On  March 28, author Guadalupe Garcia McCall stopped by for a visit. She organized a presentation for the students in the auditorium along with a writing workshop in the library. From freshmen to seniors, Guadalupe shared her abilities and knowledge with our school.

McCall discovered that she had a talent for writing at a fairly young age. “In Mexico, my father sat me on his lap and said, ‘You’re going to go to the United States and you’ll have to go to school’,” she said. “He showed me how to write and I thought ‘This is what I want to do, just make magic with my pencil'”.

When her career started as an author, it wasn’t just overnight. “The first book I wrote was just a notebook of short stories,” Guadalupe said. “I was in 8th grade and my friends wanted me to write stories with their names so I just made puppy love-ish stories about them and their boyfriends.”

It took a while, but after a certain accomplishment, she knew this was her true calling. “When Under the Mesquite came out, I got a letter from a woman in Australia,” she said. “She explained that she had just lost her daughter a few months ago and was having a hard time with grief, and reading the book gave her hope to heal. I just sat there and I knew this is what I want to do, I want to heal people with my stories.”

Throughout her time as a writer, Guadalupe has earned many achievements for her work. “I have over 25 awards,” she said. “Some of them are accolades though, not necessarily awards.”

Not only does she enjoy what she does, she values educating aspiring writers everywhere. “I love meeting students and showing them that they can do this too,” said McCall. “When I was a teacher I heard, ‘I don’t know where to start’ a lot. Getting them to open their eyes and share the gift of becoming a writer is my favorite part.”

She takes pride in her job by creating books whenever she can. “I have written and published 8 books,’ she said. “The 8th one, Hearts of Fire and Snow, is coming out in June.”

 The inspiration for her book Echoes of Grace came from the world around her. “On the news, I saw that a young woman was going to work while her younger sister was holding her son’s hand on the porch and as the woman was driving off, the boy let go, ran into the street and was killed by the mom’s car,” she said. “I was devastated because there were no organizations helping this young mom with her child.”

After the tragedy, she had an experience that coerced her to write the book. “I went to sleep and had a dream about Grace, the main character,” said Guadalupe. “She was sitting with something in her hand and when she opened it, it was a black caterpillar disintegrating with maggots. After I woke up, I immediately wrote the scene on my computer.”

McCall gets ideas from everywhere, including her personal life. “After my mother passed away, I had been taking care of my grandmother with dementia,” she said. “One day I asked about her husband and she said ‘Oh, I hated him’. Come to find out, she got married to a grown man at the age of 12. He didn’t treat her well, as you can imagine, being 12 years old she didn’t think this should be happening in her life with her body, she had no agency. So, she ran away from him and that is how I got the story of Guelita Rosa in the book.”

The personal connections aren’t the only thing keeping her stories original, but the hidden symbolism too. “The echoes, or visions, are a metaphor for the generational trauma in Grace’s life,” she said. “It has to do with how women everywhere have suffered from rape culture, femicide, abuse, and everything we’ve had to go through since the beginning because we are women. The echoes are like when you’re walking down the street alone and the hairs on your arm stand up; that’s an echo from our past telling us bad things happen in the dark.”

Even though she loves what she does, this wasn’t always her plan. “I wanted to act when I was young, so I thought I’d become a performer,” she said. “When I became an English teacher, I left it behind, but had to bring the drama back for the presentations and it’s all come full circle.”

McCall cherishes all of her work equally. “I love all of my work,” said Guadalupe. “Usually, the book I’m working on at that time is my favorite.”

To make her work the best it can be, she takes quite a bit of time to write. “Shame the Stars took me the longest to write,” she said. “I’d never written from a boy’s perspective so it was challenging to do it for the first time. I changed it up a lot before actually finishing it.”

Because her books are so admirable, she gets all the love from her fans. “I get a lot of email letters,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll give a teacher my address and I just receive batches of letters from their students.”

McCall will never stop sharing advice to the future writers around the world. “The key is to not be afraid of originality,” said Guadalupe. “You’ll have to research other novels and while it’s good to study with those, you have to remember that any stories you write will be different from all the others. Yours will be different and that is perfect.”