But first, SCBWI has been a huge part of Donna's journey and she has heard a lot of keynotes throughout the years. So as excited as she was to do one, she looked to past speakers for guidance. Dan Santat’s How To Give a Keynote advice states that you should open with a joke, so Donna baked up one for us:
Two muffins walk into an oven.One muffin says to the other, "Ahh, this oven is hot!"And the other muffin replies, "Ahhh, a talking muffin!"
THANK YOU DONNA, and DAN.
Donna talks about her family, her wonderful parents and grandparents and the wonderful stories they told her. So many of the stories in Cuentista she heard in her grandmother’s house. They were different from other stories Donna’s peers were being told, Donna’s grandmother cooked differently from other grandmothers, she drove a rusty truck, didn’t have fancy dresses. But it's all of these differences that make Donna's voice today so exemplary. Besides her family folklore, these are some of the books Donna remembers loving as a kid:
Plus this book(?!?) (plus adorable school photo of Donna at that age she was really into that book)…
So not a big surprise that Donna loves the Twilight Zone, Star Wars, The X Files, and more recently the Dr. Whos. Donna is also a huge Trekkie: “These people had a huge influence on my childhood. I saw situations with people and actors that I’d never seen before.”
In addition to sci-fi, Donna loved Mexican folklore, like Popocatépetl and Iztaccîhuatl the story of a princess and warrior that fell in love and in a pre-Romeo and Juliet fashion have a tragic ending but become neighboring volcanoes. Quetzacoatl and El Conejo is about a god who comes to earth and meets a selfless rabbit who is rewarded for his selflessness by becoming part of the moon (look for it tonight!)
Is Mexican folklore too strange or weird? Donna says no, look at all the strange and weird stuff we have in our current and favorite stories as mentioned above. Donna took those parts of herself, her love Mexican folklore stories and her love of sci-fi and combined them into her own work.
Donna feels like she’d have no books in the world if it weren’t for her writing family: Donna is also an optometrist and one of her patients happened to mention her local Western Washington SCBWI. Soon after, Donna went to a local event and happened to have her first pages with her now editor, Arthur Levine. Arthur may not even remember having this meeting but Donna does! And that the advice was a little brutal, but from it she learned to slow her story down and she now always makes sure her young readers love her main characters within the first few pages before giving them all the dramatic plot 'goods'.
Donna talks about meeting her husband at another SCBWI first pages event, and at ANOTHER SCBWI event she met Lin Oliver as well as editor Nick Thomas, who loved the first pages she shared there that eventually became Lupe Wong:
Donna touches briefly on book bans:
I have something to say to people who want to erase these stories. You are challenging those with dreams of escape or who want more. You are challenging them because you don’t understand them. We are all people with folklore and cuentos of our parents, grandparents and ancestors. For those of you who are trying to remove books from our schools... I dare you to erase those from children’s imaginations, no one can steal our imaginations...
Donna's advice to book creators this weekend:
Slow down, take your time, it’s an amazing journey. Some of you are going to meet people today, even virtually, who will become your friends for decades. Help each other along the way, and keep nurturing your dreams and the child in yourself.
And if you ever see Donna at an event, please say hi:
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