Sunday, October 3. WEST HOLLYWOOD BOOK FAIR:
The 3 p.m. panel discussion is titled: Pen on Fire: Women Authors On Igniting The Writer Within.
I set eyes on Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for the first time. She's cute and chubby. She wears blue jeans and a lacy black top. She seems smart and charming.
The moderator is Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. She sits on the left. Then L-R it's Gayle Brandeis, Alisa, Barbara Seranella and Nina Revoyr.
Barbara asks the panelists to tell what keeps their pen moving and to read a paragraph or two from their latest book.
Gayle speaks for five minutes.
Alisa speaks for fifteen minutes: "I've been wanting to write a novel since I was 14. I fell into newspapers because it was somewhere you could get paid to write. It was an education to see the way people were categorized in the mainstream media and the labels that were used the impacts that words had to create social realities in a way that I didn't like. In my case, it was that anybody would be predictable by virtue of their belonging to a group. With Hispanic and Latino, we didn't use the word Hispanic in the United States until the late 1970s. I had ten years of my life where I wasn't Hispanic. I was just Alisa Valdes with a Cuban dad and a weird mom. It was interesting to me to be in newspapers and to have all these assumptions about who I was and what I could cover and how I could cover it based on my name. Hearing things like a suspect being described as a latino man and wondering what that meant.
"With my first novel, I wanted to describe a little bit of the diversity that Latino America is. Racial diversity. Gender diversity. Language diversity. Religious diversity. I sat down with a census. It was a world I was trying to write at newspapers and getting my wrists slapped down at every turn. You're bad, you're bad, you're bad. You don't know what you're talking about and furthermore, you're crazy. That is what I was hearing. There is a Latino community and they all share a brain [LF wonders if that mythical brain is Frank del Olmo's?]. They all have the same opinions. There's a Latino vote and it's exactly the same. That's dumb.
"I looked at the census at how the pie broke down. The largest percentage was Mexican-American. I had two Mexican-Americans. One identified as Spanish. The other thought she was Aztec. They kinda looked alike. I had my black Colombian lesbian.
"I had been buying Latino novels in English [Alisa is not literate in Spanish] and not finding experiences like mine -- college educated and professional. I was finding beautiful writing that was about a miserable experience.
"I wrote the book I wanted to read and couldn't find -- The Dirty Girls Social Club.
"The second book (Playing With Boys) explores more of that diversity. I feel like I could write about Latinos for the rest of my life and never duplicate a culture.
"Dean Koontz, my favorite writer, can write about white men for all his career and he is just assumed to be writing about individuals and someone like me is assumed to be representative of a group, which is totally wrong.
"Within the book, I talk about stereotypes a lot. I set out to explore my own stereotypes and create a lead character who was the kind of person I'd be afraid of. By virtue of my upbringing, the people I was afraid of were Republican right-wing Christian Bible-thumping NRA members. On my first book tour, I had quite a few fans who would fit into that category, particularly in Texas. My lead character is a Mexican-American from Dallas, a sorority girl and debutante, a right-wing Christian who's been transplanted to LA.
"It's funny now when people come up to me and say, how could you be a Republican? I feel like I did my job.
"I'll just read one or two paragraphs of each character [every other author on the panel only read one paragraph from their work]. I write in the first-person from each point of view.
"I realized that the only stories I wrote that impacted people were first-person essays. They were the only ones I was getting calls on. I am so pleased to read reviews of my work that call it light and fluffy and beach reading."
Seranella is about to clap but Alisa won't stop reading.
Finally, Seranell and Revoyr speak for five minutes each.
Alisa writes in her online diary for September 27:
So I get to Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, and find out that not only have they spelled my name wrong on the store web site and in the local newspaper, I've been billed as a "bi-lingual" event....
This comes a little more than a week after the NY Press billed my New York reading as "bilingual," saying that I was "bringing the third world just what it needs - chick lit!" I should say that I called the reporter on that particular piece of stupidity, to ask her what, exactly, about me was "third world", and she defended herself by saying it was "a joke."
