Growing up, I never once considered writing as a hobby, much less as a part-time career. In college, my freshman English class required original essays a couple times a week, and I remember the pain of trying to come up with original ideas and the effort to create subjects for those papers.
My roommate and I struck a deal: I would edit her essays, correcting any grammatical or spelling errors, and she would develop numerous story ideas for me to write. This arrangement worked well for both of us.
Adopting Our Daughter Encouraged Me to Write
Years passed – years of raising children and adopting a baby girl in a Central American country. Seven years after bringing Elisa home, we added a young teenage girl to our family. Both of our daughters were from Guatemala, a country rich in Hispanic heritage and culture and in my efforts to encourage their appreciation of their birth country, article ideas began to form.
I began writing travel articles, first for a local newspaper, then spreading my wings to newspapers in other cities. These articles evolved into a column titled “If You Only Have a Weekend” and centered on a specific city or area in the United States.
In 1989, someone suggested I write an article about a summer baseball program that brought Latin American teens to the U.S. to play summer-league baseball. Our boys and my husband participated in this program, and it was close to my heart. Several young men from Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic spent time with us and stayed with our family.
From Latin America with Love
I wrote and tried to sell the stories, but no one was interested in my “brilliant” articles. And then, I got lucky! The editor of an English language publication about Hispanics in the United States read my proposal and called me with a different idea. “From Latin America with Love” became my first major cover story and was published in “Vista: Focus on Hispanics” and distributed nationwide. My article was about adopting in Latin America, and I interviewed several families who, like my family, grew their families with love from Latin America.
We lost our daughter, Elisa, 5 years ago in a freak accident, and it took a long time for our family to deal with it and move on. But today, I write more than ever and give credit to her for any success I’ve had in becoming a writer.