Meg Medina

A Light In the Darkness, an Interview with Meg Medina

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Iinterviewed New York Times best-selling author, Meg Medina. I learned she enjoys writing books that observe Latino culture. She often writes about the lives of young people, a topic that reflects off her own childhood. She has written dozens of children’s books and young adult fiction novels including: Tía Isa Wants a Car (2011), Mango, Abuela and Me (2015), Evelyn Del Rey is Moving Away (2020), Merci Suárez Plays It Cool (2022). Throughout the interview, she shared with me some advice, inspirations, hopes for the future, and most importantly, her love for writing. I read Merci Suárez Changes Gears before the interview and understand why it was selected as a winner of the Newbery Medal, the highest honor in American literature for children. Merci is an 11-year-old girl navigating through the drama of middle school, while at the same time dealing with unexplained changes in her grandfather life.

Q: How did you get into writing? And what were some experiences where you learned language had power?

MEG: I got into writing later in life. I was 40, before I started writing books for kids. I always liked to tell stories and hear stories. I loved books, but I was afraid to pursue writing as a career. First, I didn’t know any writers, I didn’t know who to ask about how to be a writer. But I also didn’t have the courage to think that I could do something that felt so impossible. I waited a long time. I had been a teacher and all kinds of other things before I decided to turn to writing. I think the notion of power and writing is the sense of relief that I feel when I write really anything, but certainly when I write for children. When I finish writing something, I sit back, and I ask myself, so what was I saying here? I’ve laid out the story. What am I pointing to? Or what part of being a kid growing up am I trying to speak to? This is the thing that feels the most important. When I’m thinking about power, it’s the power to feel better, to understand growing up better, to understand all the good things and hard things that happened to me as I was growing up a little better every time I write. In the biggest way, that’s how I see power in writing. Q: What was your childhood like?

MEG: I found it excruciating sometimes. I’m the daughter of people who arrived in this country in the early 60s. My parents came from Cuba, and at that time, Cuba was changing from one form of government to a Communist form of government. My family did not want to live in a communist country. They were part of the exodus out of the country, and, and when they left, they couldn’t leave altogether. My father left first, then my mother and my sister. There was a fracturing of the family. And in that fracturing, my parent’s marriage didn’t survive. When my mother found herself in this country, she had my five-year-old sister with most of her family still in Cuba. She was here in a new country, and she didn’t speak the language. And she was pregnant. She gave birth to me, and my father had left several weeks before. The start of my life was sort of traumatic and chaotic because I’m the daughter of people who lost their country. My mother took a job in a factory, there lonely, and all kinds of things. All of those feelings, in addition to just being a teenager, trying to make sense of teachers and people I was dating and friends and social stuff and all of that. It’s like, when you ask someone, how was school today? It wasn’t any one way, right? It’s every kind of way, minute by minute. I think when people asked me what my childhood was, it was all kinds of ways. It had painful moments, it had happy moments, it had a little bit of everything.

Q: What inspired you to write Merci Suárez Changes Gears?

MEG: So many things. I had it started as a short story in this anthology called flying lessons and other stories. An author and editor, Ellen Oh, cofounder of We We Need Diverse Books had asked ten authors to write a story that featured a main character who was a person from a marginalized community. I naturally picked up a Latino girl and I set it in Florida, I had spent some time living in Florida on my own with my husband and my children. I was sort of thinking about my grandmother’s condo at the time, and I was thinking of all kinds of things about school and more. I wrote this short story. It’s called “Sol Painting, Inc.” But when I finished writing that story, I found that I really loved Merci. As a to add something into all of the wonderful books that are coming out written by different Latino authors. I wanted to add something that was a celebration. Like a painting of the families that that I knew. Q: What advice would you give kids who want to be an author like you?

MEG: Read everything you can. Read the things that you are not sure you even want to read. Like if you don’t like sci fi, ask a sci fi fan, what’s the best book I should read and take their recommendation and try it. Read outside your own cultural group, read short things, easy things, hard things, just fill your brain. Because not only does it give you words and better skills in school, but it gives you tools. It gives you examples that you don’t even realize you’re learning, but that are sitting back in there of how authors handle this. It gives you more examples so that when you’re writing your own stuff, you can go, Huh, I remember how Rick Riordan did this or I know how Lamar Giles does dialogue. Or I know how Elizabeth Acevedo writes a poem in the beginning, like you start to say, Let me go back and check that — and you become a student of the things that had an impact on you. Reading is huge, and then I think you become a writer by writing, you just have were money problems related to language issues. She was cut off from her family and trying to figure out how to bring her family to this country. My mom was sad and worried and anguished. When adults feel that way in a family, it becomes the pervasive feeling in that house. There was a lot of sorrow and longing when I was a little kid. There was also a lot of joy because my family did eventually come to this country. I was very loved by them, and I love them very much. I had good friends. When I got to be a teenager, I ended up living for some time with my father during my high school years. Suddenly my father had come to this country and had been able to redo his medical training and was a doctor. I went from my life as the daughter of a factory worker to the daughter of a doctor, in this fancy American community. And I felt really lost. And I felt character, she was funny and snarky. She attended this privileged private school. She’s smart, but not in her mind as smart as her genius brother, Foley. And she’s struggling. She adores her family, and they adore her and she’s also struggling to find her way with them. How to grow up when everybody’s your parent, your grandparents, your aunt, your father, your brother, everybody’s bossing you around. I don’t know, it felt all relatable. She just felt easy to write. And it was such a celebration, I think about a family that works. A family that’s facing a big problem, maybe lots of little problems and one big problem together. But a family that works right because they have a base about love and about staying together and about being there for each other. And sometimes we have very few stories that feature Latino characters that celebrate that. I wanted to practice it. And you have to be okay with it, being terrible in the beginning, because everything we write is terrible in the beginning. Merci Suárez Changes Gears, the first 20 drafts are not what you are reading. What you read, is my very best effort, and then my editors very best effort at making that even better, and then copy editors telling me where I messed up all the comments and proofreaders asking me if it’s true that this address exists. It’s a team of people that help you get it to the professional level. So Don’t be afraid to stink is really the message.

Q: What do you hope for in the future?

MEG: Time, time to write all the stories that are inside me, and time to connect with kids like you and with other readers and time to be able to step back and look at my work and just enjoy. Being able to look at the body of my work and feel proud of it.