El Vaquero

Issue date: 3/12/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Alex Ben Parks Writer Maria Del Torro goes by the pen name of Margo Candela

In a competitive publishing environment where it can take many years to publish a first novel, a former GCC student proved that dreams can come true sooner than you realize.


"I think for me it was a matter of timing and luck and having what somebody was looking for," Maria Del Torro said modestly.


This wife, mother and novelist has written "Underneath It All," her debut, and "Life Over Easy," both women's fiction novels-books that focus on strong women characters, written in a lighthearted conversational tone aimed to entertain, even though they might address more serious issues.


"I write about modern women in contemporary situations dealing with traditional families who may not fully understand the choices their daughters and sisters make," said Del Torro.


"I include a wide variety of characters - both male and female, gay, straight, white, black, Latino, Indian - because it makes the stories much more interesting to me when I get to explore different perspectives."


Her books can be found at Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and through online sites such as amazon.com - but only under her pen name Margo Candela: a name that she enjoys and helps her feel connected to her writing.


"I went with a pen name because I wanted to diversify what kind of writing I could do," said Del Torro, referring to the flexibility it gives her to produce other types of fiction under her own name.


"My first agent suggested a pen name and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was another way for me to take ownership of what I was writing and give myself a name that went with the overall tone of the novels."


But she began writing under this name years after working in the El Vaquero newsroom, where her writing career first took shape.


Del Torro, a Mexican-American born and raised in Northeast Los Angeles, went to GCC in the early 1990s after graduating from Franklin High School. With encouragement from Mike Eberts, her Mass Communications 101 professor at GCC, she joined the El Vaquero staff.


"It was when I took Mr. Eberts' class that I realized that what I always liked in life was taking information, digesting it and putting it in my own words," said Del Torro. "He encouraged that in us, to not take things on the surface, but to think a step beyond."

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