Luna Miguel: "My writing feeds on the most intimate, although that can leave scars"

In the case of Luna Miguel (Alcalá de Henares, 1990), youth is on the way to becoming a crime that never prescribes. He is 30 years old, he has been publishing for more than a decade, but he has always been precocious, he has always been “young”. She remembers with four years receiving a Cervantes studies diploma, an eccentricity from her father, who wanted to inoculate her with the writing virus from a very young age. With 13 he wrote

, a "vaguely erotic" poem born, as he tells us, from the consciousness of "feeling the object of an adult's desire." Five years later she began publishing and has continued to do so, at an uncommon pace in this era of truncated careers, while she graduated from journalism and settled in Barcelona as a freelance writer, columnist and editor.

Today she says she feels "lucky" to have been able to leave a written record of her personal evolution since the end of adolescence. And she adds that she stopped considering herself "young" the day her son, Ulises, was born, but that she strives for her literary voice to continue sounding "new and different", the pair of qualities that she most associates with youth. “I recognize that I like the idea of ​​continuing to be a young writer for ICON”, she tells us, “but I also wonder, with a certain modesty, if I am not usurping a space that no longer corresponds to me and in which authors so representative of the sensitivity of the new generation like Andrea Abreu or Alba Carballal ”.

In February Miguel published an essay with autobiographical substance,

, and is now publishing his seventh collection of poems,

. They are “two branches of the same tree”, two ways of approaching the process of vital change in which the writer embarked a little over a year ago and has ended up turning her “into a single mother, a 100% autonomous adult and the absolute owner of her own destiny, after many years of life as a couple ”. The essay draws on readings that interact with one's own experience in an attempt to explore "the edges of female desire." The collection of poems is based on the will to “put oneself in the shoes of the other and write from a very close male voice”, that of his life partner, the writer Antonio J. Rodríguez.

Luna Miguel, pictured among books at her home in Barcelona's Sant Antoni neighborhood.Alba Yruela

This difficult exercise in poetic tightrope reading reads like a short novel in which Luna becomes a character on the margins of her own story: "That allows me to show myself unhinged and vulnerable, because I am the Moon of poems and I am not me" . Miguel explains that the idea of ​​“looking from another place” was inspired by the reading of

, by Anne Carson, one of the dozens of authors who quotes in

: “It was also a settling of accounts with myself that I dragged from that I wrote my first novel,

. In it I proposed to introduce the voice of a man, and for this I soaked myself in masculine intimacy by reading again all of Michel Houellebecq and Ricardo Piglia ”.

Luna Miguel and her cats posing exclusively for ICON at her home in Barcelona.Alba Yruela

Then she was not able: “My male voice did not work and I decided to put it on hold, but it was a pending issue, an exercise in empathy towards the other gender that I miss in many male writers and that I, as a writer, woman and feminist, felt the need to impose myself ”.

Both

and

exhibit intimacy in such a stark way that it can be uncomfortable: “There are writers of imagination and writers of experience.

I belong to the latter, my writing feeds on the most intimate, although that can leave scars ”.

While she waits for her

youth

to prescribe, Luna enjoys the experience "of writing for the first time from a home that I pay for myself and in which I am the only adult," even if that means staying just a couple of steps above the precariat : "I have built a solid career, I live on my vocation, but the truth is that I suffer to make ends meet and right now, after paying for my son's birthday gift, I have less than 50 euros in the bank."

Being young is that too.

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