Making A Book | My ABCs: Argentina, Brazil, Canada
“All 3 languages make me who I am”: Mariela Sol Torroba Hennigen on finding her voice as a trilingual writer, sharing deeply personal stories, and truly “making” a book
In the series “Making A Book” we delve into the experiences of students who published a book through the course WRI420: Making A Book.
WRI420: Making A Book is an advanced 12-week course in the Professional Writing and Communications (PWC) program at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The course examines principles, procedures and practices in book publishing. Students, working collaboratively, collect material for, design, edit, typeset, print and assemble books. Students consider the philosophical, aesthetic, and economic factors that guide publishing, editing and design decisions. The course culminates in each student publishing a book.
Mariela Sol Torroba Hennigen took WRI420 in the winter semester of 2023 (January—early April). She published her collection My ABCs: Argentina, Brazil, Canada: Stories, Letters, and Poems about Identity and Belonging on April 6, 2023. The collection explores moments from Mariela’s upbringing and family history. She reflects on how they interweave, how both shaped her into who she is and how both brought her to where she stands today. Note that this book mentions mature topics, like xenophobia, bullying, and violence.
Mariela is an Argentine-Brazilian writer. She was raised trilingual: speaking Portuguese and Spanish at home with her family while learning English at school. Since the age of seven, she has been passionate about storytelling and handwriting her own little books. Mariela currently attends the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, where she studies Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (CCIT) and Professional Writing and Communication (PWC). Mariela is the host of The Canada Things Podcast on Spotify. Her author Instagram is @povmarielawriter and her website is marielasol.com
W. V. Buluma: Why did you want to make a book? First, why did you want to write a book, and second, why publish it through the course?
Mariela Sol Torroba Hennigen: The first part: why I wanted to write a book. Ever since I was a kid, I have liked to write. I journal a lot. I was the girl with a bunch of journals and colourful covers and everything, and I still do [journal]. It’s a huge part of grounding myself, letting things out of my mind to declutter my thoughts and my feelings, and it just really helps my mental health.
This might sound cocky, but I’ve also written books before. When I was a kid, because I liked to write so much, I often ventured into writing books for school mainly, through assignments. I even mentioned it in my bio; at seven, I started these very simple scribbles. Like, this girl had a dog, and the dog is missing. Or this fantasy unicorn has a gang, and they go out on adventures in their story world and stuff like that. I found [the simple scribbles] when I went back home over the summer. I’ve always wanted to make something of my own. I just never thought I would do it at the age of twenty-one. I thought it would just be something later in my life.
Second: why publish it through the course? The opportunity arose through the editing group that I met for WRI365: Editing: Principles and Practice [a year-long editing course where students work on individual longform nonfiction projects and a group manuscript about editing]. That’s when I met Bernice, for instance. And actually she was the one that kind of brought it up in our group and was encouraging us to do it, and she got very excited, and she wanted to do it. I remember other professors had mentioned it [the course]. And even when I was first browsing about the [PWC] program online, I saw that there was a making a book course. So I was like, “okay, this could eventually be a nice course to take if I do choose to pursue this program.”
I just thought it would be a good idea to get a course credit, and make something of my own that had been something I wanted to, since I was a kid.
The interview with Bernice, for the reader’s pleasure:
Making A Book | Ghosts of A Cure
If you were to create a genealogy of your collection, what would you include? Think of My ABCs as a complex, ancient organism—where does it begin to evolve?
I love that this is your signature question across all the interviews.
My ABCs, as a project, started even before I ever thought of it as a collection. It started in that same course, WRI365, not only the idea of taking the book course, but also the piece that I wrote for that class is “The Price of Education” [a story in the Canada section of My ABCs]. It was very meaningful to me that I wrote it at that time, because it was the first year I had moved and lived in Canada.
And so when I was writing it, I was experiencing all these moments of culture shock, but at the same time I was still very much in contact with my parents and my culture back home. It was the way I digested and processed all the reflections that I was having—I just poured it out in that piece.
That piece also came from conversations that I started having with my editing group, with my family, and with other friends. [These conversations] just helped me craft the overall idea that I had, which is the privilege that you become aware of, but also holding on to your heritage and being proud of that and not compromising that because you’re in new space. That was really heavy inside of me, and the moment I let it out in that piece it became lighter. “The Price of Education” also resonated with a lot of other people in my group, but also other friends of mine who I shared it with. They were really impacted by the overall message from that piece. The final part of it eventually came to be the back quote of my book:
Home, for me, is people, places, and languages. While my identity is scattered around the world, I find belonging in my history and education. I will always find belonging in the stories and knowledge I take with me.
My ABCs really began to evolve there as the overall project.
Once I knew that I was taking the course, I started to take advantage of other writing courses to build my manuscript. For instance, I took WRI370: Writing About Place in Fall last year [September—December 2022], while WRI420: Making A Book was in the Winter [January—April 2023]. For Writing About Place I wrote about my first year in Canada, but I developed it more, exploring the various places that I lived, and the trope of the stranger comes to the strange land, and like, “what are they doing?” They’re confused, and they’re figuring it out.
But even before I knew what to do for the book, I had years of writing to draw from. A lot of stories in my book are from the first year course [WRI173: Creative Nonfiction; a course where students produce a portfolio of nonfiction pieces in different forms, including narrative essays and interviews]. I took WRI273: Specialized Prose [a course where students work on a longform nonfiction project of their choice], and the Argentina section of my book was from that class. I just realized, “wow, I talk about this [identity and belonging] a lot, I write about this a lot, it clearly matters to me, and clearly is something that I’m still navigating,” so might as well see it come into book form.
But it’s very challenging for me to pinpoint exactly where the book began to evolve, because there are pieces like the letters from the book that come from even before I was in university. It’s just reflections that I had and like I mentioned earlier, I write a lot to process what I’m going through. So I just eventually compiled everything. What I’m trying to say is, it [My ABCs] comes from my upbringing: my parents, the cultures that they share, the home the four of us built [Mariela, her parents, and her older brother], and how they bring their family histories into that. I really wanted to honour my family and their support. I just never thought I’d memorialise my family history that way, but it gives me a lot of joy, and it makes me really proud to eventually come home for Christmas or during a break and say, “Hey, this is for you guys.”
The memorialising really comes through, particularly in how you characterise your father. Or maybe I’m just latching on to that because he sounds a lot like my own dad, who is widely knowledgeable about Kenyan and African history. He always finds a way to tie our discussions back to history—he’s always teaching me little lessons.
Sounds very much like my dad always circling in some history for you to reflect about.
On the theme of identity, you write that “as an aspiring writer, I thank my trilingual background for molding me into an open-minded, inquisitive life-long learner.” Could you share how your trilingual background influenced your development as a writer? How different would My ABCs be if you wrote it primarily in Brazilian Portuguese or Argentinian Spanish?
My trilingual background really influenced my development as a writer, because the fact that I wrote the book in English already shows that it’s not my native language. That I could come here [Canada] and have this opportunity to take WRI420: Making A Book and publish the book shows that, culturally, I had things to share that would resonate with an [Anglophone] audience.
It shaped my writing because I sprinkle a lot of the descriptions and the phrases in my writing, which reminds the reader that I’m not from an English-speaking culture. I think it made me go the extra mile to strengthen my voice as a trilingual writer. I could very much just not include any of the non-English words, but I chose intentionally to do so, because it shows that like this is important to me, and it shows that all three languages make me who I am. If you were to remove one of them, it wouldn't be My ABCs. It wouldn’t be the upbringing that I had with both cultures, and then coming into this third culture and this third language.
And so how different would it be if I wrote it in Portuguese or Spanish? I know something we talked about when it came to my manuscript specifically was italicizing the foreign words. Throughout my time in the PWC Program, I always italicized, because in Spanish and Portuguese that’s the way that you typeset it. I’ve also seen italicization in academic literature in English, so I was very used to that. But then, when we were in the course, I remember Professor Guy Allen [professor who teaches WRI420: Making A Book] and my editor—who coincidentally happened to be doing research on how multilingual writers create their hybrid voice for themselves—both suggested that italicization actually makes it a hierarchy of languages.
At first it was something new for me. I have never thought of it that way, and I was a bit confused, because all my life I had been used to seeing italicization. Then I saw it as a way to differentiate a different language, so the reader becomes aware of that term and familiarizes themselves with it that way. But then I remember talking to my editor and we agreed to have all three languages stand equally. Why would I differentiate it? If all three languages are intertwined in that way, and I am fluent and comfortable in all three, then why make that distinction?
Probably if I wrote the book in Portuguese or Spanish, that wouldn’t be something that arose from the editing. A friend of mine kindly volunteered to translate the book into Portuguese. We’ve been working on that this past summer. Things came up so, seeing how certain expressions, or certain comparisons, or certain terms are very unique to English, and then finding the actual like closest translation is not as apparent or immediate.
What I’m trying to say is the three languages I speak molded me to really give more thought to how things from my culture translate to other languages, because I talk about the cultural objects, the setting, the weather and stuff like that. The idioms that my parents say, or their mannerisms, and those are things that are very unique to the language. If I were to take that away, my voice as a writer would be very different.
And I know that my readers appreciate it, especially the people who are very unfamiliar with these cultures. They’ve told me, “wow, I learned what the straw for the mate is without you actually like stating that it is; you describe it in a way that really brings the reader in.” I’m really glad that I can show my culture instead of telling it. Show don’t tell is very much a PWC thing.
I actually also contacted a Spanish editor and translator at one point. The translation was technically proficient. But because Spanish is also such a widely spoken language, there’s a lot of different expressions, different accents and idioms. I realized that even though the translation was correct, it really lacked my voice. It really goes to show how even language is not the be-all and end-all to a writer. People have different ways to express themselves in English and Spanish and Portuguese, in whatever language they speak. In my case it’s those but I would be a very different writer is what I’m trying to say if I didn’t speak these three languages, or even if I spoke the same languages with different accents and cultural experiences.
It’s one of those things I hadn’t thought deeply enough about.
For instance, Spanish is widely spoken. Very many different cultures are using it differently. Argentinian Spanish is known for being very odd amid the other Spanish speaking countries. I always tell people it’s jealousy, but it’s a recurring inside joke between the Hispanic community.
It was something I also had neglected until I started writing a lot more in English, because ever since I came to university I’ve written a lot less in Portuguese and Spanish. Then I realized how this sprinkling of Portuguese and Spanish terms became very much my voice as a writer. If I were to write in Spanish from another country, I wouldn’t know the terms or how to describe things.
That’s always tricky—capturing a whole linguistic universe.
It’s sound, right? In the book I go into linguistic things as well, but that was very much my amateur perspective. [“Um Dia en la Vida of Mariela” contains a discussion of the nuances in grammar and cadence of Portuguese, Spanish, and English.] I’ve never taken a linguistics class, but I know that a friend of mine who is in linguistics really appreciated that nuance because it’s like, “oh, I never thought of it like how even though they’re so similar, there is a distinction.” And you kind of go into those distinctions and become aware of it as a part of your identity.
You’ve talked about pulling together pieces from different classes. Could you expand on that—what’s your writing workflow? How do you outline, draft, and edit?
I remember I was really encouraged when I outlined the book towards the end of late March and early April of 2022, the end of my second year. I remember going home for the spring and drafting it all on a Google document and starting to think like, “okay, what I wrote for WRI273: Specialized Prose could be this part of the book; these stories from the first year course [WRI173: Creative Nonfiction] could come in.” So I started to create the architecture of the book overall.
When it comes to specific pieces, it was very much just the way that I saw the chronology of the story play out. When I wrote “Bucefalos” [a story in the Brazil section of My ABCs] for instance, I remember specific anecdotes like core memories, you could say, and then I just kind of parse those together. And that’s why it’s these segments that are connected, whereas “The Price of Education” for instance, was very much a combination of reflections and flashbacks and conversations that were current—conversations that I was having in Canada—that would trigger memories, and those became the flashbacks.
My writing workflow really depended on my headspace, what I saw would make sense, or what I was trying to convey. I include letters and poetry as well. That was very much experimental. I had never written poetry before. I don’t know what got into me. I just wanted to try this out. I think it really worked because there were certain ideas I wanted to convey that would require a lot more of thinking back to things that I could show and not tell. The poems kind of show that in a more telling way, because it’s just very to the point, more lyrical and rhythmic than regular prose.
Sometimes I would just repeat a phrase throughout. In the “Sometimes I Wonder” poem, I center the poem around repeating the “Sometimes I wonder” expression. Because sometimes I do wonder like, what if my life played out differently, and I kind of romanticize it and follow that train of thought. But then I realize that’s not my life. So I ground myself again.
My process and my writing workflow very much depends on form, and also the ideas that I have and how I go about it.
You’ve actually mostly answered my next question. You use various forms in the collection—stories, letters, and poems. Could you speak about your choice to mix forms in this way?
I remember I don’t know what got into me, like I said. I just thought of that because I got enthusiastic about having all this writing that already existed. A lot of the letters already existed. It keeps coming back to how I just write, even if it’s not for a class. I enjoy capturing my thoughts with the written word. And so I have these letters that I had actually never intended to share with anybody, especially not in a book that I’ve never thought would be published. But I thought about it, “you know, these letters show this vulnerable part of my life that still shaped my identity.” Because the main conclusion I took away from producing this book was identity is made of both presences and absences. I really wanted to show that, and I think most of my letters touch upon grief in different ways: you grieve the loss of loved ones from your family, but you also grieve like the fact that because you miss out on certain experiences, or you move away from everything and are kind of always on the move, and you’re kind of scattered. You struggle to hold on to something. I just wanted to illustrate how that was also a part of my reflections and my understanding of who I was and who I am.
The poems touch upon different emotions. I remember at one point I thought, “I don’t wanna publish this, this is too much, too personal.” And I remember I would have these moments of “I don’t think I'm ready to include this. I don’t want anybody to know these things.” And then I remembered I’d already registered the ISBN as ‘stories, letters, and poems,’ and I will just have to go through with it. Eventually I realized that was the best decision I could have made, because those were actually the parts that resonated with people the most—especially the letters I wrote to my grandmothers when they passed away—where I realized not only are identity and belonging such universal concerns, but grief is also very universal. If I were to take that out, I know I wouldn’t have been truthful to myself.
I’m just glad that I could have that overview of my life, even if there were moments that were more dark and lonely.
I’ve seen you marketing your book quite heavily—starting an author Instagram, sharing positive book reviews, and making content for BookTok. Could you share some insights from your marketing efforts?
Marketing my book still feels weird because I genuinely forget that I wrote this book. It sounds really silly, but I feel like a ghost writer. I feel like I did it, but it’s not mine. I think someone else in one of the other interviews you did—I think it was Bernice—mentioned how marketing is a full time job, and it really is. I'm just really trying to reach as many people as I can while still having fun. The BookTok thing is very much experimental. I know it's become a more prominent way for authors to share their writing in general. I go to the big brick-and-mortar bookstores, and they have a BookTok section. Books are going viral on Tiktok, and people are picking them up. A lot of authors get known that way.
When it comes to positive book reviews, or just people sending me their thoughts, I think it's very genuine and shows how my book is very centered on community. Even if people don't necessarily relate to the specifics of my story, I've had a lot of people reach out to say, “wow, the specific way that you wrote this really resonated with me.” Being on the receiving end of all these different compliments, or thoughts, or even critiques actually got me to annotate my own book. My readers ask me, “Oh, you wrote this this way, what were you trying to say, or what were you thinking about when you wrote this?”
When it comes to marketing, I'm just really grateful social media exists. It makes marketing to a wider audience much easier to start. The author Instagram [@povmarielawriter] was more of an attempt to separate the personal from the professional. But as a writer it's kind of hard, especially if the book is about you and your upbringing and your family history.
My marketing efforts are very much just trial and error. I'm trying to see what is engaging, what is not engaging, but, like I mentioned, it is a full time job, so it is difficult to be disciplined with it. But I'm trying, and it seems to be working, and it makes me happy to see people learn about the book.
What surprised you as you went through the publication process? What’s the most valuable thing you took away from this experience?
Other than the marketing, what happens in the aftermath. Once the book exists, you have to get it out there, you gotta get people to know about it, and try to get readership to increase if you want that. At the end of the day, it’s a business. So you're very much trying to just make it work in that field.
But the main thing that surprised me about the publication process is, in the making a book course, we typeset our books. We learn how to use InDesign, which is the software industry standard for typesetting. When I tell people I have a book published—which is an accomplishment in and of itself—they're very impressed. But I really try to emphasize that I made a book from scratch. Yeah, I wrote it, and I also designed the pages, and chose the font, and chose the spacing between the lines and between the letters, and the headers, and the cover design. I had to make all these small decisions that compounded into this physical book that people can hold and read.
I really underestimated the learning curve for InDesign. At the same time, what I took away the most was my mental resilience. I really had to persevere, even though I thought everything was falling apart. I remember it was late February [2023], and I did not have proper pages in my InDesign file. I thought I was doomed. I was like, “I cannot believe I've been typesetting for 2 months, and yet if I were to send this to get a proof copy my book would look very different from how I thought it should look.” But because of the mental resilience, I just have to trust the process. Eventually everything came together. I don't know how to explain it, but everything was crashing and burning, and I just kept going. I just kept trying, and I kept revising my typesets, and just eventually everything fell into place. I remember ordering my proof copy and I knew there were going to be mistakes that I have to fix, but holding your book for the first time was just— I cannot describe it. I got very excited and very emotional. I never thought I would get so ecstatic. I could hold something I made not only I wrote, but I made. Like I mentioned earlier, I hold it, I brought it with me [to the in-person interview] and I cannot believe I did that.
That brings me to how the most valuable thing I also took away from it was I did it with my peers. It was very much a communal thing, because we've relied on each other to learn about different tricks from InDesign, and figured out the learning curve together. I was never alone in that we were in the thick of it together, and we got to celebrate together. And that's also something that's not common. Very few people can say that they published a book together.
It must have been a harrowing few months, and then it's done, and all of a sudden all the adrenaline and stress that has been building up all semester is gone.
Oh, yeah, I felt like someone finally burst like the balloon that was still filling with pressure. And now you're like, “Okay. Now I can relax.”
Is there anything else you'd like to add or answer you'd like to give to a question you wish to ask you?
Something I want to add is that publishing a book really changes how people perceive you. Guy Allen [professor who teaches WRI420: Making A Book] told us early in the course that taking the course will forever change how we saw books. That’s very true; learning how to make a book from scratch really changes how you appreciate every single page and every single surface of that book.
It's crazy for me especially because I wrote a memoir. A lot of what I've lived since publishing has changed, or I've become aware of how my memory failed me in certain ways. It's been really great to learn more about myself and my story through publishing, seeing how people perceive [My ABCs], but also how my own family perceived it, and how I remember certain things differently from what they remember. It doesn't mean that [the book] is not truthful, but it just shows how the nature of a book relying on memories presents a very selective view.
I'm just grateful for everybody who supported me along the way and believed that eventually I could do this. We talk a lot about how teachers are the first people to recognize that potential in you. I remember when I was in high school, in Grade 9, I had to write a personal statement very early on. I was practicing the college application essay stuff. I wrote an essay, and my English teacher told me in our feedback meeting, “You have a knack for writing.” That moment stayed with me forever because I thought, “I've enjoyed writing since I was a kid.” Very often people don't encourage you to pursue a writing career because it's so unusual compared to tother more prominent industries that are a 9 to 5, where you go to an office and get the work done, then you leave. But at that moment, I told myself, “I can do this. I can write. I can make a career out of this.” I hopefully will continue to do so.
I'm very grateful to be living this, even though at times I generally forget that I did it. I feel very blessed to see how it's reached all corners of the world. People that I haven't been in touch with for years have messaged me, saying that they bought the book, that they read it, and it really resonated with them. My ABCs has reached South America and Europe and Fiji. When I went to Fiji in the summer, I noticed how universal of an experience it is to reflect on your identity and belonging in the world and in the specific community you're part of. It's been really scary to see how far the book has reached. But it's been really comforting to see how even though I keep changing, that part of my life is central to who I am.
It’s impacted people in different ways. My ABCs is used as a phrase (conversationally) which I think is really cool. I’m just glad that I was able to provide some sort of language and platform in a way for people to have those conversations. I see my book being a conversation starter, with people making those connections and feeling more comfortable bringing up these things. And I just have been enjoying having conversations because of taking this brave step of sharing my story that way.
What are you currently working on or looking forward to working on?
I'm looking forward to continuing work on the podcast that I started last year. It’s just hard to balance everything. So many people have been asking me for more episodes. I have been thinking of those in the back of my mind, but I will eventually get around it. 4 people and counting have specifically told me to also make an audiobook version of My ABCs. I'm looking forward to doing more sound and audio based writing.
More specifically, I’m working on a new project about my trip to Fiji this past summer. Thanks to the Laidlaw Scholars program that I'm a part of, and the Laidlaw Foundation, I lived in an indigenous Fiji community for 4 weeks. I'm still wrapping my head around everything I experienced, and I'm looking forward to creating a project that can really capture as much of that as I can. I'll also be experimenting, not with poetry, but with multimedia—videos and photos and audio. I'm looking forward to expanding my writing in these different forms.
Read the rest of the Making A Book series here.
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You are very brave for publishing a memoir, Mariela! I'm so happy people all over the world are enjoying your book and finding comfort in your words!
So proud of you Mari!! It’s been wonderful watching this unfold from the beginning. You’re only at the start of the wonderful things you’ll do ❤️