Scriptorium: Creating an Open-Access Creative Writing Journal in Brazil

Since 2012, Creative Writing has been an official concentration within the Graduate Program in Letters at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. PUCRS is still the only institution offering Creative Writing courses across all levels (undergraduate, MA, PhD, workshops, non-credit courses) in the country. Within this context, we created Scriptorium, our first Creative Writing Studies journal. Linked to the Graduate Program in Letters and EDIPUCRS (the university press), Scriptorium publishes articles on the creative process, literary translation, Creative Writing pedagogy, as well as fiction and poetry. In our editorial team, we have faculty members, graduate, and undergraduate students. Every article is peer-reviewed, and the journal is open access and published online. The present paper aims to offer an account of the creation of our journal, drawing from my experience as editor. I will share our publishing process, the challenges in the dialogue between Creative Writing and Academia in Brazil, and our views for the future of this kind of publication, hoping that our experience can prove useful to other researchers and institutions wanting to publish similar open access journals.

The Perfectionist Call of Intelligibility: Secondary English, Creative Writing, and Moral Education

This article puts forward moral-philosophical arguments for re-building and re-thinking secondary-level (high-school equivalent) English studies around creative writing practices. I take it that when educators and policy makers talk about such entities as the "well-rounded learner," what we have, or should have, in mind is moral agents whose capacities for moral dialogue, judgement, and discourse are increased as a result of their formal educational experiences. In its current form, secondary English is built mainly, though not exclusively, around reading assessment; around, that is, demonstration of students' "comprehension" of texts. There is little or no sense that the tradition and practice of literary criticism upon which this type of assessment is based is a writerly tradition. By making writing practices central to what it is to do English in the secondary classroom, I argue that we stand a better chance at helping students develop their capacities for self-expression, for articulating their developing webs of belief and for scrutinizing those webs of belief. I thus wish to think about English and Creative Writing Studies in light of Cavell’s moral perfectionism, and to conceive of it as an arts-practical subject and a mode by which one might, in Baldacchino’s sense, undergo a process of "unlearning." My arguments are tailored to the English educational context.

Fazendo amor com Caio F.: um conto escrito a seis mãos?

Este ensaio pretende fazer uma análise reflexiva sobre os bastidores e a trajetória de escrever o conto bolha opaca de sabão (a partir de trechos do conto Sem Ana, blues, do autor Caio Fernando Abreu), em atendimento à proposta de produção colaborativa literária, nos moldes sugeridos pelo grupo de estudos de escrita criativa, pertencentes ao projeto de pesquisa Cartografias narrativas em língua portuguesa: redes e enredos de subjetividade II, coordenado pelo Professor Doutor Paulo Kralik, na Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, em meados de junho de 2018. Questiona-se o modelo atributivo-tradicional que endurece os autores, em seus próprios processos individuais, quando desse tipo de produção. *** Making love to Caio F.: a six-handed short story? ***This essay intends to make a reflective analysis on the backstage and the trajectory of writing the bolha opaca de sabão (from excerpts from the short story Sem Ana, blues, by Caio Fernando Abreu), in response to the proposal of collaborative literary production, as suggested by the group of creative writing studies, belonging to the research project Narrative cartographies in Portuguese language: networks and entanglements of subjectivity II, coordinated by Professor Paulo Kralik, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in June of 2018. It is questioned the attributive-traditional model that stiffens the authors, in their own individual processes, when this type of production happens.Keywords: collaborative literary production; Sem Ana, blues; Caio Fernando Abreu; creative process; intertextuality.