Category: English Australia

Brazil – When the Pot Boils

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I was born in Brazil, my Brazilian Brazil, as a song sings. I’ve decided to write about it today, this country where everything is happening. I feel a mix of complete unbelievability and a sense of hope, although I’m not sure about the Olympics at all.

Brazil is falling apart and at the same time creating the roots in which the country might get reconstructed. To my work colleagues, the protests of Sunday last, 13th March, look like big parties, and they probably were.

They were peaceful, there was dancing, I’m sure there was singing of political rants, booing the current president and the former president, both from the workers party; although most of these people on the streets, were the same who voted for them. They lost faith. The defence of the two presidents is to say that this is a scheming technique of the rich people and the opposition to burn them. It isn’t. What the protests are about: against corruption in all parties, about justice for all, rich and poor.

In 2013 there was a large scale protest, at the time I was disappointed because when I enquired what the protests were for, I saw each person was protesting for something they thought was worth it, there was no unified front. It was about the money spent for the construction of the stadiums for the Fifa World Cup, about the state of the health system, about the increase in the price of bus tickets, about the educational systems. These were all valid reasons, but without focus there is no strength.

Sunday, the story was completely different; it was about corruption and that brought record numbers, a protest as my generation has never seen. It filled my heart with happiness to see this movement, a pride I might not have the right to feel, since I’ve left Brazil 12 years ago to embrace the Australian ways. Because I felt like an alien in my Brazilian culture most of my life, more so when I became an adult and had to function inside the work force. I left, I found a place where the rules and cultural subtleties are closer to my heart.

Brazil released a big shout against Corruption! It was amazing to see, although there were different little points, they were about honesty, supporting the police, the federal courts, it was requesting Dilma’s impeachment (the current president) and crying for Lula’s arrest (the previous president).

The hope is that this movement will recover the pride in being honest. With low salaries that the investigators, the police, the lower legal echelons receive, the lack of resources, the poverty of the Brazilian government buildings and institutions, there isn’t much to incentivise them to keep being honest… but now, a million people here, a couple of hundred of thousands there, in love and pride, that might give them a mission bigger then themselves, anchored in something I thought was completely forgotten… patriotism.

All this chaos started with a single thread, a judge was given the investigation into a car wash which became the nick-name of the investigation (operação lava-jato). A new law was approved around that time that enabled prosecutors to offer reduction of sentence to condemned people who dubbed on others, if they had proof. That was the thread that pulled all others, they found a link between that and Petrobras, the petroleum state company, and then it never stopped.

In Brazil there is a high level of barely literate people, which makes very hard for them to understand white collar crimes, such as embezzlements and selling of flavours; but when they found that Lula had taken eleven trucks of goods from the governmental house, the Palacio do Planalto, and among them they found gifts of gold and jewels, presents from other countries to the Brazilian people (not the person, the President), the rugs from the house, priceless works of art from Aleijadinho and Portinari, THAT, they could understand, it was the lowest type of crime: thievery.

Ally to that were the ecological disaster in Mariana, which drowned a city and will have ecological consequences worldwide, and the Zica Virus or whatever is causing a spread of neurological diseases, added to the overspending in the construction for the Olympics and the result is that the pot boils.

And when it boils, it boils. It blew an amazing number of people, although I cannot be precise on how many, something between 3 million and 6 million people country-wide.

To every protest two or three head-counts were divulged, the police would publish a very low number, the organisers, a very large number and the researching institute of São Paulo gave us another even lower number, so we don’t really know anything. As always, and as part of Brazilian idiosyncrasies, finding the truth is often hard.

The numbers aren’t anywhere close; for example, for São Paulo’s protest, the organisers calculated 1 million people, the police said it was 500 thousand and DataFolha, the research institute, said 200 thousand. The only thing I can say for sure is that there were a lot of people.

Thank you all my friends and all Brazilians who made the effort, who left the house, who went to a place in green and yellow and shouted against corruption. To all who now feel pride in being honest, I feel this might be a change in the tide. If people can take this pride to their day-to-day lives, it will change the culture, change the country, change the future.

[Note, the text in Portuguese is completely different from this one, this is for everyone but Brazilians, I explain things here. The one in Portuguese is for Brazilians, another view of the situation.]

[Picture: http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/06/protests-brazil%5D

Inspiration Outside of Me

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I have finished a Masters in Arts, Creative Writing, at UTS, in June 2015. At the time I didn’t feel the accomplishment, the excitement in finishing up, just a bit of relief. I loved the course most of the time, I loved almost all classes and felt inspired throughout. At the end I was feeling it was just a bit too much outside input into my writing and I was loosing myself.

When I completed the final assignment I was left with more questions than answers. I started the course to gain technique to write in English, but more specifically, the project I used throughout the course: my non-fiction, written like fiction, comedic, novel, about my friend who is a Brazilian, migrated Australian, who has been a belly dancer in Sydney, performing mostly in the middle Eastern Communities of the city.

As you can notice, it is a complicated project and I needed help to set it up. The inspiration and the stories are not a problem, how to link them, present them and frame them is my challenge.

I had hoped that by the end of the Masters I would have found this structure, but I found only the questions I need to answer in order to find this structure and a bit of a sense of being lost.

I gained a lot of technique and believe I am much better equipped now then before I started. I have a thicker skin and a knowledge of where to look for information too.

By the time the Graduation Ceremony arrived I was able to release the impressions of not getting as far as I wanted and had the most beautiful day  with my sister and my friend (the Muse, the Character).

The following day, it was Elizabeth Gilbert who made me realise why I felt and should feel happy and accomplished. We have TED Tuesdays at work and we watched Elizabeth’s talk that day.  She explained that a valid idea is to think of  divine inspiration as, well, divine, as is coming from outside you.

I remembered that when I was in classes no teacher would say: you chose the voice, the tone, the verbal tense, define the character and then you pray, or talk to your daemons, or to your genius, and ask for guidance. As it would be expected, we are taught to control, to wrestle with our internal intellectual gifts and bend the words into shape.

I realised that was the one thing I forgot during these studies, the thing I lost connection with, the part that lives outside of me: the sudden, potent, and magical inspiration that makes a text become funny with a few twists of words, or that make people love what you wrote even when it is imperfect.

When I heard Elizabeth talking about this part of the creative process that is not my own I was relieved of the responsibility to do it all alone, by myself, with my second language, happen. I was given the solution to all my problems and the certainty that it will come to me, and the book will be able to carry the immense fun that the stories are.

I have a super-power, an intuition capable of seeing through the veil of what is hidden to the naked eye. Sometimes I know things without an explanation and most times, when these things can be confirmed, they are as I predicted. I have an intuition about this book, I think it will be important.

The second thing the talk gave me was a confirmation of why I was feeling accomplished. Elizabeth explains that artists have one responsibility: keep doing what they love, keep sweating and showing up to their art. That is the only way your genius will find you. I also concluded that honing your technique and getting better and better at it will allow you to transmit the divine inspiration into shape. Imagine what would happen if Van Gogh was able to see the sunflowers in his mind but didn’t know how to paint. His genius would have gone somewhere else.

With these two thoughts — that an artist has to show up to her art and that technique allows you to make real your ethereal inspirations — I saw my new testamur as the proof of how much I am so committed to this art and that I am doing my part, I am showing up to my writing.

Why Australia?

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The other side of the world, really? My friends and family have difficulty to understand why, but once explained it gets easier to get.

After I came to the conclusion that I needed a good life in order to feel inspired to write (see the post called “when did I start writing?”) I started looking for ways to achieve that.

I know many people find inspiration and energy inside a depression to write. I knew then as I know now that people write no matter what if they feel the drive. Unfortunately I’m not one of those, I am not good with sadness, with being unhappy or tragedies, it is not my forte. Instead I spend my energy working hard and changing things, making life better and then writing about it when I am feeling energised and inspired, harvesting the work I put into earlier.

Of course I have to keep in perspective the fact that I am quite privileged as the worst that ever happened to me makes for the better that might have happened to a lot of people.

I was in Brazil and was able to find another job, better than the first, but it turned out it was a copy of the other. I worked 70k from home and shared my rides with a colleague who lived in the same area, who then became my good friend, my most avid reader, and eternal supporter of my writing. We talked endlessly about my writing ideas and tidbits I would write here and there. He was instrumental in my realisation that writing was my path and we still connect technologically to exchange news about our lives and our artistic inspirations.

The job was horrendous, the boss was atrocious, we worked long hours and the travelling was dangerous and tiring. On top of that the company was in a city with two smelly factories.

If I had to choose I would say that water is my element, it often features in my dreams in its many forms. Many times water influenced my life.

When I was about two years old I fell on a stream and the water carried me for some distance. In my memory I was carried away in a river for long metres but my parents barely remember the episode so I think my little child inside exaggerates it a lot.

I grew up spending most of my vacations at my grandfather’s ranch by a large fresh water dam and my parents constantly took us to the beach, even though we lived about 4 hours in-land.

I’m strongly attracted to the ocean and spent many vacations thinking deeply on what I could do to live near the sea.

I used to list in my mind all the cities in Brazil’s coast and wonder if I could find a job in any of them. Reminding the reader that this is way before 2003 and therefore there was no google or job listing website allowing me to search for work Brazil-wide.

The only economically viable option was Rio de Janeiro but I never felt a desire to live there due to the security issues. I investigated Fortaleza in the North and Florianópolis in the South but found it hard to believe I would find a reasonably paying job.

The day before I got married we suffered our first and smaller flood. It was my parent’s property with a river running at the far end of a sort of farm house. Six years later there was another flood, this time 2 meters of water inside the house and my then-husband had to be rescued from the top of the house, by a drunken strong man, on a boat, secured by a rope from the higher ground at the front of the property.

This time we lost everything and for me it was the best thing that could have happened. I had always desired to live abroad and that felt as if the Universe had just pushed me out.

Right at that time my cousin, who was living in Sydney, went for a visit and her accounts of the city made it figure in my mind’s map for the first time. Through her I discovered this city, by the ocean, beautiful, first world, English speaking, and with a migration program, which could be the solution to my problems.

I persuaded the then-husband to consider the option and he ended up agreeing and I came in first to have a look. On the second day I decided I never wanted to live, it was home, it was where I found a piece of my soul I didn’t know was missing. It took some months to arrange a visa for me and for him to join me. Four years later, with a lot of hard work and a pastry chef diploma with 900 hours in the kitchen later, I got our permanent residency, and we got divorced shortly after.

To finalise, the reason I moved here was to write and have a good life, and that I am daily achieving.

When did I Start Writing?

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At a certain point in my life I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be a writer. I find  it hard to remember how or when exactly I got to that point. Probably, a turning point happened when I was about 25 years old and I wrote a short-story that was selected as a finalist for an anthology book. By then I had decided that being a ballet dancer wasn’t for me after all. At 17 I had dropped out of my dance uni degree and moved to advertisement and marketing. At 25 I had been working at a large multinational corporation that was draining my blood.

One day I was driving alone to work, from the car radio I heard a voice saying:

“Writing is your major gift”. I’m aware the phrase is a bit strange but I cannot change the voice from beyond just to fit the English grammar, so I will leave it as is, the closest translation.

That moment I made a decision (based on a voice I imagined because I was delirious of boredom, most probably, but who cares, right?). I had been trying to write more and more and I realised I had to find a way to have a good quality of life to have energy left for writing. If you check the post “why Australia?” you will see how that brought me to Sydney’s beautiful shores.

Although, the decision was made when I was an adult, the more I search for when I started actually writing, the further back I go.

My best friend pointed out to me that none of her childhood friends wrote a story about the time they caught the maid making out with the security guard. I was telling my friend how terrified I was of this maid because she found my story and was very upset at me. Lost in my anguish cause by the upset maid I didn’t realise that most kids don’t write about stuff like I did all the time.

When I first learnt what poetry was, I also sold some poetry to my grandfather which I never delivered because I was then as I am now: hopeless at poetry. I did try though, ended up writing a few lines without an end. I ate my payment in candy and that was that.

I remember the look in the face of my fourth grade teacher when instead of delivering a writing assignment with one page, as I was supposed to do, I delivered twelve pages. Just because I couldn’t cut the story short, stop it in the middle, I had to take the character walking all the way from school to work… Poor teacher, she was a mean one but I’m not sure she deserved that punishment.

A few years later my beautifully-bummed high-school teacher published a book with short-stories, I had a story there. (Beautifully-bummed because as a Brazilian teenager, like all other Brazilian teenagers, I was obsessed with the roundness of people’s behinds around me and such youngish teacher had very nice buttocks that would shake firmly when he wrote on the blackboard.) [Two more notes: I’m still obsessed with round buttocks and at the time it was an actual back board, where you make all that effort to write with chalk.]

While I was on my dancing career path I only thought I would write a book when I retired, I wasn’t really thinking, probably from lack of food, the brain didn’t work very well. I’m grateful to say that I added things up before starving to death and changed my mind. This is my reasoning:

I am not flexible enough to be a prima ballerina + I live in a third world country quite worried about food and health, not art + I can never eat + I am always fat = bad idea.

Once I stopped dancing professionally — I still dance for pleasure — I started writing more, I’ve always had ideas, many, many ideas for being so, even if I had to give up writing about the maid’s kisses.

I fail on a daily basis to watch the news

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I received this message last night from my friend:

“I know you aren’t much into politics, just so you know, Australia’s got a new Prime Minister.”

Not much into politics is a major understatement. I can say I am alienated in an intellectual way. I don’t watch, or read, or listen to the news if I can avoid it. In general, my news are a couple of years old, when the major events appear in published books.

I felt very grateful to have friends that alert me when something major is happening so I can reconnect with reality.

To maintain my stream of interesting issues to talk about, I connect with story tellers, with things like Ted talks, podcasts, audio books, going to events and lectures and even watching high quality drama (no reality tv permitted in any way).

I simply cannot stand the journalistic style of writing, I cannot find the energy or the will to read or view the news. Maybe it comes from the trauma of having lived in a third world country where the news are a string of atrocities or injustices, I’m not sure.

But today I made an exception to see what was going on in my country. I went to ABCs news podcasts and clicked on all the ones from today and yesterday about the change of the Prime Minister. It was hilarious because there are all these interviews from yesterday and they talk to many people who categorically affirmed “they are all rumours, there is no truth in any of that, we will be in power at least for another year” and about six hours later the exact opposite happened.

Watching the news knowing what comes next might be fun.

The Structure

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How I structure my ideas is firstly by keeping notes in any way on my reach to put down ideas. In paper, on the phone, in voice notes and written bits and pieces. Early morning, middle of the night, and during the day.

Then I expand these notes to include the details that kept coming to me with or without my authorisation. The filling of these ideas assault me in dreams, in the shower, when I go to the toiled during my working day. But they come more when I am walking.

Next I start writing what needs to be put down, the parts that if I don’t make real will keep annoying me incessantly, these are the texts that won’t go away, that will fill my thoughts and ideas until they are resting in a physical form.

Following I have to organise where it all goes and write the other bits, the ones I had only the sketches for before.

Depending on the project it doesn’t have a pre-created structure. The book I have written in Portuguese, Simplesmente Gerva, has been created in a series of emails between my co-author and myself, and we never knew what the other was going to write.

I am now writing the continuation of this book and, although I am writing on my own, I am being faithful to the proposal. I don’t know much of what is going to happen to the character, I sit down to write and let him take me wherever he wants.

Sometimes a whole idea is born from one thought, one example is the one I mentioned in another post: what would a writer do if they didn’t have the means to write and which situation would that be.

To surmise, I impose no rules to myself. Whatever works, works.

The Technique

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I write using the many parts of myself. I write using both my home language, Portuguese, and my adopted language, the one of my fantasies and dreams, English. One day I may write in French, who knows. I write using the young me that lives inside and the older one. The wise and the silly. I write using my South American style, some fantastic reality, chopping off sentences (see the one just before) while writing really long paragraphs in other times.

I write with my own sense of fun, my original abilities and I have upgraded my technique with a Masters degree in Arts – Creative Writing from UTS. I am far from a literary writer, (as far as I can, actually), I aim to write in a straightforward way in plain English (or plain Portuguese, from Brazil). This was not without challenges during my studies, it was difficult to separate what was valid feedback on my style and what was my own Brazilian flavour, or what was because of the simplicity in the style. I guess I am still searching for this distinction.

I write following mostly the inspiration and the voice I found when I was seventeen, but try to give it a bit more style and maturity. I keep honing the knowledge, keep reading, listening and viewing anything that will enrich and feed my writing.

What do you Write?

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Whenever I tell someone that writing is my passion they come up with the difficult question ‘what do you write?’.

‘I write letters in a blank page’ doesn’t really explain, does it?

What I do is creative writing, short stories, blogs or novels. No poetry, no journalistic pieces. I write fiction and non-fiction, although my non-fiction reads like fiction. I love writing with humour but I also get into deep depressing stories and tales, at times.

My main subjects are day-to-day adventures and relationships. I like romance.

I would probably say that there is an element of sensuality in my writing. I am an kinaesthetic person and movement of bodies attract me even in bi-dimensional black and white letters.

I write anything that inspires me.

The Tools

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At the moment, I have 3 loves-of-my-life (how do you pluralise such a word?):

1) my computer — where all my ideas are stored. A present from my parents, the best ever. My lovely MacBook Air, that is the size and lightness of an ipad, with a phenomenal, smooth keypad, from a company that is aligned to my own values: creativity, design, beauty, sensuality (yes, the mac has a sensual design) and agility. I can carry it everywhere and write anywhere, and it has another love-of-my-life in it: the software for writing…

2) my scrivener — the discovery that changed my writing life. It made it very easy to keep all my ideas organised. It is also perfect for compiling projects. When creating a book you can keep the ideas for the chapters organised and then go into each part and just fill it with the actual writing. Next you are able to move the parts around, keep notes, research items, etc. Finally it exports to many formats including most, if not all, e-book publishing formats. Love, love, love it!

3) my nespresso — the food, albeit a drink, for my thoughts. With which I create magical Moccas with melted chocolate that energise my ideas. Another gift from my parents and my sister.

The WordPress in my Mind

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I write because I do it anyway, even without pen and paper, or without a computer. In my head I write all the time, for everything that happens around me I create an entry in my imaginary post. I even speak as I write sometimes and the thing that would give me the biggest grief would be to be made to stop writing.

I have created stories about what would happen to me if I was made to stop writing or if I didn’t have the means to do it. In which situation would you not have access to writing? And then, what would you do?

I would go insane because when I need writing something, it enters a loop in my head and I repeat the tale over and over in my head — the dialogues or the paragraphs — until I can sit down and ‘download’ them.

If I had no access to a computer, or to pen and paper, I would have to remember everything my experiences are creating… I guess my memory would expand and so would my despair.