TIPOLOGIAS DE CONSUMACION

‘It is an accessible kitchen’: Shared creativity and the exchange of

ideas in the talleres

‘This young writer has to read more, they haven’t read enough, and not just science fiction, but classics. To be a writer, to be a science fiction writer, you also have to read these kinds of realist writers, the greatest writers of the past…. you have to learn from the people who are doing well. You always have to learn from somebody. And it is best to learn from people who have done the best writing in the past. Otherwise you will get influenced by people who are not so good. And also, you have to avoid repeating what other people have done, which is getting harder and harder. The themes are once again the same. In science fiction you have to come up with some more original things, but realism is different. You have to do it your way, the way of seeing things, the way of feeling things, but the basics you have to learn from the masters. Or perhaps you are so original you can do something completely different. But even for those people, you have to learn what came before in order to disrupt it.’ (Carlos)

Carlos sat down with me to speak about the origin of the taller [workshop] he coordinates, Espacio Abierto, one of the few talleres dedicated to the genres of science fiction and fantasy in Cuba. We were speaking about the importance of these workshops, both for new writers and for some of the well-published and respected writers who still coordinate and attend the meetings. During my time in Cuba, the goals of the different participants in the workshops always interested me. Without a book market as we understand it, and thereby without looking to an ultimate goal of creating publishable and profitable work, what was the reason for attending these groups so regularly?

As Carlos pointed out, in the quote above, learning to write or to be a good writer necessitated a certain awareness of what constitutes ‘good’ literature for a specific genre and in general. A knowledge of what good literature looks like and an understanding of what has been published or what has been done before is important when starting to write. Published writers

often came up in both groups when people were citing narrative styles or comparable storylines. For the group Espacio Abierto, authors like Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allen Poe were often referenced as exemplars, as were classic works of fiction from Europe and the United States, such as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce. Sitting through a class on narrative technique taught by Raúl (co-convenor of Espacio Abierto and asesor [advisor] of Grupo Ariete), my fieldnotes reference a litany of authors he recommends for specific styles of writing including:

Victor Hugo as an example of an author of the 19th _{century who uses a lot of description. Poe}

is the example of someone who uses ambient description. Hemingway is an example, as a journalist, of someone who describes with minimal adjectives. Umberto Eco as a writer who writes texts hidden in stories. Lovecraft as an example of someone who goes overboard with description, ‘un exagerado’ [an exaggerator].

Knowledge of the published authors of the ‘classics’ of both general fiction and of the science fiction and fantasy genres were what writers needed to bring with them to the taller, as Carlos’s quote above implies. For Carlos the workshop provided a place for people to engage not only with readers’ knowledge of ‘good’ literature, but with other writers of the same genre who could provide

criticism of the writing style and structure. While writers bring knowledge of ‘good’ literature with them, as Grupo Ariete states in the declaration, they are not only interested in looking back, but also using the workshop as a sounding board for new ideas that may in some way ‘disrupt’ the status quo of ‘good’ literature in Cuba. The talleres were meeting places of old and new ideas.

In this chapter, I am interested in the relationship between the writer and their audience. To be a writer is to be read; yet in Havana, being a writer is also about encountering an audience to which you can convey your work through public recitation or performance. This chapter

introduces in depth the two workshops I attended regularly. I hope to show the space of the talleres as a space where the writers I worked with could act as writers through the sharing of written texts and the critical reception provided. Yet I also propose that there was more to attending the talleres and being a writer in those spaces than just presenting semi-finished work for the point of

receiving feedback, although that was a very central point as discussed. There was also an aspect of exchange and instruction. The talleres became a space to exchange story themes and ideas, to share writing techniques and to introduce and establish a shared body of literary knowledge. One writer

walks into the room, but with them comes their experimentation with form and structure, their experience of what works and what fails and all the writers they read who showed them what good writing looks like. As I hope to show throughout this chapter, the taller then becomes a very unique place, not a site of performed readings or editing alone, but a space filled with layers of creative exchange between those writers in the room, the canonical books and styles that shape genres, and the creative presences and spectres that each writer brings with them.