Writing as Hospitality: an interview with Beatriz Acevedo

Beatriz Acevedo used the phrase “Writing is hospitality’, during a workshop on beauty and writing I attended . It stayed with me after the session as an interesting and delightful description. Beatriz is an artist-educator who writes about beauty as an everyday phenomena, reclaiming it from haughty art theory and notions of skin-deep superficiality. She treats beauty as an aesthetic way of being in the world that leads to a kinder, more compassionate view of others and ourselves.

Welcoming your reader into the world you are writing about is dear to my heart. It’s the key to kind, engaging research-led writing. I’ve felt this for a long time, but never really had the right words to express it, falling back on explanations like “writing accessibly”, “signposting’ or latterly, writing “readerly texts”. So when I heard Beatriz describe writing as hospitality, I was intrigued and asked her to tell us more:

Hi Bea, Can you tell us what you mean when you say ‘Writing is Hospitality’?

Writing is opening our mental/emotional life to others; it is to invite people/readers to see what is in our head. We want readers to feel comfortable, entertained, nurtured, by our writing. We want readers to linger, to be amused, questioned sometimes, identified. It is a very private space between the writer and the reader.

Very true. Is that intimacy the reason why hospitality matters?

Hospitality has been enshrined by many religions and cultural practices. It comes from the idea of the Greek gods to be able to visit mortals using a human guise -of travellers and foreigners- and be welcome and protected by the hosts. A reader is a god in disguise, and we want to be sure we are honouring them as we would like to be honoured.

This is why as writers we need to give it all, to be open and true. The reader (as a wise traveller) will distinguish between fake and authentic and will only keep on reading if they feel the writers’ is truthful in her story.

That’s lovely! So how can we be hospitable in our writing?

We need to give it all, in the sense of offering the best possible craft and experience. It does not have to be perfect; it needs just to be passionate and connect with emotions. Another word that we can use here is ‘compassionate’ in the sense of ‘feeling together’.

Can you give an example of your favourite hospitable writing and why it makes you feel so welcome?

One of the best books I’ve read recently is Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, which made me want to explore some of the ideas she developed in her short novel. In terms of non-fiction, which is my genre, I love Irene Vallejo in her book “Papyrus” about the history of books. She has a style that although not “literary” is hospitable, warm, enthusiastic and welcoming, weaving great scholarship with her own life as a reader.

Natalia Gintzberg is another writer that you feel welcome. Her style of writing is very precise, almost surgical, but it is a scalpel of silk. It opens her way of thinking and her experiences in a way that you feel she is telling you her truth as directly as she can. My favourite book of her is The Little Virtues.

I am also reading a fantastic draft of a book about women in electronic music, and I feel that it is very welcoming. The writer opens her experience as a music producer, she is very thorough in her research, and the knowledge complements the rawness of her passion: her anger and her hope for improvements, as well as her joy as a creator/activist/writer (I’m flattered to say Bea is describing my book here! – ed)

Sometimes you feel in your text that you are a bit patronised, even amazing writers you feel unwelcome, like this book is talking at me, not talking to me.

Some people talk about Jorge Luis Borges as a ‘pedantic’ author, only because he had an encyclopaedic knowledge. And I ask people… have you read him? Because his writing is hospitable. In his short story The Aleph, the author begins with a sort of mundane situation, visiting his friend Beatriz Viterbo and even though he did not like her brother he kept visiting her house even after her death. There is a little trick he uses here, revealing that he did not like the brother because he was a writer that was more celebrated than him, making you privy to a private joke. Then he goes on to talk about how there was an “aleph” (a point that contains the whole universe), and he explains that what an aleph means, merging mythology with pedagogy… it’s rather ‘simple’ (I mean it looks simple, but it has a mastery behind), he really makes this complex notion into something domestic, and guides the reader towards it with compassion.

Thank-you Beatriz for explaining why writing is hospitality. What are your strategies for rolling out the red carpet and welcoming in your wise travellers?

You can read Beatriz’s writing on her blog, where she meanders through all manner of fascinating topics and observations inspired by her artistic life and travels.

Follow her on instagram for a rich presentation of her art

Here you can read a paper written by both of us where we discuss the value of making collages as reflective practice in research. I hope you feel we make you welcome!