Just got news from Luisa Igloria, poet and director of  the MFA Creative Writing program at Old Dominion University. Barely South Review and ODU’s Creative Writing program are partnering on an inaugural short story contest. The Norton Girault Literary Prize offers publication in Barely South Review and $1,000 for the top selection. Best of all, it is being judged by the fabulous Latina author Cristina Garcia.

Here are the details: 

Remember: it’s a Feb 29 deadline. ¡Vamos! Dust off your mss, have courage and submit.

Thank you to the committee for such an honor. Of all the happy things that have come my way as a result of this book, this is one that I am so proud of.

Mil gracias, chicas…

awarded by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison

A big thank you to the Charlotte Zolotow Prize committee for selecting Tía Isa Wants a Car as a highly commended book for 2011.

I’m also happy to join in a standing ovation for this year’s big winner, Patrick McDonnell, whose nifty picture book, Me … Jane is the 15th annual winner of the prize. The Charlotte Zolotow Award recognizes outstanding writing in a picture book. Thanks to Patrick’s book, kids from birth to age seven can learn about the incredible life of Jane Goodall.

Still, that didn’t keep him from looking adorable (if grotesquely suntanned) with that apple in his mouth and his stitched up lids. And it didn’t keep my daughter – a life-long reader and Charlotte’s Web fan – from whispering “Wilbur” with more horror than if she’d been Fern Zuckerman herself. The result? She’s in college now, and not a shred of meat has passed her lips since that fateful day.

¡Que cosa mas grande! Especially at Christmas. Having no lechón (or as my Puerto Rican friends say, perníl) on Noche Buena is a travesty. Slapping down a piece of dill salmon is just not the same. The Christmas meal for Cubans is as traditional as turkey on American Thanksgiving. We eat roast pork, black beans over white rice, fried bananas, and yucca. For dessert we serve Spanish turrones (almond candies) and flan (recipe on my Oct 10 post). We also keep Pepcid handy.

Turrones - my favorite are the tooth-breaking alicantes

Sure, we’ve learned to add things around this menu – especially since most of us live in culturally blended families by now. But whether apple pie sits next to your frijoles or not — if you have a Cuban gene in your body, lechón is going to be on your holiday table.

So this week, with all due respect to Wilbur’s memory and to my vegetarian family members, I give you a link to one of my favorite holiday books, Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share Their Holiday Memories (Knopf, 1999) and the directions for preparing the lechón the way it was intended.

Lechón Asado

The secret is to marinade the pork for at least 2 days and to cook it on very low heat. You want soft, garlicky pork that falls off the bone.

Ingredientes

Fresh pork shoulder …about 6 – 7 pounds (not as horrifying to look at in the end.)

Marinade: 

1 head of garlic,  chopped (nope, not a typo)

1 – 2 T of olive oil

juice from 4 oranges, 4 lemons, and 1 lime

¼ c sherry

1 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp cumin

1 T salt

1 bay leaf, crushed

Instrucciones

Make slits all over the shoulder with a sharp knife.

Mix the orange, lemon, and lime juices with the sherry and set aside.

In a mortar, mash the garlic, olive oil and spices.

Insert your paste into the slits and rub remainder on the outside of the pork.

Pour liquid over the pork.

Wrap and let marinate for two days.

To cook:

Place roast in disposable pan and pour marinade over the top.

Cook on 325 degrees F until the roast reaches 180 degrees (very well done). Baste every hour or so.

If the meat starts to brown too much, tent with aluminum foil.

¡Buen provecho!

¡Ay que rico!

Okay, friends. Steven Spielberg has been in town shooting for his Abe Lincoln film. Unfortunately, that means he’s been too busy to make my book trailer. Ha!

So, instead, I offer you my humble, homemade effort. The Girl who Could Silence the Wind, is my young adult novel due from Candlewick in March 2012. I’m so excited to see this project finally come together. Of all my  novels, this is the one that I wrote and re-wrote to the point that I almost lost hope.

But here it is — at last!

If you’re curious about how to make one of these mini-movie ads for your own book projects, here’s how to get started on a Mac, using i-Movie or Garage Band. I recommend contacting Chris Cheng at SCBWI Australia for the specific, step-by-step directions on how to turn your laptop MAC into your own movie studio. (He gave a very worthwhile session at SCBWI a couple of years ago.)

In a nutshell, I did this one by creating a Keynote slide presentation (just like Powerpoint, really.) I exported  the slide show to QuickTime and then used the movie as the movie track in a Garage Band podcast. For sound effects and music, I browsed the library available on Garage Band. All in all, not fancy, pero bueno, it was pretty fun.

Thanks for watching, and please share this trailer with all your reading friends.

Con muchos cariños

Meg

“Plants are like beautiful women,” he explained in Spanish. “You have to neglect them a little to make them want to show themselves to you.”

Don’t worry. I didn’t buy a single plant from that imbecile.

Still, all these years later, I realize his silly theory might work just fine for blogs.

That’s because Marci Rich, blogger at Midlife Second Wife, selected my very often-neglected blog as one of her nominees for the Liebster Award. As far as I can tell, the Liebster is a love note-meets-chain-letter  for blogs. In getting this award, my blog was cheered on by Marci as one of her small time favorites (fewer than 200 followers) – and (best part) I get to pay it forward and pick 3 – 5 of my own favorite small blogs to announce. Like a lot of us, I read the larger blogs. A friend recently pointed me to Jane Friedman’s Being Human at Electric Speed, which is wonderful for writers. I also love Being Latino and Bicultural Mom, mostly for all the inside jokes and experiences that are shared. But this award is for the bitty blogs.

So, first and foremost, a big thanks to Marci Rich, for reading my blog and nominating it. And now….¡Atención señores! My favorites:

Gail Shepherd; Paradoxy 

Gail Shepherd and I worked briefly together as journalists in Florida, before either of us had turned to writing for children. Imagine our mutual surprise when we found each other making work for young people. Her blog is charming and full of great advice for writers in the trenches. If you’re in South Florida, especially, log in.

Gigi Amateau: If You Enjoyed Your Ride, Kiss Your Horse

I know nothing about horses, except that someone I admire loves them deeply. Still, that’s not why I am nominating Gigi Amateau’s blog. What I love about this blog is the expert way that Gig goes about building a community. Especially interesting are her interviews with people who are turning horse love into love for other people in the community.

Lucinda Whitehurst and Wilma Snyder: The Open Book Blog

Lucinda Whitehurst is a librarian extraordinaire, and she puts together this sweet quarterly newsletter and blog about children’s books with her mom, Wilma Snyder. It’s a mix of book reviews, author interviews, and cool updates on what a rock star librarian is doing. Lucinda would know. She is based in Richmond, VA, at St. Christopher’s School, and has served on the Caldecott Committee, among other nifty assignments.

Stacey Loscalzo:  Stacey Loscalzo’s Blog

Stacey is a one-woman encyclopedia of reading strategies — and a former teacher to my oldest daughter, who struggled terribly with learning. She is completely dedicated to unlocking even the most padlocked door to reading. She’s also a huge fan of children’s lit.  If you’re looking for ideas to spark your kid’s reading (backed up by experience and research), Stacey’s blog is a great place to start.

 Dawn McMullan:  Bring Back Dinner

Everyone should have a friend like Dawn McMullan. She travels to Africa to help victims of genocide, writes freelance for magazines and NPR, cheerfully accepts her children’s strange pet requests — and is devoted to food. For one year, she promised to have dinner with her family every night — all while educating her readers about Africa. Her blog is so readable and funny — what else could it be with a husband and two teenage sons in Dallas? She’s about to readjust the focus a bit, but I’d stay tuned. She never disappoints.

Congrats to my winners! Now it’s your turn to acknowledge the award and make your own selections. Please don’t forget to grab the Leibster button and feature it on your site.

Cariños…

These days I’m on the hunt for books at every age group that really dazzle me for their appeal for girls. (All suggestions welcome.) You might remember that I’m half the brains behind Girls of Summer with my friend, Gigi Amateau. We are spending this winter and spring discovering new writers and dreaming of what will make our Must Reads for 2012.

Vicky Smith at Kirkus recently posted a nifty list of best books for 2011, so naturally I got curious. Very helpful, as it’s divided by categories. I picked up Inside and Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai and The Fires Beneath the Sea by Lydia Millet on her recommendation.

Then, because I’m a browser, I grabbed How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr (Nat’l Book Award finalist for Story of a Girl) and Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace, which the Times of London compared to Philip Pullman’s work on Victorian life.

Finally, I took a drive to my closest indie bookstore, bbgb, where a team of design “elves” were making snowflakes and other store decorations. I picked up Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu. If you follow Shelf Awareness, you know that NPR’s BackSeat Book Club is reading it this month. Michele Norris will be doing an author/reader  segment on All Things Considered.

Who knows what I’ll love and what I won’t. But when I despair at the early nights of winter, I’ll be thinking, “ooh, let me read a while….”

Sweet fantasies one and all.

In all these years, though, I’ve never managed to escape the way I hoped. One thing or another (life? money? my lack of nerve?) always seemed to get in the way.

A haven for writers

But things are finally looking up, if on a modest scale.  On the spur of the moment, four friends and I — all writers — are heading to the gorgeous mountains of Virginia. The Porches is a rambling 1854 farmhouse on the James River run by authors Bill and Trudy Hale. It offers gorgeous grounds,  a private room, walking trails, WiFi, and a communal kitchen. That, and utter respect for a writer’s work. Our group’s mission:  three full days of writing, interrupted only by evening meals and (if one of us has her way) cocktails by the fire.

“Pack warm socks,” a friend told me. “And be prepared. You won’t want to leave. Ever.”

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to do something so simple and healthy as going on a writer’s retreat. I suppose I thought it would be too expensive (which I have discovered is untrue) or, more likely, that it was too indulgent to cut myself away from my life for a few days. There were all these other needs in our house, after all. Wasn’t I supposed to attend to them?

But now I’m asking a new question. If I don’t take good care of my writing life, who will? It’s a question every writer, whether published or aspiring, should tape to their bathroom mirror.

I have a January 1 deadline looming for edits of my 2013 YA release, Finding Yaqui Delgado. This is the exciting and exhausting roll-up-your sleeves stage. I’ll have to cut characters with the precision of a surgeon, or add new ones seamlessly.  I’ll need to read my words aloud to see how they sound. I’ll have to fix the ending. To get it done, I need quiet and I need time to think. And by think I don’t mean about what’s for dinner.

I’ve reached that stage where I’ve learned to stop apologizing for my creative side. It’s okay to feed the part of me that is no one’s wife or mother or friend or employee or volunteer. I need to be absolutely nothing except a writer in stretchy pants for a few days.

Is this indulgent? Maybe, but I don’t care. At long last, with my sweet family’s blessing, I’m not shy about  making a break for it. I’m running, folks —  hair flapping, arms in the air — to do what I love most. Write.

Meg’s next appearance:  Virginia Educational Media Association Conference, Thursday, Nov. 17, 6:30 pm, Library of Virginia