Socorro Venegas and Paula Tomassoni at the Federal Education Commission: A moving dialogue about death, memory, and writing

How do you write when someone is no longer there? How do you find words to speak of the void? Can literature accompany grief without dissolving it? To a packed house at the Editors' Fair (FED) , which ends tomorrow, Sunday, and can be visited with free admission at the C Complejo Art Media, the conversation "Writing Despite the Pain" between Mexican writer Socorro Venegas and Argentine writer Paula Tomassoni , moderated by academic Alicia Salomone, fearlessly delved into a delicate and unavoidable topic: how to write literature from the experience of loss.

Venegas, with her attentive gaze and sing-song voice, began by asking herself: "Why did I write about grief? Why is that in my stories?" She explained that she belongs to that "breed of writers who work with very personal coordinates , with their own biography to write."

And although her books are not strictly autobiographical, she admitted that there is a germ of truth in them : “I couldn't say exactly when the fiction begins because I was 12 years old when my brother died, at 9, of leukemia, after having endured a lot of pain. I was also widowed very young .”

She recalled her first novel, The Night Will Be Black and White , and evoked a scene from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking , when the author describes the moment she realizes her husband has died. " That anomaly that isn't within the realm of the rational interests me greatly . More than the event itself, I care about seeing how these stories end up interpellating others through their very absences."

Tomassoni, born in La Plata, is the author of Leche Merengada (Merengada Milk), Indeleble (Indelible) , and the short story collections Pez y otros relatos (Fish and Other Stories ) and El paralelo (The Parallel) . She coordinates the reading series "Hasta que choca con África" (Until China Collides with Africa) and writes reviews for the magazine Bazar Americano.

Unlike Venegas, she clarified that her novels "don't have a direct connection to my biography, but they do have a personal connection to my story" : from a very young age, she went through grief that marked her. "Sometimes I find it hard to talk about grief. A friend asked me: Do you have any novels where no one dies? And I replied: "Do dogs count?"

Regarding his method, he explained that he doesn't deliberately seek to narrate loss. However, it creeps into his plots : in Maynes , the story arose from a news report in Spain, where a man, facing imminent foreclosure on his home, committed suicide. Shortly after, the foreclosure was called off: "I imagined his wife being left homeless, a widow, without a job," he said.

In Enlutada , the core is the death of a father. “The way I wrote both was to go slowly, looking very closely. I have a friend who says we write with the light of a match: we only know what that light illuminates,” she said.

In the dialogue organized by the publishing houses La parte maldita and Corregidor, Salomone proposed comparing the way in which different cultures approach death .

Venegas spoke of the Day of the Dead in Mexico as a celebration that invites us to remember and honor: “In large communities and villages, grief is experienced as a community. That ritual presence is important. I believe that today we need to imbue the extreme urgency of contemporary societies with a more communal vision of loss.”

Tomassoni took up the challenge to talk about the south, where, he asserts, death often goes hand in hand with silence . “We try to express what is linked to silence, and that has to do with the human condition. I'm intrigued by how we live with the certainty of death: in some cases naturally, in others with fear. There's an enormous source of stories about the finite.”

And he recalled an image from his city: “In La Plata, there was an advertisement for a cemetery, and a very large woman was struggling to read the sign. I wondered what she was reading, what her concern was. This coexistence with the inevitable fills me with curiosity.”

Venegas shared an episode that illustrates how memory can rewrite reality. In 2019, she wrote a story based on a childhood memory: a hospital hallway filled with sick children and the moment she visited her hospitalized brother. Some time later, her mother clarified that it never happened: she couldn't go in to see him . "But it gave me comfort to think that I had seen him after so much time. In literature, one reckons with memory, and you have to be generous with yourself," she reflected.

Tomassoni, for his part, admitted that he fears his own emotions when writing: “I never know what the reader will feel. I've received very different responses: people who had to put the book down, go outside for a bit, and then come back. When I write, I don't think about it too much. My experience is a bit of a surfer,” he shared.

Towards the end, Salomone asked how a process as contradictory as mourning, which escapes the linear narrative of Hollywood melodrama, is put into literary form .

Venegas responded that, even though a life has been lived, it never becomes predictable : “I often read Pascal Quignard. Sometimes we invent memories because we need to fill the gaps left by absence.”

The audience, which had listened silently and participated with solid questions, applauded vigorously. Outside, dusk had already fallen over the FED. And among the last to leave the room, the certainty still lingered that, in the face of death, words cannot heal the wound . But sometimes, with their phosphorous spark, they ignite the path that remains.