Family time 

By Lupita Vega 

It was mid-march and I knew I had to go back home to Oaxaca. I had been living in Mexico City for the past five years, but when the quarantine started it got way more complicated for me to sort out the expenses of the city. Furthermore, my family was anxious about me being alone in the middle of the pandemic.  

As my job turned out to be less demanding at the beginning of the home office routine, family matters started to be more time-consuming. Of course, I love spending time with them and being able to play with my nieces and nephew again was a really good gift I am thankful for. Since my brothers had to keep working, I tried to baby sit them as much as possible. Furthermore, they allowed me to stay sane, for the most part, during such unstable times.  

During this period, I thought a lot about the other mentees and mentors that have managed to take care of their family and continue to write. I have always admired them but now more than ever. It was complicated for me to balance out all my responsibilities. Even though we were indoors, intimacy and solitude felt almost impossible. Not only that, I started to feel like I had no motivation to keep on doing my work, all I wanted was to be distracted from what was going on out there and not to dwell to much on my own distressed state of mind.   

Nevertheless, coming back to Oaxaca ended up helping me boost my creativity. I finally had time to experience a lot of things that I did not remember about my childhood and the wonderful places I had been in Oaxaca: through family albums, collective recollections, old newspapers I found home, stories from my brother’s childhood and my father’s work, even the ghosts we thought we discovered in our house. I believe I managed to create other characters more truthful and diverse. I wrote around five new drafts for short stories during the quarantine and I don’t think I would’ve been able to do so without this need of going back home. I started asking for free Sundays in order to be able to write my ideas down and get some work done in that matter. 

I am thankful for the opportunity of sharing more time with my family and mostly I am thankful for their stories. However complicated it might have been to get used to one another after some time, I know I am very lucky to have them with me. 

Bibliography and research interests  

My project was mainly about an obsession I have regarding doors and their symbolic representations and interpretations. I had started my inquiries through Bachelard and how he sees them as double menaces, a double and contradictory desire to open them or close them. However, translating my collection of material doors to fiction proved to be more challenging than expected. I seemed to be writing the same story over and over again, instead of creating different universes in each text. Thanks to the workshops throughout the project I realized I could broaden my search to houses and how very concrete and material places affect those characters within their walls. Also, I knew I had to work on my description skills, since I tend to neglect that part. I started to read more fiction that could help me learn how to improve on these aspects. My mentor recommended The haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, as a great example of how architecture can even damage or have an influence upon psyche. Below I list some of the bibliography that I used and continue to use to have references as to what I would like to work and learn.  

Fiction books I read over and over again: 

-Cuentos completos by Inés Arredondo 

-Siete casas vacías by Samanta Schweblin 

-Cuentos reunidos by Amparo Dávila 

Houses and material places that have an effect in the character’s personality, even so that can be characters themselves. Confining spaces in which characters develop their stories: 

-Restauración by Ave Barrera 

-The haunting of hill house by Shirley Jackson 

-Los ingrávidos de Valeria Luiselli 

-Nada by Carmen Laforet 

-El cuarto de atrás by Carmen Martin Gaite 

-Jamás el fuego nunca by Diamela Eltit 

-La passion según GH by Clarice Lispector 

Interesting quotes on doors: 

-Antigonick by Anne Carson 

-La poética del espacio by Gaston Bachelard 

-Viento quebrado by Dolores Castro 

Currently, and as a result from the quarantine time I have been writing about Oaxaca, and I have been researching on different aspects: 

Attention to descriptive passages and relationship between nature and character’s personality: 

-La perra by Pilar Quintana 

-El matrimonio de los peces rojos de Guadalupe Nettel 

-La naturaleza seguía propagándose en la oscuridad by Andrea Mejía 

I’ve tried to learn about: 

- “Listado de especies de cigarra” by José Antonio Sánchez-García1, Roselia Jarquín-López1, Héctor Miguel Guzmán- Vásquez, Fernando Ruiz-Ortiz, Elia Jirón-Pablo, Laura Martínez-Martínez1 y Hansen Duvan Meneses-Agudelo. 

-Crocodiles digestive system 

-Coffee plantation processes