Regina Rodríguez Sirvent: "School was my life, I was there from sunrise to sunset"

BarcelonaThe author Regina Rodríguez Sirvent has become one of the most powerful and fun voices in Catalan literature. After the phenomenon of Les calces al sol with more than 100,000 copies sold, she is now releasing Crispetes de matinada, in which her childhood friends are crucial characters and play a decisive role in the novel's plot. Because when Regina talks about her time at school, her first thought goes directly to her friends. “School is the foundation of my deepest friendships, it's the most important thing that happened to me and I keep all my school friends. With my friends, we have been very daring and very mischievous. We even opened the teachers' lounge to look for our grades, add extra positives, and we even photocopied exams!”

For the writer, the environment has also been key. She was born and raised in Cerdanya and explains that her school "had stunning views". "Enjoying that landscape from the ages of two to eighteen marked me a lot and allowed me to see the horizon in a different way. I am very lucky to have many good memories of school, and not everyone can say that. Besides, I have played a lot of sports all my life and I was always playing basketball, at pitch-and-putt or running. I got excellent grades in physical education because I liked it, and also in religion because you only had to have good handwriting. School was my life, I was there from sunrise to sunset.”

His childhood memories have no end. He remembers the days they got their vaccines, the image of the access ladder to the center, the smell of freshly baked bread he kneaded during a camp, and the fear he felt the day he had to take his recorder exam. Furthermore, "they taught me Spanish always in Catalan and that amused me a lot. I had a teacher, Armando Garcia, who never left anyone indifferent. He taught me how to look for words in the dictionary, and every time I open a dictionary I remember him. The first rule was as beautiful and as obvious as that before opening the dictionary you had to calculate where the letter was. That he taught me this detail... I find it delightful".

Precisely the protagonist of his first novel is an au pair who travels to Atlanta to learn English and Regina admits that, at school, she always liked English, but never mastered it. "I loved a Greco-Roman civilization class because electives have always been a great source of inspiration at a time when you are very lost. I would have liked to do an artistic baccalaureate, but I didn't know how to draw and I hated technical drawing. Perhaps if I had done an artistic baccalaureate I would have been a writer sooner, we will never know".

The teenage diary

Creative, daring, and athletic, Regina began writing by filling the pages of her adolescent diary because when she was twelve or thirteen years old, she already really enjoyed writing. "I wrote in the diary, but it got so long that in the end I thought, I'd better not start or I'll spend three hours writing. I didn't know how to write just one page, I wrote a lot and I did it for many years. I never won any Jocs Florals because I didn't even know what prose was and I thought I had to write poetry! Despite not winning any literary contest, I was very interested in listening to the stories that others had written. For me, the world stopped. Later, when I started writing, I found my voice writing humor and life, my own.

These first steps as a writer are also marked by the presence of a teacher, Robert. “He was my creative writing professor and he was the one who planted the first seed. After reading a text of mine, he openly told me that it was very bad, but that he saw soul in it and that he believed I should try. Two decades after that moment, I will return to the United States to present the book that blossomed from that seed, and Robert will be there”.

Now Regina Rodríguez relives her school days through the eyes of her two sons and fully enjoys this journey back to childhood that she is experiencing as a mother. The author says that these moments are “of such enormous abundance" that she has opened a WhatsApp group with herself "to be able to write it down and remember everything". For example, the day my son told me he had made fine sand at school. It was a very clear portal that made me remember when I was five years old and spent hours making fine sand”.

He is aware that teachers are decisive figures and gets emotional explaining the hug that his five-year-old son's teacher, Cristina, gave the boy on the last day of school. “Teachers will never be rewarded enough, and I don't mean financially. We give the most precious thing in our lives to people who are neither paid nor treated properly. Leaving your child at school in the morning is everything; it determines your day. Being able to do it with calm and joy is the most important thing in life.”