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The series of interviews Experts as Disciples collects the experiences of outstanding personalities during their learning processes, both in the academic field and in everyday life. It has a double objective (in addition to natural entertainment): to serve as a vocational guidance tool for students, teachers, and the general public and to highlight what, in my opinion, is the most common trait of human beings: always to be learning.
Someone once told me that theater directors are nothing but professional audiences; in the same way, I think teachers are only experienced students who share their experiences with others.
Interview by Andrés García Barrios
Flor Aguilera is a successful Mexican writer who has concentrated mainly on novels and short stories for children and young people (although she also has books for adult readers, including six of poetry). She is the favorite author of thousands of kids who find in her someone who understands them in their search for sincerity. Her titles could not be more suggestive: The Day Grandma Exploded, The Werewolf Is Allergic to the Moon, So You Know What to Do With Me, As the Audience Begs for a Ferocious Tango (four of her numerous books; the latter is poetry in English).
Flor shares with us as a lifelong learner is her journey through the eight cities of the world where she has lived and her four areas of professional study (journalism, art history, English literature, and international relations), finally settling in the territory of writing. She landed somehow in the Dynamic School of Writers, a flourishing hotbed of Mexican literature in the first decade of this millennium. Flor has received numerous distinctions, among them the René Cassin Prize in Human Rights (Paris, 2000) and the recognition of her novel Jane Without Prejudice as one of the best books of 2020 in the prestigious annual listing published by the Cuatro Gatos Foundation (Four Cats Foundation). This novel is included in the Prepa Tec reading programs. Many of her books are also read in primary, high schools, and prep schools throughout Mexico.
Do you remember your first day at the Dynamic School of Writers?
“I remember that day very well,” recounts Flor. “The first thing they told us when we were all “sitting down” was, “In this school, there is only one rule: You will not write.” In the beginning, the idea was that students would invent their own method of writing, that we would find a voice of our own through experimenting with creative processes in other arts. We were taught by a photographer, a choreographer, a sculptor, experts in graphology and physiognomy, a great fashion designer. I was so excited…I thought I was in the right place at the right time in my life. I had to study many things before, in many places; I finally arrived there and lived it so joyfully.”
That day they also asked, ” Why do you write?”
I remember some of the answers of my colleagues: “I write in revenge!” “I write, so people pay attention to me!” I had prepared a funny response, which provoked some giggles out there: “I write because when I speak, I always blush.” It was not an entirely sincere joke, but in reality, it said a lot about me. It was true that through writing, I could tell things that I was reluctant to say out loud, things that did not go very well when I opened my mouth. In fact, it is something I feel right now as I answer these questions.
As a writer, could you have skipped elementary school, high school, prep school?
No, definitely not. There was a book club at the school I studied at in the United States in third grade. Every month, we could choose a book that came to us in the mail at school. It was exhilarating to open the package and find the new book! That has a lot to do with the charm I feel for books and why I write for children and adolescents.
And your professional careers?
Having studied and practiced in several careers and having traveled so many places in the world gives me a perspective that allows me to invent singular circumstances for my characters. I always tell myself, “My character is the way he is because he lives in such a place or because his family is this way or that.” The most exciting thing about writing is creating characters with a particular point of view, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and speaking for them.
If you could travel to the past, that strange country, would you go back to the Dynamic School of Writers?
Without any doubt. Lately, I have been in contact with my former classmates, and we all feel the same nostalgia. There we met incredible writers whose life experiences were as meaningful as what they narrated in their works. They gave us excellent tips: Ignacio Padilla [i], for example, gave us a class called Plagiarism. He told us, “If you’re going to sit down and write, first see how the masters do it.” And he made us hand-pick books by the great writers! I decided to transcribe several chapters of García Márquez’ book The Autumn of the Patriarch in a notebook. While doing so, I realized things: “Okay, okay, I already understand how he builds a sentence …” That really touched me, truthfully. I was able to experience what it is to be a writer without being a writer yet. And I got hooked and wanted more!
Thanks to the School of Writers, you published your first novel.
Schools are also a place for that. You find opportunities. Also, they taught us that part, that of publishing. None other than Marisol Schultz spoke to us on this topic. She was Director of Grupo Santillana and later also directed the Guadalajara International Book Fair. Her class was masterful. I would definitely go back to school. It was fantastic!
Playing at being writers, did you all learn to be them?
Yes, a large part of what we did in school was that. A fantastic teacher played recordings for us of people reading stories in Swedish so that we could do simultaneous translations without understanding anything! In a workshop called Writing without Bounds, which I took outside the school, another unique teacher had us follow people on the street and write down everything we saw them doing. Haha, it’s not a very safe exercise, but I, who as a girl dreamed of being a private detective, loved it. One of my “targets” once realized that I was following her and got scared, heh, heh. Being a writer has its risks, but that’s how I discovered that to continue creating, I had to play. When writing, there is a very rigorous part: correct the text, edit it; you edit, and you edit, and you edit again. But to start a new work, you need to unblock yourself and let creativity and imagination flow. It is scary to face a blank page. How do you get started? There are tricks, and one of the best is learning to play.
Learn to lose control somehow, right? They say out there, “If yo
u try to control everything, you lose control.”
Yes, right. But there is also something else: When you write, the lack of control goes hand in hand with a certain order without which it is difficult to lose your fear of the blank screen, the blank page. I learned that in another workshop outside of school with the writer Toño Malpica.[ii] Toño taught us to go step by step so we would not be scared by the question, “How am I going to write a novel?” And before that question, a worse one: “What? I am going to write a novel?!!!” The answer was: Structure! Structure is fundamental; for me, it is. You first plan chapter by chapter, knowing exactly what happens at the beginning and the end. That helps you control your inner chaos and not get lost.
Take control, somehow.
Yes, but then we go back to the beginning: no matter how well you have planned who your characters are, you must not lose sight that at some point, they are going to get out of hand and contradict each other. That is part of their authenticity. This is the exciting thing of writing about what I call “truly fictional human beings.”
One thing I like to know from the experts is how they live as part of a tradition. This is very clear in the case of artists: You usually realize that you are a recipient of heritage from long ago (even from ages that are lost in time) and consider many of your predecessors as masters.
Those of us who dedicate ourselves to writing are part of a giant tradition. And I’m going to confess something to you: Many times, when I go into a bookstore, I feel a little sad, and it isn’t that there are so many books written: it is that so many books are published! I wonder, why one more? However, the shame vanishes when I think that what I write will be funny for someone, moving, valuable, that I can accompany that person, make them angry, provoke fear. What results then is a mixture of honoring the masters while creating a place for yourself (a space in that place that has no room).
The chain of receiving and giving is unending…
That’s right. Honestly, I don’t have a very long list of classic writers. I learned from Shakespeare because, as a child, I memorized the speeches of Romeo and Juliet and recited them, locked in my room. Beverly Cleary[iii] left a mark on me because her character Ramona Quimby looked like me (in the movies; nobody looked like me on TV, so seeing her on the magazine cover was a discovery). At 14, while resting for an angina operation, my parents brought me a Box Set by Jane Austen,[iv] the British novelist…and everything changed forever! She is still my favorite author: her intelligence, her mood, her dialogues, the one who, with three words, describes a character. Then came Emily Dickinson,[v] poet, with her mixture of sarcasm and tenderness; and finally, two Canadians who, when reading them, I began to think about dedicating myself to writing: Margaret Atwood,[vi] who transforms fairy tales into something hilarious, brilliant… and dark! And Douglas Coupland,[vii] famous for his book Generación X, but Life after God was the one that marked me. Something lit up in me, and I said, “This is what I want to do.”
Tell us another important thing you’ve learned from someone.
One day the writer Dave Eggers[viii] was asked, “If you could belong to a group like the old literary avant-garde (the Surrealists, the Dadaists, for example), what would that group be called?” He replied, “It would be called The New Sincerity.” I learned that from him that I also would belong to The New Sincerity.
[i] Ignacio Padilla (1968-2016), Mexican writer, member of the Mexican Academy of Language.
[ii] Antonio Malpica (1967), multi-prized Mexican writer of novels and books for children and youths, including theater.
[iii] Beverly Cleary, United States writer born in 1916 and died this 2021 at age 104.
[iv] Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist.
[v] Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), United States poet.
[vi] Margaret Atwood (1939), Canadian writer and political activist.
[vii] Douglas Copland (1961), Canadian writer and visual artist.
[viii] Dave Eggers (1970), United States writer and editor, Director of the literary journal Mcsweeneys.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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