Young Adult Author Ray Villareal Interviewed for OAK CLIFF PEOPLE

From People Magazines, Oak Cliff

Author’s Third Novel Targets Young Crowd
Villareal’s boyhood fantasies about neighbor’s garden inspired book

By Silver Hogue
Staff Writer

Ray Villareal hopes his third novel, Who’s Buried in the Garden?, will catch the attention of a younger audience.

The new tale will hit bookstores Saturday, and Villareal will be at the Borders bookstore at Greenville Avenue and Lovers Lane that day to answer questions and sign copies.

The Kessler Park resident, who has been an instructional reading coach in the Dallas ISD for 28 years, gets ideas for his books from his experiences living in North Oak Cliff.

Villareal said a woman who lived across the street from him as a boy inspired the new book, originally titled Mrs. Leigon’s Grave.

“She had a beautiful garden and in her backyard, she had this flower mound that looked like a grave,” he said. “We would walk through the alley behind her yard on the way home from school and thought that that’s where she buried her husband.”

The book was actually Villareal’s first, but was rejected by publishers in the beginning.

“When I had grown as a writer and could see a lot of the things wrong with it, I rewrote it and changed it from the third person to the first,” he said. “I injected a lot of humor and it was eventually accepted.”

Villareal said while his books are usually geared toward middle-school children, he wrote the new for students in fourth through sixth grades.

“It’s a humorous story and this one is light-hearted,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun. I really enjoyed writing it and think that kids will enjoy it.”

Michelle McCutcheon, librarian at George W. Truett Elementary School, said Villareal’s books are really encouraging to students and she looks forward to the new one.

“I think kids identify with a lot of his characters,” McCutcheon said.

Villareal said he hopes students will understand the moral of the story.

“My main character is friends with someone who makes up stuff all the time,” he said. “In the end, he has to make some decisions. It’s about making good decisions and learning who your friends really are.”