Six years after the publication of The Grief Keeper, Alexandra Villasante returns with a new YA novel, Fireblooms. After learning that his estranged mother was recently diagnosed with cancer, 17-year-old Sebas boards a Greyhound bus to New Gault to care for her. New Gault is a city run by TECH, a privately owned technological corporation that also funds the local high school. The only way to succeed academically is to opt into TECH’s network, which grants societal privileges in exchange for constant surveillance and monitoring. And while student ambassador Lu—a nonbinary poet with anxiety—professes their unwavering faith in TECH, Sebas refuses to sacrifice his agency and privacy, rattling Lu and setting the stage for the teens’ slow-burning romance. Villasante spoke with PW about delving deeper into her own identity, branching out creatively, and organizing the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival.
The Grief Keeper came out in 2019. Why the large gap between your debut and sophomore novels?
Fireblooms was the second book in a two-book contract with Penguin Random House. But by the time things would have sort of normally gone into play for the next book, we were in the pandemic. A lot of things happened personally, but also in the publishing world, and the words for a second novel just weren’t coming out. I have two kids. They’re older now, but when they were going through the pandemic, it was so hard for them.
But during those six years between The Grief Keeper and Fireblooms, I was able to do a lot of things I didn’t know I could. One of those things was write short stories. I published five short stories in five anthologies. It really fed me as a creative person. It challenged me to write different things. I wrote horror for the first time.
You have this expectation, when you’re a new writer, that you’re supposed to have a new book come out every year, at least when you write for kids. I just don’t think that’s sustainable, and it’s not the right path for everyone. But Fireblooms was always on my mind. I wanted to talk about a utopia that really wasn’t, and how a place can seem like safety to one person and really restrictive to another.
Six years is a long time in publishing, but it was also a fertile time, and I honestly believe that the version of Fireblooms that’s coming out now is so much better for the time that it took to get there.
What surprised or challenged you when working on Fireblooms and the short story anthologies that differed from writing The Grief Keeper?
One of the earliest short stories I wrote was called “el viejo de la bolsa”—the old man with the bag—in Our Shadows Have Claws. It was a historical horror narrative that took place in Uruguay in 1977. My parents immigrated from Uruguay before I was born, and I’ve been going back there for years. When I was working on the anthology, I went to my mother and said, “What can you tell me? Like a myth?” And she’s like, “What do you mean? You mean like el viejo de la bolsa?” And as soon as she said that I was like, “Oh my God. I remember him.” That story let me go a little bit deeper into my own identity. I’ve not met many Uruguayan authors, so it always felt to me, when I was writing my characters, like, “Can I write a Uruguayan? Do people even know where this country is?” That story gave me permission to bring more of my identity into my characters. Authors have a lot of fears, we have a lot of hang-ups, and we’re not always clear on what we want to say and how we want to say it.
New Gault offers its residents free access to food, healthcare, and advanced technology; in exchange, citizens must compromise their own freedom and privacy. What influenced this premise?
I didn’t want to make a dystopian world where it was very clear that the city was bad, and the people were good. There’s nothing wrong with that setup, but I wanted to be a little bit more nuanced, and I wanted to really think about the ways that we compromise our freedoms and liberty every day that we probably don’t even think about.
Chris Rock has a bit in one of his comedy specials [Bigger & Blacker] where he says something like, “Don’t try to ban guns, just make the bullets really expensive.” And I read this incredible book by Dashka Slater called Accountable, which is about a very serious bullying event that happened in a school. I thought, “If words were really expensive, if words were so restricted that you had to be conscious of everything you said, what would that do?” In some ways, it would make people safe from hate speech. If speaking was so prohibitively expensive, it would make people be more thoughtful before they said something hateful.
Of course, this is within a capitalist construct. It’s about the money. New Gault is a very privileged society where kids don’t have to work because everything else is free. But when a character in Fireblooms runs through his word allowance for the month, he has to work in the cafeteria to earn more words. He experiences a loss in status. So that was sort of the genesis of that idea.
How does the work you do as a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival influence your projects?
The Latinx Kidlit Book Festival puts on a free virtual festival for kids in pre-K up to 12th grade. Last year, as part of that festival, we launched the Latinx Storytellers Conference. What we’re trying to do is get as many Latinx stories out into the world, and to lift up Latinx creators. In terms of representation in children’s book by ethnicity and race, books by Latinx authors make up something like 7% [of what is published] when, population-wise, we’re about 27%, so the representation just isn’t there. And with the political environment we’re in now, we need even more stories and more empathy. I want our Latinidad to be on all the shelves, because we want to represent the world as it is. So that’s why we do what we do.
As for how I do it, well... with a lot of cafecito. I have a day job and I’m a writer. I have a family. But this work is just as important to me, so I make time for it. It does also help me creatively. From a personal perspective, I got to interview Pam Muñoz Ryan at this past Latinx Storytellers Conference. I’ve been influenced by Pam’s work since Esperanza Rising, so to hear her talk about her entire journey, and to see her speak about how failure can challenge you to do more and be better was really inspiring. So I’m also doing it for selfish reasons, because I need to be connected to this community and to hear these stories and know that there is a place for me.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a short story called “Quinceañera House” that takes place in a town where, instead of having a fiesta for quinceañeras, the teens have to make it out of a haunted house that wants to kill them. That is their coming-of-age ritual. In this house are all the things that want to take a woman down, all things that want to hold her back, and all the spirits of the girls who never made it out of the house.
I talked to Vincent Tirado, who’s a master when it comes to horror, and they recommended some things to look at for someone like me who’s a huge baby when it comes to horror movies. I’ve been listening to podcasts and audio dramas like The Magnus Archives by Jonathan Sims and I’m reading Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays. I’m challenging myself to write more horror because I think that it has a lot to say about societal and intergenerational fears, and the things that we hide from ourselves. Horror is my next playground.
Fireblooms by Alexandra Villasante. Penguin/Paulsen, $19.99 Sept 30 ISBN 978-0-525-51405-3
