Each year, the Writing University conducts interviews with writers while they are in Iowa City participating in the International Writing Program's fall residency. We sit down with authors to ask about their work, their process and their descriptions of home. Today we are talking with Florencia DEL CAMPO, fiction writer from Argentina/Spain.
Florencia DEL CAMPO (fiction writer; Argentina/Spain) is the author of four novels: the first one is La huésped (2016), for which del Campo was a finalist for the 2014 Premio Equis de Novela. In 2017, she published Madre mía. Her third novel, La versión extranjera (2019), won the El Premio Internacional de Novela Ciudad de Barbastro. Her most recent novel, Que tenga una casa (2024), won the Premio Brutal Best Novel 2024 in Spain. She has also published several poetry books and children’s titles in Spain. Her participation is courtesy of the Paul and Hualing Nieh Engle Fund.
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1. Do you have a plan or project in mind for your time at the residency?
Yes! I'm working on my first non-fiction project here in Iowa. I have published novels, poetry and children's books, but I've never published non-fiction yet. In this nonfiction project I am researching the topic of motherhood and mothers-daughters relationship. I analyze almost 100 titles written by women to point out how many issues are constantly appearing in that literature.
2. What does your daily practice look like for your writing? Do you have a certain time when you write? Any specific routine?
Not at all. I don't have any routine. I just write when I have the time to do it. Anyway, I feel writing is something that happens all the time. I don't think that writing is the moment when the fingers touch the computer... I think writing is a way of life; a way to be into the literary world. Writing is happening all the time in my body and my mind. I don't need a routine, times, schedules... I just need the desire to write, and I've never lost that one.
3. What are you currently reading right now? Are you reading for research or pleasure?
I'm reading for the research I mentioned in the second question, but I am also re-reading Écrire by Marguerite Duras. It is a book every writer should come back to from time to time.
4. What is one thing the readers and writers of Iowa City should know about you and your work?
Most of the books I've published are allowed in the library of the University of Iowa. Many of them are about some topics that obsessed me: migration, alien status, houses (literary but also symbolically), women, motherhood, daughterhood... language! More than the topics, I concern the form of the writing: how the language can say something about itself. My novels, all told in the first person, are a female voice attempting to express something that is always of the unspeakable variety. My narrators are all foreigners. They've left their homeland and are no longer at home. She is in France in my first novel, La huésped. She is in France or India in my second novel, Madre Mia, and in the United States in my third novel, La versión extranjera. And in every case, the most difficult battle is with the native language, with the original language and its cracks, with its fissures, rather than with the host language, which they do not speak. Is that the conflict of my narrators, or the reason for writing? Are my stories inhabiting the fracture, or is literature?... That is something I always think/ask about.
5. Tell us a bit about where you are from - share some favorite details about your home.
I was born in Argentina but I've been living in Spain for 13 years. I'm not sure if my home is Buenos Aires or the mountains near Madrid where I have a house. And this confusion is precisely the topic or the base of my writing. In my novels, the narrators are foreigners, the other, the otherness, the strange... Me too. Anyway, Buenos Aires is one of the most important cultural epicenters in Latin America, and my house in the mountains has the possibility to think about what is a house while I look through my window and see cows and birds and a river. The big city and the countryside... another expression of my condition as an alien.
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Thank you so much Florencia!