What does a writer do when he feels that what he has to say is not enough?

“The drama of my life is that there was no great drama,” he says Jose Santamarina, who is a writer and also a facilitator of writing workshops. He says it when he talks about until there’s nothing left. This is not the first book in which he participated, before there were the anthologies babies well there How to win the World Cup against Brazil. It is, yes, his first “solo” book.

It is a book made up of four stories – those that take place between childhood and adolescence and are revisited later, when it is easier to find the right words – but above all in a tone. A touching and economic tone at the same time, and which crosses the narrator, a child-adolescent who has four sisters and no male brotherand that he grows a little in this house and a little in the Cardinal Newman College.

Santamarina publishes his texts in La Agenda, Rolling Stone and Seoul and writes on Enzo Fernandez In boys. The selection that made us happya book edited by Readthe publishing house of GlobeLiveMediaand available for free download on Bajalibros.

“Writing workshops are an excuse to also have a conversation with myself, because what I am supposed to teach are difficulties that I can also find when I start writing,” he says in author podcastdriven by Julieta Roffojournalist from GlobeLiveMedia. And he immediately adds: “The absence of drama is the drama of my life, it’s one of the things that tires my writing because even now I think ‘who am I to recount experiences in my life where there is no Isn’t there a big conflict to say?’” .

Something – or someone, there are always good editors to lend a helping hand that will embolden enough – convinced Santamarina that while there wasn’t a huge conflict, there were still stories to tell, and with these stories he made his book. “Those of us who write spend thousands of hours watching a scene rather than experiencing it.“, explains the writer during the episode of author podcast, and immediately adds: “Well, maybe, for the simple fact of being alive, there is something to be said.” Maybe it has to do with this, or with another aspect that Santamarina reveals: “Writing is what comes out when nothing else comes out.”

There sentimental education, one that usually occurs more or less alongside formal education (especially in the height of secondary and the early years thereafter), runs through the tone which, in turn, runs through Until there is no have nothing. “These years, those of childhood and adolescence, constitute a time when the word is an elusive commodity. The word is missing. Afterwards writing can become a means, a place, to say something that could not be said before”, reflects Santamarina on this kind of climate which crosses its work.

Football – his fanaticism for River precedes it – is one of the frequent themes in the texts that the author of How to win the World Cup against Brazil publish. He therefore answered why writing about what for some “there are twenty-two guys running after a ball” can be so beautiful. “Whenever I write about football, I do it from the margins. Sometimes doing it from the play itself doesn’t make sense because there’s nothing better to say than seeing the play again.”. He has an example on the tip of his tongue: the goal that Julian Alvarez He did it against Croatia in the Qatar semi-final, taking everything – the ball, the defenders, the goalkeeper – up front.

“The day the River – Mouth of the Libertadores, which was finally played in Madrid, I spent seven hours locked up on the pitch almost without knowing or understanding what was going on. I went home relieved because I didn’t have to deliver the text on the game, and then I thought ‘no, stop, these seven hours are writeable’. Football is not necessarily what happens on the pitch, it could be something else. A lot of things,” he describes. The tone, whatever the next story, he has already found.

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