"For authors that write about children, there is a need to go back in time to find that child they once were or still are. It is a hard exercise on memory," said Laura Restrepo, a Colombian writer, journalist and political activist who also studies authors who write about children, in her first Cornell talk, Feb. 26.

Restrepo is the first Latin American woman writer appointed as a Cornell A.D. White Professor-at-Large; she began her first official visit to campus with a public talk, "Authors in Search of the Child They Were: On Memory and Origin," in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium.

Restrepo, the author of seven novels -- of which the most recent is "Delirium" (2004) -- discussed the memory of childhood as an important experience that offers us some hidden information about our lives.

"From a writer's point of view, I'm not particularly interested in literature theories, but in talking, letting myself be surprised, getting into the kitchen of other writers to see how they cook their stuff, as a person who reads," Restrepo said, noting that it does not matter whether books are fictional or biographical as they are all "metaphors of life."

Restrepo described writing about children as an experience of diving into time, life and words and rhythm. "We conjugate words so we can go back in time, following this idea of childhood, which deals with the beginning and the end, when the beginning and the end find each other," she said. Examining such Colombian writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Restrepo said, "Something in Colombia is so overwhelming, like there is a black hole in time; if you don't tell everything immediately, it's going to disappear."

She quoted works by Márquez, Leo Tolstoy, Philip Roth, James Joyce, J.M. Coetzee, Amos Oz and Vladimir Nabokov to illustrate how the end of childhood is essentially the "end of possibility."

"The paradox is that authors searching for that child might be closer to death than to childhood," Restrepo said. She also addressed such issues in writing about children as moral confusion behind punishment, sexual awareness and the mixed feelings involved in defeating the father and separating from the mother.

"Dickens drew the most magnificent children characters," she said. "Both Oliver Twist and David Copperfield had to go through hunger and cold, neither of them had parents to protect them." Restrepo explained that children often go through difficult experiences in literature because childhood is an "unstable phenomenon."

At the end of her talk, Restrepo discussed how children's acquaintance with words "is a great revelation that lets children find their own identity." Quoting from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," for example, she said, "'because when he woke up, he not only turned into an insect, he also turned into a writer.'"

On campus through March 7, Restrepo will be a keynote speaker at a joint conference between Cornell and Syracuse University Latin American programs, Feb. 28-29, and will hold a roundtable discussion March 6 with invited literary experts on her work followed by a book sale and signing.

For more information, see http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/LatinAmerica/conference/restrepo/index.asp.

Graduate student Zheng Yang is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.