Reading as ONE in MetroWest: An Interview with Amy Wilson Sheldon and Jennifer De Leon
by Jessica A. Kent
August 2, 2021
Communal reading isn’t a new invention, but the book world has seen it as a method in which to connect in a more universal and widespread way than a simple English class or book club. From the Boston Book Festival's One City One Story initiative, to the New Bedford Whaling Museum's 25-hour Moby-Dick read-a-thon, organizers are providing avenues for communities to literally be on the same page with one another in fun, unique ways.
Another communal reading initiative is coming to the Boston area. The MetroWest Readers Fest has launched the first community read for the towns west of Boston. Called ONE, it will encourage residents of MetroWest to read two chosen books, and then patriciate in book clubs, gatherings, discussions, and author events in the Fall.
I connected with MetroWest Readers Fest founder and director Amy Wilson Sheldon and featured author Jennifer De Leon to learn more about the initiative, and to talk about the two books chosen, how readers find connection to stories, and the importance of providing opportunities for readers to engage with books, authors, and each other.
Amy Wilson Sheldon | Jennifer De Leon (photo by Alonso Nichols)
Creating the Inaugural MetroWest Community Read
Amy Wilson Sheldon has been taking the initiative on literary events in MetroWest for a few years now. In 2012, Sheldon created the blog A Lifely Read, "writing about how real life is illuminated in fiction, how fiction is actually relevant." Since then, Sheldon has been engaging readers via blogs posts, insightful social media commentary on books and publishing, and through community events like Book Covers, where authors and local leaders read their favorite book passages out loud, and Modern Fireside Poets in conjunction with the historic Wayside Inn of Longfellow fame.
Rather than create "literary events" which may only engage certain types of literary folks, Sheldon's goal is to connect with readers, however they may engage with the books they read. "I worked with the Dublin Book Festival, which is a really lively and fun and accessible book event. So I got this twofold bee in my bonnet about what more could I do with A Lifely Read,” explains Sheldon. “Could I bring what I'm writing about — all these issues about what reading means to people — to life with an event? Could you make something a little more accessible, and for people who wouldn't see themselves as people who would go to ‘literary events’?”
Out of those questions came the founding of the MetroWest Readers Fest in 2020, a 501(c)(3) with the intention of having a multi-day book festival in Boston's suburbs. But Sheldon, like other organizations, needed to pivot when the pandemic hit, and the Board suggested doing a community-wide read instead: MetroWest would read a book together individually this summer, and then gather together to discuss it and hear from the author in a series of events in the fall.
Now, they just needed to find the right author with the right book.
Enter Jennifer De Leon, a Boston native who was raised in and returned to Framingham, and who is quickly becoming a fixture in the Boston literary community. She also recently published two books in quick succession: 2020's Don't Ask Me Where I'm From (Simon & Schuster), a YA novel about fifteen-year-old Liliana Cruz, a first generation Latinx and Jamaica Plain native navigating the suburbs of Boston, and 2021's White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (University of Massachusetts Press), a collection of memoir-esque essays about identity, creativity, and family. (She also published Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education [University of Nebraska Press] in 2014, a collection of essays edited by De Leon that center the Latina experience in higher education.)
For Sheldon, De Leon and her work "just ticked all the boxes”: Boston-centric books that address relevant topics, a MetroWest author who is engaging, and it “feels like someone would want to go hear from her,” says Sheldon. Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and White Space were both chosen for ONE's community read.
Boston Book Origins
"Ironically, the very first short story I ever wrote was about this character named Liliana, who was fourteen and living in the suburbs of Boston," says De Leon of the main character of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. Yet despite sending out the stories, literary magazines weren’t publishing “stories for teens” then. So the book that would become Don't Ask Me Where I'm From turned into a side project De Leon worked on while spending seven years writing and shopping around an adult literary novel that didn't find a publisher.
After receiving the Associates of the Boston Public Library's Writer-in-Residence fellowship in 2015-2016 for YA writers, De Leon decided to double down on Liliana Cruz's story. De Leon spent the time reading all the YA and middle grade books she could find, and produced a first draft that was a third person narrative set in the 1990s. An editor then suggested De Leon make the novel contemporary and change the point of view to first person.
De Leon had been teaching in Boston Public Schools, and was surrounded by the voices of teenagers every day, so Liliana became a composite character of the author as a teenager, De Leon’s students, and pure fiction. And while De Leon never did the school integration program, METCO, that Liliana does in the novel, she shadowed students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, and conducted interviews to get it right.
De Leon then wrote a new draft while serving as the Boston Artist-in-Residence through the City. The book sold and went to auction — publishers and readers were now craving teen stories — and Don't Ask Me Where I'm From was released in 2020.
White Space is a collection of De Leon's personal essays over the years, and functions both as a memoir and as observations on identity, culture, and belonging. It’s also somewhat of a companion volume to Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. White Space features essays of De Leon's life growing up in Framingham and the Boston area; Liliana lives in Jamaica Plain, yet goes to school in the white suburbs of Boston. White Space features stories of De Leon's immigrant parents; Liliana's parents are immigrants as well. Liliana learns about her Guatemalan heritage and Guatemala’s history in Don't Ask Me Where I'm From; De Leon writes about her time teaching in Guatemala and interviewing guerilla fighters about the civil war. Liliana is a writer who is finding her voice; De Leon articulates the same journey in White Space.
Since ONE is about readers and reading, how did De Leon think about writing for an audience — or did she? "For both of these books, they're for my younger self, but they are also for an audience that's craving these narratives, because many of these stories are often in the margins, or they just don't get attention," says De Leon. She explains that "for a long time, I was writing to an idealized portrait of a reader, or like what I thought my audience was,” thinking that she had to write in a way that fans of The New Yorker would appreciate — and the writing wasn’t coming together.
But De Leon recalls a story from Sandra Cisneros, who, while in Iowa, was attempting to do the same thing: Write for a highly literary audience. But she wasn’t finding her voice, and encountering friction in her workshops. “She went back to her apartment and wrote these vignettes that would become The House on Mango Street. And she said that she wrote them in a way that wouldn't allow someone else to tell her that she got it wrong. I just love that,” recalls De Leon.
Once De Leon abandoned the approach of writing for a literary audience, and just wrote in the authentic voice of Liliana, it clicked. “I feel like I wrote Don't Ask Me Where I'm From in a way that nobody can tell me I'm getting this wrong. This is my story to tell."
Engaging Readers Through Theme, Genre, and Windows and Mirrors
ONE is about the community not just reading these two books, but connecting with them as well, and connecting with a book as a reader often happens through themes. From engaging with her audience already, De Leon finds that readers are being pulled towards themes of belonging, and relating to these stories of characters who feel like outsiders — who are lonely, or alienated, or on the receiving end of microaggressions or racism — finding their place and their voice in the world.
Readers are also connecting to the themes of family as well, which are told with such detail that they become universal, like De Leon's essay on helping her father write a resume, or Liliana wanting to help her overworked mother by making dinner.
Another way readers are connecting is through being able to get a glimpse of the writer's life, as both De Leon and Liliana desire to find their writing voice. "The 'white space' refers to the white spaces I've been in, but also the white space of the page. I think people always appreciate when writers pull back the curtain on the process of being a writer," De Leon says.
Many readers are also having their first interactions with learning about Guatemala and its history through White Space or Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. "I'd love for readers to see this book as an entry point to learning more about Central America, or even to color in some of their perspective on immigration." De Leon hopes that will be a topic of conversation for the MetroWest community.
The community will also essentially have their choice of how they want to engage with these topics and themes. For those whom fiction resonates the most, their "in" will be Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. For those whom memoir or non-fiction resonates the most, their "in" will be White Space.
For Sheldon, the combo of books is perfect: Don't Ask Me Where I'm From is YA, so it will have a teen readership, but many adults read YA as well. White Space is essays, but reads like an engrossing story. “In a way, I think it's this combo is perfect, because it's not one type of fiction and one type of nonfiction. They have cross appeal,” she says.
"I think fiction proves a safe way to enter these conversations that can be prickly about race and class and segregation and education," says De Leon. At the same time, though, De Leon has found that her vulnerability in her White Space essays has given readers the chance to connect with these stories on an authentic level, past the polish of modern society.
However a reader gets their “in,” for Sheldon, "Books are a really nice way to start building community, when you're on literally the same page, if you will. I think it's just a beautiful tool to start exploring topics."
In a Goodreads article, De Leon writes about choosing books for her students as searching "for stories that could be windows and mirrors." For De Leon and Sheldon, how will these books be both windows and mirrors to the MetroWest community?
Sheldon see that these two books can function as mirrors in their "universal themes, like belonging, the sense of community, family, and I think those are entry points for people — they should be, and they can be." Sheldon also adds that MetroWest is a diverse community — collections of small towns, a Brazilian population in Framingham, a Guatemalan population in Marlborough — where these books can provide a mirror to their lived experiences, or to anyone who identifies with parts of the stories.
As for windows into another’s story, De Leon cites her own experience of her Guatemalan parents choosing to plant their family in MetroWest. “It's a story you don't always hear: Immigrant family moves to Massachusetts, raises their kids, one becomes a writer. I feel like those are the stories that we don't get to hear," said De Leon.
All Readers are Welcome
The MetroWest Readers Fest vision is to engage readers who may not consider themselves "literary" or who wouldn't go to a "literary event," but who enjoy reading and want to connect to others around books. Sheldon also saw how the past year's shift to virtual literary and book events engaged a whole new population of readers who wouldn't typically go to such an event, but who found that not only was it accessible, they enjoyed the experience, and found value in hearing from the author.
Sheldon describes how the ONE kickoff, which took place on July 13 at the Wayside Inn and where attendees could have a drink, browse books, and chat, embodied the fun, whimsy, connection, and community that can be created around reading. Hygge House Books staged a pop-up at the event, with a selection of books and fun sidelines like book socks to sell. "And then people could go across and grab a drink at the Inn's old bar,” says Sheldon. “Little things like that — showing that you can be in a book environment, and it can be casual, and you don't have to be just talking about books the whole time."
De Leon admits that "writing can be stuffy or just a little closed. And so I think [ONE] is cracking these myths of what it means to be a literary person or to be someone who engages with stories. I think we will see readers of all stripes at these events. You're bringing the stories to the community versus asking them to go into this private space in the city."
Part of the accessibility is allowing readers to participate as much or as little as they want as well. As Sheldon explains, "Here are the three steps: Read, discuss, attend an event — if you want. Some people love to read — maybe they're going to choose to read this in their book club, or maybe there's a place of worship where they're going to organize a little discussion. But then there are people who just like to read alone, but might want to go hear from Jenn. And so I think what's cool about it is that it is this communal experience, but there are lots of different ways to participate in it."
And after a year of reading alone, we’re ready to connect with one another again.
Find more information about ONE and upcoming events at the MetroWest Readers Fest website. “An Evening with Jennifer De Leon” will be held on September 28 at Ashland High School, as well as on September 30 at Goodnow Library. The website also has resources, discussion questions, information on book giveaways, and more.
Jessica A. Kent is the founder and Editor in Chief of the Boston Book Blog.
