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Want to know about literary celebrity? Ask Marisa de los Santos while she's doing the laundry. Plus, reaching troubled youth, searching for Charlie Chan and more.
Photograph by Todd Vachon, www.toddvachon.com
Nonplussed
Rising author Marisa de los Santos stays down to earth even as her literary star ascends.
Marisa de los
Though she’s still floored by the undeniable success of her debut novel “Love Walked In,” the Wilmington author revels in the normal life from her Wawaset Park home.
Her follow-up book, “Belong to Me,” landed on shelves last month, but de los Santos claims her life has changed very little since becoming a bona fide literary celebrity.
“Love Walked In” spent most of 2007 on national and regional bestseller lists, including USA Today, plus four weeks on the New York Times paperback fiction list. The book created such buzz, a movie deal with Paramount Pictures—with Sarah Jessica Parker set to produce and star—came before the book was
released.
“I get a call from Hollywood while I’m folding laundry,” de los Santos says. “They say there’s a meeting with Paramount and Sarah Jessica Parker, and I say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ and go back to folding clothes. It sounds so trite, but you get a piece of news, really good stuff, and it’s very exciting. Then I go back to my life, my day-to-day life.”
Film production is still in limbo. And besides, de los Santos, 41, is more interested in fighting the good fight against labels like “romance novel” and “chick-lit”—two tags that haunted “Love Walked In,” which centered on a Philly barista named Cornelia and a little girl named Clare.
“I find that it’s used by a lot of people to mean lacking heart, being written for commercial purposes, to be not that smart or to be about fashion and shoes,” she says. “I just don’t have that information.”
“Belong to Me” isn’t a sequel, but it follows main character Cornelia to her new life in the suburbs, where she realizes the perfectly trimmed facades of her neighbors’ homes harbor a few secrets.
“The first book was never a romance for me, and the second book really isn’t,” de los Santos says. “It’s such a different atmosphere. Cornelia is in a very different moment in her life. She’s married, living in the suburbs, and she’s just in a very different place.”
She probably does a few loads of laundry, too.
—Matt Amis
Billie Travalini and works by her students (below)
Touching the Hard Cases
Billie Travalini’s new book reveals the hearts of troubled youth.
Billie Travalini wasn’t surprised by what she saw: some of the state’s most troubled kids producing stunning works of art and poetry, drug offenders writing haikus, street toughs sketching vibrant still lifes.
As an educational consultant with the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, Travalini had visited many of the state’s youth detention centers for years, touting the virtues of literature, art and critical thinking.
The results are published in “Teaching Troubled Youth: A Practical Pedagogical Approach,” a collection of works by students from local detention centers.
“Most of these kids are born with two strikes against them,” Travalini says. “To tell them that they have real, potentially marketable talent is a tremendous change in their thinking.”
Travalini also came from a damaged home. “It drove me to help others who didn’t have the resources,” she says. An adjunct professor at Wilmington University and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Travalini, 60, is an award winning author and poet. Her 2005 memoir, “Bloodsisters,” which chronicles her abusive childhood, won a Lewis and Clark Press Discovery Prize.
Many of Travalini’s students had no formal education. Many have learning disabilities. “They relate to realness,” Travalini says. “They’re surprised by this middle-aged white woman who had the same problems as they do. I tell them it’s OK to be who you are, to have a childhood that wasn’t filled with love.”
—Matt Amis
From "Bloodline," Ashburn's exhibit about AIDS in Africa.
A Focus on Food
An award-winning photographer looks at eating disorders.
Having stunned viewers with her “Bloodline: AIDS and Family” multi-media presentation on the HIV pandemic in Africa at Delaware State University last fall, photojournalist Kristen Ashburn hopes her current project will draw similar attention.
Ashburn has trained her lens on the issues surrounding food, “looking at what people do in their consumption of food that is an extension of other elements of their life,” she says. Though she’s not dealing with her typical subjects—political strife in the
Self portrait
Ashburn, 35, a graduate of Dover High and New York University, has had her work featured in such publications as Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek. Producing photographs that tell powerful stories, educate and inspire action is not easy, she says. “It is essential that I represent people and their stories accurately,” says Ashburn. “The time that I invest is critical both to their trust in me and the overall success of the project.”
If you missed “Bloodline,” look for her next project in late 2008.
—Erica Hayman
Chan Do
A local expert on a certain Asian detective shows up in a new documentary.
Nobody was happier than Howard Berlin when 20th Century Fox released “The Charlie Chan DVD Collection, Volume 4,” in February.
Berlin, of Wilmington, is an internationally renowned Chan expert. His two books “The Charlie Chan Film Encyclopedia” and “Charlie Chan’s Words of Wisdom” were hailed by the Chan cognoscenti, so much so that producer John Cork invited Berlin to appear in his documentary film “In Search of Charlie Chan.”
Berlin easily names all 47 Chan movies made from 1925 to 1949. Of the six actors who portrayed him, Werner Oland is his favorite.
Berlin sees a little of himself in Chan, “with respect to his using scientific techniques and the scientific method to help solve a particular case,” he says.
Berlin—also an expert in bluegrass music and rare coins—has written 31 books on various subjects. When he’s not writing, he’s traveling. In the past 12 months alone, he’s visited
Despite his worldwide travel and prolific literary offerings, Chan never loses his appeal to Berlin.
“Chan breaks all the racial stereotypes of the yellow peril, Fu Manchu character,” he says. “He’s polite, wise and cultured. And he uses brains over brawn.”
—Maria Hess
