Out of the File Drawer and Onto the Page: My Journey from Writer to Author

I didn’t set out to write a memoir, or a book, or even a story. The scraps of memory that eventually became Waking in Havana began to surface as I sat at my small formica kitchen table, placed a cassette in the ancient tape recorder I had unearthed from a jumble of give-away items in the basement, and pressed “play.”

The voices I heard, scratchy and distant, were those of Cubans living with HIV/AIDS who had, over the six months in 1996 I had worked with them, become dear friends. The stories I wanted to tell were theirs. My role, I thought at the time, was simply to be a trustworthy narrator.

I did not think of myself as a writer, though I had written poems and short reflections since I could remember—first handwritten in childish script, later typed on an old Smith-Corona with an “i” that did not strike properly, leaving a pattern of absence on the page. They were tucked away in a drawer in the scarred wooden desk, carved with initials of old boyfriends, that I still carted from home to home.

In my decades as a nurse, and especially as I began to work with children and families navigating the stormy waters of the AIDS epidemic, my writing became more frequent—as a way to capture the deep feelings this work engendered, a way to say on paper what I often didn’t have words to describe.

But when my husband Clarence was diagnosed with AIDS himself and the disease came home, the writing stopped. That was a story I held inside, kept close to my heart.

In 1991, six months after Clarence’s death, I returned to Cuba, the revolutionary island I had visited with a work brigade 20 years earlier, and where my youthful idealism had transformed into a lifetime commitment to social justice activism. In 1996, I returned to live in Havana and work at the AIDS sanitorium, originally a place of quarantine and treatment meant to control the epidemic in Cuba, that eventually evolved into a site for education and prevention. There I came to know and love Alejandro, Hermes, Caridad, Roberto and Tanya––the main “characters” in Waking in Havana. There I absorbed and reflected on the reality of AIDS in a very different culture and socioeconomic system.

I was not a journalist but I tried to be a careful observer, and I recorded my dear friends stories in their own voices, their own words.

Back to the kitchen table, to the tapes. First I transcribed the stories, almost like interviews. But they needed content––descriptions of place, some historical background, details of daily life in Cuba in that moment—the 90’s—years of hardship and deprivation in Cuba after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the island’s main trading partner and provider of economic aid.

The Special Period in a Time of Peace, Fidel Castro named it, and Cubans rose to the challenge–– organic gardens sprung up at daycare centers, schools and factories, thousands of Chinese made bicycles replaced buses and cars on the streets of Havana, and neighbors looked out for each other like never before. Solidarity was not just a word. It was alive and palpable in Havana in 1996.

I began to write around the edges of the interviews and slowly my own experience crept onto the page.

I was becoming a writer, so a writing workshop seemed in order. I joined a memoir class at the Writer’s Voice in New York City and exposed myself to critique for the first time. Fellow writers urged me to tell more, dig deeper––It’s your story too––so I tried. I dug and added, but still felt hesitant to include my story. Was it about not wanting to expose the raw emotions of loss mixed with shame that hard marked the stigma-filled years of Clarence’s illness. Or was it about not having the right structure as I told myself at the time. I lost my way, stopped going to workshops, and put the pages and pages I had accumulated in a file drawer for several years.

But I kept writing. I joined a 100-word group––7 writers each of whom shared exactly 100 words with the group once a week. I volunteered to lead writing workshops with the NY Writers Coalition and bathed in the safety of writing from prompts and having my writing received “like a newborn baby” with love and praise.

And eventually the pages came out of the drawer. I revised and shaped, sent them off for a developmental edit, then revised again. I wrote a book proposal, query letters, a pitch. I stood on line to pitch an agent at a writer’s conference. Her eyes flicked around the room while I talked, rapid fire, voice trembling.

“Oh, AIDS is over I’m afraid, but Cuba––now that could be sexy.” The drawer was tempting, but I resisted.

Instead I kept revising and shaping and digging until I had a book that was as good as I could make it, written in a voice that was authentically mine, weaving the streams of my own experience in the AIDS epidemic with what I had observed and learned in Cuba.

I felt ready to share my book with the world, but how? Who would publish this deeply personal story about an epidemic people thought was “over,” and a forbidden island that few Americans visit? That’s when I found She Writes Press, a hybrid publishing company dedicated to lifting up the voices of women writers. And that’s when I became an author.

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ELENA SCHWOLSKY, RN, MPH, is a nurse, community health educator, activist, and writer who spent a decade as a pediatric nurse at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She has trained AIDS educators in Cuba and Tanzania and currently teaches community health workers in diverse urban neighborhoods in New York City. Her essays have appeared in The American Journal of Nursing and The Veteran, and her work has been included in the anthologies Storied Dishes: What Our Family Recipes Tell Us About Who We Are and Where We’ve Been and Reflections on Nursing: 80 inspiring stories on the art and science of nursing.

A chapter she co-wrote appears in the textbook Children, Families and AIDS: Psychosocial and Therapeutic Issues. Schwolsky is the recipient of a writing award from the Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund and is proud to be recognized as the madrina (godmother) of Proyecto Memorias, the Cuban AIDS Quilt project.

Find out more about her on her website https://wakinginhavana.com/

WAKING IN HAVANA

In 1972, when she was a young, divorced, single mother, restless and idealistic, Elena Schwolsky made a decision that changed her life: leaving her eighteen-month-old son with his father, she joined hundreds of other young Americans on a work brigade in Cuba. They spent their days building cinderblock houses for workers and their nights partying and debating politics. The Cuban revolution was young, and so were they. At a moment of transition in Schwolsky’s’s life, Cuba represented hope and the power to change.

Twenty years later, she is drawn back to this forbidden island, yearning to move out of grief following the death of her husband from AIDS and feeling burned out after spending ten years as a nurse on the frontlines of the epidemic. Back in Cuba, she experiences the chaotic bustle of a Havana most Americans never see—a city frozen in time yet constantly changing. She takes readers along with her through her humorous attempts to communicate in a new language and navigate this very different culture—through the leafy tranquility of the controversial AIDS Sanitorium and into the lives of the resilient, opinionated, and passionate Cubans who become her family and help her to heal.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing