at once. the navajo have a word for this kind of balance and beauty. we are one with the universe was without a spiritual dimension to our work as conservationists, we are only working for ourselves, not the future and certainly not for future generations of all species. ..scussion on immigration. [inaudible conversations] [laughter] >> i think we'll go ahead and start. good morning, everyone. >> good morning.go will come. we attendees to use the sessional-- social media. thank you for joining us and thank you to the san antonio public library a and the southwt to school of art and craftft for sharing their space with us. a portion from the proceeds of

book sales benefit the san antonio public library foundation and direct after this a session our authors, natalia sylvester and lauren markham will sign in the barnes & noble book tent outside on a gust as street. this morning our session is entitled when you can't go home, the making of american lives. lauren markham is the author of the faraway brothers, too young migrants in the making of an american life. lauren markham is a writer based in berkeley california focusing on issuesn related to youth, migration and the environments. her work has appeared in outlets including vice, the new yorker.com. , the guardian and the virginia quarterly review where she is a contributing editor. for over a decade she has worked in the field of refugee resettlement and immigrant and education. natalia sylvester is the author

of, everyone knows you go home. she came to the united states at age four as a child she spent time in florida in the rio grande valley in texas before her family set down roots in miami or she received a ba in a creative writing at the university of miamif, a former magazine editor, natalia sylvester now works as a freelance writer in texas and as a faculty member at regent university. her articles have appeared in writer's digest, the american-statesman and on nbc latino.com.r her debut novel chasing the son was named the best debut book of 2014 and chosen as the book of the month by the national latino book club. please help me welcome natalia sylvester and lauren markham. [applause]. we want to start by introducingy the topic of these packs.

in 2008 the us department of justice board of immigration appeals created a precedence when it ruled young persons who are perceived to be affiliated with gangs did not constitute a knowledgeable social group under asylum law. many families save their country due to violence and many send their children when it's the only optionnl versus death. this phenomenon creates the terms we hear on the news, unaccompanied alien children, unaccompanied-- unaccompanied minors, child exodus. in the faraway brothers lauren market asks why is it our national headlines reduce the complexity of immigration to binary politics, keep them out or let the men, while her know all your code works seems to answer the questions about why immigrants flee their country, about the struggles they endure

and the challenges they face adapted to a new home.le she chronicles the jury as they make their way to california. in everyone knows you go home she asks who protects the invisible.ts he risked his life on the beast to make his home with him in the rio grande valley of texas. i want to start by asking our authors, what are the theories if an unaccompanied minor faces especially when they are nearing 18 years of age as is the case in both of these texts and lauren, you call 18 the line in the sand of life, so what kind of its come up for these migrants? >> welcome i think, you know,-- thank you for the question.

i think that if start long before young people come into the united states, really immigrant comes into the united states. for the young people i'm writing about it's very similar case to eduardo, the protagonist. these are young people who are traveling alone from their home country crossing into the united states without papers and not in the custody of their parents and the that is what the government calls unaccompanied minors. border patrol likes to call them judy for short. the series of if starts back home. if i leave home where will i go? if i leave home, who will take care of me? if i leave home how will i pay for the journey and i take out a debt am i putting my family at risk for taking out that kind of money? what will happen to me along the way? will protect me and then once

they come into the united states if they are apprehended which is a key difference in what happens at first in my book and eduardo's case in natalia sylvester's book. if a young person is apprehended , which the two young men i write about our, they are put into a the sort of praline d failing immigration system they are put into detention and placed immediately into deportation proceedingss, so thy have to figure out how to fight their case, how to fight their case without a lawyer. they are not provided lawyers-- in immigration court you aren't provided lawyers by the us f so you have to find a lawyer by yourself which is challenging especially if you're in detention and especially if you are young person trying to figure out a navigate things, so that they with the 18-year old line in qualifies for certain things if you're under 18 that you don't the day youn turn 18.

for example, special immigrant is one of those that depending on the state you have to apply for that status before your 18th birthday. the other thing is that if you are detained as a young person under the age of 18 and you are still in detention on your 18th birthday there are many cases that you are in al youth detention facility in border patrol comes then picks you up on your 18th birthday so your birthday present issue are taken to an adult detention facility and you have fewer legal protections and fewer legal recourse is based on the fact that yesterday i was 17 and today i'm 18. >> i don't know what else toer d to that other than like for me when i was writing about my character i had done that research and done-- learned a lot about the process and one thing that struck me was the way the conversation went when i interviewed some immigration lawyers. that if really kept coming up and it was more like well if he

went through these kind of situationse, then he might have more options. what it felt like is that the more you suffered the more options you have, buthe also the suffering needed to be wrapped up in this quantifiable package, which so often it's not. in order for this to be able to be presented in court and to have a chance c and that really struck me as such a very sad away to look at that experience of a person, that we really-- that you can say that one person is more deserving than another based on like well, was their father a drug addict or at a dead, where they abusive like all these checkmarks made throughout the process and so i really just wanted to like for me i'm a fiction writer and i also wanted to be able to look beyond the paperwork and just see the person and all the

different experiences they are bringing and what-- look at the person as a whole and not just their suffering, but the joy that we all experience, triumph, survival because i do think that like the way our system works now unlike even just the national conversation is very much focused on the suffering and trauma, which is obviously a large part of it, but when we talk about the real story here there are so much-- they are so much more rich than that and i feel like they deserve to be heard in their complexity and humility-- humanity. >> to add to that, one of the things that was so compelling about eduardo's character and everyone knows you go home is how especially to beginning his sort of trauma and challenging and the experiences he has gone through t so to shut him on checking down in the away the immigration system not only does it reduce people to this sort of like the out almost a numeric

calculation of their suffering, but requiresre you to tell your story of suffering and in many cases like again and again and again and that is incredibly challenging for people who experience adverse index of trauma and especially young people who are not-- don't feel safe in their past experience or -- an honorable. >> great. in both of these stories secrets that the families hold are really important to the reasons for their migration. and in some cases the families themselves hurt each other. the uncle for instance in "the faraway brothers" threat to kill his nephew because someone has taken down history on his property and ernesto has to

leave because of that, but there are so me secrets that families keep, how does it create a narrative when there is so many missing pieces to a family's life when they have to leave their land, their language and keep these secrets. had he keep piece that togethert for both fiction and nonfiction? >> for me as t a fiction writer that was one of the challenges because i remember myem first draft because my characters had some me secrets they are keeping from one another. on the side of the parents enter a different generations it's really out of protection and love and yet what is that mean about, you know does that mean the book was like they are not talking enough like things havek two still happen and sober me the challenge was looking beyond the-- i just felt like well, we

are not only defined by the secrets we keep. we are also defined by the things we do even as we hold them in their secrets and lives in people i know and love-- i know i will never know all their secrets and i think a lot of the family members who aren't trying to-- they don't want to take credit for the sacrifices they madeor for me and my sister in order to bring us here, so i realize i could never actually fully acknowledge everything they sacrifice because i willl always know because part of them continue to protect me is keeping those secrets and is so for me the story was not necessarily about building up to this revelation of the secrets. it was really more about what happens when the silence lingers and we kind of end up intersecting and crossing these pass because i think of our lives as like these paths in

some way they all come to life in another as they don't, but especially because i was also looking at the intersection between the spiritual world and life and death t, i think that afforded me a little bit more space to think well, are there things we will simply carry with us into death and whates does tt mean to not know. i think sometimes the not knowing was the more hurtful part, but then how do you come to terms with what pain to his also what's protecting you and that became a really driving factor for me. >> yeah, i think secrets is a mechanism and make the of protection indefinitely that is in the family i was writing about and although sort of corollary people i spoke to either who i interviewed once had a you know detention center -- sorry a shelter or at a

detention center for young gang membersg in el salvador. does secrets like i'm protecting my family so i'm not telling them this thing or i don't want my dad to know this is happening because i don't want him to know i was in a gang or i don't want my brother to know that xyz happened because then he will think less of me l like that wa- the secret keeping, the protection, but i also signed sometimes these are twin like a lot of secret-- secret keeping out of shame and one of the things for me that was most vexing about this was as a nonfiction writer it was my job to figure out like what had motivated and kind of cause like what was the secretce sequence f events and what was the internal reality that will cause these two young men to-- they were identical twin but-- brothers and one findshe on the wrong si.

his uncle in town is protected by the gangs and hee has to fuly overnight and then the 20 brother realizes because he looks exactly like his twin and there's a price on his twins had he also has to travel, so my drop is to figure out what with the circumstances even before these young peoplese-- that-- wt was their motivation, what was their internal reality, external reality that kind of lead up to this rupture in their lives where they had to make this move? what were the conditions in el salvador? what was the us role like i had to go way way way back in way deep into the characters and individual people's decision to kind of understand that moment and everything that happened and after work when people are keeping secrets-- [inaudible] one example is that the sister and i think we will talk more about that later, but the sister that stayed back home is a reallywh important character in

the book and she had her second kider with someone she met and i said how did youou meet him and she said oh, it was so weird one day he called h and it was the wrong number and we just a started talking and he lived a couple hours away and decided to meet up one day and we liked the sound of each other's voices and then like we started a relationship and had a baby. i was like that's interesting over time that's actually know what happened out-- but all. she's in her-- like send her number into a tv show in el salvador almost like a craigslist like online like chat forum thing, but on tv so you can send in your information and she said something liken i'm looking for friendship here's my number and there's like this tickertape that goes underneath like the talkshow or whatever.

so, she started getting all these calls and that's how she met this guy, but she never told her family that. she didn't want anyone to know because it was out of this o lie loneliness and shame of her loneliness and i almost picture her-- was the movie? bonnie and clyde, you know at the beginning. bonnie is like sort of lonely and bored in this house in the middle of nowhere and she's just like dying for action and then like clyde comes into town and they start robbing people. she had that similar likee, she was just on a fraction in her life andon dying to be seen to e connected to peoplet, but that was shameful her her own loneliness. she wouldn't tell people like that. that's one example of like a thousandndts that secrets are complicated when you are trying to write a book of truth because you will never, ever, ever know all of the secrets that people-- even your closest loved ones

also as a nonfiction writer it's their job to understand as much as possible. >> in both of your books, the migrants create relationships with us-born members of their family or friends and what kind of dynamics are there in, you know, both people from the same ethnicity, but yet such a different upbringings. lauren markham, knowing your book isabella and her husband have different backgrounds and talk about howow you don'ton understand how this came because your family wasn't a migrant family and lauren, in yours, they date young women who are us-born and they do findot lotsf commonalities, but then there are lots of things that the other doesn't understand, so how

do they create those relationships? >> so, my book begins on the day of the dead, which is when they are married and that's the day that his father who is dead, no one will talk to him because they been estranged for so long. except for isabella and they developed a special bond. throughout the process of the book you learn that isabelea is actually like sixth generation texan and is so like you are mentioning her and his mother and father crossed the border before he was born. they have these very different experiences and yet for example isabel is often asked where you from and when she says texas, it's like yes, but where you really from because it she still looks a certain way the people feel like that's not-- must mean you are from somewhere else.

but, i think that one of the things i was trying to convey is that there are different ways we connect to our roots. for example, isabel at the beginning of the book is not entirely like-- she doesn't really celebrate day of the dead in the way that most people do t and assurance to connect to it more threat the process of the book as she understands the significance of it and as she tries to beor more active about honoring her loved ones who have passed and i think that was something that was very important to me to say like yes, we have been hearing different we have different ways of staying connected to our roots, but also claiming our space here the in between places became really important to me as well he comes like that idea of where are you from or that idea of if you are from here, but then when you go home or if you don't then people there ask you where you are from and you never seem to quite fit in.

to me, i just like well, could this in between also be a space that's okay that we claim as our own because there is something very unique about the latino immigrant experience in the life that we make here in the us like that for example me as someone born-- like when i go back i know i don't have the same experience. does that make the less peruvian -- peruvian? actually, it's not like relf-and-half kind of thing, ot's actually i am a whole person and these are both whole parts of my identity. i don't know if that explains. >> yeah, you know, i think it's a case of the twins anyway and in addition to writing i work st a high school for immigrant youth in oakland,, california, o i see this among a lot of

students that sometimes what they are looking forel in their relationships is an exit strategyte or, you know moment o moment from like the struggles in the secrets a in the kind of trauma that they been experiencing and i think for these young men a lot of the relationships they made were like temporary kind ofte escape hatches or exit strategies from what they were experiencing and they were trying to just feel like you know, normal kids. that's what they were looking for their relationships. one of the things that struck me in the sense and it ended up being a theme in the book that we took a very ill-fated camping trip, like backpacking trip with some students and one of the twins was on the trip and a couple of kids with sneak away and smoke cigarettes and there was this moment and i guess full disclosure i'm talking about

being a nonfiction writer full disclosure california still and at this moment was very muchch n a state of drought and we found out the skits were sneaking a way to smoke and we were so terrified of burning down the entirety of california that we decided if these kids are going to smoke anyway we would make a plan and i would go and supervise to make sure they were like about to burn us all down, but there was this really interesting encounter between a young man from iraq who came as a refugee and ernesto one of the main characters in my book where they were actually connecting from like f wildly different lie experiences, backgrounds, geographies, reasons for coming were different, but they had this moment of sort of sharing like you, essentially we were both forced outhh. we both didn't want to leave home and we both were in danger and they had to. it was really kind of-- i know

it's happening through translation because he spoke are book and there were someone else they're translating into spanish and that was an interesting momentnt and i think especially for the zen people. they are so much better at adults than-- at finding commonalities and moments of connection. >> thank you. in each of these texts that unaccompanied minors make several attempts to reclaim their lives and they do so with so much trauma and i don't know if it's called ptsd in this case, but lots of dreams that wake-up ernesto and he screams waking up his 20 night. i'm wondering how do the characters make sense of those dreams and natalia, in yours it's not just-- well, it could be perceived as that, the spirit

is visible to only some and others don't see itso, so how important is it for them to talk about these of spirits or dreams that come up as part of their healing? >> so, in my book even though it's told an alternate points of view we mostly see eduardo through others and especially is about and she so badly wants to know like what he's been through and she wants to bee able to be there for him in that moment where he like might event or begin to heal, not realizing that he needs to do that on his own terms. in ways he does like and for him -- to me it was important to recognize the resilience in him because i do think that youth are more resilient than we give them credit for especially when they are placed in a situation where there innocents in their childhood is taken and if so

they are already in a place where they have to grow up and they're having to become what we would think of as like stronger versionser, you know more mature versions of themselves and yet they are still very much like eduardo very much wanted these very simple things. he was excited to go to homecoming. he was excited to talk to a girl and have her birthday party. i just wanted for his healing to be on his own terms, so we do learn threat the process of the book that he has in his ways dealt, but not the weightot isal necessarily pictured and not the way she would've wanted. maybe in a way that doesn't involve her at all, but her role maybe was to allow it, you know give him the space to do so. i think that space was really important.

>> i was just going to say vehemently agree that not only i think it was wonderfully done and-- in your book this kind of healing on people's own in terms, but working with young people every day who come from over 34 countries, work with 400 students every year i that it is on their own terms. that's just a fact that is how people heal and what was actually really compelling to mt and sort of why-- one of the reasons i ended up-- you know, these twins did not have like the most horrible story, one of the most interesting of all the .tories i've ever heard it wasn't the most harrowing. it wasn't the most sensational like it wasn't this sort of facts of the story that a lot of journalists tend to like drool over. i have these crazy things happen

, which is something i always try to check in myself and resist, but what was compelling to me about these two young mens is that they were identical. they looked at the same. there are still days where i uin't tell them apart even though i know them quite well. every now and then i will see them and confuse one of them or see a picture and won't be able to tell. they had the most identical life they could have. they grew up in a small sheltered town in rural el salvador. they came from the same parents, same symptom-- siblings pick they were inseparable, did everything together and yet they had such different relationships to el salvador, to their home, to what happened to them, to why they had to leave and whether they wanted to go back. they had different relationships to california, to their new home, to their identity of being a newly arrived immigrants in oakland, different things they

wanted to do and they had wildly different reactions to the kind of grief and loss and trauma that they experienced on the road and so they had to deal with that really differently and what happened at different times being each one of them was sort of having a kind of-- you know, both of them in different ways would bury their pain and suffering and event it would bubble up in these really different manifestations. one of them took to getting compulsively piercings. like you just pierce and that was like-- and he was cutting. the mechanism he had for dealing with his pain took another oned sort of became a temporary alcoholic for a while. they just-- the ways that they dealt with their pain and grief and then the way they began tohe heal were completely on their

own in terms. >> i really like what you said and iha notice that your book ws that like you said yes, these are not the most extreme cases and i appreciated that because it's also something i was trying to do with the characters in my book is thatat often times the y the conversation around immigration goes especially now, it stays within these two extremes. on the one hand it seeks to vilify immigrants and they use these extreme cases of criminals.

i felt the pressure to overperform in order to make the sacrifices that my parents had >> i was an honorable student in kindergarten, just to learn the language. i'm ready for this. i have this little card with -- i have no keys and says, honorable student. i i got a free burger king fries. on the one hand that pressure is very -- it's very real about comes from a source of love, of wanting to honor your parents and knowing that they wanted

what was best for you. the outside pressure of actually being, like, having to validate my existence is much more painful, and i don't -- i didn't want to feel like i'm making a chase to sun, here's how much my character was been through and here's why you should see them as human. to me they already were and i didn't want to have to put them through more pain than their experience has already carried in order for a reader to think that they're human. i think when we talk about this humanization of immigrants i feel we should be putting that task on is those who seek to dehumanize them. why don't they show their humanity by not putting the burden of proof on us. >> and i could not agree with that more. people saw all the time, gosh,

those boys you write about, made in horrible decision and its was like, yeah, they did make some bad decisions, and i gate lot of questions like why did you choose to portray them in this way, that sort of shows them kind of like warts and all. tell us about the decision. first, i'm a nonfiction writer so i portrayed them as they are and i'm like, have you ever met teenaged boys ever? anywhere on earth? this -- you know, why should be holding these young men to different starts, because they have to prove it to us, that the laws should protect them or they have to prove tout us that even though the laws protect them, they're worth it? that's an absurd double standard that we could not agree more we put on immigrants all the time. in very kind of overt ways and also in really subtle, kind of microaggressive ways as well. >> i think often what a

privilege it most have been to grow up having a perfectly ordinary life and not having to justify your desire to have it. i just -- there's so many of us who think, okay, so, -- again, it has to be quantified somehow and just very sad. >> that's like any -- that's such a losing -- if you're always trying to justify your existence you're right to be there, what an exhausting and never-ending battle. >> yes. >> especially if you're in fiction -- as a fiction writer you have to choose what decisions these characters make, and for me a lot of the pressure came when you have a character who maybe isn't a good person, and will it be -- will that be used as the example, right? to then say, see, look what they're doing, look how bad they are, and that's an unfair burden for anyone to carry because why

is it that we have to then through our work represent an entire community when what we're trying to do is get so many voices out there that you can see how rich and how much more complexity is. i'm just more interested in making sure all the characters get to show their truth, and hopefully people will be able to see that we all share these common -- the things we snare common as well as the different opportunities we weren't afforded. >> one thing i was taken with reading both of these is the influence of technology on their lives. they still wanted to posteriors something on facebook and i'm thing, you, it's the same experience. >> that actually was one of the main reporting tools i used, was instagram and facebook because there's a record, and a lot of

times these young men were, i'd say, tell me about that or what was that like how did that feel. it would be like, good. bad. i don't know. not because they didn't have completely rich interior worlds. of course they did. but communicating those was uncomfortable and and challenging. it was like they're processing their own stuff on their own terms. they were totally open the book but just the process was challenging, show to affect could good on -- never guessed this but could go on instagram and they were emoting more on instagram and facebook. they would say today is a sad day because of this and this and this. i could ask them about that and also a record of their emotions they were much more comfortable in that ritual space than they were in real life. >> right. and how much danger that brought , too, for them posting

when they were going leave and that creates a trail for somebody to follow them. and both cases the young man -- the possibility of them driving and maybe getting a tick, all the dangers that presents. >> in both of the works, women have to negotiate their agency. they create the relationships in their family, try to stabilize them and deal with the way the income works in the faraway brothers, the sister of the twins has to try to get back the money, the huge debt, that their family has gotten into because they wade for their two sons to leave, and in everyone knows you go home, they have such huge

stakes? what happens in the relationships of their lives, and i know that lauren, you also wrote about the increase in the number of young women who are leaving el salvador and making the journey, and in both books, the women recognized that when they travel over the bored, their lives are risked in many different ways versus men who travel that border. can you tell us about how you wanted to write these women and what they have to negotiate. >> i think the word that sticks out to me the most, what you were talking about, is stability. i think of stability is such an incredible force, and yet is invisible. you don't notice it until it's gone. to me, looking back at the why

my childel childhood -- i realize the force was helding to and per pep waited by my care and did indicated the back to her because even though my parents both made very different sacrifices, the one my mom made was to give us that stability, the emotional stability to keep us nurtured to keep -- like, even like a checkbook balanced to keep us navigating the immigration system back and forth, checking in the mail, filling out forms and realizing this was wrong or this after knew won't work and we need to find a new one 0, or realizing today we have to drive to the embassy again to get these papers. just always, always there, always carrying it. and i always -- i noticed it in some ways and then obviously didn't -- as you get older you notice it in very different ways ump think the important thing to me, just it became important for me to just see her and see the

experience ofs like here, and not let it get over shadowed by these -- the more obvious accomplishments of, like -- yes, my father also worked and he started over from scratch, and he had to build his new career after learning the language and taking tests and getting resetter identified as a physician and everything, and i value that and i think it was time to reclaim the value that my mother brought as well, and especially as far toes -- as far as the agency of the characters a lot of the women go through very hard things in the book, and yet they also -- i firmly believe that we are more than the traumas we carry, and i wanted to be able to see all of them, not just, like, the aftermath of these experiences, but to see, well, then, what

else is happening to them and what are they doing with that experience? how much does it really -- how many does it play a role and what other ways is it me imposing my own gaze and saying what but those and maybe they're trike to focus on other sources of joy. so it's a constant -- it becomes very complicate but something that -- like, at wasn't point i had to change change the name of the character and i learned the new name i had chosen means warrior, and i thought, well, that's so weird, very fitting because she is a warrior. she is fighting all these battles that maybe others don't see, but became important for me to see them. >> the issue of imposing your own gaze on your characters is real in the limit fiction i have written, and certainfully nonfiction when you're writing but experiences or communities

your not from. maresela became a significant character book and that was not the initial plan. when i fir met here, i was very confused by her. my gaze was on these two young men, and everything they had experience and struggling with. two young men in oakland, 17, trying to find a lawyer and living through horrible things, been detained, far from their family, one is having bad dreams, and they had all this pressure, luke they owed this money and missed their families and living with their old-under brother who was really sweet guy, and not -- he was 24 and not that equipped to deal with, like, two -- who among us if to 17-year-old showed up on your doorstep it's like, oh, great,

i'm ready for this. the same thing that happened in your book, too. surprise, you have two twin brothers are here. so, i -- i sense from her when i was down in el salvador, sometimes i was talking to her on the phone and then when i was there she choose much resentment toward her brothers. what is this? she is like, when are they going to send the money? what are they doing? why are they in school? shouldn't be in school. they need to get jobs and i was like whoa. this is intense. where is her compassion for her brothers, and it's because my gaze was so trained on them, i wasn't seeing at all the kind of mess they had left her in, and this isn't to put a thumb on the scale of either. he point is both in the united states and in el salvador the twin brothers and the brother wilbur, who is their guardian, and the parents and everyone had

their own reality and challenges in this messy situation, which is to say -- i think too often we focus on immigration stories as this is the thing that starts when someone steps across the line, and then the immigration story tends to be like what is happening in the united states, burt it's like -- the world keeps going. and the people that were left behind are still behind, and that was a real -- it's like i knew that intellectually, but she taught me a lot about that in trying to understand her world and her challenges. that kind of opened up this, i think, important narrative aspect of the book which is i need be going back and forth between el salvador and the united states and also within myself, sort of a double compassion, that both people are right and both people are wrong about the other person, and the amount that was on her shoulders because her brothers left, was tremendous.

at a certain point they owed over $22,000, the parents were older, the boyfriend wasn't as solid as a guy she hopes and imagined. and meanwhile from her perspective, her twins are living the high life and post pictures on instagram of their new nike shoes. she knows they cost way more money than we have seen. so the amount of pressure on her was tremendous and that dead lead know write an article for a magazine called "pacific standard" about the plight and faith of young women inle el el salvador and young women are dying and more and more people are joining gangs and i don't -- in the context -- in the

communities where gang violence is sort of really the stranglehold on everyone, and all the activities that go on in a town. those are the options. and she is the first one to really teach me about that. >> natalia in your book, writing but omar as a spirit who appears on the day of the dead, seems like such a challenge to write about because he is -- i don't know if to use the word transparent -- invisible. how did you write bus something to difficult? create a character who is present to only some and have you had a lot of feedback about the popularity of the day of the dead? >> uh-huh. yeah. so, the book actually began with

him. he was the force that brought even just everything that came after to -- i think a lot about the difference between the spark and the idea of a book and then what propels it to continue, as you write it, because it's full of ups and downs. i realized partly through that, the original premise i had just simply, here is a man and woman who are married on the day of the dead and here is the spirit who comes and what if he is turned away? except for by one person 'he more i was writing this, and omar's voice came clearly to me. someone who actually can be funny and white and dry, and he -- even though he is dead his an incredibly joyful character, and i realize that, yes, there's a lot of death in the book but there's also a lot of life, and for me that's the duality.

one doesn't exist without the other so why write a book but death without life or pain without joy. so i wanted to really incorporate all that. the more i thought about it, in writing omar and writing him crossing over from the spirit world into the land of the living, i realized this is an immigration story and an immigration story that i feel like i've carried around any whole life, trying to make sense of and it's all these different experience, not only in my own life but of people who i love, people who have shared their stories with me over the years, people in my community, and so much of it became -- it was two yes that was driving it, because a., omar left his family and abandoned them despite really loving them. and for me, the question i'd also wonders was, how did my

parents leave the country they knew and loved and yet they decided to leave. so what is it that makes you leave someone or something that you love so deeply? so that was the question i was trying to answer through omar and his love story between him and alda. the other question was what happens once you have made this really difficult journey and you arrive and you're turned away. and i realized, again, it was about the immigrants, it and was -- like, how is it that we can turn so many away after everything they've been through, and the other thing that became important to -- i wanted to be very conscious of it -- was the idea that, yes, day of the days is suddenly becoming this trendy thing to those who are not part of the culture, and even though,

like in peru, we celebrate day of the dead. i have not celebrated it but have known about it. what i really wanted to focus on, at least, was the spirit of the holiday as in refusing to forget, honoring the memory of your loved ones who have passed. to me the idea of refusing to forget translated not to just refusing to forget your loved ones but refusing to forget a history that maybe a lot of people would like to us forget, and a history of violence, a history of also joy, a history of rewriting and actually pretending that a lot of things didn't happen, and so for me the -- what became important to me about the spirit of the dead was honoring that idea of this is about remembrance and holding on to something that others

might say, just let it go. >> these texts intersection so much in all of the circumstances that affect mights. we'd like to allow the audience to ask questions so we have about a little less than ten minutes so we'll take questions. >> when you first started -- >> one moment, we are going to wait for a microphone. >> nationwide question -- question. >> when you first started write being was there something you compelled you that you had to write about it? just wondering how was nat for you. >> yeah. both. i would say. i write some fiction, and i also write nonfiction. i have a -- writing anything helps me to better understand it for myself, like it's an

exercise for myself and writing nonfiction i got into journalism, you can tell i don't wear that as comfortably sometimes but i think that what journalism -- i figure out when i go into journalism through the back door is that journalism is a way to write about and learn about things -- geopolitical dynamics, and human experience that felt vital and important and that i wanted to understand sort of like as a human being and then to try to make sense of that for readers. i've been reporting and writing but unaccompanied minor and the rise in this population for a couple of years, and then one day i was sitting at my desk and a friend and colleague of mine said we have to do something but all these kids who -- of ours who have upcoming court dates.

i had been reporting on this issue in texas and i was in the central valley and california and right under my nose, all of these young people were at this school i work at four days a week. so there was this convergence and felt vital to understand that. and listening and reading in the news in the sum of summer of 2014 but unaccompanied minors. none of that seemed to land. none of it seemed to go deep in a way that i had -- that felt reflective of the young people i'd spoken to. these news reports, this isn't the story. i felt like a responsibility. >> i would say it's -- to me it's often both. on the one hand i -- yeah, all writers have something to say but there's sometimes when you don't know what is compelling you and the questions you're asking as you write reveal what you're trying to say even when they don't give you direct

answers. for me, like, one of my first writing teachers would say there's a story behind the story and for me me story behind the story was the story of the people i had known and love and grown up with. so that's what really drove me as i wrote, just trying to honor those experiences in a way that i hopes -- that in a way that actually brought me joy because i know this might sound surprising in the book that is quite about agency and a quite of lot of death -- rick experiences and felt like what a privilege to be able to see each of these characters with all that they bring, not just their pain. so, yes, it's like their humor and dreams and as separations as

and triumphs. so, that's really -- i'm hopal that answers you question. >> the joy that was true for me, too, that it was joyful and felt very much like a privilege to spend time with these people in real life and try to make -- bring them as true as i had experienced them as much is a possibly could on the page. >> we have a question here in the third row from the front. >> thank you, first i want to thank this panel for a wonderful, interesting session this morning, and i-we heard from a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer, and what interested me is one thing in which the line between desk and nonfiction, and i don't think -- i wonder if you might comment on

that. does the fiction writer have more liberty, more freedom, or not? and does the -- and on the other side does the nonfiction writer -- you're always a writer. you're always dealing with those so-called real people. so thank you. >> uh-huh. >> so, i have a background in journalism and fix. i was studying both while i was in college and she enter six fascinating. when you think of nonfiction, and even journalism, the thing tech but often is who is writing it and what is the gaze and what their things getting lost in between, because who -- you have thirds the phrase that history its within by the victors. so me it's like, what are the voice not being -- that are getting lost in this

conversation or not being rightfully amplified or being heard, and i think in that way, what i love so much but fiction is it feels truer. even when you don't have access to facts as they're printed to you because the facts that as a journalist i got access to, they're limited in so many ways about, like, -- yet i could see the gap. when i read -- every time i read a newspaper article, every time a read history book, i say we're learning you but this but where are the voices in the story that got lost and i think of that in my own family history and my own ancestors to's and that's why this idea of a spirit and the secrets you carry from generation to generation, was so -- resonates so much with me because there are so many stories of generation that get

lost or not heard and yet we feel them. i look in the mirror and can see the traces of my roots and, yes, i have european roots and also have indigenous roots and where are those stories and names? i feel with fiction, i still have a responsibility for the truth and i still heavily research everything but i also feel like i have responsibility to acknowledge and hopefully honor all that still survives in me that isn't being amplified nearly as much, and to kind of row claim those stories and this names even if i don't know all the details. my job is to imagine and to listen and to hopefully bring that out. >> well, we'll end with lauren's response to this question as we near the end of our session. >> thanks. i agree with all of that. a friend of mine, molly, wrote a

beautiful book of poems where she is imagining these -- it's per poems are called the virginia colony for the epileptics epileptics and the fiorinale minded and is imagining the disabled people in the 30s and 40s and 50s who were institutionalized and essentially sterilized, and she is imagining those experiences me and did a ton of research for this book. she is a poet and writing poems but they feel when you read those poems as though they're almost journalistic documents enthough they're -- she talks about. he pathetic leaps and i see that in poetry and fix the texas i write, that in certain ways it is more -- in certain ways you're dropping deeper into truth because you're able to kind of exist in a rounder

reality that isn't confined by the facts or in the case of nonfiction, the facts you can find. i'm only allowed to write but the thing is know. so if i don't know what color the couch is, i can't say what color it is. so you're confinedded be the truth and the truth you can figure out. so there's a real dynamic interplay between nonfiction and fix and these stories kind of making meaning of people's experience. i will say there's something wonderful but nonfiction, but the confines. when i sit down to write fix and anything is possible, it's a terrifying at best. with this i can stick to what is true. but i just want to say i thing sometimes the truest stuff i read is actually fiction or poetry. >> please help me thank our authors who, lauren mark harm ad

natalia sylvester. >> and a wonderful moderator. >> we invite you to follow our authors to barnes & noble book tent and that is on augusta. >> thank you. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you: >> this an exciting last 30 minutes or an hour or so. it's the transition is always kind of a mixed time. we hate to see our great leaders go and welcome to see our new leaders come, so we're all grateful for what we