Valerie -Welcome to Bookworthy. We are a month away from Christmas. And if you've been around Bookworthy, you know I love Christmas books. So today we're talking with Maria Antonia about her picture book, The Christmas Elephant, A Nativity Story. I can't wait to share this sweet book and this author with you. Welcome to Bookworthy Maria.
Maria -Hi, thanks for having me.
Valerie, it is my pleasure. Since we are technically in November and Christmas is on the way, what is your family tradition with your Christmas tree? When does your Christmas tree go up?
Maria -So our thing is always Advent. And when the first Sunday of Advent hits, our Christmas tree goes up. I know some of the members of our family, they put it up a little earlier and some put it up a little later, but ours is Advent. Yeah.
Valerie -I know it's hard not to get excited when we get close to Christmas and just be like, I just want to celebrate today. What is it? My mother has a December birthday and growing up, we always waited until her birthday to put up the Christmas tree. And thankfully it was the earlier part of December. Then one of my sons is on the 19th of December. And I was like, oh no, we can't do that. We can't wait till the 19th to put up the Christmas tree. So, We try to wait till after we do his birthday party, which is usually the first weekend in December because December birthdays are just tricky.
Maria -Yeah, they are. They are. Yes. Yeah, I have I have nieces and nephews in December. I had a best friend, or one of my good friends growing up her birthday was right after Christmas. And she said it was kind of cool in a sense because she got double presents, but then she got no presents during the year. So
Valerie -Right, yeah. Have to celebrate a half birthday or something, right? Well Maria, tell us a little bit about your book, The Christmas Elephant.
Maria -So the Christmas Elephant is about two sisters putting on a Christmas play with their, I think we decided it's a school that's putting on this Christmas play. The older sister is the director, and the younger sister is supposed to be a little lamb. And she doesn't want, she just, she can't be a lamb. She has to be an elephant. She wants to be the Christmas elephant. And her older sister's like, no, You can't because there are no elephants in Bethlehem. And the older sister is just like, I mean, this is historical. This is a historical event that we're talking about. And the younger sister, she can't. And so there's a lot of where she tries to sneak into
The play and the older sister always catch her. Then tragedy strikes when the baby Jesus doll goes missing and the little elephant Ellie, my little elephant, remembers she and so to save the Christmas place she is going to find baby Jesus.
Valerie -Super fun. Now, do you have any siblings?
Maria -I do. I am the middle child of five. So, I'm right in the middle. Yeah.
Valerie -Oh my goodness. So, you got to see a lot of sibling dynamics in all of that.
Maria -Yes, yeah. And I am an older, I'm an older sister, so I'm the oldest daughter. So I do have a, yes.
Valerie -Okay, I was wondering if you related more with the older sister or the younger sister.
Maria -I am definitely Piper. Like all the way, I would have said something like, there are no elephants in Bethlehem. But yeah.
Valerie -Too funny. Now did you perform in any nativity plays when you were a kid?
Maria -Oh, oh, so yeah, so I, probably the first thing I got to be, I mean, I got to be the shepherd and the sheep. And the biggest one was I got to be, I got to be Gabriel in, in one and we were doing it from the Bible. So, I had to memorize I was I was older, I was like in grade, I was in like, it's the eighth grade. And I had to memorize all the speeches, every single line from the speech she gave to Zacharias and Mary, and then I also did the angels. And I was in eighth grade, and I was also in French immersion at that time. So it was, I had to do half my most not half, I would have done 80% of my schooling was done in French in that year. So that was a bit of a challenge and I had to memorize these. So I've memorized it on the bus and And my family was like, oh, don't worry. The people said we'll put it on a big poster board. We'll write out all your space. So if you lose your space, you just go watch. You just read. And I did that, except, I mean, I had it memorized, but there was one, I don't know which one it was. I was probably the Zacharias one. And I was halfway through it. I couldn't read that poster board. It was afterward I realized At that point, I didn't have glasses. Nobody knew I needed glasses. So that poster board was no good at all. And I fumbled through. And for someone like me who is a perfectionist, that's hard, but it also, I think it's a good thing where I learned that you know what? It's not the end of the world. Nobody even commented after the show was done to me because of course, they were glad. They didn't have to memorize all those lines.
Valerie -Very true, you have to pick your parts wisely.
Maria -So, that's right. Why was I didn't even pick it? I was handed this role. So, but yes, it was, let's just say I, well, I later on, I mean, in high school, I did chorus parts, but I later on went on to being a stage manager. Like I much prefer being backstage. So, I've done, you know, like shows in Toronto, Canada in sort of off-off Broadway in New York City. I've done shows in
Detroit and my zone is behind the stage. And that is one thing I really love about the illustrator Laura Zarin. What she did was she, because a lot of it takes place backstage, she shows these behind-the-scenes views of the stage, which is my view of the stage. And I always love, I love when I first saw what she had done, I'm like, yeah, that is exactly what I was hoping for. And there's a few of those that are my favorite ones are of the back of Mary and Joseph and everybody waiting to get on stage. So.
Valerie -Yeah, it's a pretty neat perspective. So, you resonate with Piper a lot in this story. And I love that you do see a lot of the behind-the-scenes orchestration that happens because a lot is going on behind the stage. I have a kiddo that's in theater and I was helping with the sets for one of their productions when he was in eighth grade. And it was just wild that we had to think about how things moved, when things moved, which direction things went. And it was wild.
Maria -Mm-hmm. Yep. That's right. And it's like, there are some, sometimes there are quick costume changes or, and you have to be ready for that. And, you know, as a stage manager, I've done the, where I'm like roaming the floor, and I've also done where I'm like, I'm in headphones and I'm calling the show. And I'm like giving the light cues and the, I preferred to be walking around the light queue when you kind of sit there and you're strapped. Yeah, well, you're just calling, so you're just saying, queue 65, go. And then whoever's in the light booth, they like, they do their queue 65. , I will say that, in some of the bigger theaters, I had to do that. I didn't like that as much, but it was, yeah, doing quick costume changes was always kind of, fun in that, you know, could we get it done? We have five seconds to switch off this and put this on. So yeah.
Valerie -Yeah, and it's never an easy transition. It's always liked an extreme, isn't it? Oh, my goodness. Well, what do you hope to communicate with your kiddos with this book, Maria?
Maria -Yeah, so I think it's the perfectionist. I mean, there's that, that things aren't always going to be perfect, that there can be joy found in things that we didn't really plan for. That's the Piper side of people. For the Ellie side is that, you know, it is good to be. God made us all unique. He made us special in the way that we are and I'm hoping that for her, I mean, it isn't so much like she saw it as God that God made her, Ellie, the elephant. I mean, she is based on a niece of mine who always wore an elephant suit. And we have this story we've asked her, you know, like, are you always gonna be an elephant? You know, she's like four years old. And she's a very serious little girl. She is grown up now. She's now in high school. But we asked her this and then she was very serious. She'd go, I will never not be an elephant. You know, she has outgrown that elephant costume. She actually had a full, she had a couple of different elephant costumes. She had just like a mask, like a Halloween mask with a little trunk. And then she had this full, like from head to toe, trunk coming off. Yeah, it was the cutest thing. And she's outgrown that. And I asked her, actually, because I was getting ready for all this podcast and just getting everything ready for my website. And I asked her, does she remembered that. And I said, well, do you have anything like your elephant? And she looked at me and she goes, she's like 17 years old now. She's like, Aunt Maria, every test that I do in high school, I draw a
Little elephant. Like it is still, it is still part of who she is. And so, I think I've also likened in the back of the book, I've likened the story to a Mary Martha story where Piper is the older sister, Martha, and Ellie is the younger sister. That kind of came out of the fact, that what if Mary and Martha had a Christmas play about the birth of Jesus? How would it have gone down? And I'm thinking, you know, Martha would have been telling Mary there are no elephants in Bethlehem. And I think Jesus would have come and said, you know what, Martha?
Maria -It's okay. If young Mary wants to be an elephant, God made elephants, and we can accommodate that.
Valerie -An elephant can't ruin the Christmas story. What is it? At a church we went to when we used to live in Houston, they did a big Christmas production where they had live animals on the stage. And there was always this one camel that was the most honorary camel. And they just kind of had to work that awareness into the storyline because he would always cause trouble on the stage.
Maria -That's right, that's right. Wow. So apparently, camels spit. So.
Valerie -Oh yeah, yes. And it's not spit. It's not like, you know, it's yeah, it's gross. We did a, um, traveling with my family. We went and did a llama excursion. So we went hiking with some llamas and it was just lots of fun. But yeah, when those llamas started to spit, we're like, oh, that's not, that's not pretty.
Maria -Oh. Ha!
Valerie -Yeah, and the keeper told us a little bit more about how that happens. We're like, oh, okay. Don't want to know.
Maria -Oh. That's, yeah. I can't, I've never done a show, and I don't think I've ever done a show with live animals. Which, you know what? Yes, yeah. They are, they're not easy to work. They can't, I mean, I guess you could maybe have a trained animal, but even the trained animals sometimes go a little honky.
Valerie-There's wisdom there. Everybody has a good day and a bad day. So when the bad day shows up on show day, you just have to work with it. Right. So fun.
Maria - Yep, yep, which is why we always have to dress up as sheep. And the camels and there are camels in my story, and I know my editor was like, I don't think those humps are big enough. I'm a kid. So, we went to my illustrator, and we said, can we make them a little more hump-like? And she did, 'cause she's that good.
Valerie - Those illustrators are definitely amazing. Now Maria, when did your writing journey begin?
Maria - I guess, I mean, as a kid I wrote, I mean, I do have, I do have a memory of my mom writing cursive and me not being able to read it, but I would write it. And I would write what I now know as E's. I was like, I would show off to my sister. I'm like, yes, I'm writing cursive. Then, you know, in, so I was always drawn to storytelling, to books. I was part of like a young author program when I was in high school. I don't remember much about that other than we did, I took a class on calligraphy. I don't remember what the other class was about because we had two, but I remember that, and I got to keep the calligraphy pen. Maybe that's why. And again, yeah. So, but yes.
Valerie -Something sentimental.
Maria -When I seriously began writing for kids, because when you get to be high school and university age you just don't read kid books anymore because you are too old. Although I did take a children's literature course in university. And I'm not sure why I did that, but I did. And I realized I liked these stories. And I was introduced to new stories too. I like these stories better than some of the other literature that I studied. But then in, you know, I didn't have time to do a lot of writing. I tried, I think I entered a short story competition that didn't go anywhere. I'm like, I'm not paying money for that anymore. But then I had like I said, I have, there are five children in my family. So I have three brothers and a sister. And they started to have kids. I have 13 nieces and nephews, and that's a lot of birthdays. Yeah. And so what I thought I was not, I can't afford gifts for all these nieces and nephews. So I started to write them stories and that happened about 2008 when I started. Now, they were born, like the first ones were born in 2000, or 2001. So they were a little bit older when they first got their first stories. And then I started writing stories and sending them out for their birthdays. And I kept looking, a lot of them were based on, so some of them were based on like Bible stories. Some of them were based on, I loved fractured fairy tales. So I would take like, I would mash up Cinderella with Sleeping Beauty and put a little Rapunzel in it. And then sometimes for one of the boys, I rewrote Sleeping Beauty, but the twist at the end was that Sleeping Beauty was like a dog. That's, it was a beautiful dog, like because it was for one of the boys. I didn't think he would appreciate Sleeping Beauty, but like I thought he would like a dog. So that, so I did that. And then in about, I would say 2016, 2017, I thought, well, maybe I could get these published. So I sent out my first manuscript. I reworked it. So when I wrote my birthday stories. I mean, they're like 12,000 words, 14,000 words. I didn't know any better. And I started to, I did though. I actually picked one of the shorter ones to send to a publisher that took unsolicited manuscripts. And I heard nothing. So I thought, well, okay, maybe I'll, I found Facebook, there was a Facebook kid-lit group. I went in there and there was a critique. You could ask for critiques. That was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, to put myself out there. No one has ever read my work other than my family the contests who never contacted me and the unsolicited people who never contacted me either. So I don't know anything about them. But this was really hard to ask someone to say, what do you think? And I took that same story that I had sent in, which was kind of maybe 700 or maybe 800 words, it's still a little bit too long. I asked for their critique, and four ladies said they would critique. I critiqued their stuff, they critiqued my stuff. I
Am actually still a critique partner with one of them. The other one I was for a while but then she had to take a break from writing. But yeah, so I still am in contact with some of them, and when I realized it wasn't as scary as like they didn't rip it apart. They were very, very nice and so then I whittled my word count down, I started learning, I started going online, finding anything and everything I could about how to write for kids. And I wrote this book, The Christmas Elephant. Originally it was titled No Elephants in Bethlehem. My publisher decided to change the name to The Christmas Elephant, which I like, I like both. I like both titles, but this works. And so that, that the first time I wrote, I sent that out to agents and it was actually the the manuscript that I sent to my now agent in 20 let's see had to be 2019 that I did this and I signed with her in 2020 and then as soon as I signed with her the world shut down. And yes, it did. But we still went out. I went out in fall of 2020 with this manuscript. And everyone came back and said, you know, they love the story, but we already have a Christmas book. Love the story? No, we have something too similar. So I wrote other manuscripts and those went out and I wrote a second one, which is actually my, I got a two-book deal. So this is the second one. It actually was the one that went out to my publisher first. And it's the Runaway Sheep. And they were very interested. And my agent said, oh, well, because we had shelved the Christmas Elephant. It went out in 2020. This is 2023. Three years of that's it. And my agent said, well, you know, Maria has a Christmas book, would you be interested in this Christmas book? And they said, oh, send it along. So all of a sudden, my, what I thought was done, like this is, this was it, it had been to every publisher that we could think of. And yeah, so she, they came back and they said, you know, we actually wanna publish this one first and it's we want to publish it like a year from now. Like normally you wait. It was a huge like the. They had to get we had to get an illustrator right away. I think we had an illustrator by. So this was October of 2020, like so a year ago, and we had got our illustrator by November.
Valerie -That's a fast turnaround.
Maria -And she, I think, had to get all the sketches in by January. Yeah. I mean, she had a fast turnaround. And then I had to all of a sudden, so I'm at work in, it had to have been February. And my editor's like, we need to get this out like yesterday. Can you please, okay all this? So like we had I was able to do some of it at work because I have a desk job so I'm able to just quick look at this and then I came I said well I can't fully look at it till I get home and then I was able to yeah we were able to get it done but yeah she had to call me at home and we had to get it out there because yeah it was very quick again Christmas deadline, which makes sense.
Valerie -It's interesting just the timelines of how publishing works and that, you know, Christmas books have to be ready, you know, nine months before Christmas and they get released two months before Christmas. So it's a very interesting timeline for sure. But what's one of your favorite books, Maria?
Maria - So, I mean, if we're talking like a non-picture book, I will say it's a toss-up between Anne of Green Gables and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Chronicles of Narnia, I kind of lump them all together. So those are probably my favorite books. If you want like a picture book. I just read a really good one that I really liked called Braver Than Brave by Janet Sumner Johnson. And it's about a girl who is supposed to go on a roller coaster, the coaster of doom. She's scared. And I had a very similar experience when I was five years old on something called the I went on the ghost or coaster. And my mom, I went with my mom, and I was five years old. So, this is like a kid, a kid's roller coaster, but like, I'm not talking, this is not a little kid's roller coaster. This is like, like I've been on it since. I, we were, we were just at the same park and
yeah. I mean, it's, it's a big roller coaster for a kid, for five years old. Anyhow, my mom didn't
tell me that I could close my eyes. So, I went the entire ride with my eyes open. It scared me. I did not touch a roller coaster till I was in high school. And then it was peer pressure that got me back on a roller coaster.
Valerie -As a family, we went on a vacation and decided to go on a rollercoaster. Well, it was called the electric eel, and it had the biggest drop. It's like a thousand-foot drop. And my youngest was seven at the time and he rode with me, but it was only one of those bars that come down rather than individual bars. So, I'm a little bigger than my seven-year
Old. And so, he had a little more gap than I did. And he was like bouncing on this air board and he's like grabbing onto the bar with all of his life. I'm going to die. And I think I never laughed harder on a roller coaster than that one. I know my mama's skills are poor there, but it was golly, I feel so bad for him, but it was perfect for me. I think we all have to have that roller coaster story somewhere in our lives, right?
Valerie -Well, Maria, what can we expect next from you?
Maria - Well, I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but The Christmas, or the Runaway Sheep is my next picture book, and it's coming out in the spring of 2025. So, this was a two-book deal with Paraclete Press and they're doing Christmas first, and then I get a little lost sheep, which is based on the parable of the lost sheep. Yes. And yeah, and the Christmas, well, the Christmas elephant is, they're humans. There are humans in the runaway sheep, but it's a real sheep. Like the humans are the shepherds. So, yeah.
Valerie -A different perspective. Very neat. Maria, where can people find out more about you and your books?
Maria-Yes, yes. So probably the best place is my website, which is Mari and there are two A's, Maria and Antonia, both have an A in it. So, it's Mari and there they can sign up for my newsletter, all my social media links are there. I'm on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, or X however you like to say it. And yeah, so that's, with my newsletter, I do, I send it out about twice, you know, every two, every other month. And I always have something a little extra to download. So, it's for kids. So it's really for kids, I would say, like preschool. And probably you can go up to even age 12 and get something out of the different activities that I do. So, some of them, now we're going in, we're getting ready for the Christmas elephants. I'll be getting a lot of activities ready for that.
Valerie -So fun, I got to poke around on your website a little bit and definitely looks like you have lots of fun printables that engage kids in their curiosity and their interest. So, I'm sure kids will find fun things with the Christmas elephant too.
Maria -Yeah, and I was a teacher. I did teach about 20 years ago. So, this is my teacher-ness comes out with these.
Valerie -Very neat. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Maria.
Maria -Well, thank you for having me. That was a good interview. I enjoyed it.
Valerie -So glad. And thank you for joining Maria and me on this episode of the Bookworthy Podcast. Check the show notes for any books or links that we discussed and let us know in the comments when your Christmas tree goes up. This wraps up the season four of Bookworthy Podcast. We'll be back with new episodes in the new year. Be sure to like and subscribe to discover more great books together.
Merry Christmas and Happy Reading.
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