The Stories We Carry With Us
Yesterday, September 12, 2026, I had the opportunity to participate in Pathways to Publishing: Expo for Aspiring Authors at the Bronx Library Center. I arrived intending to listen, learn, and meet other writers. I left thinking, once again, about the stories we carry with us and what happens when we finally decide to share them.
One of the most meaningful moments of the day came through a conversation with an aspiring Puerto Rican author. We quickly discovered that we shared several interests: preserving our culture and memory, and the power of storytelling to help new generations find themselves within Puerto Rico. His work focuses on stories for children and characters inspired by the Taíno world.
At some point, we began talking about El Cuco. We laughed, because for so many Puerto Ricans, simply mentioning the name is enough to awaken memories we recognize immediately.
That led me to tell him about my own experience growing up in Barrancas, Guayama, surrounded by fields of sugarcane, with the Caribbean Sea marking the other edge of that small world of my childhood.
I also told him how those memories eventually found their way into my writing and helped give life to The House the Fire Did Not Touch. I did not need to tell him the entire story. A few images were enough: the sugarcane, the sea, the houses, the characters who seemed to belong to the landscape, and the stories adults told us when we were children.
His reaction surprised and delighted me. Those small fragments immediately awakened his imagination. And as we talked, I found myself thinking about something that sits at the heart of what I try to do as a writer and what we are building at Madera Ediciones: our stories do not have to be enormous to be important. Sometimes they begin with a road, a house, a name that frightened us as children, a family story repeated for decades, or the memory of how the sugarcane smelled after the rain.
Preserving culture also means preserving those small things.
That is why gatherings like Pathways to Publishing matter. Not only because they bring together writers, publishers, and people searching for different paths toward publication, but because they create spaces where one story can recognize another.
Yesterday I went to the Bronx Library Center as an author and publisher. I came home remembering that before any of those titles, we are all people carrying stories with us.
And some of them are simply waiting for someone to tell them.
