‘The skys of March’, the book that made Andrea Crespo Granda the type of writer she wants to be

With one of the best-selling publications at the 2022 Guayaquil Book Fair, author Andrea Crespo Granda hopes that her work the air of March keep finding your readers, those who are willing to walk a sometimes complicated path, he said in a recent interview for this newspaper. “And above all I hope that those who read it have the patience to face a novel that does not provide answers and, on the contrary, hopes to leave more questions than certainties.”

Essay, fiction, poetry… you didn’t set boundaries between genres when developing this publication, how did that process go?

The boundary of the genres is a fiction that we impose on ourselves because the categories (literary and in life) give us “peace” and structure. Language builds up, because “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, in my case I see writing as an act/leap into nothingness.

The use of free-form genres is the result of a writing process that draws from a variety of sources, as the protagonist is an anti-heroine. Sometimes stoic, then dramatic, then punk and then calm again. She herself is a cloud; therefore all this amalgamation had to be contained in an unequal voice and means.

I write a book and in that writing I break everything down, because valuable writing is only possible from pure risk. The first quote, which is from Wittgenstein, contemplates a fundamental value in my writing; in my previous books as well as in this novel I use different textual categories to address/approach a force, a mobilizing question that is the beating point of the story. In this case, March sky beyond the plot, it tells us about a protagonist’s constant walking and falling into desire at different stages of her life.

How long have you been working the air of March until its publication?

I started writing it in late 2018, after visiting my sister based on Martha’s Vineyard, but I realized it was a story I had been thinking about for a long time. He had a kind of ‘mix drawer’ where he kept several stories that took the form of the current novel in 2019.

That same year, the book won an honorable mention in the Miguel Donoso Pareja Prize for Short Novels, and in 2022, thanks to IFCI incentives for unpublished works, it was published under the independent Guayaquil label Cadáver Exquisite.

Who is Aurora Aura? What happens are your personal memories?

Aurora-Aura is heroine and anti-heroine at the same time: romanticism and punk or neo-romanticism. Aurora has been pushed away from the norms in search of the ever-present desire. At the beginning of the story she describes herself as “a hole”, “something dark” and that is the key to knowing that she is above all a force/vortex. Something that attracts an interior that we do not know how we will get rid of.

The book is fiction. The main character is a 64-year-old woman, married with three children. In my case I am neither Aura’s age nor motherhood, but all memories are real; that is, they are a pure story.

What themes did you want to cover in your main character book?

I wanted to deal with such a basic subject as love, but not in the limited version of the couple, but in the full range that can be presented to a person: love for the mother, for children, for ideas, for oneself.

Although the central story is a supposed “relationship”, this is an excuse, because throughout the life of Aura/Aurora I write about what we love and what we leave behind, because sometimes we don’t understand the dimensions of love. Love can be a flame, but also old hands feeding another. Loving cannot be the tyranny of a heterosexual relationship and only at certain ages. We even have to expand the idea of ​​love to compassion, to forgive ourselves, to embrace who we were.

Another topic he wanted to address was transgression. From myths like Medea to reports of female victims of femicide, we see our transgressions go unforgiven. Aurora is a woman who commits the worst of all: abandoning her children out of desire. I wanted to focus not on the moral judgment of disobedience, but on how the “heretic” lives it, who has decided to set fire to everything, to be an outcast, to renounce peace.

How do you feel you changed yourself as an author after the production of March sky? What teachings has this process left you, perhaps his character?

I learned something very valuable: what kind of writer I don’t want to be. I hope to find a path that will allow me to continue making book houses, book heavens; books-objects, novels-poems.

I hope I don’t become someone who speaks from the mundane, who exoticizes her gender/identity/thought to say what is expected of a Hispanic woman. I hope I am not a writer trying to teach readers what is wrong and what is right, or that one ideology is better than another; it’s easy to stop writing literature and write behavior manuals or, worse, airport novels.

In what ways do you expect this book to guide readers who bet on it?

As I said, I hope this book leaves more questions than certainties. And that they find something in the pages, a sentence, an image, a desire that resonates

Do you already have another project running?

Yes, a few. One is already finished and the other is work in progress. The novel I finished is about an exiled couple who observe the night sky and walk sleeplessly through the mangrove swamp. I started the other one in mid-2022, in which the character is a girl. The common thread in the three novels is love and families… and politics.

where is it available March sky?

In Guayaquil at La Casa Morada, La Madriguera and Librería Española. In Quito at the bookshops Cosmonauta, Rayuela and Fondo de Cultura Económica. In Cuenca in Palier.