This week’s featured author is Francisco Stork. Mr. Stork is the author of five novels which are in the genre of young adult fiction. He was a recipient of the 1999 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and Behind the Eyes (Dutton, 2006) was selected for inclusion in The New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age 2007 and was the recipient of the Americas Award for commended titles. His book The Last Summer of the Death Warriors (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 2010) was awarded the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award by the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English. Read our interview with Francisco Stork and see what has compelled and motivated him to become an author and still maintain a career in the legal profession.
Can you tell us about yourself; where you grew up, where you currently reside, etc.?
I was born in Monterrey, Mexico. My mother was a single mother. Charlie Stork, an older Dutch-born, American citizen traveling through Mexico married my mother and adopted me when I was six-years old. A few years later, we moved to El Paso Texas where I grew up. Charlie Stork died in an automobile accident when I was thirteen but my mother and I remained in El Paso. Eventually, I got a scholarship to attend Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama and then a Danforth Fellowship to attend graduate school at Harvard University. There I met my wife and we have been residing in the Boston area ever since.
Did being an attorney inspire you to write or was this always a passion of yours?
I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember. For my seventh birthday I asked my father for a typewriter. I still have that old Remington. I went to law school after graduate school so I could support my family, but I always intended to write. I didn’t realize, however, how incompatible some legal jobs are with the writing life. I didn’t write my first novel until I was forty-five. I finally found a job working for a state agency that develops affordable housing that gave me enough time on weekends to write.
As a writer, what moved you towards writing for a young adult audience?
I wanted to write a book that dealt with my experiences growing up in the housing projects of El Paso. It was to be a book dedicated to my then teen age children. But as I was writing the book, I discovered that there is a great need to write value-oriented books for young adults. It’s a time of great decision-making and of asking big questions and I like to write about the big questions.
What were some of the challenges you encountered as a writer?
I think the biggest challenge was combining a legal career with writing. You need to develop lots of patience when you can only write just a few pages a week. I also suffer from depression so having to write through depressive episodes because I have a deadline to meet has at times been extremely challenging.
What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered from a publishing and marketing perspective?
There’s an expectation once you have a successful book for your other books to repeat the same successful formula. People always compare your books to the book of yours that they are familiar with and this comparison process keeps them from getting to know you in all your dimensions.
Having studied Latin American Literature with authors and scholars such as the Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz at Harvard, can you briefly summarize your experience and if that helped to shape your writing?
I spent four years at Harvard with the best teachers in Latin American and Spanish Literature. Unfortunately, I could never be the kind of scholar that Harvard wanted me to be. I kept getting B minuses on my papers with a little notes saying, “creative but not scholarly enough.” What I remember the most is the great exposure to these wonderful teachers and to such great writers as Cervantes, Borges, Gabriel Garcia, Marquez. I really learned to write by studying them. What is the impact that you want to make with your literary works?
I would like my work to touch young (and old) people in a deep way. I would like my characters to live with them for a long time. I want my readers to ask questions they’ve never asked before and to see their lives and as precious and rare.
Can you tell us about any upcoming projects and/or recent books?
My fifth novel Irises came out this past January. It’s the first time that I write from the perspective of young women. It’s about two very different sisters growing up in El Paso and the effect that poverty has on their dreams.
Visit me at http://www.franciscostork.com!
