We’re delighted to introduce a new writer to Writerland, Diego Courchay, whose newsletter chapters will be appearing every month. Diego’s work has appeared in a host of publications around the world, including at The Delacorte Review which published his remarkable saga about France, his father and fascism “Pupil of the Nation” in January 2020. We’re devoting our next print issue exclusively to it early next year.

There are days when writing grips you. Yet when daily pressures stake their claims, reason may move you to postpone. The moment is lost. Or the opposite happens, the stars align, your will matches your desire, you cobble the hours together: you ride that wave to the full stop. And then often wait for a prolonged time, scanning the tide for the next surge.

Then there are those whom writing grabs and never loosens its hold, people you’d swear are made of words as much as water. Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa is among them.

Carmen has written 19 novels, eight books of essays, two books of short stories, two children’s books, six plays, and 23 poetry collections, in addition to articles, artistic collaborations, and teaching. She has the prizes to go with it, including an Emmy award-winning series.

For more than half a century –to her reader’s joy– she seems to have been inhabited by a visceral need to write, always at that compulsion’s beck and call. Where did that imperative come from, and how have they cohabited over a lifetime?

“I knew the irresistible desire to write literary texts a few months after my mother's death. My dad already had a girlfriend; a year to the day of his widowhood, he would marry her. She had no desire to be near the six of us –the youngest of my siblings was two-year-old. She was coming to a party all her own, at everyone’s expense, and we went on to six more years of sadness and anxieties for my dad.

“My world came crashing down on me at fifteen, and that's when the fervor was born. Writing has been my moral and emotional backbone to this day, the most stable things sustain me when I write a novel; then there is the certainty of having a complete and uninjured head and body, a whole life, a meaning, a space and a place. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Perhaps someone will give a psychoanalytic interpretation to what I’m describing: the mother does not allow the daughter to grow, to be herself; the symbolic death of the mother is necessary for the birth of the creative force, the will of the self to make a world of its own.

“I am not sure that this interpretation hits the mark. Because I don't know if I truly separated from her, when she died: maybe writing is my surrogate mother, but with objections: I never could confront my mother, as any self-respecting adolescent does. I didn't confront her; I didn't look her in the eyes one on one, between two women. I was a child when she died. The few photos that exist of her –most disappeared beneath the disaster of the new marriage– are for me the permanence of an enigma. I do not control the ‘impulse,’ the ‘need,’ or the ‘drive’ to write, but I do not neglect it. It has its own will. It is somewhat paradoxical: writing sustains me, but I sustain the space that allows it to be, I protect it quite zealously. It's very easy to see it eaten up by other duties. I find a way to protect it. It is in self-defense: otherwise, I disperse, and I am miserably unhappy.

“There is a Cuban poet, Carilda Oliver Labra, who writes ‘I’m in disarray, love, I’m in disarray / when I go into your delayed mouth.’ For me, writing is the only thing that gives me coherence, inner order, and serenity. No matter what I am writing, it gives me the backbone, the support. If I listen to Carilda's poem, writing takes me to a territory far away from love, because ‘I array myself, I write, I array myself…’

“Writing is a support that often burns, either because of violence, or because of the world described, or because of the form it takes, or because it is extremely labyrinthine, or because it flees, runs. I don't care: I become impervious to everything when I write fiction or poetry (although the latter is something else, it is less ‘home’ when I write, it always has something reluctant: like a mustang, an untamed horse.) If what I write is narrative, it is mine, my pillar.

“It also eats my dreams. That's something I particularly like: dreams don't speak to me anymore, they speak to what I write; they plunder my unconscious and give it to writing on a silver platter; they choose for me; they are my accomplices; they vanish me. I dream a lot, I sleep little: the most delicious nights for me are those in which every time I wake there is the memory of a dream waiting to meet my vigil, a dream still warm, like the bread out of the oven, in correspondence, that gives me material to write. Rarely, only very occasionally do they give me a generous tip: it is an exchange between them and what I write. I am, in a way, their witness. A witness without a voice, but who can very much vote, and mobilize. If I don’t take care of the time to write, nurture the time and the manner of being that is attentive to writing, then everything is in vain, and chaos reigns, the true Chaos, a frightful god. I also know the dreams of the god Chaos: they are fearful.”

Every novel has been “an adventure,” and also “haunted” you. Ideas come and go, how do you recognize there is something latent that will become your new writing project?

“I don't know if an idea or a project is here to stay. That's my part: it's up to me to make room for it to grow. When something doesn't come to fruition, I know that it's mostly because of my absence, because I didn't know how to protect it, or I didn't know how to approach it. It is, I will say, my power: to take care that a text reaches its end. To see it coming, to have the idea: this ends up being unavoidable, but it is minor compared to the effort, time, zeal and readings required to write a text.

“And then to be faithful to it: not to be a coquette flirting with another possible text. I must avoid the desire for the ‘spark,’ for the ideas of ‘this could be a novel’ –I have them often, the last one that wanted to bite me is of writing a novel about the Cristero women, that legion of women who fought in Mexico’s religious civil war, not always with weapons, but supplying arms and ammunition, working as spies... and who were taken prisoner... and I imagine that legion of women among the followers of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who never said they were raped, but they were raped... I would love to write that novel, but I would hinder the one I’m writing, and by being feckless, looking for greener pastures, I would end up not even writing the novel that I am writing –or should be writing right now–, but the one I feel like writing, the latest affair. No, writing is like a demanding marriage, and more so: like a kind of convent of the imagination, a tyranny with sackcloth on and all the apparatus of repression to keep out the ‘bad’ desires... bad ones that may be even better than the one that already commits us to fidelity... Those sparks often jump when I am reading to understand something for the novel I am writing... the spark jumps, the loving spark, the ungrateful spark, the one that would be my undoing.

“Maybe that's also why I need to read poems when I write. I think I read poems to listen to the words, to nourish the prose. In that darkness that is writing, the flowers that are poems are necessary: they are the presence of light in their color, on their petal.

“For me, as for everyone, curiosity is paramount in life. It’s the lifeblood of the intellect and of the soul. I’ve yet to know how to be bored. Fiction is ideal for that: it opens a layer of the imagination that invites, incites, and asks us to partake in curiosity. There is always something hidden, inextricable, in a novel.”

Writerland

Chapter 88: Writing’s Lifelong Grip