Editor’s Note: With a nod to the epistolary genre, Daniela Suárez develops an original thesis on creative writing, “the conversation” as a resource, and the writer’s vocation. “Letter to Rita (or How to Write to Each Other in the Second Person)” was a finalist in LALT’s first literary essay contest in 2023. It was translated to English by Matthew Shorter.
Dear Rita:
You begin Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty with a lecture, perhaps an invitation, which poses a question for me. In it, you state that dialogue is the best way to think, “because thinking is nothing other than answering.” Reading you, as so often happens in conversations with friends or with books, your words became a bridge for me to something else, in this case to the words of Alejandra Eme Vázquez, who reminds us that that the essay is the journey of a thought which finds its shape on the page. The two claims, yours and hers, have stayed with me for months, and since I don’t have time to write an essay on the theme, I decided to tell you about it in this letter.
Your opening words from that class bring to mind the image of a lecturer who, inclined to abandon the script of a rigorously inflexible talk, looks out across her audience to read with them, and from them, the ultimate form that her argument must take. Instead of accepting the fiction of the straight line, she permits gestures, glances, the presence of the other and of others to leave their imprint, lighter or deeper, on the living writing of a thought which, like a river’s current, gathers into its waters the mineral memory of all that it touches.
I must say, Rita, that re-reading you, I yearned for that “state of writing” you describe so well; that state so often preceded by conversation, the necessary complement for ideas that must find their shape in our mouths and in our hands. As you rightly say, there is something electric and unexpected in the cliché of finding ourselves before a blank page or screen. It is from that very non-time of non-writing that the possibility is conjured, in this letter, of talking with you.
It’s almost a cliché to evoke Virginia Woolf to underscore our lack of time or material circumstances to write, to recall that we don’t have the titular “room of one’s own” that might accommodate our writing. I also think now of Doris Lessing, who felt obliged to leave her children because she wrote. Or of Rosario Castellanos, who, hemmed in by lack of time and money, has to apologise for not being able to write more often to Ricardo. But what has changed? What can we do today, we women who, as always, want to write but lack the time? How can we balance the rhythms of our lives, subject to imperatives of productivity and efficiency, with writing and conversation? Or, put differently, how can we shape the flow of our thought? How can we practise that?
Laia Jufresa says that for a ballerina, each practice session cannot be, is not, a public performance. Jufresa applies this to the domain of writing: sometimes writing is, in the strictest sense, practice. Or, as Alejandra Eme Vázquez has also said: not all writing is intended as spectacle, understood as being published and distributed far from (or close to) its writer. In this respect, and as you say, Rita, conversation appears not as a preparatory step to writing, but as a fundamental part of the process that will lead us to that great act of stagecraft which is sharing a version of our thought with others. Conversation, then, is not only the dancer’s display of a finely tuned muscle memory, but also the first beat that reaches us, the initial thrill that awakens our nervous system to form the steps, the choreography and the practice that might eventually be shared.
You also once said, Rita, that conversation is increasingly rare, that it is an art practised less and less. You said it while in Buenos Aires, a Latin American city where, you observed, people resist the idea that chatting is a waste of time, and consequently, it’s very common to see people talking for a long time without ever feeling that it’s been an unproductive activity. In the United States, from where I am writing to you, this is more and more difficult. Not for lack of desire to converse, but because the lack of public spaces, the prevailing culture of productivity and urban design itself, which forces us to depend on the car, make the interchange of ideas less likely. In contexts like this, and especially in academic spaces, as you’ve pointed out, conversation is often institutionalised and, if it cannot appear as evidence of productivity in a CV, its informal and non-bureaucratised version seems doomed to extinction.
So, Rita, I want to propose something to you. What if conversations with our friends through an instant messaging platform are the first step of writing, or are writing itself, in contexts where the walls of the room of one’s own are not made of brick and plaster? What if, within the inventory of light and shade that technology has given us—the internalisation of eternal vigilance, the very modification of our tastes and habits, the (not so) subtle ways in which it tames us—the epistolary conversation can also be fostered as a way to try out our ideas? Is that not what the essay is? What writing is? What grants the status of writing to what we leave on the non-page?
Of course, I’m not suggesting that digital conversation should be a substitute for afternoons in the café or long after-dinner chats, or that we stop weaving ourselves in the company of others—but that we should consider these scraps, so common now, that accumulate in this space of writing, and how that contact with others bends the curve of our ideas.
We bring ourselves into alignment through what we say—and what we write—but also through other mouths and other ears.
I put these and other questions to a friend via Telegram. Sometimes through voice notes, but almost always written, perhaps dictated to the phone while I walk to pick up my son from school. She, both sender and receiver, throws back at me a question or an idea that makes me stop at the side of the road, disobeying the green of the traffic light telling me to step off the pavement. Then, I wait. I listen. I think. Sometimes, I answer. I cross the street.
Another message arrives: ping!
Revelations. Questions. Epiphanies. Jokes. Complaints. Fears. Dreams. Everything belongs in those daily conversations that stretch out like a drip throughout the day because we don’t have time to write. In the falling of the drop to the ground, it is transformed, and when it touches the earth, it buries itself there to water an idea, a question, an intuition.
My thought and my interlocutor’s walk with me as I work, clean, care, play.
Ping!
Text from C: The thing that interests me about all this is the possibility of creating spaces for writing on and off the page. How do we do that? For now, the instant messenger also works well for thinking with interlocutors separated by geography.
I think. I reply.
Sometimes I have to wait for the night, for that “state of writing” that emerges in the half hour between the end of working hours and the start of sleeping time, just before the hurried reading that barely fits on the pillow, before catching up with our partner, before washing the dishes and folding the clothes, before preparing the next day’s lunch for my boy… And it’s usually that: half an hour, a ritual moment, in the living room. Long messages which always start more or less the same way: I’m replying late because I was waiting for a moment of calm, although I already had the message written—essayed—in my head and also, I wanted to write to you from the computer, so I could expand on my thoughts…
We bring ourselves into alignment through what we say—and what we write—but also through other mouths and other ears. Other texts. We reply and receive replies. Sometimes, after talking to a friend, I write a message to circle back to an idea: I said such and such, but I want to add this. I promised this information, here it is. I read this idea, it reminded me of you. You said this, tell me more. This interests me, what do you think. In this back-and-forth of ideas, they change, new ones arise and are transformed. If I had time, I’d write…
Ping!
We think together about politics, love, sex, child-raising, money. We laugh. We disagree. We change our minds.
Ping!
And so, yes, I write, and I write you this, which I had already essayed, because I don’t have time.
Long Beach, California
