading Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon, and whatever, the great whites, great white males.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The great whites, yes.

Zoraida Córdova:
The great white male sharks. And so a lot of the feedback in my creative writing workshops, it was always, why does this have to have zombies in it? Why does this have to have a love story in it? Why can't you just tell your immigrant story? And I'm like, "Okay. So that's what really turned me off about creative writing at the university level," because there was no place for genre. And I'm like, "19 year olds are not going to write you a literary masterpiece because we don't know the world yet." So just let me write my zombie short story, and if you want to read into it, an allegory about society, you can do that, but I'm just writing a zombie short story with a romance in it because it's about a breakup.

So I really fought against the impulse to have romance in things. And there was a period of time in YA, when I started in 2011, when I sold my first book. And the conversation was really like, "Ugh, YA authors put romance in everything, and why can't we just have a book without a romance?" And so the romance was always second or third tier in my books, in my debut, The Vicious Deep, even in the Brooklyn Brujas series, even though the whole thing is powered by love, right? Love is the thing, and then I think around 2014, I just stopped fighting it and I was like, "I'm going to write a romance novel." And that's when I started, because I was like, "Why am I fighting this?" Why am I fighting the thing that I want to write? For who? For a teacher that I haven't seen in-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.

Zoraida Córdova:
... five years or 10 years? For a critic who I don't know?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Some voice that you've... The one in your head, is the-

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, some critic that we've internalized because of institutionalized misogyny and anything women like sucks.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.

Zoraida Córdova:
So I'm like, "You know what? More romance, the better. I'll put romance in everything." So I just stopped fighting it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Also, just thinking about when you were writing for Star Wars, or Disney with Kiss the Girl, and you have these boundaries, but you do your own thing. You've been talking about, just what you like and do what you like.

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How does that feel from that independence perspective, to have a little bit of guardrails on it?

Zoraida Córdova:
The thing with IP is that it's different from ghostwriting because ghostwriting, you write the thing that they want you to write, but with IP, you bring yourself into it. So I bring myself to Star Wars, and when I wrote my last Star Wars novel, it's a book about war, but there's a romance in it. And I told them from the beginning, I was like, "All right, but I'm going to write a romance in the plot."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's what you do.

Zoraida Córdova:
And they were like, "Great." It's not like they're expecting you to sound like anyone but yourself. So it's like you have to find a middle ground between what I would do in one of my novels and what I would do in a Star Wars novel. And oftentimes, they're the same thing, but there are instances where like, oh, a Jedi can't do this because we can't let Jedi have fun.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
Just kidding.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.

Zoraida Córdova:
But Jedi can't fall in love, right? We've seen what happens when Jedi fall in love.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
So why are you trying to make this Jedi fall in love, Zoraida?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Because everybody's going to be in love. That's [inaudible 00:27:36] you're like, "I'm writing."

Zoraida Córdova:
So I didn't get my way in that one.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, okay.

Zoraida Córdova:
So the guardrails are more things where I'm like, "All right, I knew that this would happen." With Kiss the Girl for Disney, a retelling as contemporary human women. And I say human, Ariel's the only one who's half fish of the Disney princesses, the others are already human. With this, I just put everything I loved about music and growing up in the '90s with pop bands, and I made them Ecuadorian and Colombian, and I saw a lot of parallels in family dynamics. Here's this girl with so many siblings, and I have a lot of siblings, I have a lot of cousins, and so I had to make sure that that family aspect didn't go away.

I could talk about diaspora, but still in a very Disney, rose-colored glasses, everything's going to work out way. It's also not the kind of romance novel that I would've written on my own because my romance novels are a little bit more racy, but it's the kind of romance novel that your mom and your daughter can read it, and there's not going to be anything inappropriate for any age group. So it feels like a family event as well.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It is a family event. It's funny you say that because I was reading it and my daughter was like, "What is that?" [inaudible 00:29:03], she's 12, and she was like, "Oh, no, I want in on that book." We literally were sharing reading it at the same time [inaudible 00:29:11]-

Zoraida Córdova:
Yeah, and that's what the series is supposed to be in many ways, so I love that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Okay. So you talk a lot about writing outside of the confines of genre, but since you brought up Gabriel García Márquez at the beginning, I'm curious if you feel pressure as a writer of South American origin, South American writer, to stick to that style of magical realism. Your first adult book, The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina, incorporated many of those traditional elements. And I wonder, how do you balance that with finding your own voice, and especially when you're writing in genres like fantasy or speculative fiction, romance?

Zoraida Córdova:
I think I should phrase it this way. When I wrote any other book, I didn't feel as much pressure as I did when I was writing Orquidea Divina. And I think it's because when I was writing any other book, I'm like, "Oh, this is for me." I feel the pressure in Orquidea Divina, and I feel it more now that I wrote Orquidea Divina, and I'm like, "Oh, well, people are going to want me to write another book like this," and I don't know if I have it in me, I feel I... But I'm going to try. Of course, I'm in conversation with the writers of Latin America, but I'm also in diaspora of my country. I almost feel like, do you know anything about James Joyce?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Not besides basic things, but [inaudible 00:30:44] not really [inaudible 00:30:44]-

Zoraida Córdova:
So apparently James Joyce wrote Dubliners and Ulysses when he was out of Ireland, like he needed that distance in order to write about a place. And I feel like, because I have that distance, my books are always going to be about the perspective of somebody who is away. So Latin Americans in diaspora, Latin Americans in a modern sense, although I will write historical at some point, I'm pretty sure.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Given Zoraida's fearless commitment to independence, I was pretty sure she must be an inspiring school speaker. What middle schooler wouldn't be impressed by this self-assured, punk rock, Latina queen of magic or, "Baddie queen," as my daughter says. And sure enough, she told me she sees it as her role to encourage kids to carve out their own path. But when I asked Zoraida to share about some of her standout school visits, the final part of her answer, which you'll hear, has a very different tone, a gentleness and temperance that caught me by surprise, which at this point, I should stop being surprised by.

Zoraida Córdova:
I went to visit this school in Long Island, which had a majority Latin immigrant population. And these kids, they hadn't read the books yet because the library had three copies and there were 20 kids. But I did a presentation and the kids didn't care about the books, but they were like, "Miss, are you married? Miss, do you have kids? Why? Why? Why not? Why?" And I'm like, "No, and no." And so they were like, it almost felt like that time when I saw Amelia Atwater-Rhodes on the back of her book, right? A 13-year-old writer. These kids needed an example that you don't have to follow an expected path or the thing that everyone else in their family might've done, right? Whether it's have kids by a certain year, or you could be a writer, you could be an artist, you could do something, right? You also have to feed yourself, so I'm also very practical, but you can do stuff that is outside of what you think the normal is, right? And so you have to step outside of your comfort zone.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What is your advice to kids when you're like, "Okay, you can step outside of your comfort zone of what's expected for you?"

Zoraida Córdova:
I tell them that all your family wants is for you to be safe, right? There are some career trajectories, some decisions, where you don't know the outcome as well as if you took a safer trajectory. And so now that I'm calmer in my-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In your old age.

Zoraida Córdova:
... late 30s.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Exactly, you're still young. Yeah.

Zoraida Córdova:
As opposed to when you're 20 and everything's a fight, right? With family or friends or anybody, you learn that you can communicate the things you want to do and the choices you want to make that are outside of your comfort zone. And just know that you, hopefully, have a safe place to land if something goes wrong, right? So if I completely fail and nobody wants to buy another book from me after this next book, I know that I can go to my mom and be like, "All right, this didn't work out. I need some help getting back on my feet or finding a different path." But you still have to try. I think we all owe it to ourselves to see what is possible.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Zoraida loves breaking rules, and she loves honest writing that doesn't meet the exact expectations of what writing should be. She's channeling that belief for her reading challenge, Screw the Comfort Zone.

Zoraida Córdova:
These are books that I've read in the last few years. These are some books that if somebody pitched this to me as an agent or editor, I'd be like, "I don't know how to sell this. I don't know how to market this." Some are adult, some are middle grade, some are YA. So I have, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, and then I have a Come Out, Come Out by Natalie C. Parker, which recently came out. Then there's The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. Then there's Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan. And then a ghost story, middle grade, is called Jasmine Is Haunted by Mark Oshiro, and it's a novel about ghosts, and grief, and that thing that I talk about where it's like you have this unlimited hope, right? So it's like you're all going to be okay, and so Mark is very mean in what he does to characters.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, no. Yes, yes. I know.

Zoraida Córdova:
They put characters through the ringer. It's one of the things, you have to face your ghosts. So if you want a good ghost story for this fall, that's a really good one.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Zoraida's full reading list and all of our past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is, once again, Lexi Whitehorn, a literacy specialist at the North Dakota State Library. This time she tells us about some of the fun ways in which she piqued kids interest in new books when she was a school librarian.

Lexi Whitehorn:
So some of the things that I did to get kids interested in books or interested in reading, I did book talks every other Friday of just introducing new books that we had in our library, trying to start a lunch club where some of those kids who maybe are a little bit on the more introverted side, or shy, or quiet, and really, the lunchroom is a loud place to be.

So we started a lunch club where they could come down to my classroom with their lunch, we would eat, talk about books, and then they would leave, or we would sit and just read throughout our lunch. There's book tastings, so to just have a couple of books out on the table or out on their desks, and you give them five minutes to read the first chapter, read whatever they can, and then timer goes off and you switch to the next book, just to get them a different taste of different genres and authors. And one thing that I haven't been able to try because I've been out of the classroom, but that I think would be a really neat idea, is to do a blind date with a book, where you cover the title or you cover the whole book in paper, but then use AI to rewrite the description of the book using teen lingo. So kids are always like, "It's so cringey when you use lingo," but I think it would be just a neat way to get kids interested if they could read the description.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Zoraida Córdova. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and Medusa by Katherine Marsh. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review, just takes a few seconds and it really helps. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport, Elena Guthrie and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josia Lamberto-Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, please 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 bonus content. Thanks for listening and keep reading.