Hi

Fiction Writing

I started my “writing career” when I was 4 and ran my own “newspaper”. It wasn’t much about news, as you can guess. It featured what I imagined as the day-to-day life of the cats in my neighbourhood, the struggles between strays and pets.

In school, I was the short girl sitting at the back of the classroom, so I could write stories when I should be listen to my teacher.

Thanks to this strategy, I completed a young adult novel when I was 13, consulting psychologists and lawyers, turning my classmates into beta readers. It has never seen the light of the day, and, probably, it never will.

But it encouraged me to send my stories to the world — and one was published in an anthology, and another was awarded a second place in a competition.

Thankfully, despite the amount of time I spent writing in class, my grades remained good enough to get me into university. In Brazil, we don’t have creative writing degrees, so a BSc. in Communications with a major in Journalism was the next best thing.

For many years, fiction wasn’t part of my life. I was a journalist, then a public relations/marketing manager. The writing was still there daily, but no, it wasn’t the same. The closest I got to fiction writing was when a non-profit organisation asked me to write a historical book celebrating their 40th anniversary.

The research involved three years of interviews and document analysis. To solve the expected gaps, missing pieces of information lost over decades, I wrote the book “O Farol” as if it were a memoir. The organisation became a real person telling her own story — I guess that was my fiction writing calling sneaking in.

In 2010, I moved to Ireland, a land of so many talented authors and Nobel Prizes of Literature. My desire to write fiction returned with all power, and I joined the Irish Writers Centre’s New Irish Communities group.

There, I met aspiring and published writers with English as their second language. It gave me the incentive I needed to get back into writing. Eventually, my sabbatical turned into permanent residence, followed by Irish citizenship.

In 2020, I also joined Writing.ie’s Writers Ink VIP group, a community where I’ve found even more support. Later, I’ve joined other writing groups hoping their energy and encouragement would feed my creativity.

Since then, my poetry, short stories, and essays has been published by Poetry Kit, Époque Press, Pendemic, and Diápora. My stories mix Brazilian and Irish cultures to explore themes of home, cultural clash, and identity.