A Q&A with Ashley Hope Pérez, author of “What Can’t Wait”

On the brink of graduating high school, Marisa must make some tough decisions. Should she stay close to her family, marry a nice boy and get a job at the local grocery store? Or should she go off to college to study engineering at The University of Texas at Austin? Caught at the crossroads, Marisa must decide whether she has what it takes to break free and follow her dreams.

Inspired by her teaching experience at Chávez High School in Houston – where many of her students faced similar challenges – Ashely Hope Pérez tells the story of Marisa’s struggle in her debut young adult novel What Can’t Wait. She was kind enough to “sit down” with Chick Lit Café to talk about her passion for teaching, tips for aspiring novelists, her vampire literature class, and what’s up next!

 Welcome Ashley! Tell us about yourself. Have you always dreamed of becoming a writer?

Right now, in addition to writing, my jobs include LOTS of reading for my Ph.D. exams in comparative literature this May, being mom to an active 9-month-old little boy, teaching a course on women writers of the Caribbean, and getting the word out about “What Can’t Wait” my new YA novel. Past lives include work as a bilingual literacy tutor and Montessori teacher and several years teaching high-school English in southeast Houston. I also love to exercise and bake cookies, hobbies that cancel each other out and make me happy.

Writing has always been part of my life in important ways, but I used to get paralyzed by a fear of inadequacy and a worry that I’d never be able to write again. I only began to think of myself as an author once I started writing for teens, and I attribute the successful completion of two novels, What Can’t Wait plus my next novel, also coming out with Carolrhoda Lab) to the fact that my students gave me a sense of urgency about writing that was more powerful than my fears.

What inspired you to write about a teenage girl struggling to carve her own path in life while dealing with a family that expects her to stay close to home?

My students, my students, my students. Marisa isn’t based on any one student, but so many of the circumstances my students faced influenced the world Marisa finds herself in. I wanted to show that, for many teens, using education as a means of advancement also requires tough decisions and scary compromises. Teens like Marisa (and many of my students) deserve lots of credit for having the courage to find ways to maintain connection to family while nevertheless forging their own path. I wanted to honor this reality with my book, which is why it’s dedicated to my Chávez students.

How have your students responded to this book?

From the beginning, they were my biggest supporters and my first readers. One student wrote me an amazing letter (which I still have) telling me how important the book was to him—and that it was one of two books he read from start to finish. Reading that letter, I knew that my book had found a reader for whom it mattered and that—if I persisted—it could find many more.

When I write, I still think of my students, and having a clear sense of audience is a huge help to me. It’s one of the things I like best about writing YA literature.

What do you hope your readers will take away from this story?

Oh, so many things. That you can live your own life without forgetting to take care of the people you love. That you can’t be your best self for others if you aren’t taking care of your dreams. That keeping promises—especially to yourself—is really hard work. That family can be a surprising ally. That it’s always scary to step out into the unknown, but sometimes it’s worth it.

Not only are you an author – you’re also a grad student, a teacher and a parent. That’s quite a heavy load! How do you find time to write?

The truth is that sometimes I don’t have much time at all. But I’m a firm believer that whatever writing we do—no matter how paltry it seems—is better than what we don’t do. So instead of saying, “I can’t get anything done in fifteen minutes,” I focus on how much I can get done in fifteen minutes. Sometimes the time constraint functions like a pressure cooker, and I feel like I get more “real” work done than when I have a bigger block of time but feel less of a sense of urgency. Oh, and I also have a very supportive husband who loves to play with his son. That helps a lot.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) by Georges Perec. This is a wild novel full of crazy catalogs of items, descriptions of paintings, and digressions that nevertheless make me want to slow down and savor the minutia of being human. Lots of times when I’m reading, I’m trying to figure out how I could do what the writer is doing, but this is one of those books I just have to stand back and admire. (Haruki Murakami has the same effect on me).  What I mean is that Perec’s work is so different from my own on every level that when I think about what it must have felt to write it, it’s like imagining being Martian.

Perec was a member of OULIPO, a French literary association founded around the idea of using constraints to facilitate creativity. You might have heard of him as the writer who composed an entire novel without using the letter “e” (La Disparition, translated as A Void). Reading La Vie does tempt me to try using some kind of constraint—although not as extreme as cutting a letter—to generate a first draft. Just as a lark.

What’s the most important piece of advice you could give an aspiring writer?

Recognize that writing well is a process, and develop your own strategies for moving a piece forward. That is, don’t expect the writing to be done after a couple of drafts, but also be strategic about how you rewrite. When you think you’ve done everything you can to improve your writing, put away your manuscript for a while. Check out a great book with writing exercises or strategies for revision, do some practice, and then dig back into your manuscript. Go to a conference. Join a writer’s group. For me, the most important part of writing is rewriting.

The best revision tip I ever got is this: every time you do a major revision, retype the whole work rather than going back into the old file. I know it sounds too simple (or crazy) to be effective, but I can say from experience that it helps me get back “in” the narrative and helps me to resist the urge to tinker without accomplishing any real revisions.

I couldn’t help but notice you teach a vampire literature class. Would you ever consider infusing vampires into a future young adult book?

I actually designed the vampire lit class in response to the interest expressed by students. Before teaching it, I had read little beyond Dracula. Together, my students and I developed key concepts for understanding the evolution of the vampire in literature and how writers use the vampire to explore varied concerns. This was a thrilling intellectual project (and so fun that I taught the class twice), but I don’t anticipate any vampires appearing in my novels any time soon. It’s not that I’m uninterested in pushing the envelope beyond the purely realistic, but the vampire figure is so weighted with expectations on the part of the reader that I would feel overwhelmed just thinking about where to position my character with respect to the tradition.

Could you give us a sneak peak into what you’re working on now?

I’m knee-deep in revisions of my second YA novel, The Knife and the Butterfly, which is coming out with Carolrhoda Lab in 2012. The book follows two teens through the aftermath of a deadly gang fight. There’s Lexi, a troubled girl from a working class background who hangs with a street gang for protection. And there’s Azael, a romantic drifter essentially orphaned by his mom’s death and his father’s deportation to El Salvador. The truth about what happened connects them in a surprising but powerful way.

I also have a third novel idea simmering on a back burner, but I’m a little superstitious and don’t like to “spend” writing ideas before I get a handle on them. Check back with me in another year and I’ll be ready to talk about it!

Want to know more about this talented new author? Check out her super-cute website!