Q&A with Luciana Brandão
We were drawn to Luciana Brandão’s “After” not only for its beautiful language, but also for its oddity. The collective “we” voice, the spirituality, the lovely and tragic inner world of onions — we are so lucky to be home to this fantastic piece! Read below for an interview between Brandão and one of our editors, Katie Moats.
Your use of language and tone were so thoughtful throughout this piece. How do you make these sorts of decisions in your writing, and what is your process like in general?
My decision about the use of language is usually an encounter between a specific style or technique that I am interested in at the moment and that I want to experiment with and the requirements of what is necessary to tell a certain story.
In this piece particularly, I was exploring and experimenting with different kinds of narrative voices, mainly what is known as “unnatural voices”. The provocation came from a creative writing exercise during a workshop I was invited to attend, in which we should try to create a piece from first person perspective, but using the plural “we” instead of the singular "I".
So there came the idea of working with a different kind of "we," something totally unconventional, (in this case, an onion), and to wonder in a poetic sense about what would be its voice, its consciousness, its questions, and the inner dialogues that this inanimate resource would have.
And then I also wanted to tell a story that demanded an active participation of the reader in order to grasp its meaning and its main conflict. I was doing a lot of reading on some more sinister and hideous stories, mainly from Argentinian authors like Samantha Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez, and also a bit of Cortázar. So, I wanted to apply some of these references in creating a story that was weird, dark, obscure, and that could conceal some kind of riddle within its multiple layers.
What makes you want to write? Why have you chosen to be a writer?
That’s a very kind question but it's a little bit difficult to escape the clichés. I've been a very imaginative kid. Since I was very young, I would have these imaginary friends, and I would create stories with them and my own little private world of imagination where I could choose who were my enemies, the heroes, and my friends. Through this imaginary world, I could live and experience a thousand different adventures far beyond the constricted universe of my real life.
I guess this will to bring to life stories that take us beyond our own reality is one of my main motivations to write. Also, and I think it’s Stephen King who says that in his book On Writing, the idea that once those stories are on paper and they reach a broader audience and another person gets to read them, then it feels like a transmission of thought in the sense that this person will be seeing in their imagination something quite similar to what I was seeing when I wrote that.
This idea of connecting minds throughout time and space in a way that someone that I’ve never heard of will be there seeing the same things as me—it makes me feel like writing is some kind of magic. That really drives me to be a writer and always in pursuit of becoming an even better writer.
What influences your writing? What sort of writing (or maybe writers) are you drawn to when you’re putting together your own stories?
As a Brazilian person, I think my writing is heavily influenced by other Brazilian and Latin American authors, and also in general by other female authors from different nationalities.
Usually, I am very initially drawn towards stories which plot or motif make me intrigued and curious. One author that I've already mentioned in the first question is Samantha Schweblin. Recently I've read a book of hers called Kentukis, which is the idea of some people being able to watch other random and unknown persons throughout a computer screen due to a new technology that is similar to a stuffed animal Furby-style with a video camera implemented inside their eyes. So when I hear this premise It makes me very curious and I go like "okay, so that's something different, something I haven't seen yet", which draws me heavily towards reading and finding out what kind of universe or situations will emerge. Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and the brazilians Socorro Acioli and Ana Paula Maia are also some favorites.
More on the level of language, I have to mention Clarice Lispector, who is a Brazilian author from the second half of twentieth century, a very important one. She writes lots of her passages in a flow of consciousness and she's very poetic, while at the same time talking about deep and highly philosophical life questions. And also Virginia Woolf, with her sensibility to grasp a scene, create an atmosphere and bring to us a lot of subtext. The way she directs our gaze towards the scene is exquisite. She has this ability to present the characters, being inside their minds, while at the same time delineating what we as readers are meant to see, that for me is just amazing.
What’s next for you as a writer? Short term goals, long term goals? What pushes you to keep working towards these things?
Although I’ve been writing and publishing for more than a decade now, this is the first year that I am able to fully compromise with the craft and bring more time and energy to learn and improve my writing skills.
One short-term goal, which is already being accomplished with this contribution to Weird Lit Magazine, is to get more of my short stories out there in different kinds of publications to be read by different audiences. Another goal is to publish my first novel. I have been working on it for the past few months and now I would like to get it published in a press that helps me get a broader audience. As for a long-term goal—or maybe, more actually a desire I have, is one day seeing one of my books or short stories being adapted to the cinema. I would really love to see what a creative director is able to do with my characters and ideas and how it would all come out on a movie screen.
