This week I joined Tinta Viva, the Taller Ibero de escritura creativa at UIA, led by Esperanza Bustillo Puente. From August to December 2026, I will be taking part in this creative writing workshop alongside more than 200 writers and writers-in-the-making or escritores en construccción: an international community gathered around that strange, necessary, occasionally maddening practice of putting words on a page and seeing what they decide to do.
The first session was titled La Odisea, which feels like a fitting place to begin. Writing, after all, is rarely a straight road. It is more often a voyage full of detours, false starts, unexpected monsters, useful shipwrecks, and the occasional glimpse of Ithaca before the fog rolls back in. And very appropriately, the recent film is providing a lot of opportunities to revist the classics. In this case, our adventure has us setting off thinking we know the story, the voice, the destination. Then the sentence turns left. A character refuses to behave. A memory barges in. A metaphor overstays its welcome.
Most of my writing happens in English. That has been the language of my technical books, much of my blogging, and a good part of my recent theatre work. English is where I often think in structure: argument, rhythm, sequence, explanation. It is the language in which I have spent years trying to make difficult things clear, whether writing about data science, machine learning, physics, or the odd absurdity of life with technology.
But Spanish is not secondary. Spanish is closer to the bones. It carries childhood, family, humour, music, impatience, affection, and a different way of arriving at meaning. There are things Spanish does with texture and emotional temperature that English approaches from another angle. There are jokes that only work in Spanish, silences that feel different in Spanish, and sentences that carry more history than their grammar admits.
So the challenge I am setting myself in this workshop is simple to state and harder to do: to write bilingually. Not merely to translate from one language into the other, which can quickly become a mechanical exercise, but to let Spanish and English both take part in the writing. To see what happens when one language opens a door and the other refuses to walk through it in the expected way. To explore whether a scene wants the precision of English, the pulse of Spanish, or the friction between the two.
That friction interests me. A bilingual text is not just two monolingual texts standing politely side by side. At its best, it creates a third space: one where meaning shifts as it crosses the border. Sometimes the Spanish word is not there to be explained. Sometimes the English sentence does not need to apologise for itself. Sometimes the gap between them is exactly where the writing lives.
This feels like a natural continuation of several threads I have been following on this blog. In Reams of Paper, Together, I reflected on what a 30-day writing challenge taught us about discipline, accountability, and the private contract one makes with the page. Writing may be solitary, but it is not always best done in isolation. There is real power in knowing that others are also turning up, wrestling with their own sentences, filling their own blank spaces.
Tinta Viva has that same collective energy, only amplified. More than 200 people in one workshop is not a cosy little writing circle. It is a crowd, a chorus, a small literary weather system. That could be intimidating, but it is also invigorating. Every participant brings a different relationship to language, form, memory, and ambition. Some will arrive with polished projects. Others will be at the beginning, still discovering whether they are allowed to call themselves writers. For the record: if you are writing, you are already in the room.
The workshop also connects with my recent adventures in theatre. In The Last Grasp, I wrote about stepping more fully into playwriting and directing through the OSO Writers’ Studio. Theatre taught me something technical writing never quite could: that words are not finished when they are written. They change when spoken. They acquire bodies, pauses, gestures, misreadings, breath. A line that looks elegant on the page may collapse in an actor’s mouth. Another line, plain and unassuming, may suddenly become the emotional centre of the scene.
There is another thread as well: my children’s book, What Does It Take to Fly?, which exists in English and Spanish. Writing for children in two languages sharpened my awareness of how differently ideas travel. You cannot simply carry a sentence across and expect it to land with the same weight. Rhythm matters. Cultural resonance matters. The music of explanation matters. A child asking a question about flight in Spanish is not quite the same child asking it in English, even when the curiosity is identical.
That is part of what I hope to explore between now and December. How does voice change when it crosses language? What happens to humour, tenderness, conflict, or memory? What becomes clearer? What becomes impossible? And what can only be said by refusing to choose one language at the expense of the other?
I do not yet know what will come out of the workshop. A story, perhaps. A set of fragments. A bilingual essay. A failed experiment with one or two salvageable lines, which is still better than a pristine idea never tested. The sensible thing would be to arrive with a plan. The more interesting thing may be to arrive with attention.
So here we go: una nueva odisea con tinta viva. From August to December, I will be writing with Esperanza Bustillo Puente, UIA, and a community of more than 200 writers and writers-in-the-making. Two languages on the desk. One page at a time.