Matt de la Peña

I grew up in a border community in San Diego called National City. I used to think that this was detrimental to my possibilities in life. And as a person looking back, it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. I learned so much in this community. It was predominantly Mexican-American, but my family was mixed. My Dad was Mexican, my Mom was White, but they were both born in National City so they were both native to this community. And it was just good people and good families. And I think when I look back that’s what I value most in my own community now, is family and people being together.

A community like National City, there’s two views of a place like this. There’s the way the community feels about itself, and then of course there’s the way others view the community. And I will say we were very aware that we were considered a sketchy neighborhood or the place you wouldn’t want to end up. 

When you live in a community where maybe others don’t value what’s happening in that community, or they consider your community to be sketchy or lower class, maybe when you’re outside of the community and others ask where you’re from, you can be a little bit more vague because you don’t want to kind of just label yourself as a National City kid.

But there was a little bit of pride in the community because the families were tight. You know, I always tell the people, there’s different messaging in different communities for the younger generations and the messaging I got was very valuable to me. It was, it’s all about hard work and being loyal, looking out for your cousins and your family and being respectful to your parents. So those are great values. However, it’s impossible to see those values from the outside because nobody really wants to come in to the community. 

Now I will also tell you, I went to high school in a completely different kind of community. It was kind of a small town, beach town community that was a little more evenly split between the Mexican-American population and the White population. It’s now a very wealthy community today. But when I was growing up it was sort of moving in that direction, but there were still real families that were just working working-class jobs. But I feel very lucky that I got to be in both communities to sort of see the difference. And I think I write from that point of view of having been an insider in both kinds of communities.

In terms of language growing up, my dad was a very quiet man and he spoke Spanish. My grandmother spoke Spanish and she spoke English too. My grandfather on my dad’s side didn’t speak English; he only spoke Spanish. And so it was very interesting as a kid because my dad was very quiet. I always say he didn’t really speak any language; he just was a working class man who went to work, came home, and just sort of like provided what he could. He was there, he was always there. He always showed up, went to sporting events, stuff like that. But he was just a very quiet man. 

And I think it was sort of the message in our household. It was that, to have the most opportunities in this country, “You will be an English speaker, you will sort of assimilate.” And that’s the way I sort of grew up, that’s the way my sisters grew up, even my cousins. 

But it’s an unfortunate thing, and I think it’s my dad’s greatest regret is that he didn’t sort of make sure we spoke Spanish with my grandparents, for instance. The generation of today, they’re doing a great job of owning who they are culturally, while code-switching when they need to. And so I think there’s great progress in that. We can still all be a part of America, but each different group can hang on to cultural artifacts, cultural ways of kind of moving through the world, that feel authentic to them. And I think it makes the country more interesting if you do hold on to your culture.

I wasn’t a real big reader and I wasn’t a very confident reader early in life. In fact, when I was in second and third grade, that’s when I was struggling the most. And you know, looking back, you try to figure out like, “Why wasn’t I into books, why wasn’t I a reader, why did I struggle?” 

And it was pretty easy to see the answer. First of all, I never had reading modeled for me. I never saw anyone reading for pleasure. The only time we saw books were in the school setting. And if you don’t feel confident in the school setting, then you don’t feel like some of the stuff in that setting is for you.

But then if you’re not good at something, like it was hard for me to learn to read, you just sort of like – you’re not there to succeed inside of a book; you’re there to survive, right? And I think that’s such a common thing among reluctant readers. So yeah, it took me a little bit longer to learn how to read and be a confident reader. 

But I will also say that by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade I became a pretty good reader. The problem is, I was still carrying with me this idea that I wasn’t intelligent. And I think I was just kind of passing along. And I don’t think me or many of the kids I went to school with were truly seen by the system. So, you know, I was allowed to think of myself as unintelligent, on into high school and no one was really there to tell me different. So it wasn’t until I got to college that I became somebody who was confident intellectually. 

And here’s the interesting thing: Looking back, I actually was pretty good at reading the world. Like, I had a good idea of what was happening around me. I could see underneath what people were saying and people’s actions. I could understand motivations. I just hadn’t transferred that to the written word. 

And I think once I learned that there was a link between what novels do and what I was doing naturally, it was like, “Oh, there’s a place for this. This is where people do that. They talk about what they are seeing, and that maybe other people aren’t noticing.” So it was kind of a natural fit for me to write novels. Even though when people talk about my background of being a non-reader, it’s surprising that a non-reader would become a writer, but it’s actually a better fit than you would think.

 What I would say to a kid who’s a struggling reader or defines themselves as a reluctant reader, I would just say, you just have to follow your curiosity. So for me, I started to read biographies about basketball players because that’s sort of like how I viewed myself, right? If you love videogames, you read Ready Player One, you read books about videogames. If you love dancing, then you find books about dancers and sort of their life. So, follow your intellectual curiosity and you’re going to be more likely to enjoy the reading experience. 

But then, I always tell young readers that are maybe not experienced readers, give every book you read 50 pages, and here’s why. What you don’t know when you’re an inexperienced reader is that some of the best books you will ever read start off feeling uncomfortable. Maybe this writer has an interesting style or the syntax of their sentences is slightly uncomfortable for you at first, or it doesn’t make sense. 

Well, by page 50 you’re either going to fall into it and it’s going to feel like breathing to read those sentences, or the book didn’t work for you. So, I always say, give a book 50 pages. Experienced readers, what we know, is that you know we’re probably eventually going to figure out the rhythm of that book and then we’re going to see if it’s good or not.  Inexperienced readers don’t know that that could happen, that you could get over that hump in a book. And so that’s what I often say, is like, you know, give it a chance and then you’ll find out if it’s worth your time or not. 

As I get older I’m starting to understand that all my work comes from a place of being slightly on the outside of an in group and I actually think that this is a very valuable place to be as a writer. So I was just talking with a couple of writer friends recently about the “own voice” movement and how important it is for insiders in a community to write that story, right? Because there is an authenticity. 

But I was arguing that sometimes it’s the insider who’s sort of on the margins of that own voice community who can see it the best. Right? Because they’re not right in the middle of it, they’re kind of watching it and they’re a good observer of that community. 

So there have been several places in my life where I felt like I was slightly on the outside of that community. Well, first of all there’s the obvious racial delineation of, you know, my dad was Mexican and my mom was White. So as a mixed kid, I never felt like I was quite Mexican enough to be down with my cousins or my Mexican friends. I was there, I was in these groups, but I was never on the inside. 

But I also didn’t feel like I was White enough to be really close with the White friends in my community, so I felt like I was just slightly on the outside there. And it’s you’re kind of like you’re an interloper. And I feel like you get access to both groups while you’re not on the inside of either. 

And it’s actually a great place to report from and there are many ways I’ve done this. So, for instance, sports and creative writing. I was a basketball player, but I was writing poetry all the time and I ultimately ended up writing books. And so I remember in the writing world I always felt like, did people think of me as a jock? And I hated that. But in the basketball world, sometimes my teammates would make fun of me for being interested in writing poems. Like, “This isn’t what we do.” So, there’s that too. 

And then I will also say, I grew up in this working class community. I grew up very poor and this was my life and now I’m in a different position in my life. Right? I can afford to have a house. I can afford to go to restaurants. I can afford to buy clothes any time I want. 

And now it’s so strange, because you would think you would settle into that new life of opportunity and privilege, but I still feel like I’m not quite in that world. So I think even in my life today, I don’t feel fully inside of the group I exist in. And, that seems like it’d be a problem, but I think for me I really value it as a writer.

In Last Stop on Market Street, thematically I had been trying to cover this territory in a young adult book and it just wasn’t working. And then I was alerted to an image on a young illustrator’s blog. It was a grandmother and her grandson on the bus. 

And I remember the minute I saw that, my agent sent it to me, who ultimately became the agent for Christian Robinson, and it was his blog. And when I saw that image I was like, “Oh, my gosh, the book I had been trying to write as a young adult needs to be a picture book.” And so, then I started to think about this grandmother figure. 

And for me, I had a grandmother who was the center figure in our family, my Grandmother Nettie. And so I thought of her and I thought of me because I spent a lot of time with her when I was a kid. I even lived with her for a while. And so I thought of her presence in my life and so I sort of wrote the story with that in mind. And it was kind of an “own voice” thing, where I had taken public transportation much of my young life. 

But then when I was still in the process of revising the book, I was introduced to Christian Robinson for the first time, who I knew was going to illustrate it, and he was with his grandmother. And I remember I got to talk to them for about fifteen or twenty minutes. And I just saw the grace and dignity that she had. 

You know, she had raised Christian in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a few of his cousins. And I realized at the end of that interaction that I actually had to take myself out of the book and I had to lean toward his experience. It had to be that way. And you know, there’s no “find and replace” for race, on your keyboard. So it means you basically have to rewrite the entire book with this new vision in mind. 

So I’ll actually say, the book was in a way inspired by multiple grandmothers. It started with my own grandmother. It sort of leaned toward Christian’s grandmother ultimately. But I also got to pull in my daughter’s two grandmothers. My own mom and my wife’s mother. And they both sort of fed the story too. So it’s interesting, I think. There’s a power in the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent that had to be part of that story. 

Originally in Last Stop on Market Street, one of the themes was that CJ wasn’t raised by his parents. It wasn’t a traditional family and that was stated directly in the story. But then I realized that I needed to be cleaner and more efficient in the story. So I took all of that out except for one tiny detail that most people don’t really see as kind of residue of this theme. 

When CJ closes his eyes on the bus, he imagines a family of hawks. And so that’s the one illusion to the traditional family. And it’s just a passing thought because he’s a young boy growing up in America, influenced by the media that surrounds him. So in all the commercials, he’s probably seeing traditional families. In all of the books he’s read, he’s probably mostly seeing traditional families. So there is that residue. But obviously you see that that relationship between CJ and his grandmother is what raises him. 

Carmela Full of Wishes is about a young girl who’s living in Watsonville, California where my parents currently live. It’s a migrant community, where a lot of food is harvested. You also have a lot of migrant families. Carmela is growing up in a mixed-status family. That means her mother is an American citizen, her father is undocumented. 

Sixteen million people are living in mixed-status families today in America, which makes it a common American story, but we don’t often think of it that way. So I wanted to tell that story. My dad grew up in a mixed-status family and so I wanted to kind of honor that part of our family history. 

This is a book that takes place in a predominantly Mexican-American community which is very important to me. The end papers, which you probably know are the very first page and the very last page of a picture book, and there’s usually a picture. Well on this picture we see – we see migrant members of our community harvesting food. And that alone is an important part of the story. It’s sort of valuing that life and the importance of the food that is harvested. 

This book came out the same day in English and Spanish. And Penguin, which is I have an incredible relationship with Penguin Books For Young Readers, and they’ve made a conscious effort to have all of my picture books released in Spanish and English on the same day. And I think that there’s a power in that. 

It’s a very powerful symbol, saying that this book in Spanish is just as valuable and important as this book in English. And you know some people ask me, “Do I translate the story?” and I don’t. I can’t. I could not. But what I love is that they allow me to look at it and I get to look at the musicality of the language and you know, I can move through some of it.

But I actually get to bring in my dad to help me make sense of it. He actually titled one of my books for me. Because he was like, “I don’t know about this title, Matt.” And I was like, “Well, what do you think it should be?” And then he had this other idea of what the title in Spanish should be, and it worked.

So in a strange way I’m honoring my dad by trying to get the books to come out in Spanish and English the same day. And it also reflects the changing America. Right? I think we’re valuing bilingualism in a way that we didn’t in the past. Now we know it’s an incredible – it’s a gift if kids can speak more than one language. 

In addition to Spanish, my books have been published in multiple languages. Dozens of languages, and that’s incredible. Sometimes I’ll get emails from people in other countries and they’ll send a picture of the translation in whatever language that is. 

And those are some of my most valued photos because it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this tiny little story that I wrote in this tiny little Brooklyn apartment, is now in different parts of the world that I’ll maybe never get to visit.” So, that’s amazing. And you think of all the kids that might be exposed to Carmela’s, for instance, her story.

Christian Robinson and I began our collaboration with Last Stop on Market Street, where I sort of moved in his direction and the story of him being raised by his grandmother. And then that was followed by Carmela Full of Wishes, where he sort of leaned toward my family background. 

When we were on tour for Carmela, we had a little free time before one event and we sat in the café together and we started to talk about, “What do we want to do next together?” And we batted a few ideas back and forth. And we knew we wanted to do public transportation again because we both value that. But then he got this look on his face and he said, “I’ve always wanted to explore how I grew up with an incarcerated mother.” And honestly, that’s the last thing I remember from that conversation because I had always wanted him to say that, to me. 

So I think from that point on for the next maybe about eight months, I was trying to figure out how to honor that part of his story. What he couldn’t have known at the time is that I’ve always been fascinated with the criminal justice system in America and some of the inequalities that I’ve noticed through life. I have family members who have been in and out of prison and I’ve always been keenly aware of how the system works differently for different people. And I have a book called We Were Here, a Young Adult book, which is about kids in a group home and I worked in a group home. 

So, I took that notice from Christian that he was ready to explore that story, and he was kind of inviting me into that and I disappeared. I didn’t talk to him after the tour for a good six months and then I presented him with Milo. A seed was planted on tour for Carmela, and I knew this is the book that was the most important one to tell it next. 

Winning the Newbury Medal is a gift in many ways, but the most important gift it gives you is the freedom to tell the story that you’re called on to tell. No matter how non-commercial it might seem, no matter how sort of daring it might seem to you.

So, when I sat down to write Milo, I understood and I was very aware of the fact that, if I was a new author, I might not get to tell this story. But you need to take advantage of the fact that after winning the Newbury a publisher might allow you to take bigger risks.

So, that’s why I decided that I could try to tell Milo’s story. But not only tell Milo’s story. But do it in a way that was pointing young kids into a direction of something that was not often spoken about to young kids, such as the danger of stereotypes. And also the way that some kids are growing up with parents in the system and how not only the parent is getting that sentence, but the child is, too.

When I was writing my third picture book, Love, I set out to write a totally reinforcing story that was full of joy and full of love to the point that it was called Love. Why? Well, because I had a new daughter and I wanted to write a story that I could read to her at the end of the night, and feel good about myself and hopefully have her feel good about the world as much as she could. But the symbol was that I just wanted to share love with kids all over the country. Right?

But after I wrote the book, and revised it several times, it just felt like there was something missing. And I had an epiphany. Because, and this all comes down to the way I see the world. I think there’s great love in the world, but I also see a lot of sadness and I see melancholy. And I don’t think it’s something that we should try to eliminate; I think it’s part of our journey.

So, if I was going to write a book called Love, I felt like I had to at least acknowledge adversity. And in one of the scenes in the book, it’s a big cast of characters, right? The way I describe it is, the main character in the book Love is a contemporary American childhood and so there are kids of all different races and abilities. So we’re trying to bring as many people into this concept of love as possible. No one person owns the concept of love.

Well one kid, he’s kind of hovering underneath a piano with his dog and he’s hiding because his two parents are in an argument. And it seems like it might have been a big argument, a scary argument, because there’s a lamp that’s toppled over, and even a little loveseat that’s on its side. So it’s a scary moment.

And I felt like it’s important for kids to know at a young age that adversity exists and it’s part of our journey. And in some ways it’s beautiful. It’s just as beautiful as the parts where we’re happy and joyful and full of love. It’s just part of our experience as humans.

Well, we had this book in, I guess it’s called F&G form, folded and gathered. So, it goes out to bookstores and it goes out to reviewers. And there was a little bit of controversy about this particular moment and there was some pushback from a certain outlet.

They said basically, “We can’t have a book called Love have this moment of violence, of insinuated violence, so, can you take it out?” And the illustrator and I, Loren Long, we really had to sit with this feedback and decide what were we going to do. This is where art and commerce collide. So, if we took this scene out, maybe it would really help with book sales. And if we kept this scene in because we thought it was the right artistic choice, maybe it would harm the book’s ability to get out into the world when, let’s be honest, that’s what we want our books to do. We want them to have a wide reach. We want every community to read the book to their young family members.

Well, we’re lucky because we had experienced a little success in previous books, both of us. So we just took the risk and we said, “We’re going to keep it in,” because we felt like that beat needed to be in the story. And I’d have to tell you, like, I’m so thankful we did because one of my proudest feelings about the book Love now is that it has generated lots of conversations, not only about the concept of love but the concept of adversity. 
And I think at the end of the day, all books are – they’re just a vehicle to conversations. And I think this added to the conversations that were possible around the book Love and that’s why it needed to be kept in.

I remember posing through an essay conversation with Kate DiCamillo, like, “What is the job of the author for the very young? Is it to preserve innocence or tell the truth?” That’s a big question for a writer of books for young people. And you know, she said, “I think our job is to love the world.” And I thought that that was such a beautiful answer to the point that every time I sign the book Love, you know, I write the person’s name, “To Todd, Love the World,” and then I write, sign my name.

So I kind of am plagiarizing Kate DiCamillo every time I sign that name or sign that book. But I just think that’s such a great way to sort of think about that particular scene in Love that is kind of scary. Well, I hope that in presenting that I’m also loving the world.

Loren Long, the illustrator of Love, and I sat down and we were talking about each little vignette in the book. And when we got to this moment where the text sort of ended up being the boy under the piano, initially he told me, “I was thinking of a Norman Rockwell moment where there’s the death of a pet and they’re sort of gathered around, mourning the passing of a valued pet.”

And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that could be good.” But then I had this instinct to ask him, “What would you do if you could do anything in this moment?” And I remember we were sitting at lunch in Atlanta at a conference and he paused for a very long time. And then he looked up at me with this look of like pure honesty. And he said, “Alcohol has really harmed my family. There’s a lot of problems that have come from that. And when I think of this text, I think of that part of my family.”

And he said, “I just don’t know if we can do that in a picture book.” And I was like, “I don’t think we can either, but let’s try.” So that is why there is an empty tumbler on top of the piano, suggesting that perhaps the father had been drinking.

And here is what I think is important about that. There are so many kids out there today who are under the metaphorical piano, for the exact same reason. It might not be alcohol, but it might be some other version of that and it’s affecting the family.

And that is a diversity that we don’t often talk about is that so many kids have trauma in their family lives caused from substance abuse. So that was part of what we wanted to sort of suggest in there. And now we tried to make it quiet because some kids don’t even notice that. And that’s okay too. That’s not their entry point into the story. But some older kids feel seen, and some older kids ask questions. And I think that layer needs to be there, too.

I’ve always been friends with authors, because I am an author, but I didn’t really understand the power of some of my friends’ work until I became a parent. And there is nothing more amazing to me than reading to my daughter and now my son, who are both very young, and watching their minds just expand right in front of me as we explore these seemingly simple picture books. I think we are living in a golden age of picture books. And as I’m reading them and inspired by them, and watching my kids be inspired by them, I feel so privileged that I get to do this too.

There’s also something else that I think about as a picture book writer, and somebody who reads picture books to my children. I think about my childhood, and I was never surrounded by books. We didn’t own books. My mom read to us sometimes, but it wasn’t the focal point of our childhood. And then sometimes I look up from the chair I read to my kids in, and I just see that the walls are lined with books and I see the magic that can happen in this space. And I truly am amazed by the power of literature.

My daughter, she’s now seven, but for a long time, before she could read text on her own, she sort of measured the world by referencing the books we had read together and that was amazing to me. Like if something happened, she’d say, “Oh, it’s sort of like this when that happened in that book. And do you remember that scene?” And I was like, “Wow, she’s using it as a reference point to life, which I never did as a kid.” So I see the power of literature more as a parent than I ever have as an author, which is pretty profound.

I think one of my favorite things I’ve experienced as a human being is watching my daughter learn to read. She learned to read near the end of kindergarten, and at the beginning of first grade.

I was always present as my daughter was going through this process of learning to read. At first, I was holding up flash cards. Pre-pandemic I was probably going to be traveling all the time, right? But now I’m home, and I’m holding up flash cards and watching her sound out very slowly the word, cat. You know, c-a-t, cat. And she’d get so excited. Meanwhile I was always reading to her. And she loved, she’s always loved story, and loves that I’m reading to her from novels.

I remember I read to her The One and Only Ivan and she just was totally locked in and asking questions. And this was during the pandemic. Then she discovered graphic novels. And I was reading those to her and she loved that she could kind of like what we would do with picture books, she’d look at the pictures while I read the text and she was getting the story on two layers.

And then I started catching her sneaking off with those books and just looking at the pictures on her own. And then fast forward a couple months and I was watching her just read some of the dialogue. Not the narrative, but just a little bit of the dialogue and she’d laugh. And I was like, “Oh, she gets it enough because we’ve read it together, that she can laugh at the joke.”

And then slowly but surely she began reading every part of the book on her own. And that’s why I value graphic novels as a literacy tool, as well as just a great vehicle for story, so much. You know, her vehicle was the Dog Man books and I watched her learn to read.

Fast forward to today and my daughter is reading book after book after book. And it’s just amazing to watch her now have ownership of a story. I still read to her all the time, because I want to be a part of this too. And she won’t read the books we’re reading together on her own. She puts them aside, and that’s her, she’s being loyal to our little collaboration. But she’s reading all these other books at the same time. And it’s just, what a gift to watch your child learn to read.

We need diverse books because we have a beautiful diverse country and there are so many wonderful stories that we all want to read.

I think ultimately Milo Imagines the World is a journey of a boy learning how to understand how others see him, and also how he sees himself. And so there are two things going on there.

He’s speculating about the people around him on very little information. So he imagines this scraggly-faced guy who’s doing a crossword looks a little disheveled. He imagines him going off to an apartment that maybe has a lot of cats and trash and maybe he’s a lonely man. So he makes that leap from this visual information, he’s slightly disheveled and he has a little bit of a scraggly beard, to a lonely existence.

Well, I think part of the journey on the subway to visit his mother, part of that journey in terms of his interior journey, is that he’s also beginning to connect the way he’s making these judgments based on very little information, and the way people might be judging him similarly with very little information.

And there’s a young boy who he thinks dressed really nice, and he’s got a perfect part and shoes with no scuffs. And he thinks, “Well, this kid, this light-skinned boy, is probably living in a castle. He’s got a great life.” And there’s one moment I think that’s to me the most important moment in the book where they look at each other and in that strange moment of connecting visually, I think Milo’s heart sinks.

Because when he looks at this boy he sees all the possibilities that this boy has that he doesn’t have. And in that way he’s actually stereotyping himself, which we don’t often talk about with this book. And I think he’s building walls around himself in that moment, that he’s not fully aware of.

And I’ll tell you, this comes from my own childhood. I remember we never went to restaurants. And one time a friend’s family took me to a restaurant and I was so nervous because it had cloth napkins and the waitress was actually asking me what I wanted to order. And I had never experienced this, like, “What salad dressing do you want?” And I was so confused, and like, literally sweating.

And then I saw this other boy who was the same age as me at a couple tables away. And I remember he just seemed so confident. And two things ran through my mind at that moment. First I thought, “This kid, he just has different access to the world than I do and I’m never going to have the opportunities he has,” and it made me feel like my life was more limited. And then I also thought, “If I ever have any money, I’m going to go to restaurants every day so I know how to do this,” and I also thought it was fun.

But I think, in that moment, Milo’s feeling something similar. He’s actually building walls around his own possibilities by judging himself against somebody else. Now, when he sees that this same boy is going to the same destination that he is, that he also has an incarcerated mother, it pops something. And now he has to confront that, “Maybe these judgments that I have, that are based on stereotypes, lazy stereotypes, maybe they’re in need of revision, or maybe I need to be less confident about them.”

And so I think what I was really trying to challenge young people to do is, is understand that when you see somebody on the street and you sort of do lean on these lazy stereotypes that we all lean on, try to be more generous with people around you, because behind every face we see on the street there’s an entire story that we don’t have access to. And I think if we understand that, we will be more generous with people around us.