Well, I have written very different kinds of books. It seems part of it is the fact of being bilingual. For example, poetry and writing poetry is one of my most significant creative things, but I can only do that in Spanish. I can’t really do poetry in English, so I have a world of poetry with many books, an A, B, C — an animal A, B, C — which has poems about animals whose name begins with the letters, but poems about the letters themselves, which is very well known among the Spanish-speaking children. And whenever I go, they will tell me back their favorite, and they know them very well. I have another A, B, C of the ocean that was recently published. I have just collections and collections of poems in multiple anthologies, so that the author in me.
But in English, I found that I needed to depend more on the story on the power of the story, because I can’t do the playful things that I do with the language in Spanish, the puns, the rhymes, the alliterations — those things. I don’t have that skill in English, so I need to depend on strong characters, strong plot, a good narrative, a good pace to get the kids interested. So, then I become a different person and a different writer in the other language, and that’s, you know, part of the richness of being bicultural.