Francisco X. Stork's Second Chance: An Interview

Authors don’t often get second chances. When a book is published, it’s published, with all its reviews—the good, the bad, and the mixed. Francisco X. Stork is a happy exception. This past May, his novel On the Hook came out from Scholastic, to great acclaim, including on this site (lynmillerlachmann.com). This 2021 book for teen readers is a reimagining of his 2006 YA novel Behind the Eyes. Today, Francisco visits the blog to talk about how his writing has evolved over the past 15 years and what has changed in Hector’s story from then to now. In addition to Behind the Eyes and On the Hook, Francisco X. Stork is the author of the YA novels Marcelo in the Real World (2009), The Last Summer of the Death Warriors (2010), Irises (2012), The Memory of Light (2016), Disappeared (2017, and Illegal: A Disappeared Novel (2020).

LML: You’ve talked about how you rethought and rewrote your earlier YA novel, Behind the Eyes, to turn it into On the Hook. How did that original story come about?

FXS: I wrote Behind the Eyes (some fifteen years ago) when my son and daughter were teenagers. They were living a comfortable life in the suburbs of Boston, headed to good colleges, and I wanted them to see a different side of life, so I wrote about Hector, a young man growing up poor and afraid in the housing projects of El Paso. Hector’s story was based on my own story growing up in El Paso. I lived in the same housing projects that are depicted in the novel and, like Hector, I lived with fear of getting noticed.

Why did you choose to rewrite an old, out of print book rather than leaving it behind completely?

I really love Behind the Eyes. I’m very proud of the book that opened the doors for me to the world of young adult literature. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the best book I could have written at the time. But a few years after it was published, I began to see that there was untapped potential in Hector’s story. Hector’s story was not reaching some of the young men who were caught in a cycle of hatred and violence. I am grateful to Arthur Levine who saw what I saw and gave me the opportunity recreate Hector’s story.

How did the novel change in the course of your rewrite? How much of the change had to do with your development as a writer and how much with changes in the outside world?

On the Hook takes some of the existing characters and settings and turns them into a new story. The characters that remain, while they retain their old names, are different, more complex and more real. It is no longer just Hector’s story, but it is also the story of Hector’s antagonist, Joey. There are relationships that were not there before like the friendship between Hector and Azi. Most of all, Hector’s character and actions are a balance of interiority and agency that was only possible for me to create after many years of writing, after the publication of six other novels. I hope also that I am wiser than I was fifteen years ago! I know for sure that I am more acquainted with the debilitating and destructive effects of hatred (both in myself and in society) than I was then.

How might On the Hook speak more to young readers today? What do you want them to take away from this book?

Hector’s story is a current story. It reflects the way that hatred has become prevalent and even considered “normal” in today’s world. I hope that the book becomes a meditation on violence and hatred, on how it grows and how we might see a way to take the energy of anger and hatred and put it into the hard task of finding common ground with others.

What’s next for your writing? Do you have plans to stay with young adult fiction or move into another category or genre?

I am working on a young adult novel now that will come out late next year. I’m switching gears a little and writing a love story. I don’t have any ideas for any fiction work after that. I’m open to writing another young adult novel if the inspiration comes. I’m happy writing about and for young people and am not interested in writing adult fiction. In the back of my mind there is the seed of an idea about writing a book about the practice of writing for young writers. So, maybe.

Thank you! I look forward to the new novel!

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(Lyn originally interviewed Francisco X. Stork for her blog, lynmillerlachmann.com. Thank you, Lyn, for permission to share this interview on De Colores (decoloresreviews.blogspot.com.).

Surviving Santiago

author: Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Running Press, 2015 

grades 7-up 

Chilean, Chilean American

Surviving Santiago, Miller-Lachmann’s companion-sequel to Gringolandia, takes place in 1989, in the waning days of the US-sponsored Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, after the plebiscite that removed him from power, and before he actually stepped down. It’s told from the POV of 16-year-old Cristina Isabel Aguilar Fuentes, known in her adopted country and by her friends as “Tina Aguilar.”

Tina’s mom—who, in Gringolandia, had relocated with her family to Wisconsin, and now is divorced from Marcelo and remarried—has sent her to live with her papá for the summer; and returning to her homeland is the last thing Tina wants to do. It’s a strange place, Santiago de Chile, not a place she remembers, and not a father she remembers. Marcelo, a revolutionary who had been tortured by the regime, has come out scarred, inside and out. He is addicted to alcohol and when he drinks, he becomes violent and abusive. Papá had wanted Tina to spend the summer with him, but when she arrives, she finds she’s on her own.

Throughout, Miller-Lachmann paints a complex and realistic picture of what torture under the dictatorship did to individuals and families—in this case, post-traumatic stress causes Papá to lash out at those he once loved. Tina soon sees how he dehumanizes Tía Ileana—who is lesbian and the only person who takes care of him. Tina remembers her papá from childhood—how he would drive the children to school, how they would go to the beach, how they would play cards together. But now, she abhors that he has become, as she spits out, “a bigot and a jerk.”

Indeed, Marcelo is a broken person, yet he never drinks at work, because this work is too important to screw up. His friend and colleague, Ernesto, adores him. “We worship him, Ernesto says. “He taught us everything we know about investigative journalism.” “During the plebiscite,” he tells Tina, “he was on the air for thirty-five hours straight. Said he couldn’t sleep until he knew the bastard was going down so he might as well work, but I’m sure it’s an on-air record.”

As in Gringolandia, there’s a metaphor here that’s not really a metaphor: Papá has rescued two parrots who had been abused by a bird torturer; one was un desplumado who eventually grew back his feathers, and the other has chewed off part of his foot. What will happen to Papá as a result of the torture he suffered at the hands of the Pinochet regime? Will he heal or will he remain physically and emotionally broken?

When an attractive, motorcycle-riding dude—a delivery boy—arrives on the scene, something is not right. Although Tina and Frankie share a love of Metallica and both are dealing with fathers who have alcoholism, Frankie’s extreme right-wing views of the regime and Chile’s history and world events—such as how “Franco stopped the Communists” in the Spanish Civil War—are the opposite of what Tina knows to be true. And they’re the opposite of all that her papá has fought and suffered for. Still, Tina sees Frankie in a way that only a love-struck teenager can: she senses, yet ignores, the oncoming danger. This is Chile, after all, and Augusto Pinochet is still in control. The military police and the regime’s hired guns are still “disappearing” people. In this tense, dangerous scenario, what’s Frankie’s role? Who is he, really?

As the tension builds and careens to a satisfying conclusion, everyday people try to survive and families continue to search for the bodies of their “disappeared” relatives, those who had been imprisoned and tortured struggle to become whole again, and Pinochet and his thugs do their best to see that his fascist legacy continues. This is 16-year-old Tina’s narrative—usually on-point, sometimes naïve, but every word believable.

Where appropriate in narration or dialogue, Miller-Lachmann uses idiomatic Chilean Spanish, and seamlessly inserts English interpretations (some of which will be a hoot for Spanish-speakers):

The moment I set Pablo down, he fluffs his tail and takes a dump on the counter. Tía Ileana yells at me. She hasn’t yelled at me since I got here, but I guess I’d yell too if a bird pooped where I sort of cooked.

¡Pégame un tiro ya! Pablo screams back.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you,” I murmur, stroking his head.

He keeps screeching, “Just shoot me,” in Spanish….

When the parrot quiets, I say, “Hello. How are you?”

“¡Alfonso, conch’e tu madre!” the parrot squawks at me.

I don’t reward him for calling someone named Alfonso his mother’s private parts. Instead, I repeat, “Hello. How are you?”

This time, the bird squawks, “Vamos, pajero dormilón.”

Laughing, I say, “I did get my lazy ass out of bed.”

Like Gringolandia, Miller-Lachmann’s latest effort is one I’ve read several times and I’ve wanted to quote from practically every page. It’s that good. And, like Gringolandia, Surviving Santiago is an important historical novel, and is highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 6/26/15)

Gringolandia

(Note: This is an updated version of the review, which corrects the location of the swimming pool depicted on the cover of Gringolandia.)

author: Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Curbstone Press, 2009

grades 7-up 

Chilean, Chilean American

During the years of the US-installed and –supported Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean secret police (DINA) operated clandestine prisons in which they tortured or executed thousands of people. Villa Grimaldi—which the torturers referred to as “el Palacio de la Risa” (the “Palace of Laughter”)—was one of four of these torture centers on the outskirts of Santiago. From mid-1974 to mid-1978, the DINA killed or disappeared 236 of the 4,500 prisoners held there.

Sometime towards the end of the Pinochet regime, the torture centers were all but razed, probably as an attempt to erase from public consciousness what happened there. In 1978, Villa Grimaldi was sold to a developer and, after a public campaign was launched in the name of human rights and historical memory, the infamous torture center was transformed into the Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz, a memorial of the lives taken there.

Part of what is left of “El Palacio de la Risa” is a nondescript swimming pool that had been used in the tortures. Now, with discolored green tiles covering the bottom, it is fenced off for both citizens and tourists to view. A photograph of this swimming pool—with a dove flying out of it—is the cover of Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s amazing young adult novel, Gringolandia.

Having Chilean friends who were tortured in those years—as do I—Lyn told me that she started working on Gringolandia in 2004, after the revelations of the tortures committed by military police personnel of the US Army and other US agencies conducted at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Then, she said, as during the Pinochet dictatorship, people were generally shrugging off torture as an aberration or justifying it as a way of obtaining information. Meanwhile, FOX media, in its award-winning drama series “24,” helped create the kind of division and suspicion to convince people to “follow the leader” rather than protest.

Meanwhile, the stories of the Chilean people—victims, survivors, and disappeared—were not being told and, given the responsibility of our government for installing and supporting the dictatorship that tortured, murdered or disappeared some 35,000 people, Lyn told me, she set out to create a young adult novel that “was real, honest and truthful” to tell those stories.

Much of Gringolandia is narrated by Daniel Aguilar, an immigrant teenager living with his mother and younger sister in Madison, Wisconsin. Part One, entitled “Then,” is told in third person; detailing Daniel’s beating and the horrific arrest and torture of his father, Marcelo, an underground journalist and revolutionary, by the Chilean secret police.

Someone grabbed Daniel by the hair and jerked his head back. He looked up into the covered face of the tall one. The boss. The man’s eyes were black and terrifying in the shadow, and his mouth, a little round hole cut out of the mask, moved like the mouth of a robot.

“Boy, you watch this,” he snarled. “This is what happens to communists.”

The helmeted soldiers left. The tall man crouched and ground his knee into Daniel’s shoulder blades. Rough hands in his hair twisted his head back. The other three masked men pounced on Daniel’s father, aiming blows at his head and body. His glasses flew off and were crushed beneath a black boot. He fell to his knees. Blood ran down his face into his beard.

Daniel closed his eyes and tried to shut out the sound of his father coughing and choking, horrible gasps. They’re beating the life out of Papá. Someone…make them stop. When Daniel opened his eyes again, his father was on hands and knees. A soldier’s boot struck the side of his head. He flopped onto his back and lay motionless.

“Let’s get him out of here.”

Part Two, “Now,” begins almost six years later. While Papá remains imprisoned in Chile, Daniel, his mother and younger sister have fled to Madison, Wisconsin. Mamá works with the Latin America Solidarity Committee, and Daniel, now 17, has carved out his own niche: a junior in high school, he plays lead guitar in a rock band and is dating a minister’s daughter. But Daniel is also traumatized and silenced; he keeps his head low and doesn’t call attention to himself. “Here, nobody talks about it,” he says, “at least not outside social studies class. And when they do it in class, I make my mind go somewhere else.”

When he drives to the airport to pick up his newly-released father, Daniel finds Papá damaged in body and spirit: partially paralyzed, Marcelo is a self-destructive alcoholic who has nightmares, lashes out at his family and can’t stand to be touched—and is bitter at having been exiled to the place he calls “Gringolandia.” It would appear that the dictatorship has succeeded in silencing both Daniel and Marcelo.

In Parts Three and Four, we meet Daniel’s girlfriend, Courtney—“La Gringa”—a well meaning but naïve, self-centered young woman who passionately wants to be part of something she doesn’t understand—and unwittingly comes close to sabotaging the survival of both the family here and the underground movement in Chile.

Although the dictatorship succeeds in breaking up Daniel’s parents’ marriage, it doesn’t succeed in silencing Marcelo—and it leaves Daniel with an important decision to make: Should he remain in the relative safety of family and friends in Madison, or risk torture and death by joining his father in combating a brutal dictatorship in Chile? What Daniel decides will have teen readers thinking deeply and making connections between the microcosm of their own families and the macrocosm of the world outside.

In Part Five, “A Bird Named Pablo: A Metaphor,” the dictatorship has been defeated by, of all things, a plebiscite, and Marcelo, back in Chile, is healing from his wounds—physically and spiritually. Here, he has written an incomparably beautiful story about a conure (a protected species in Chile)—tortured by a torturer—whom Marcelo has rescued and rehabilitated—and who builds a family of his own. A metaphor that’s too close to home to be a metaphor.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s book is complex and multilayered and beautifully written. It takes twists and turns and shifting perspectives, but the overarching theme is Daniel’s struggle with guilt over his father’s arrest, and his struggle to reconnect with a person who is substantially different than the father he knew and loved. “Papa’s words race through my mind,” he says.

I want to think of him as a hero and me as the son of someone who did great things. Like investigating secret prisons and bearing witness to what went on there. But there’s a huge empty space in my chest when I think of all the time we missed together. Five years, three months, and sixteen days, to be exact. And when I walk out of the studio, my fists are again clenched, and my neck and shoulder ache, as I think of how he put us in danger, ordered us out of the country—and still wants to go back there.

The story of how one small family survives a cruel and sadistic regime is a gift to all of the survivors of dictatorships, those who have become permanent residents of the US and those who have repatriated. Without polemic, without didacticism, Lyn Miller-Lachmann has created a disturbing, thought provoking novel that succeeds in being “real, honest and truthful.” Gringolandia is highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 7/15/13)

Note: A number of excellent videos exist about Salvador Allende, the 1973 coup, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the quest for justice. They include: the three-part The Battle of Chile, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1975, 1977, 1979); Chile: Obstinate Memory, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1997); The Pinochet Case, directed by Patricio Guzmán (2001); A Promise to the Dead, directed by Peter Raymont (2007); The Judge and the General, directed by Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco (2008); Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi, directed by Quique Cruz and Marilyn Mulford (2009); Salvador Allende, directed by Patricio Guzmán (2011); and  No!, directed by Pablo Larraín (2013).  —BHS