During the autumn of 2006, my former World Literature teacher invited me to teach a class of creative writing at the George Cosbuc high school. At one point I tried to become a writer, but I was always stumbling because of my high expectations and because of my critical view of myself. After a few lines I would start to delete some of the words, the quality of my writing would become depressing and I would get to this dead end where I could no longer write anything.
I wanted to protect the high school students from this battle with their own expectations regarding the text they were going to write. Thus, I proposed that they would write the works of an imaginary author. I asked the three girls who participated in the class to write on a piece of paper the names of three Romanian writers they liked. We placed the pieces of paper in a hat and took out two of them. Nicolae Labis, a poet, and Mircea Eliade, or Cartarescu, came up. We cut off the family names and this is how Mircea Nicolae was born. After my class was over, I used the name of the imaginary author.
