the writers’ rooms | 2
twelve o’clock, 5 August 2021 – 17:49
He lives in Bagnoli, but has a small studio in Piazza Dante
«Screating is the only thing that makes me feel free and when I’m not writing I get pissed off because I feel like I’ve stolen precious time. Here, I can’t wait to write! ».
Even while completing this interview for «The writers’ rooms», Valeria Parrella paws, she knows that writing is her always and hers everywhere: «I live in Bagnoli, in a very small but bright house. I can write anywhere, I don’t have a favorite place. If I know what to write – and I always know what to write, fortunately – I can write in the living room, on the sofa, on my Zanotta ‘sack armchair, in the kitchen, in my son’s room and above all on the small desk given to me by the musician Dolores Melodia ( aka Antonella Monetti, ndr), which is a reminder of his mother, my personal friend. The only place where I can’t write well is the terrace because it is flooded with light; during the lockdown I also wrote in the bathroom! ” reveals the forty-seven-year-old writer from Campania, whose name and signature have, for almost twenty years, been intimately linked to the great orbits of contemporary Italian literature, journalism and theatrical and cinematographic dramaturgy.
In Naples, in Piazza Dante, Parrella has a studio where she works occasionally and which, in recent years, has hosted people, family and friends visiting the city: “The architects Emilia Abate and Francesco Rotondale have taken up the colors of the cover of the my debut stories (Fly plus whale, ed) for this study which was originally rather dark and which, due to the pandemic, I have used very little in recent years ». The desire to write is very strong, intense, extreme: «Once, in a hotel in Florence, I started writing on the blank pages of a book using an eyebrow pencil! If you have to write, you can also write on a wall. In general, I hardly ever take notes on notebooks or notepads, but on the books I am reading at that precise moment, on their spaces and on their blank pages ».
“I’m an analogue girl,” says Valeria Parrella, who in the summer almost never adopts the internet for her research in view of writing a novel: “I’m going on vacation to Procida, to a point on the island where the mobile phone doesn’t has reception. If I have any doubts, I do research in the old way, consulting books, manuals, guides or asking for information from specialists ».
There are few customs that the writer born in Torre del Greco allows herself: she reads all her writings aloud to check its effectiveness and keeps all her diaries. “I like the sound of the word ‘agenda’ and a few years ago for the Dictionaries Più della Zanichelli I also edited the specific entry in the dictionary (” The agenda is the place to put things not to be forgotten. forget”, ed). I have always kept my diaries for 12 months, from July to July, and there I sign the appointments, the deliveries of the drafts of a book, the recall of the vaccine, the days of menstruation. Once I lost one of my diary and a very kind gentleman gave it back to me, taking it to the Agnano market in a very circumspect way. It looked like an Alfred Hitchcock film, even if it had a lot of comedic implications ».
The conclusion of a book is perhaps the only moment in which a Parrellian ritual practice is relentlessly revealed: “On the last ’round of proofs’ of one of my novels, at the end of the verification of the pages, I have to crumple up every sheet I have bed and throw it on the ground. Of course, the room is filled with arches of paper balls, but only in this way do I know that the proofreading is finally completed. ”
Writing is a fever and a resource, even when waiting in the ward: «My son Andrea has had long hospitalizations and I also wrote while I was in the waiting rooms. I wrote on a hospital railing or on very uncomfortable places. If you have to write, you can’t wait to write ».
Valeria Parrella is a champion of “extreme writing”, even in tragicomic situations: “Once I happened to write in the kitchen of my Neapolitan house, in via Duomo, with the workers who came in every five minutes to ask for information, objects, buckets , tools and help. It was, in fact, an absurd situation because the wall overlooking via Duomo had collapsed and I was writing in a house that had only three walls, while the workers were building a piece of the facade of the building! “
August 5, 2021 | 17:49
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