This week, TheLatinoAuthor.com is featuring first-time author Torrey Maldonado. Mr. Maldonado grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and used his life experiences to help him write his book Secret Saturdays. It appears that his life experience has paid off as Torrey Maldonado is taking the author stage by storm. His book has been spotlighted by NBC, New York Daily News and the New York Post.
Secret Saturdays, published by Penguin, has quickly become the American Library Association’s Quick Pick and has also been adopted into Kansas’ and Pennsylvania’s High and Middle School Reading Circles. Raised in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, he indicated that his and his students’ struggles inspired him to write this novel. Read our interview with Torrey Maldonado and see what compelled and motivated him to become a veteran teacher and inspiring author.
INTERVIEW
Q. When and what compelled you to be an author?
A. Is it true that we absorb what our mothers do while we’re in their bellies? If yes, my writer-journey began in my Mom’s stomach because she read books out loud to me while rubbing her belly. She definitely set me on my writing-journey. As long as I can remember, she’s treated books and writers as special. I worshiped her and wanted to be special to her so it makes sense I became a writer, yes? No. Not with the rough realities of my upbringing. A lot of relatives and people in my housing projects pressured me to stop writing because they felt writing equaled school and boys who were into school equaled soft. So how did I stay on my writing-journey in one of New York’s most violent housing projects with crime, drugs, and people around me trying to knock me off-track? Comic books. I got hooked on comics in the third grade. Two years later, I told myself, “I want to write stuff like this someday”. I look back and see that the fifth grade “me” made a promise that the adult “me” is keeping.
Q. What are some of the hurdles you’ve faced as a writer from a professional standpoint?
A. My challenge in writing Secret Saturdays was the hurdle I face as a teacher: get youth to be living examples of the Core Standards. Across the U.S.A., our schools are implementing the Common Core State Standards. Young people may not care about those standards but they love my novel enough to memorize Secret Saturdays. Why? I did what the comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s wife did. She knows “you are what you eat” and realized her kids hated healthy foods so she snuck healthy food into delicious snacks then made a cookbook. I know that “kids will be what they see” so I snuck into my book images of youth seeing themselves master Core Standards. Does it come across as corny? Booklist calls it “infectiously readable”. “The Core Standards,” according to a standards-guru, “is is meant to get youth to listen like judges, write like news reporters, and read like detectives.” Sean is a Hip Hop fan and writes rhymes; you see his writing develop into an investigative report of his life. A mystery unfolds and he solves it by reading texts, media, and interactions like a detective. He learns to analyze his world as a great judge would. To further align my book with where U.S. schools are heading, I designed standards-aligned lessons for Math, Science, History, and English and a Discussion Guide and Quiz based on Secret Saturdays. They are on my web site and free for the taking. Another hurdle I faced is keeping my book curse-free and sex-free. What sort of teacher would I be if my author-mouth had to be cleaned out with Orbit? I’m grateful people feel “I kept it real but kept it clean”.
Q. What are some personal hurdles you’ve faced as a writer and how did you overcome those?
A. From my birth to the 1980s, I felt like nearly everyone in my Red Hook projects was my family. People looked out for each other and I was protected. Then drugs ripped Red Hook apart and, by 1988, Life magazine did a nine-page photo spread calling Red Hook the “crack capital” of the U.S.A. and one of the ten worst neighborhoods in NY. What I’m about to say didn’t happen all the time but the violence happened too much. I remember being a twelve-year-old and just getting back to the Red Hook projects after visiting a relative in jail and a gun shootout started right outside while I was in the store buying groceries with food stamps. Right there, I did something that built my will to survive and succeed. Yogis say, “Ohmmm” over and over again. I remember feeling and thinking, “Someday life will be different for me. Someday life will be different for me.” You might say I was praying to get strength. I did that a lot. Then my prayer became “I’m going to make it, come back here, and get others out.” That part of me who almost didn’t “make it” still lives in me and is committed as an adult to using Secret Saturdays and my future publishings to hook teens and pre-teens to books to springboard them to greater heights in life.
Q. What advice would you give to upcoming authors to be successful in this business?
A. Write lines people don’t want to skip. Write what people feel. Eighty percent of Justin’s voice is how I spoke with my friends during my pre-teen and teen years. What makes up the other 20 percent? The 2011 language of youth. Years before I wrote Secret Saturdays, I visited a Literacy (English/ Language Arts) teacher-friend for lunch. I kept grabbing urban fiction titles from her shelves and I was shocked at how many sounded fake. I picked up a famous writer’s novel and told her, “Listen to this. This sound real to you?” I read their book out loud and my friend laughed, “No! You know our kids don’t even talk like that!” So, being playful, I reread those lines how our students or real-life urban-adults sound. The Literacy teacher said, “Torrey. I’m not kidding. You should write a book?” So, I wrote Secret Saturdays and kids find it so real that they memorize parts of my book. My advice to writers is do what I did: read the stiff dialogue that’s on shelves, practice loosening it up, then write in that real voice.
Q. Who are some of the people (famous and otherwise) that have inspired you to write?
A. I’m inspired by:
- Oprah Winfrey because her mission and Secret Saturdays and my writing is the same: evolve people into better humans and show life is about choices;
- President Obama because my book is the tool The White House is looking for to help youth pick up their pants and fully grab “The American Dream.” My life is proof that if we want better men, we must get more boys reading, period; and
- Thank you to comic book writers and illustrators. As a teen, I needed real thrills to distract my mind from the rough realities of my neighborhood and schools. Violence, crime, drugs, and people trying to knock me off-track surrounded me. Reading could have helped take my mind off my problems yet being a reader in my neighborhood brought new problems. Where I’m from, female readers get called “geeky” but boys get called the other “g word’ and I don’t mean g-g-G Unit since people feel school is a “girl’s thing”. So I read what guys in my neighborhood read to avoid being bullied: comic books. They pumped me up the way sports, video games, shows, and movies did. By age fourteen, I had almost two hundred comics. So comic writers and illustrators deserve applause for hooking me to literacy and inspiring me to hook kids to books.
Q. What is the next project you are working on and what upcoming events are on your calendar over the next couple of months?
A. I just returned to NYC after being asked to address one of the biggest Young Adult Author conferences in the country: the Anderson Conference in Chicago. I’m blessed because I was sort of The Little Engine That Could. Yes, my book made the American Library Association Quick Pick List and Kansas and Pennsylvania have chosen Secret Saturdays for their Middle and High School Reading Circles. Yes, my book was selected as this past August 2nd’s National Night Out Against Violence official book. Yet, thus far, I’ve published one book. In Chicago, I spent the weekend on panels alongside multi-book, powerhouse authors with international critical acclaim and their books have been optioned for movies. How lucky am I? To whom much is given, much is expected and being blessed with such opportunities motivates me to continue to make our Latino community proud; therefore, I’m finishing my second novel (it’s something Secret Saturdays fans will love). I also have a number of exciting author-visits and Book Fairs lined up. I’m speaking soon at a Librarian Conference and also at Columbia University in New York. Elementary schools all the way up to colleges where professors have built my novel into their curricula and organizations continue to invite me to meet their students and families and those are very bright days on my horizon.
Contact: http://www.torreymaldonado.com
