This essay examines the creative process behind the novel Tinta da Bahia (2026), investigating the relationships between historiographical research, memory, and critical fabulation in the construction of a fictional narrative. Centered on the trajectory of Aziri Dagwa, an African woman who was abducted and enslaved in nineteenth-century Brazil, the essay discusses how literary writing brings together historical documents, poetry, Black feminist thought, and anti-colonial studies to create characters and narrative voices that challenge hegemonic representations of the Black experience. It examines the theoretical and aesthetic choices that shaped the novel, with particular attention to the creation of Chica d’Água as a first-person narrator whose voice functions as an echo of memory. By interrogating the silences of historical archives and the colonial images of Black women in Brazilian literature, the essay argues that writing is a practice of displacing perspectives, temporalities, and spaces, capable of challenging canonical readings and expanding the horizons of the literary imagination. It concludes that Tinta da Bahia employs critical fabulation as a creative method aimed at restoring the complexity of subjects who have historically been stereotyped, affirming literature as a space of language through which the world can be reimagined.
This essay examines the process of transforming an ethnographic dissertation on a Pentecostal recovery center into a novel in progress. Drawing on the dissertation, field diaries, fictional drafts, and discarded versions, I discuss two complementary moments of the creative process: the initial attempt to transpose into fiction the scenes, characters, and outcomes retained by the research; and the later invention of Ismael Ventura, a narrator born from what ethnographic selection left out. The analysis focuses on four writing operations: the shift from description to scene, the creation of composite characters, changes in focalization, and the reorganization of fieldwork time into plot. I argue that ethical and aesthetic decisions are not separate stages, since the protection of interlocutors changes literary form and fictional invention redefines responsibility toward empirical referents. Finally, I propose the notion of a public anthropology of intimacy to name a form of writing that does not merely popularize academic findings, but produces, through literary means, other forms of intelligibility, presence, and public dialogue. Comparing what the dissertation narrated with what it silenced reveals that every ethnography simultaneously produces a narrative and a remainder, and that fiction can inhabit both.
This essay discusses the contemporary poem’s multiartistic forms through the triangulation of three elements characterized as strange: the bodies, the fruits, and the parties (Aleixo, 2025; Garramuño, 2014; Mattos, 2025). Starting from the notion that a poem is composed by different performances (written, vocal, bodily, scenic, audio, visual, etc.), and being that no one is more definitive or important than the other, I articulate the concepts surrounding the poem’s performance and nonspecific art as distilled experiences (Lorde, 2021) of the dysphoric world (Preciado, 2023) in which this poetry is produced. The main corpus of analysis is the poetic and theatrical performance Festa Estranha, which explores the image beyond the page; it gives body to the poem, accessing other tools to amplify the game of opposites (Paz, 1996), and creating more friction. In addition, there is a sense of collectivity, not only during the creative process of building the show, but with the audience as well. Bodies, fruits, and parties are strange elements that act as literary and artistic devices (Polesso, 2026) for creating new worlds and realities that explore themes by cuír/queer (Nascimento, 2019), LGBTQIAPN+, marginalized, or dissident groups. Festa Estranha gives back the strangeness surrounding the contemporary, not only in the new ways of making poetry, but through the dilemmas and experiences from those who are affected by straight cis and colonial worldification politics.
This paper analyzes how KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select transforms the traditional royalty system into a gamified economy in which writing and reading are mediated by metrics, algorithms, and continuous performance. It is based on the hypothesis that the platform establishes a form of aesthetic governmentality, converting authorial freedom into productive engagement and the symbolic value of literature into measurable data. Through a theoretical-analytical approach, grounded in studies on gamification (DETERDING et al., 2011), combined with an analysis of data from the KDP Select Global Fund (NOBLIT, 2025), the study observes that although the global fund has expanded more than twentyfold since 2014, the value paid per page read has remained stable, revealing a diffuse and self-regulated competition. It concludes that KDP Selectturns the act of creating into a measurable performance and reading into economic data, establishing an economy of permanence in which the author, transformed into a player, must produce incessantly to continue existing within the literary game.
This article reports on the pedagogical experience of the elective course "Language of the Ocean," developed with students in Cycle I (6th and 7th grades) at a Municipal Full-Time School (EMTI) in Fortaleza (CE), Brazil. The central objective was to investigate how creative writing, mediated by the use of logbooks in Bullet Journals, could act as a device for ocean literacy and for the construction of students' narrative identity, transforming sensory experiences and field records into narrative memories. Methodologically, the proposal was grounded in action research and structured into stages of aesthetic awareness, multimodal writing workshops, and field experiences integrated into the discussion of the Blue Curriculum. The results demonstrate that 75% of the students produced structured narratives with marks of authorship, and 80% achieved an understanding of the principles of ocean literacy. It is concluded that the intersection between Geography and Portuguese Language, in light of SDG 14, promotes the recomposition of socio-ecological metabolism and youth agency, consolidating ocean citizenship through the authorial systematization of environmental knowledge.
