Collective residencies / NEW JOURNALISM II / Olot
AMALIA TORRES
From Tuesday, 18 September 2018 to Friday, 21 September 2018
Bio
Amalia got a diploma in Literary Journalism from the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona in 2015, and she is a journalist from the Universidad Católica de Chile. She works as journalistic coordinator at the newspaper El Mercurio of Santiago de Chile, writing about society, environment and health.
She is one of the coauthors of the book Ritmos para el paraíso y otros relatos de periodismo literario, MeCoPH 2016 award for literary journalism, and co-author of the children’s book Mi libro de todas las cosas: ideas para sembrar, comer y ensuciarse.
Amalia has participated in different journalism workshops. Among them, one about writing profiles, offered by Julio Villanueva Chang, editor and founder of Etiqueta Negra’s magazine, and another one about data journalism by the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI).
Project
During the residency, together with the MeCoPH alumni and teachers, we want to create a network in which we could share different literary journalism projects and in the future achieve joint reporting. The main objective of this network is to keep in touch and to allow its members to share and disseminate stories that are relevant at the global level, benefiting from each other’s perspective and experience from their respective countries.
Days to get motivated
When I got off the bus that took me to Olot I knew I had to hurry. That the winners of the Mecoph Prize for Literary Journalism would already be presenting their stories published in two books ⎯Cuando encuentres a Malinowski and Ritmos para el paraíso⎯, in Can Trincheria, and that I had to join later to talk about my own text.
But what I didn’t know was that when I arrived I would see a very attentive audience, neighbors of Olot and others coming from Barcelona, for knowing how each one arrived at their stories and how they were drawn together until the final text was achieved. Nor did I know that the conversation with the new Master’s students would be so long that Can Trincheria was going to close its doors and that we would have to continue discussing in the Hotel Riu, where we were staying.
I didn’t imagine, either, that now, on my way back to Chile, I would miss each and every one of the people I met at the residence hall. Because, although everyone was working on their projects, we also took the time to do what we might not have been able to do anywhere else: get to know each other among journalists from different countries, realize that we had common themes and that it was possible (and even more important) to keep on getting together and collaborating, no matter how far away we were geographically.
With them we launched the first lines to create a network of collaboration from our respective countries.
In the Faber residence I met journalists and writers who have interesting, collaborative and individual projects and works, who are very motivated by their work and by what happens in their environment.
Journalism can become a routine job at times, but then there are experiences like the one that allowed me to experience Faber, that connect you with people full of ideas and passion for writing, that always ask you what you are going to do next. I don’t have the answer yet. But I already have the motivation.