Shanghai speech: Why does one write

Why does one write remains to me, after many books published and some awards, a mysterious matter. If I cannot answer completely for myself, I am even less capable to do so for other writers. Nevertheless, I can start talking about my earliest memories related to writing. It began early, when I was a child growing up in Canada, in fact, as soon I had been schooled long enough to be able to read. From the third year of my grade school onward, I used to bring to my father little poems of my own. My dad paid me a quarter (that is, twenty-five cents of a Canadian dollar) each time I gave him a new poem. My father did it to encourage my creativity and muster my love for French, which was not only our mother tongue, but my favorite subject in school, along with (later on), Biology and History.

As elementary-school children, we had to write simple literary essays on subjects like seasons or the woods and forests, any subject the teacher could think of. I enjoyed these small essays tremendously. I was such a perfectionist that I was often accused of having copied my compositions from a book, which of course I never did: my writing expressed my own thoughts on the things of life I was thrilled about. My father often went to the school I attended to convince my teacher that I was not cheating. I could not tell now why I liked creative writing more than I know why violet and lilac are my favorite colors. However, they seem to be, according to this odd concept called “individuality”, some innate preferences. By the age of eight, I was already an avid reader. Hans Christian Andersen, as well as Asterix and Obelix, the Gallic heroes of Herzog, filled my childhood with wonder, the same way Agatha Christie's novels, later on, bewitched my years as a youngster.

I wrote poetry just for myself like many teenagers do. I kept doing it in college, although I did not choose Literature as a course of study. My family moved to the United States for a year when I was eighteen, and my English was not good enough then to undertake literary studies in a language that I may have spoken well enough to get along in daily life, but was still new to me as a complex means of expression. I thought of studying Journalism, but felt insecure writing in English, so I chose Geography, specializing in Latin American Studies. Later on, I moved to Mexico. And still later on, I got a Certificate in Translation. Many years later, my fascination for the “poetry” of images led me to study Photography.

Once definitely settled in Mexico, I set as a personal goal to heighten my mastery of Spanish. I did it as a challenge at first, since I was a complete outsider in that institution called Literature. The method I chose to get to handle literary Spanish was to read compulsively. I got acquainted with the best Latin American and Spanish authors. I took all the literary seminars, courses and workshops available in Guadalajara, the city where I still live. In 1997, I published my first book ─a novel─ in Spanish; it went almost unnoticed because of technical problems (very bad edition), but it opened for me the door to publication. In 2003, I published my first collection of poems, and since then, I have published more than fourteen books of poetry, three plaquettes, three novels and two collections stories.

A writer (I know I am not discovering the red tape by saying that) is, above all, a reader. Our readings are what makes us writers. My case as a writer is a little peculiar because I started publishing in a language that is not my mother tongue, and I would dare to say that I know Spanish-language literature better than I know literature written in the French. The list of authors who have had impact on my writing is as long as the scrolls of the Dead Sea: suffice it be to mention Borges, Cortázar, Rimbaud, Faulkner, Celan, Rilke, Steinbeck, Coetzee, Ndiaye, Tournier, Anne Hébert, Quignard, Mahmud Darwish, Juan Rulfo, Guimaroes Rosa, Carlos Pellicer, Neruda, José Gorostiza, Fernando Del Paso, and the list goes on ad infinitum. It is almost unfair to mention these few names and to omit all the other ones that have been adamant to my literary training.

I know the difficulty of publishing fiction that is non-commercial. I am far better known as a poet than as a prose writer. Nonetheless, I must admit I like fiction as much as I do poetry. I started a novel about Henry the Navigator, the mystic Portuguese ship lover who is the inventor of the caravel (the boat used to explore and conquest the Americas), although I do not know if, as a book, it will ever lay on the shelves of a bookstore. This is where my training as a Geographer pops up, I suppose. One of my published novels deals with the migration of French settlers in 17th-century New France. In my drawers (should I say “computer” not to be anachronic) I keep several poetry books. They are, in fact, “work in progress”: I work on them at the same time, jumping from one to another, slowly adding poems as they come. I am in no rush. I quote John Maxwell Coetzee in his novel Foe. on the virtue of patience: From which we may infer there is after all design in our lives, and if we wait long enough we are bound to see that design unfolding; just as, observing a carpet-maker, we may see at first glance only a tangle of threads; yet, if we are patient, flowers begin to emerge under our gaze, and prancing unicorns, and turrets.