Estela Calapiz. Peninsula 360 Press.
More than ten years ago, Casa Círculo Cultural was created to bring Latin American culture to this part of the Bay Area. The sense of this project was - and still is - that our families have a place of belonging and that their children and the new generations do not forget their mother tongue through art, theater, music, creative writing workshops, craft workshops, community living such as clubs, cinema debate, book club and radio programs.
The community work is done through volunteering. At the beginning, as you can see, this goal seemed distant and ambitious, but it was achieved with the effort of many people and with the tenacity of its director who has not given up, to date, to achieve the initial task.
This time I will talk about how it started "The Creative Writing Workshop" and the benefits it has provided to the community of migrant families living in this part of California. I will tell you how the idea of involving these women in writing was born: it arose from the need to generate a space for free expression when I observed the mothers waiting for their children to leave the workshops offered at La Casa Círculo CulturalThe children began to form a group in which they conversed spontaneously, a situation that led us to think that this socialization could be channeled into some benefit for this group. It was then when the project arose that they began to learn to write.
The origin of these women was varied: one or two came from El Salvador, from Guatemala, from Peru, from different states of the Mexican Republic; as well as their schooling: there were women who barely had elementary school, others had reached high school and one or another had a profession. It was a somewhat uneven group, but each one, at her own level, began to write short stories, other texts, such as poetic prose, some verses, some songs. The compendium of the small writings was the publication of a book. Some of them even wrote their own book.
The work that was done did not try to teach them everything they needed, but how to achieve enthusiasm and create in these women: love and esteem for knowledge, reading and self-criticism, as well as working with their self-esteem by seeing their writings published. For some of them, this workshop basically helped them to learn new words and to start reading.
Readers may wonder why write? I will tell them that writing is a craft that can be learned - although being a writer is another matter - but from that you can discover a writer, a woman who would never have realized it if she hadn't tried.
If you want to write, you can, but first you must know the techniques of a craft as old as man, for example, that of storytelling, and all these women had a lot to tell, because a story can take many forms: that of a letter, a story or a novel, that of a song, or a biography. Writing also is a cultural tool that facilitates cognitive development, rescues memory and privileges power. According to the cognitive conception, writing is a process that requires the active participation of the writer who must apply very complex mental operations: planning, writing and revising.
In conclusion, I will say that the purpose of this writing workshop was not to be a school to train writers, but rather laboratories for literary creation. Spaces of relationship between people of the community, of dialogue, of help to people who have recently arrived in the United States, a place of exchange where doubts are resolved, insecurities are smoothed out and one learns to move in this culture and to learn a new language.
I would like to tell you that during this time of confinement, in order to continue with the Project, a virtual Reading Club has been created, a space where we have begun to read famous writers, little by little of course, and we have also read our own writings. The Writing Workshop, or now the Book Club, where more and more people of any sex are coming, is the place where, at last, you meet people with common interests, with whom you can give your opinion, share your tastes and inclinations, but also your anxieties and obsessions, those of each and every one of us.
In this space you can not only share with people of sexual diversity, but also with people of different ages, older or younger than you, wiser or less wise, more or less capable, better or worse; just as it happens in your daily life. With these workshop companions, you will achieve belonging and closeness with like-minded people whom you will end up getting to know very well. In this way you will learn to respect different opinions: they will not necessarily be complacent and flattering, but they will be critical and sometimes ruthless when it comes to passing judgement on the subjects they write or read about.
To finish: Here I leave you with this text by Gilles Deleuze:
Literature is on the side of the formless, of the unfinished... Writing is a matter of becoming, always unfinished, always in progress, and it overflows any liveable or lived matter?
