Just Maria
Just Maria is the story of Maria Romero, a blind sixth-grader who is trying her hardest to be normal. Not amazing. Not inspiring. Not helpless. Not weird. Just normal.
Normal is hard enough with her white cane, glass eyes, and bumpy books, but Maria’s task is complicated by her neighbor and classmate JJ Munson, an asthmatic overweight oddball known in the halls of Marble City Middle as a double-dork paste-eater. When JJ draws Maria into his latest hare-brained scheme—a series of public challenges to prove their worth as gumshoes for his Twinnoggin Detective Agency—she fears she’s lost her last chance to go unnoticed.
As she tackles JJ’s bizarre challenges, Maria is surprised to find how liberating it can feel to step outside of normal, break a tiny rule now and then, and not worry so much about what others think. When a young girl goes missing on the streets of Marble City, Maria’s new-found confidence is tested in ways she never anticipated.
Use your cane and your brain, and figure it out . . .
Aimed at middle-grade readers, Just Maria explores difference and disability without resorting to the saccharine, while engaging universal themes about the price of popularity and the meaning of independence. The lessons Maria learns are lessons for all of us: be true to yourself, be true to your friends . . . and the world needs more weird.
Published by the Fitzroy Books imprint of Regal House Publishing in January 2022.
Order now from Regal House Publishing, Malaprop’s, Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshare, or wherever you get your books!
Other Writing
While Just Maria is my first published book, I’ve been tapping away at keyboards for most of my adult life. Like a lot of writers, I have stacks of unpublished work: two novels, two collections of children’s poetry, a mortgage contract, my wedding vows. Most of it will never see the light of day, and that’s for the best.
But I’ve also been lucky enough over the last twenty-five years to get published and paid on occasion.
In the late 90s, I made half a living freelancing for The Austin Chronicle, writing a steady stream of features, essays, and reviews for the alt-weekly. I wrote about live music, biscuits from scratch, and miracle hair-growth tonics, and once got to wax poetic for 5,000 words about the Hill Country polka scene. It was a sweet gig.
When I left Austin in 2001, I kept writing, but did less of it. It was mostly small-stakes work for regional publications, the kind of thing you might peruse with a cup of coffee while waiting for your muffler to get fixed. About bears, maybe, or banjos . . . but never (that I remember) about bears playing banjos. A fella has to draw the line somewhere.
In short, I was a dabbler. An enthusiast. An occasional journalist. It was ephemeral work, never meant to be saved, but I loved it. I believe that any time spent wrangling words into sentences is time well-spent. The bulk of those words are long-lost and little-missed, but I did some internet archaeology and dug up a few old pieces, in case you’re curious. You can read ‘em below (so long as the links keep working).
Seeing is Believing. When IFB Solutions launched our first outdoor adventure camp for teens with blindness and visual impairment, I wrote it about it for Blue Ridge Outdoors. (The article is mine; the title was not.)
Confessions of an Outdoor Dad. Another piece for Blue Ridge Outdoors.
I dug up an old essay about splitting wood from Asheville’s Mountain Xpress.
Final Notes. I wrote this essay about saying goodbye to my maddening-but-magnificent student Al when I left the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It appeared in Education Week’s Teacher Magazine back in 2003.
Finally, a few from my salad days at The Austin Chronicle: a defense of napping, a rant about whistling, and the very first piece of my writing that anyone ever published . . . a reverie brought on by the chance discovery of a stray baseball (complete with a typo in the very first sentence). Enjoy.