PALABRAS: Award-Winning Author Jennifer De Leon Reflects Upon Lessons Learned as a Writer

This article is part of "Palabras," the Latin Post Latino Author Series.

Jennifer De Leon, educator and author of "Home Movies" and "The White Space," has always loved stories.

Since she was a toddler, De Leon has loved listening to stories, writing them, and telling them; while her parents weren't educators or writers, they were great storytellers who easily articulated warm stories about their home nation of Guatemala.

After emigrating from Guatemala, De Leon's father worked in a factory and her mother cleaned homes. The two relocated because although they didn't receive formal education in Guatemala, they wanted more for their daughters. They wanted them to go to college and have jobs that didn't require them to work with their hands. However, as a writer and a teacher, De Leon's hands are absolutely instrumental.

"My parents told us that school is a set of keys, and you can open any room when you have that set of keys, but you have to earn it," De Leon told Latin Post. "My mother motivated me. She's one of the most talented women that I've ever met, and she's someone who wanted her daughters to go to school because she couldn't. And she has be the only mother who would tell her daughters not to get married and not have kids ... because she wanted them to feel free to make our own decisions and not rush into things. But, of course, once I turned 29, she started changing her tune."

While De Leon was in college, she was able to travel to different countries. She studied abroad in Paris, completed an internship in Nigeria with the United Nations, and traveled to neighboring countries such as Benin, Togo and Ghana. Because college granted these opportunities (and because her parents were very strict), she seized any opportunity to travel and see the world.

During the author's senior year of college, novelist Julia Alvarez ("How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" and "In the Time of the Butterflies") visited for a reading. De Leon met the author, but thought, "she must go to hundred schools and she must meet 1,000 people." Nonetheless, Alvarez kept in touch with the 22-year-old, sending her post cards and encouraging her to write. Alvarez's reassurance helped De Leon develop a willingness to be a writer. She then attended her fist writing class as a late 20-something in Boston and participated in Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) workshops.

"VONA was founded by Junot Diaz and a couple of others, and they basically wanted to create a non-MFA type of experience for writers of color," said De Leon. "We discussed, 'who do I think I am?', 'why am I writing?' and they gave us a roadmap. There, you work on your writing and you work on yourself ... your critical self. Dealing with rejection was really difficult, but VONA helped a lot with that part of my journey."

An extremely important thing that De Leon had to learn is that she's been misled by the idea that "good writers don't have to revise." Often, in school, papers have to be perfect the first time, pens must be used rather than pencils, and there's no going back. But in the world of a published author, "not only can you go back and revise, but you should. It's a part of the process." This is something that Junot Diaz helped her to learn during her time at VONA. He told her," You're hard on yourself. ... No one sits down and writes a story the way you read it in a book. That doesn't happen. Sometimes you have to throw out pages, but guess what? Something in those pages will take you where you need to go in your next draft."

Although Alvarez and Diaz played a role in encouraging De Leon to put the pen to the paper, her parents, Guatemala, and her early-bred love of story played a fundamental part in establishing her identity as a writer. De Leon shared that the wonderful thing about writing is that "you can change so much. You can change your own narrative, you can change the narrative of your culture or gender, and you can change the stories we tell ourselves. There's so much in the stories that we hear and the stories that we read, but then in the stories we write, also."

Her story, "Home Movie" was selected as this year's "One City, One Story" pick, as part of the Boston Book Festival. Thirty thousand copies of her stories will be distributed in and around Boston this fall. De Leon edited and wrote the introduction for the award-winning book "Wise Latinas." Also, she's published the stirring award-winning non-fiction essay "The White Space," which details her experience as she writes as résumé for her 56-year-old father.

"'The White Space' is about my father, who asked me, randomly, to help him write his first resume at the age of 56," said De Leon. "He'd only had one job, he'd worked at a factory for years, but when he got cancer he was laid off. Luckily, he survived but it was very hard for him to find work. So, he asked me to help him write a resume for a temp agency and I almost broke down crying because there wasn't much to write. The professional experience, the education experience, the skill sets. ... It felt like such a cheap way of showing someone's life on one piece of paper. So, I wrote down all that he had to offer that could be boiled down and put into these categories, because it still didn't explore all the parts of his life that can't be minutely categorized."

Her other pieces, "Lucky Woman," "Mapping Yolanda," "The Broken Clock," "Ashes" and "The Flea Market in Lynn," are pieces that capture De Leon's prowess as a writer. The author's upcoming works include a story about a married couple from Guatemala who live in Boston. The couple is at odds because the husband wants to return to Guatemala and the wife wants to remain in Boston. Another new project that De Leon is working on is a coming-of-age tale, Volar, which focuses on a 14-year-old girl who grew up in the suburbs of Boston. Lastly, De Leon is finishing up revisions on "In the Country of Memory," a book she has been working on the last six years.