ACTFL Dinner with Authors

At last week's ACTFL Convention in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to have dinner with a few CI novella authors. Erin Almeranti, the President of Teacher's Discovery, was hosting a dinner outing with them and invited me to join them. I know Erin from having worked with her at CI Summit (sponsored by Voces Digital) these past three summers, and the chance to have dinner with some CI authors (as well as to engage in CI fellowship) was not something I was going to miss!

In attendance were Erica Peplinski, Bryan Kandel, Esmerelda Mora, Grace Sotomayor-Mantri, and Andrea Caulfield. Since I was the only one there who had not written a novella (besides Erin), I asked what the catalyst was for each of them to write their first novella and then to continue writing them. Although this question was coming from a place of curiosity, I was also asking from a more personal place: I am thinking of writing a Latin novella but am not sure if I know what/how to do it.

I got a myriad of varied responses:

• "[This event in the novella] actually happened in my life, so I thought I'd write about it."
• "I wanted something for my students to read on X topic."
• "I did not like how Latinos were portrayed in X novella."
• "I had to cover X theme in my school curriculum, so I wrote this novella to cover that topic."

Essentially, each saw a need/hole that needed to be filled. Many of their novellas were originally readings which they had written for their own students which then turned into novellas.

I currently feel the same way now as these authors once felt: I too see a need/hole in current Latin novellas. This is not to say that those novellas which are currently published do not have any value - I do not feel that way at all! Over ten years ago, there were NO Latin novellas out there, and now I see so many out there. However, the hole/gap which I see which needs to be filled is that there are very few Latin novellas which are truly written for novice-low/novice mid readers. While many Latin novellas are marketed as being for Latin 1 or 2, the writing resembles textbook readings which tend to be heavy on vocabulary or do not incorporate the repeated sentence patterns which novice readers so desperately need to gain reading confidence. 

So I do not know where I will go from here. I do have a number of writings which I have written over the past two years which have turned into rough drafts for possible novellas, but I have just never taken the next step. However, it is very encouraging to have heard from these authors that they felt a need to write their first novellas. At least, I am heading in the right direction!