Author addresses Friends of the Library
Approximately 35 people visited the Elks Club Friday afternoon to hear local author Marta Gibbons, aka Marta Elva, discuss her first novel, “American TumbleWeeds,” as a part of the Friends of the Pine Island Library, Meet the Author Series.
Elva and her husband, Michael, recently returned from their second book tour that took them through New Mexico and Texas to promote the novel. One of the highlights of the tour, she said, was speaking at two locations of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and Las Cruses. Elva was also the featured lecturer at the University of Texas El Paso, UTEP, which was sponsored by Chicano Studies, the Tumblewords Project and the Department of Creative Writing.
“American Tumbleweeds” is part fiction, part autobiography, and is about a bi-cultural Mexican-American family learning to live between Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas – a distance of only 6 miles but culturally world’s apart. The story is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl named Inez.
Born in Mexico and raised in the U.S., Elva’s personal insight brings an inside perspective to issues facing all Ameri-cans today.
“I’d like to share my writing process and part of the novel at the same time,” Elva said. “To me writing is like any art form. Most art is left to interpretation and those of us who create prefer that the reader interpret the book.
“The one thing I did develop during the book tour is a superstition,” Elva said. “I wear the same outfit when I speak so when you go to the YouTube videos and wonder why I’m wearing the same outfit?”
Many people want to know what the inspiration was for Elva’s novel?
“For people like me, I know where I belong,” Elva said. “My blood and genes are Mexican but my heart and mindset is American and therefore I am Mexican-American. When I was a child I had no concept about countries’ boundaries. Children just want to be among the people who want them.
“My intent actually was to use the relationship between the two factions of the family as a metaphor for the relationship between the United States and Mexico, which my book describes as a love-hate ambivalence about mutual need and recrimination,” Elva said.
Ultimately “American Tumbleweeds” is about families and Elva’s publisher may have put it best when she said, “‘American Tumbleweeds’ captures poignantly the growing pains of a young girl and of all immigrants whose dual cultural identities lend them both strength and strife. From Amalia, the matriarchal grandmother, to Inez, woman-child of the 1960s, these ‘American tumbleweeds’ portray every family: loving and clinging, wounding each other deeply while comforting each other in the soul-deep ways that only families can reach.”
“American Tumbleweeds” is available from Amazon.com and other online sources.