Featured Author: Raquel Rivera
 
Bibliography at Orca
Orphan Ahwak: When her village is attacked, Aneze is the only survivor. She renames herself Orphan Ahwak as she struggles to survive on her own, enduring cold and hunger and befriending people whose customs are completely foreign to her. Through it all she remains determined to become a hunter and to find a place in an often hostile and terrifying world.
Interview
Why do you write, and why children's books? I write children's books because they are fun to do. As a child, I would spend whole weekends sunk in my beanbag chair, zooming through all kinds of books. I still do it whenever I can (except I don't have a beanbag chair anymore). After I had my first child I got back into kids' books by reading with him. And I would tell him stories and try to share my thoughts in a way that he could understand. So I suppose it all came together and got me started writing books for children.
What kind of research do you do before you write? I read heaps of books. So far my interest has been in writing historical stories, so I need to collect a great deal of information before a plot begins to take shape. If I have the money, I will visit the place where I set my story. Otherwise, I have to rely on books and pictures and documentary movies... anything I can find.
Do you put your family and friends in your books? Oh sure. I put in bits and pieces, not really a whole character. Family, friends and I also put myself in. I also use stuff I overhear—on the bus, at a café—I learn a lot by eavesdropping on other people's lives.
What is your favorite children's book? Right now I'm reading the Bone graphic novels with my son. They are really
good. When I was a kid, one of my favorites was the Asterix series. Favorite in the series, you ask? Asterix and Cleopatra!
What are you working on now? Well, I'm drawing a book, actually. It's a book for babies. But since I have my baby daughter with me, it's slow going. I hadn't done much drawing for several years before this, since around the time my son turned two. I
figured this was because his drawings were much better than mine, so I got discouraged and gave up.
But now I realize it was something else—it's hard to draw a picture with a toddler running underfoot! It's easier to write stories because ideas can pop into your head at any moment, anywhere. You can be making sandcastles at the park and writing a story inside your head at the same time. But when you are drawing, you can't have a little one tugging at your arm, or ripping your paper, or getting into the toxic art supplies, can you?
What are you reading now? I'm reading a very interesting biography of writer Alice Walker, by Evelyn C. White. Alice Walker wrote the book The Color Purple, among many others. She was born in a family of poor black sharecroppers in the U.S.A. and grew up through some very turbulent, racist and scary times in the South. I've enjoyed many of her books over the years. Now I get to find out how she became such a strong, honest, inspiring example of a human being.
Biography
Raquel Rivera was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. After graduating York University with a B.F.A. in Visual Arts in 1987, Raquel Rivera moved to Barcelona, Spain, for two years. There she found work as a teacher of English, pursued her drawing and learned Spanish.
Some years later, she left Toronto again to live in Singapore. While working as a project manager and copywriter for a graphic design firm there, Raquel was able to produce a series of artist books. Her "Small Books" now tour North America in Projet mobilivre/Bookmobile (www.mobilivre.org) and are included in the collection at Montreal's Bibliograph/e Zine Library (www.bibliograph.ca).
In 1996 Raquel and her future husband Kim moved one country north, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They started a website design practice and founded Site Dish! (www.sitedish.com) to house interactive projects experimenting with art, writing and interface design for the web. At the same time, Raquel was able to pursue her writing and drawing online in web art collaborations with
Montreal-based artist, Jeannette Lambert—work which was featured in online journals and festivals around that time.
In 1999 Raquel began raising a family and focusing exclusively on her own writing and art. She has since published poems, exhibited her drawings and written three children's books: Arctic Adventures, Tales from the Lives of Inuit Artists, Orphan Ahwak and Tuk¹s First Whale.
Raquel maintains a book review website, In My Hysterical Opinion. She now lives in Montreal with her husband and two children.
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