Marta (Gibbons) Elva

Marta Elva will discuss the process of writing and read selections from her novel,
American Tumbleweeds, published by Circling Rivers.

Set in El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, American Tumbleweeds, tells the
bittersweet story of thirteen-year-old Inez, whose Mexican-American family
struggles to stay together as tradition collides with the social upheaval of 1960s
America.  Inez’s family threatens to fragment when her father gets arrested for
smuggling marijuana into the U.S. The old ways cherished by her beloved Mexican
grandmother offer refuge from the turmoil. But life in El Paso is far more
exciting, as mini-skirts, rock music, and the sexual revolution shatter tradition
on both sides of the border.  Poised between two countries and hovering at the
divide of childhood and womanhood, Inez must choose whether to make the dangerous
leap her parents never quite made, the leap faced by every new American: letting
go of the old country to embrace a new destiny in the United States.

John Sayles, filmmaker, author, and MacArthur Fellow, says, “Marta Elva pulls us
into the minds of a half-dozen members of a border family in crisis, dramatizing
the state of living ni aqui, ni alla—neither here nor there geographically and
emotionally. A moving first novel.”

Marta Elva [Gibbons] was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and raised in El Paso,
Texas.  Marta lived in Gloucester before moving to New York. Her career as a
writer, producer, editor, and camera operator in television and independent film
spans over three decades and includes several Emmy-nominated shows, notably PBS
WNET New York’s, Setting the Stage. She and her husband live on Florida’s Gulf
Coast.

 http://circlingrivers.com/home/american-tumbleweeds/