This Is a Sad One

I joined a writers' group that meets from Monday to Friday on Zoom, no talking just a cohort of people typing. I thought I’d work on my other writing project, or maybe the other one, or that long-forgotten draft… you get the picture.

Before I started drawing I used to write, even getting published a few times in (sadly defunct) literary journals and during my time as a member of the Quebec Writer’s Federation, I got surprisingly good feedback for my short pieces.

I stopped writing because I’m a linguistical orphan. My first language is Spanish but I’ve been functioning in English most of my life. I began reading and writing in English at the age of five and the books I read over and over in those years were basically by two authors: Oscar Wilde (read to me out loud) and Beatrix Potter. It was the start of a lifelong anglophile obsession.

This obsession detached me from my heritage, origin story, country, schoolmates, and as I grew up, from every human that surrounded me. I was deep in the lives of the 70s Punks, the New Wavers, and the Bloomsbury group writers, I read novels by the most wonderfully snobbish authors. I gobbled up the music and books by British, Scottish and Irish artists.