Laura C. Vela, author of 'Seismil': "Writing isn't scary: publishing is scary."

" Six-thousand " is not the same as "six-thousand." To climb a six-thousand-meter peak is to ascend a small but demanding peak: enough to make your breath hurt, but enough to see the world from another height. Six-thousand, with a space, refers to the number. Words change, and Laura C. Vela writes from altitude.

Since the publication of 'Seismil' (Free Children*), the book has generated attention in bookstores, the media, and social media, and rightly so: the work has sparked a debate about how to narrate traumatic experiences and reflect on structural violence. Sabina Urraca, her editor, noticed Laura C. Vela in one of her writing workshops. Laura, however, couldn't continue the course. Sabina immediately intervened: "Laura, I've been thinking and I'd like you to continue the workshop." She offered to continue for free, but Vela wanted at least to pay her symbolically. They then kept in touch so Laura could find the right words to write 'Seismil'. The book avoids both sensationalism and mere testimony; what it offers is a space where pain is named and thought about. Above all, it is named.

For a time, Laura C. Vela decided to disappear from the spotlight. " I was very angry and wanted to stop giving interviews," she admits, recalling the frustration with which she saw how questions about 'Seismil' focused on the personal rather than the literary. The headlines and introductions revealed too much and often did so in a morbid and sensationalist manner, far removed from the tone of the book. "The book is not an event, a news story, a headline... there is an artistic work behind it and a person," she insists. Sometimes, she says, she comes across interviews in which she doesn't recognize herself. But publishing, she acknowledges, always involves exposing the work. "It's no longer just yours; you've given it away to generate a conversation. When something comes out that horrifies me, I think: 'Something else will appear on the internet and this will be buried.'"

The account of what she experienced in 'Seismil' is presented in a raw way; but it also slips through fragments, silences, and metaphors. Literature, she explains, offered her something that other languages ​​couldn't: the ability to name the invisible, to sustain the experience without needing to show it in detail. "When a victim of sexual violence recounts her experience, she may do so differently days later, or add details she didn't remember at first... Writing allowed me to give shape to something that can't be shown in an image or a piece of data, because it's not just an event, it's much more," she says. "For me, what I experienced does appear raw, I mean, just as I think of it, without sugarcoating or metaphors. It's just that it's interspersed with fragments and silences because traumatic experiences tend to be like that, and because I wasn't interested in the details, the plot, the morbidity... but rather in conveying the experience, the sensation, life..."

The balance between the intimate and the political isn't a clear formula, nor an instruction manual. It's rather a pendulum swing, an oscillation between personal wounding and the recognition that this pain also belongs to a structure. "From the moment the rape happened, I felt isolated and distanced from everything around me... And I realized it wasn't a coincidence: it's part of a structure that seeks to keep us from speaking, from finding complicity."

When some readers call it "brave" or "necessary," the author flinches a little: she appreciates the gesture, but is suspicious of the label. "It saddens me because such praise speaks little of the tone, the form of the book, my writing... and it seems to me that there is often a certain paternalism." Perhaps it's insecurity, perhaps a sound intuition. In any case, Seismilse resists being reduced to simplistic adjectives.

The birth of "Seismil" was due to an exercise inspired by Joe Brainard's "I Remember," which triggered memories and words riddled with trauma. "It was impossible for me to write an 'I Remember' from my adolescence that wasn't riddled with trauma and its consequences. From there, something was unleashed, and little by little, I started writing more," she says. But it wasn't writing that scared her: it was publishing.

“Writing is dialoguing with the voices of others, a way of thinking while you write. It’s a creative, demanding, and often painful act, but it’s not scary: it brings joy. What ’s scary is publishing. My readers were no longer going to be just Sabina, Paz, and Weldon, but anyone who picked up the book. Including my family, the people touched by my story... I was afraid they wouldn’t understand why I needed to write, even if it meant exposing everything like that,” she confesses. “I wrote it thinking, honestly, that only Sabina would read it and that it would remain something between us,” she recalls. That trust turned writing into a safe space, where words flowed without a plan: some appeared after reading a text, others emerged from memories, from things that happened to her, even from moments in her everyday life. The hardest part, she confesses, wasn’t saying it, but reading it afterward.

Laura C. Vela continues to be surprised that there are still those who question her literary legitimacy. "With all the hybrid, fragmentary books, fascinating diaries... some people say that 'Seismil' isn't a book, that they can't evaluate it literarily, and that the entire focus is on a single part of the plot. I know that people may like it more or less, but we're still super conservative," she reflects. For Laura, the book is about words. "Some words, the ones that weigh us down, are constantly repeated inside our heads... until we find those other words that lighten the mood, that don't go away, and that hurt us. 'Seismil' is also the story of a reconstruction, of the path toward those words that rebuild us, to kick all the others to the curb," she explains.

Throughout Laura's life, certain words have become her territory of study: "to attract attention," "to please," "to hurt." Vela remembers how these were the first words she heard at school that made her aware of what had happened. She was barely thirteen or fourteen years old, and at the time she couldn't put it into context. Today she recognizes that they reflect a structural machismo: "Until recently, the entire narrative was based on men's narratives. And controlling women's bodies begins with controlling their narratives," she says.

The relationship with the outside world appears repeatedly: the school teacher becomes a constructed character, a blend of external perception and intimate memory. "I wasn't surprised to find differences in our stories... we build the image of the person with what they give us and fill it with our own experience," she explains. For Laura, this tension between the perception of others and her own voice is a fascinating territory: we all create images of others and begin to relate to those fragments.

In "Seismil," then, the words are not innocent. The intimate expands in the plural, in layers, in counterpoints. What remains after reading it is not the epic of the testimony or the impact of an event told in its raw form, but the labored breath of someone who climbs a six-thousander: an intimate effort that becomes shared.