[00:00:00] Emy: Welcome to What's Your Why Brought to You by Wyoming Humanities. I am your host, Emy Digrappa. In this episode, we are exploring the Writer's journey, and my special guest today is Rebecca Balcarcel. Rebecca is a children's book author, poet, and English teacher. Rebecca is Guatemalan Anglo-American. The award-winning author of Shine On Luz Veliz and the Other Half of Happy.
[00:00:33] So welcome Rebecca. Thank you. Happy to be here. Absolutely. I love having you and I love that you're a children's book writer just kind of wanna go down that road. Although I did read in your bio that you have identical twins.
[00:00:51] Rebecca: I do, yes. So I'm a twin
[00:00:54] mom and that's an adventure. Of its own. Yes, I bet.
[00:01:00] Emy: I bet. And and are they truly, like when they were born, they were hard to tell apart
[00:01:04] Rebecca: They were, one was seven pounds and one was closer to six pounds. So for a while it's the one was bigger, which is, by the way, that's a lot of baby all at once. Bye. Um, so they were not premature either. They were born on the due date and we did have little, um, bracelets either on their ankles or, or wrists to make sure everyone could tell them apart.
[00:01:28] I could tell them apart always. I knew you know, they, like one of the four ears is different. Okay. And so that one has that ear. but really everything else like. the hairline, the features, they are the same. One has a little wider face, so it's like the same eyes, but set in a slightly wider canvas, so to speak.
[00:01:52] The same nose, but. Again, like space just slightly different, but to me they don't look that much alike, but to the whole world, it's hard to tell any difference.
[00:02:04] Emy: That is so interesting.
[00:02:06] Rebecca: Yeah.
[00:02:07] Emy: Yeah. and they still very, um, very much.
[00:02:11] Rebecca: Well, you know, I mean, they always had their individual personalities. Of course, you know, they're different people.
[00:02:18] but they are a lot of like in, and maybe it's more just how siblings are from, from being born in the same family and raised in, in the same environment. Uh, it is hard to tease apart that nature, nurture. they understand each other really well, probably better than. The outer, you know, family and and world, and they're almost 30 now.
[00:02:42] So, it's been a long time since I like dressed them alike and pushed the double stroller and had two high chairs, you know? but those were, those were fun, exhausting, fun days. Um, oh, I'm
[00:02:55] Emy: sure. I'm always interested in, in the identical twins because, I've had a couple of instances where I was actually, in a bathroom and I was washing my hands and I looked over and I said, oh, hi.
[00:03:08] And I started talking to this woman and, and she's really sweet. Um, but she, she just kinda shook her head and this, she said, do you think I am so and so? I said. Yes.
[00:03:23] Rebecca: Uh, are you not? then she's like, oh, I, mm-hmm. That happens all the time. It, it must, yeah. I must say that my twins didn't deliberately set out to play tricks or anything to try to fool us.
[00:03:40] But they accidentally fooled people. You know, people call them by the other name all the time, or especially in isolation. It's hard to tell which is which. If you can't see them side by side and compare you know, for me, I can tell, but, A lot of people in isolation, they have no idea which one
[00:03:57] Emy: they're talking to.
[00:04:00] Rebecca: Oh yeah. I, uh, yeah,
[00:04:00] Emy: I know. But, tell me about, about your book journey. How did you decide to write a book, and go down this road to become an author?
[00:04:12] Rebecca: I think like a lot of authors, I really loved reading. And so the germ of everything started, you know, with the magic of books and, and I guess this feeling of being transported into other worlds and other people's, you know, characters', minds and experiences.
[00:04:29] So I wanted to write, as I got older, you know, I thought it was fun to write as a kid and. School assignments, you know, were fun If it was like write a story I did get encouraged by teachers, like, yeah, pat on the head, like, you're, yeah, a nice story, but I didn't really. Take writing seriously till college and at.
[00:04:52] By that time I had kind of stopped writing, but I took a creative writing class at a community college and that class changed my life. I was headed on a different major. I wanted to be a psychologist and just being in that class and then a visiting writer came to my school. And it that just, I realized, oh my gosh, I want this to be part of my life, always, whether I earn money or not.
[00:05:18] You know, I want to be a creative person in the world and I want to keep telling stories and writing to make sense of my own life and to make sense of my experience as a human. Um, I now teach at that same community college. And I now teach that creative writing class, and I am the person who invites the visiting author too.
[00:05:43] So, uh, there's been kind of this sweet, full circle, part of my life with that. eventually I came to, I, I did a degree in poetry, um, an MFA because I had focused on poetry, one day, one month wrote a stack of poems all in the voice of one character. And when I sent this to an agent, she said, you have a novel here.
[00:06:10] And I said, yeah, but I'm not a novelist. And she said, you are now because this is, this would really work as a novel. Why don't you flesh it out and, and connect the pieces? And that became my first book. The Other Half of Happy. And because the character was 12, my agent said, you're writing a middle grade novel.
[00:06:30] And I said, oh, what's middle grade? So I had to educate myself about what that was. And you know, it turns out it's all the great books of my childhood, like Charlotte's Web and Bridge to ter, the, and the Chronicles of Narnia. Like that's all middle grade. And so I started to read. Contemporary middle grade, you know, written recently in Newberry winners of the last few years.
[00:06:56] And that showed me, oh yes, my book does fit in that. I can see how my book contributes to this, genre. And, um, that became my first book. And, and I was surprised as anybody to. Discover that I was writing novels.
[00:07:16] Emy: Why, why did you, um, choose that age group,
[00:07:20] Rebecca: I feel like the age 12, you know, around there, 11, 12, 13 was a very big turning point for me as a.
[00:07:30] Kid becoming an adult, becoming self-aware, and that that's kind of developmentally true for almost everyone. That suddenly you see yourself as a, as a person as, and you have a self-awareness that you didn't have before. Plus you have questions about the world that you didn't have before, like younger than that.
[00:07:54] We're sort of learning what the world is, and, but right at that moment, about 12, we start to really have processed that first part. And now we're asking questions, big questions about life, about death, about spirituality, I mean, and. Those kids that age want to explore all of the big questions, but they're not jaded yet either.
[00:08:22] And I really like that when I do school visits or talk to kids this age, I love how, um, much hope they have. Uh, I love how. You know, they still see the world as a, a place where anything could happen. There's lots of possibilities and I wanna keep thinking that way too. You know, I want to not get bitter and jaded even though, you know, life does have a sober side.
[00:08:54] But the young people of that age are, are not afraid of dark subjects too. I mean, I don't write anything truly horrifying and scary, but they are open to all the aspects of life and, but with sort of an open-hearted attitude, so that makes it really fun to write for them. I just love, I love that age and I liked being that age.
[00:09:20] Although it was also hard.
[00:09:22] Emy: are you writing to a, Latina population? Well,
[00:09:28] Rebecca: this is interesting 'cause Yes. I think the other, David Bowles has put it in a way that I, that I like. He says that he thinks of his audience as. Being kind of a semicircle around him and that on the front row are those Latino kiddos.
[00:09:46] And so I guess my front row is, is Hispanic girls, Latina girls, because that's my character and that's my own identity. And so I feel like the story I'm telling probably resonates with them. Very readily, very immediately. But that's just the front row. The story's really for everyone. You know, the second and the third and the hundredth row.
[00:10:11] Um, just whoever might be touched by a human story, you know, which is even adults. so it's not exclusive, but I do think of that population as sort of the first, the first. I guess, uh, you know, natural audience for the book. At the same time though, I am mixed. So my mom was born in the United States and my dad is from Guatemala, and they have a sweet love story because she went into the Peace Corps and that's how she was sent to Guatemala and they fell in love even though she barely spoke Spanish and he barely spoke English, but.
[00:10:52] so when I was born, um, there was some Spanish in my house, but not as much as my cousins, for example, whose parents were fully Latino, latina. You know, they grew up fully fluent in both languages and being mixed. I do sometimes feel like, um, maybe there's an even subset of Latina girls who are also mixed.
[00:11:19] That would be, you know, a couple of seats in the front row. those mixed folks are also my audience. And then. you know, there are lots of ways to be mixed. I think mixed folks maybe are also drawn to my books because of the, the heritage That's a multicultural bicultural heritage. Did you grow up in, in the States? I did. So I was born in Iowa. Lots of corn, no tortillas. I like to say my dad was one of about three Spanish speaking, you know, natively Spanish speaking people in our entire town, and that made him kind of a celebrity. I'm happy because that meant that my slight tan of skin tone, My super black hair, not anymore, but was, thought of as a fun thing, an interesting thing. Um, I never experienced bullying or stigma there in our little town, probably because my dad was so, uh, fun and made friends easily and. People knew him because he was the only one, you know. so that was my mom's more or less like family town, but we did move to Texas.
[00:12:40] I. I was only 10 years old and this was a huge change. One of the good things was that Texas had so many more Spanish speakers, and so now there were tortillas and there was the music and the food, and you know, my dad could speak Spanish with other native speakers and that was a lot of fun. But it meant that I suddenly noticed what I had been missing because in Iowa, everybody's just doing their thing.
[00:13:09] I mean, at that time it's, it's more diverse now. But, everybody made their green bean casserole. Nobody made tamales at New Year's, you know, in Texas they did. And I realized, oh my gosh. there's this whole part of myself that hasn't really. Gotten as much airtime, you know, hasn't been developed or cultivated.
[00:13:30] So I felt a little fish out of water that I, I should know this stuff, but I, I don't. But through my teenage years, I did spend time with my, like relatives who are full Guatemalan. You know, both parents were born in Guatemala and the kids were born in the United States, but. They were kind of more plugged into the whole culture.
[00:13:53] So I learned, I did, I learned how to make a tortilla, you know, yeah, that, that mixedness did mean that I felt a little outside of both cultures. You know, the, the not exactly a perfect fits in either, either one. And my character struggles with that same thing.
[00:14:14] Emy: Oh, interesting. Okay. And how does, how is she struggling with that in the book?
[00:14:20] Rebecca: You know, the first, um, so in my first book anyway, they both my. Books have a mixed character. Um, well, and in both they are a little more interested in assimilation and being a normal quote American, whatever they think that is, and rejecting their heritage for a while until it occurs to them. Wait a second.
[00:14:44] Uh, this is a richness that, that I want to have in my life. Like I want the, the food and the music and my father's heritage. I don't wanna cut that off from myself and I don't have to. I can actually be whole, only if I have both sides of myself, included, you know, in my identity. So the title of my first book, the Other Half of Happy, comes from that idea of needing to be.
[00:15:14] Having the other half added to be whole and to be happy. So yeah, they both struggle with this. Um, there's a lot of rejection of heritage. At first in my second book, um, the main character has discovers that her father actually has a Guatemalan daughter. Who they didn't know about and who is now gonna come live with them.
[00:15:39] And so instead of Guatemala just being kind of this distant thing, dad's country, Guatemala is personified in this daughter who's gonna come and live with them. And that's a problem because this, this daughter is, she's pretty, she speaks Spanish fluently. She even gets. Dad's jokes in Spanish. This is a major threat for the main character, but of course she learns to embrace her sister.
[00:16:10] so that's, yeah, they both have to deal with a lot of heritage issues. And side note, in my real life, my real dad did have a daughter in Guatemala through a previous relationship before my mother. And we did not learn about her until. I was in my thirties and she was in her forties, and I'm really happy we learned about her.
[00:16:36] My father did not know about her either. I. And I thought, wow, I've gotta write a book about this. Which, which I did. So Shine On Luz Veliz, is that book. And I was imagining, what if we had met sooner, you know, what if she had come to live with us, what if we had grown up together? so I just, I, the kind of origin story of that book really comes from my real life.
[00:17:01] Emy: Oh my gosh. tell me about your last name, because it's very, very unusual. Um, does it have a special meaning?
[00:17:08] Rebecca: Well, literally the, the Balcarcel, the, the Bal refers to Valley. Of course in Spanish, B and V are almost the same sound, really? So Valley Tercel is a jail, but I'm happy to say that it doesn't mean a valley full of jails.
[00:17:28] It actually means a valley that's so steep that it seems like it's, um, you know, enclosing you. So it's a deep valley. And so it's a metaphor that the, a valley, like a jail almost that's. That's enclosing around you. So that's, that's my understanding. And in Spain. There is a tiny village named Val Carcel with a VI have not been there, but there's also a River Val Carcel and I have been there.
[00:18:02] And it was part of a 500 mile walk that I did, uh, called the Camino de Santiago. And this Camino, this w goes all the way across northern Spain and it crosses this little river. And when my father died in 2021, um, we had him cremated and some of his ashes were at our home or spread there, but some of them I brought with me on my 500 mile walk and I, I.
[00:18:33] I sprinkled some of them in this river. Karel, we don't know exactly where. Six generations ago, the immigrant from Spain came, who was the first, you know, Balcarcel in Guatemala, but we know that it was from northern Spain. And I felt like, well this is close enough. And so, he is. Kind of got this multi international kind of, uh, dual country, triple country, experience after death.
[00:19:05] cause we also put some of his ashes in Guatemala, so.
[00:19:09] Emy: Oh my goodness.
[00:19:10] Rebecca: Yeah.
[00:19:11] Emy: did he have a big family? Do, do you know the family there and, and are you close to them? He
[00:19:16] Rebecca: was one of, I believe it's eight children who survived. He actually outlived a lot of his siblings, but I have a lot of cousins, lots and lots of cousins.
[00:19:28] Many of them are here in the United States because he was able to help them come legally and, you know, start a new, new life in the United States. And so, yeah, I, I know them and we're on Facebook or whatnot. some are still in Guatemala. But not as many. And then my sister, half sister is also lives in Guatemala.
[00:19:51] but we don't know, like going back generations. I mean, there are lots of Karels near the town where he was born. but then like going back, we're not sure. Where we connect in Spain. Exactly. So I would like to find that out. Mm-hmm. but a lot of my family's actually in Texas, Oh, that's nice. It is.
[00:20:13] Emy: How, how about your mom? Where, where's your mom?
[00:20:16] Rebecca: So she, lives seven houses from me in Texas. So I. am an only child except for my half sister, which we didn't know. But, it was so great in my adult life to be able to buy a house in the same neighborhood as my parents so that we could have the whole grandparent closeness for the kids, et cetera.
[00:20:37] Sanity for me, the mom. and now it's nice that I can be helpful to my parents. I mean. Dad in his time and now mom, uh, to be, you know, useful in their declining years. but she has a big family too. She was one of five and her sister lives in town so I have cousins on that side of the family also.
[00:21:00] So it's, it's great. I, I feel like family, Wow, it's so important. I guess that's a cliche, but, but I am shaped by these people, you know, and I put a lot of my family in my books. Um, like there's a, kind of engineer maker, tinkerer man in one of my books, completely based on one of my mom's brothers, or she has two brothers actually, who are really.
[00:21:25] You know, build houses and invent things. And, in another book I have, um, a very engaging grandmother based on my mom's mom, who my grandmother, I. She was so creative and, you know, would make make up games and be very engaged with us grandkids. So in a way my family's kind of woven through all the characters, all through the books.
[00:21:55] Um, but Mom's heritage is very British, very German, very northern European. According to the DNA test, she's like more British than the average British person because Oh, she took a test. Yes. And in today's Britain, you know, it's quite mixed, but from the British Empire and everything, uh, but she actually is to get a very, very Northern European, very Anglo, I guess.
[00:22:26] Yeah. And of course my DNA shows pretty much that half and half and. A chunk of Spain, a chunk of Native, central American, um.
[00:22:37] Emy: What is, what is the, um, the native, what is the Central American Indian?
[00:22:42] Rebecca: It's really the descendants of the Maya, and I think they call themselves the Maya still, of course you have different groups, but they, they would genetically.
[00:22:54] Be pretty much under the Maya umbrella. It's amazing to me actually that in Guatemala you have many languages spoken. I mean, Spanish is the colonizer language and it's the language of school and business and government, of course. But you have Kaqchikel and Kʼicheʼ and mom and you know, there's like 20 or 30 other languages and they're all.
[00:23:20] kind of Maya, all the puppies of the big Maya mama dog. Mm-hmm.
[00:23:26] It's quite diverse and colorful.
[00:23:29] Emy: Wow. It's so interesting and, and I love hearing about people's family history and especially, um, yours is unusual. and I'm glad you were able to trace your dad back to his roots in Spain.
[00:23:43] That would be really interesting. I would really love to hear about that.
[00:23:47] Rebecca: Well, I would like to know more about the, like we know the immigrant's name was, and we know he brought a guitar. At least that's, that's the story because guitars are very important to all my uncles, my grandfather, you know, my dad.
[00:24:05] So, I hope that's true that this immigrant had the guitar. but I don't know where an Anto left from, like what was the port, and we think he was maybe an indentured servant, something like that. But yeah, I'd like to learn more too.
[00:24:23] Emy: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:25] Rebecca: I did put guitars in figuring prominently in my first novel too, because the main character's father is also a guitar player and is really anxious that my main character, her name's Kiana.
[00:24:40] Kiana is supposed to also learn guitar and she wants to, but she wants to play American songs and he wants her to learn his, you know, Latino love songs and boleros and everything. And so that's a point of friction for them. And I must, I won't give away the climax of the book, but she, she does something very terrible to the guitar.
[00:25:02] I'm sorry to say.
[00:25:04] Emy: Oh, no, no. Yes. But what are you, what What are, what are you writing right now?
[00:25:10] Rebecca: I am writing, I think, a verse novel. So a novel told in poems. Right. Uh, which. work well with my poetry background now, and the main character is a, a girl born in Guatemala and she was adopted to the United States as a baby.
[00:25:32] And this is somewhat based on reality because lots of Guatemalan children have come to the United States, uh, especially during the two thousands. And, uh, some of those adoptions were completely legitimate. Some of them were actually a human trafficking situation, to be blunt. the laws were very lax and I've interviewed, a group called, well, a few people from a group called Guam, let's see, Americans with Guatemala and Roots, I believe, and they.
[00:26:06] They actually contacted me because they read my first book as a book club project. You know, they were like, oh, let's learn about Guatemala by reading my book. And I was like, oh, wow. I'm not even native Guatemalan, but okay. And so I got to know them and some of their stories, and these folks are finding out as adults that their Guatemalan parents didn't necessarily.
[00:26:32] Give them up on purpose. You know, the babies were, you know, there were different kinds of legal things that happened. Some of them were just stolen though, you know, like the baby disappeared. And I've, um, interviewed some of these folks and I thought, well, this is a very dramatic story. So I would like my character to be one of these children.
[00:26:55] what's happening is a lot of these folks are finding the birth family, or at least the birth mother in Guatemala and traveling to meet them. So in my book, my character goes to meet her birth mother in Guatemala and spend some time in her village Another source I'm drawing on besides the interviews with the real life adoptees is also my half sister, because she has witnessed some of these reunions between the adoptees and the birth family because she is close with someone who is a searcher, or sometimes they call them, usually the term is searcher, but sometimes it's like my angel or something.
[00:27:37] The person who will. Dig through the records and try to find the information they need to figure out who the birth family is. I'm hoping to capture some of the drama of these reunions and the, uh, you know, the feeling of growing up American, but being genetically guatemalan, which I know a little bit about with my own mixed heritage.
[00:28:01] yeah. And it'll be, it, you know, it'll have a happy ending, but, um, but there's some struggle there with identity, with heritage. who am I really? and some environmental. there there's gonna be, the village has to face an environmental threat that my main character's gonna kind of help the village meet.
[00:28:21] So I hope it'll be exciting.
[00:28:23] Emy: that is gonna be very interesting. when do you hope that to be published?
[00:28:28] Rebecca: Well, it was originally going to come out this year, but, I haven't, I. Gotten the final version turned in yet, so probably it'll be 2026. I started writing the book in prose in regular, you know, uh, my, like my other novels and it.
[00:28:49] You know, I wrote two different versions and it just wasn't quite alive on the page, and so I started trying out poems and that really worked at capturing some of the emotional energy. So I'm, that switch, you know, is slowing down the publication process, but it's, it's totally worth it. Yeah. It'll. At least I hope I'm not quite finished with it, so we'll see.
[00:29:18] We'll see. But I think it'll be worth the wait.
[00:29:22] Emy: it sounds excellent. Well, thank you so much Rebecca, for spending your time with me and I, I loved learning about your family and you know, how your books came to be. That's so interesting. And um, it's been my pleasure. Absolutely. Looking forward to your next book.
[00:29:42] For sure. Yay. Do you have a title yet? Me Too. A still working.
[00:29:47] Rebecca: Uh, it might be Sun Child. Sun Child, but uh, you know, we'll see if the final we can work on that. The what the final decision really is there. Yeah.
[00:29:59] Emy: Okay.
[00:30:00] Rebecca: And thank you. This has been really fun.
[00:30:03] Emy: Oh yeah. Thank you so much and have a wonderful afternoon.
[00:30:09] You too.
[00:30:09] Rebecca: Yes. Oh, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure. You too.
[00:30:14] Emy: Bye.
Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file