This post was written by Brooks Jewell, Senior Director of Internal Communications at Scholastic.
After more than 15 years as a civic-minded attorney, Francisco X. Stork published his first novel. Eleven books later, he continues to weave tales of love, family, and the distant promise of a better future out of the threads of suffering and upheaval that represent every day survival for his characters. In One Last Chance to Live, we meet Nico, who uses his English class journal to investigate the tragic death of the young woman he loved, deal with his mother’s illness, and discover that he alone can save himself and his younger brother from a violent gang. For Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month, we asked Francisco about his latest novel and how his life helps shape his stories.
You said were writing a much different story when this book came about – but the character of Nico Kardos had to be told. What was so unique about Nico that it changed the story’s direction?
I started out with the hope of writing a non-fiction book about writing for young writers. Those pages maybe had good advice, but they didn’t have any life. Then I thought about a kind of epistolary novel between a young writer and an old writer and that’s when the voice of Nico became very strong. His complicated motivations for writing as well as the daily challenges to his dream to be a writer was a story that asked to be told. All that I feel and have learned about the writing life is embodied in Nico’s story.
Have you had any other character tug at your shirt sleeve demanding to have their story told?
Marcelo in the Real World started out as a story about Aurora, Marcelo’s mother. It was to be the story of Aurora one year after her son’s death. She finally has enough courage to enter his room where she discovers Marcelo’s journals. When I started writing about those journals, I understood that Marcelo was asking me to tell his story.
The romantic relationships in your books are nuanced and often clouded by other emotions as the characters deal with real life situations. Why is it important to you to share the “messy side” of having feelings for someone?
“The messy side of having feelings for someone.” That’s a pretty good description of what happens when we fall in love. There’s this process that goes on if love is to last – a movement that goes from selfishness to more and more selflessness, from “I want you” to “I want what is best for you.” Sometimes what is best for you includes my friendship and my love and sometimes it doesn’t. The pain and messiness that accompanies love is evidence of the struggle of love to become more selfless.
Nico talks about beauty and honesty in writing. What does that mean to you and how do you achieve that in your books?
Honest writing for me is writing about the questions that burn inside of me, the mysteries that fill me with awe. It is writing from the core of who I am, what makes Francisco who he is. It is writing the books that only I can write. It is presenting the truth of life as I see it. I write with the faith that what is interesting to me will be interesting to others. At the same, I want to share what I write so the writing needs to contain the beauty of character and story and words that touch the heart of the reader.
Like many of your characters, your family had a tough time making ends meet, how much of your story finds its way on to the page?
A lot of my personal story ends up in my books. Not so much in the settings of the story as in the interior life of the characters. I have never spent much time in the Bronx, but I share with Nico his anxiety about how he and his brother will survive in a tough environment without his mother’s salary. The thing about poverty is that it limits the choices you have in life. It’s hard to be a writer when your family needs you – a circumstance that affects many young people of color. I think it’s important to represent those in our society who are poor, but to represent them with the agency and courage they need to survive.
The book opens with Nico’s semi-prophetic dream – how does this reflect your own spirituality and belief in the choices we have?
I wanted to show in concrete form one of the qualities that I think makes a good writer. Nico has a dream that he takes seriously, that is, he listens and struggles to find out what the dream is trying to tell him. In doing so he manifests an openness to a world that is larger than the material world where the only thing that counts is what can be proven or is profitable. It seems to me that our greatest artists have in some form or another been in touch with this “spiritual” world – the world of inner visions, intuitions, inspiration and a sensitivity to the value and reality of our feelings.
Nico struggles with wanting to be a writer, but not sure he is good enough – what advice would you give kids like him who want to be authors?
It is very difficult for most of us to become good writers without an enormous amount of practice. We need to find a way to write for the sake of learning how to write and without the expectation of immediate acclaim. Nico, I believe, becomes a better human being (and a better writer) through the practice of keeping a daily journal. When he starts out, he wants fame and money, but these motivations are forgotten as he examines, through his journal, his love for Rosario and the reasons for her death. Writing becomes for him a way to find truth and to accept the strength, beauty and loss of his love for Rosario. The effort of writing becomes valuable and worthwhile even if he never publishes what he writes. So, if you want to be an author – see writing as a way of life, something you will always do because writing is part of who you are and the best way to help our hurting world.
