Anna Veltfort on turning memories of living in Castro’s Havana into art
Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Goodbye, My Havana» author Anna Veltfort
- What made you want to write this memoir?
I had never been able to explain, to the people in my life in the US, what the Cuban Revolution was like or what my experience living in Cuba during the early years of the Revolution as a teenager and young adult was like, much less how it was to come out gay there. I attended all of high school and college in Havana, and came of age in a country, a historical period, utterly different from life in the United States. Writing and illustrating this memoir was the solution to my desire to convey at long last this strange and amazing experience of life on another planet.
- Why did you choose to tell this story in color?
Cuba is a land of intense color, impossible for me to imagine in anything but full color. I also set out to use color as a visual stand-in for music and sometimes emotions. Thus to life in the USA, before moving to Cuba, I gave a muted palette intended to evoke the period of my childhood in the US during the 1950s. The long, difficult wait in Mexico before getting to Cuba, I rendered in a limited palette of blues and greys, and the times of terror in Cuba, when homophobic repression touched my life and of others I knew, in reds and orange.
- What was the writing process like?
- First I created an annotated chronological timeline of the events, places and characters that I felt played a role in the story.
- Guided by that timeline I wrote a running narrative of what would roughly be the whole book, subject to many changes, omissions and additions along the way. While crafting this narrative, I mined many letters, diaries, and photographs from that past, and consulted photographs that I commissioned as references from friends in Havana, drawings I had made in Cuba at the time, letters from my family. I had a trove of materials that I had brought from Cuba in 1972-- vinyl records, posters, books, magazines, political pamphlets, school papers, calendars... all very useful to transport my mind back into that time and place.
- The key, and for me, most important and difficult part of the whole process happened now: translating this textual narrative into a visual narrative. This involved creating first rough thumbnail page-by-page sketches of panels and art and then more detailed storyboards of the panels, art and speech balloons for texts.
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