Spotlight On Writers – Gabriela M

First, let me say thank you to the entire Spillwords team for giving me the opportunity to talk about me. It is a pleasure and an honor. I was born in Europe and I lived in different countries before I came to the US. I call America home. I call my formative years ‘the European period.’ Europe is the place in which my soul hides when things get tough; the place where my creative juices first started. A magic place filled with beauty and pain. A place to which I return very often. These days I think of myself as a European and an American at the same time. I think at myself as a mix. But then I say to myself: “Wait, Gabriela. A mix? That is the definition of an American.”

Pain, suffering, love. Things that I can never forget. John Fowles’ words are tattooed in my soul: “Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.” (John Fowles, ‘The Collector’).

I love oceans and islands. I love tropical climates. I love green. Everything is green in the tropics. There are so seasons. As I wrote in one of my poems: “Your love, eternal summer with no births and deaths.” I was thinking of the tropics when I wrote that.

I have very few moments when I get stuck creatively. Usually when I am extremely tired. Then I turn again and again to the writings of my favorite novelist: Lawrence Durrell. His books are all over the house. I pick one and start reading from somewhere in the middle. After a while, it feels like somebody pours inspiration in my veins. I get transported in another world. A world in which creativity flows in all directions.

There are other writers that have almost the same influence on me: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire.

My favorite word? I have many. One of them is ‘dream’.

A poetic sentence?

“You is always I
Even in a dream”

Those lines are part of a poem that I wrote called ‘Dream’