About Rafael Peñas Cruz
Who am I?
My name is Rafael Peñas Cruz and I am writer and professor of Spanish and Hispanic studies at the London School of Economics. I am Spanish but have a degree in English language and literature and have been living in London since 1992. In 2004 I published my first novel in Spain, “Las dimensiones del teatro” and in 2009 my second novel, “Charlie”, which won the fifth edition of the Terenci Moix Award for gay fiction and was published by Editorial Egales.
What is “The Quince Jelly Tin”?
“The Quince Jelly Tin” is a writing project that aims to turn your old photo albums into stories to be published in this website, which aims to become a repository of people´s lives.
Why is it called that?
The name “The Quince Jelly Tin” comes from the box where my mother treasured the family photos and other documents that she brought from the small town in Southern Spain where she was born when she migrated to Barcelona in the early sixties. Haunted as I was from an early age by stories from the past, I regularly asked her to take the box out and tell me about the people that appeared in those old photos.
What do I want to achieve?
The aim of this website is to collect the stories told by your own shoe boxes or quince-jelly tins. I work as a kind of medium who invokes the spirits of the dead, mediating between people and their past.
How does it work?
I go to your house and you open for me your own quince jelly tins. You lay those photos, documents and objects on a table and I listen to the memories and stories that those photographs and documents awake in you, trying to find some order and make some sense out of the chaos of experience that these family archives usually contain. Then I write a story giving shape to the information you have given me in our session.
How much does it cost?
Please contact me to agree on a price suitable to your needs and requirements. The price will include the time spent during the interview session where you show me your pictures and tell me your memories , plus the time that it will take me to write a text of about 3000 based on that interview. You will then be able to review the first draft and suggest amendments before it is published online.