Interview with

Rita Espeschit
Canadian Women Reading and Writing
February 5, 2009

Rita Espeschit left a senior editor position with a Brazilian publishing house to immigrate to Canada in 2001, when the growing spectre of organized crime made it increasingly difficult
for her to live and work in Brazil. She has published fourteen
books for children, three poetry collections, a co-authored series
of eight Portuguese language-arts textbooks for children, and
journalism in Brazil’s top newspapers and magazines. She has
won numerous literary awards, including the Jabuti National
Prize, the Paraná’s State National Literature Prize, the João de
Barro National Prize, and the “Revelation Author” prize. Since
coming to Canada she has begun to expand her writing from her
native tongue, Portuguese, to English, and is currently working
on fiction for young audiences. She is Edmonton’s PEN Canada
Writer in Exile for 2008/2009.

CanWWR (Patricia): Yes, it sounds very complex.
R.E.: No no, just mechanical. Just copying from one page to the
other. But there was a library for adults, not for kids, and there
was a ver old lady there that didn’t really care. So I read all sorts
of weird books. (Laughter) Very strange, I don’t even know the
names of the authors because that didn’t interest me at all.
CanWWR (Clare): Did your mom know that you were reading
those?
R.E.: No, it’s different there. I don’t know, she was working all
the time, she didn’t really know what I was doing or not doing.
(Laughter) So that was my first contact with books, these very
strange books that I was reading when I was seven to ten.

We interviewed Rita Espeschit (R.E.) for CanWWR on March
20, 2009 at the University of Alberta.

CanWWR (Clare): Did you enjoy them?

CanWWR (Clare): I want to start by asking you about your first
interaction with literature when you were a child. Did you have
as much access as you wanted to books you were interested in?
Did people guide you towards certain books or did you come to
them yourself?

R.E.: Yes, yes, very good. Very exciting! (Laughter)

R.E.: I come from a poor family in Brazil, and that means that
you usually don’t have access to books at all. Nowadays, public
schools have very good libraries. Each classroom will have
its own library. But back then it wasn’t that common. But my
mother worked full-time, and because I’m very old it was different back then. (Laughter) So she worked eight hours. School in
Brazil is just half, so it’s four hours a day. So I’d spend half of
the day at her work place. Nowadays it doesn’t happen, but back
then it did. And there was a library at her work place.

R.E.: They never knew. (Laughter)

CanWWR (Clare): Did that get you in trouble at all? I think
if I were reading adult books when I was seven my parents
would’ve been a bit angry with me.

CanWWR (Devorah): What were some of the topics?
R.E.: Let’s say there was lots of passion. (Laughter) My counsins used to buy classics, international classics. Book stores
love them because they don’t have to pay copyright, so that’s
how I got to Jules Verne, which is “Julio” there. All of those
that everyone reads when they are young—[Mark Twain’s] Tom
Sawyer, etc.

CanWWR (Patricia): What did she do?

CanWWR (Clare): So did your reading go in that direction, or
did you stick with the more passionate books? (Laughter)

R.E.: She was a public servant. She used to do what computers do today. Numbers here, numbers there. (Laughter) It was
in a train company, so to see where each car of the train would
be at every single moment of every day. So, she was a human
computer.

R.E.: Yes.
CanWWR (Patricia): Family reading. (Laughter) Was it Tomaso
1

Sawyer? What would the name be?

CanWWR (Clare): Do you come back to any of those? Do you
reread some of them?

R.E.: Usually in Brazil you don’t translate. In the case of Jules
Verne, it was because it was so old that it still came through
Portugal. In Portugal they translate everything. They don’t
say Maus, they translate it. Elsewhere in the world it’s Maus,
because it came from here, but in Portugal they translate everything. So it’s Carls Marcus, not Karl Marx. (Laughter)

R.E.: Yes, like Guimarães Rosa is probably the best ever
Brazilian writer, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the poet. The
modernists Brazilians of the 1920s. And that’s when I started to
publish too. These teachers, both of them were involved in publishing. The university had this literary magazine—but I think
you’re going to get to that later.

CanWWR (Clare): So did your reading habits change once you
were able to actually buy books for yourself?

CanWWR (Clare): Yes, I think that gets into the next question,
so we can move on.
CanWWR (Devorah): Can I ask a side question? I’m just curious about your school, did you get chosen to go to it, or did your
parents place you in that school?

R.E.: From sixth grade on, I went to the public university, where
they had those schools for them to learn about us. So we were
the guinea pigs. So from the age of eleven, on, I was within
the university context. So then everything was different. I had
contact with real literature and culture, met up with artists and
writers. They were within the university and we had access to
them. It was the whole environment. Because we were in the
middle of the dictatorship so the university was one of the few
places where you weren’t living in a make-believe world. So
that was really good.

R.E.: In Brazil for you to get to university or schools that are
hard to get into—because it was public in the sense that it was
free and supported with government money, but it wasn’t in
the regular public school system. So there are tests. Because
the educational system is so unequal, you can’t really rely on
marks, because marks in this school and that school will mean
completely different things. So it was a test that a whole bunch
of people took.

CanWWR (Clare): So when you had access to a wider collection of books, did you find yourself drawn to any particular
genre, author or titles? Or did you just read everything?

CanWWR (Devorah): Right, right. My real question, though, is
if you’ve always been a writer, or if there was a moment when
you started to write? Some writers have a moment when they
decide they have to write, or there’s a person that approaches
them and tells them, “I think you can be a writer.” Some people
do it for survival, they just have to write every day. So how did
you come to it?

R.E.: Everything. I was very interested in everything non-fiction, the political side. That was something else that was funny
too, because those teachers saw a chance to make us think critically! (Laughter) And then when I was in high school I had two
more weird teachers. One tried to kill herself at the end of the
year. She was amazingly good. The second one was himself a
poet, a very well-known poet, and he was as well known for his
writing as he was for his love of spirits. (Laughter) It was chaos,
but creative chaos. I think because it was within the university
they didn’t really feel that they had to stick to a curriculum. So
this teacher, we studied poetry all year long. It was contemporary poetry, very good poetry. And then the next one that I had,
he was a literary critic. The first day of school he said, “Okay,
whoever doesn’t want to come to this class, I’m telling beforehand. I’m going to pass everyone.” (Laughter) “So if you don’t
want to come, don’t bother, because you’re going to pass and it
will be good marks.” So half of the class disappeared, but the
half that stayed was so good.
CanWWR (Clare): Yes, they’d be really committed to being
there.

R.E.: I always liked to write, but it was just fun when I was a
child. So I used to edit my own newspaper. (Laughter) Sometimes it had like three copies. (Laughter) But that was just playing. When I was in high school I used to write poetry, but still
just for myself. I would write in boring classes and then at the
end of the class they would go straight to the garbage. But then
there was a contest, and then this guy came to the class and told
everyone that I had won, but I had never entered the contest. My
friends told me that they got the poems out of the garbage, and
they entered them. (Laughter) And the thing is, contests there,
they are good in terms of money sometimes. So I was fifteen
and I got some money from a poetry contest. So I was filled
with this deluded notion that there was money in it. (Laughter)
And then when I realized, it was too late.

R.E.: And it was a literary critic style. So we spent four months
with one poet. Over the whole year, we got to three writers.

CanWWR (Devorah): And that was the moment when you
became more serious, would you say?

CanWWR (Devorah): How old were you?

R.E.: Yes.

R.E.: That would be grade twelve, here.

CanWWR (Lindsay): Maybe we could talk about your writing
2

process and how’s it evolved over time, since high school, and if
you could describe a typical writing day. Do you have a typical
writing day? A routine?

year-old days with your group of poets?
R.E.: That’s harder, I think. I would link up with associations
of writers, so I helped to start our state writer’s association in
Brazil. We just created an association here of immigrant writers,
so that kind of thing, that’s usually what I work with. Or when
you work with something that’s not specifically book form. So
I have a book that’s for little kids. I say it’s a graphic novel for
toddlers. (Laughter) So this is the kind of thing that you don’t
do by yourself, I work with an illustrator. I’m writing a play,
so I have a dramaturge. For many projects I’m working with
someone.

R.E.: Yes, well, the thing is, I started writing poetry then, and I
published a book when I was nineteen. Self-published. Because
it was a time when it was a poetry fever, so if you sat in a bar for
two hours at least four poets would go to your table trying to sell
their books. So we had a group, we used silk screen to do posters with poetry, and then we’d glue them on the streets, people
would do poetry on napkins bars, so it was everything poetry. I
was just writing poetry and studying for a long time. But it’s not
something that you can make any money with, of course. So for
poetry there isn’t a regular day, because you can’t have a regular
day with something that’s so on the side, so it’s whenever. But
then I started writing for kids, when I had my daughter—I
always wanted to write for kids, because that’s the only thing
that makes money in Brazil. But I would feel like a fake if I
did it just for that. (Laughter) I really wanted to but I couldn’t.
But then when I had my daughter, “Aha! Justification—yes!”
(Laughter) So then I started writing for kids, and I worked as a
journalist. So I was writing all day long as a journalist and, on
the side, writing books for kids. Sometimes I have a structure or
skeleton before, sometimes I don’t. So it isn’t really always the
same. For example, I’m horrible with book titles, book titles, so
the book titles that I have that I like—and there are some that
I really like—they came before the books. “That’s a good title,
I should write a book about it!” (Laughter) I use lots of things
from dreams, from my own story, I most likely use lots of things
that I read but I have a horrible memory, so I hope my stuff is
new. (Laughter) I think that’s it. Sometimes the characters will
drive it, sometimes it’s plot. It’s not always the same. As for
having a routine—not with writing literature, but for other writing projects I have one. Like I was involved, up until two weeks
ago, with writing a dictionary for children. It’s a monolingual
Portuguese dictionary, and that was almost four years, six thousand entries, with a partner over the internet.

CanWWR (Patricia): Well, this is a related question, and it takes
me back actually to Clare’s first question. And that’s about what
you read right now. Whether the reading helps your writing or
feeds your writing, what authors you particularly enjoy? Now
these might be Brazilian authors, but do you enjoy Canadian
writing too?
R.E.: I’m starting to get to know Canadian writers. I moved here
almost eight years ago but I had no English at all.
CanWWR (Patricia): Slow process, yes.
R.E.: And unfortunately the same way that you don’t know
a whole bunch about Brazilian authors here we don’t know a
whole lot about Canadian authors there. If you’re anywhere
in the world everyone knows about Americans but that’s it.
(Laughter) Other than that, you don’t know about Brazilians, I
don’t know about Canadians.
CanWWR (Patricia): So Margaret Atwood isn’t a big name in
Brazil?
R.E.: No.
CanWWR (Devorah): Well, did we recognize any of the poets
you named?

CanWWR (Lindsay): Wow. So do you prefer to write children’s
literature, or do you enjoy your journalistic work, or do they
feed into each other?

R.E.: No.

R.E.: They do, a lot. What I like about journalism is that you
have a chance of being paid to study. If you’re writing about
something you have to read about it. So if you ask about what I
read, it goes to whatever I’m working with at any time, because
I don’t really have a lot of time to say, “Okay, I’m going to read
what I like.” But I read a lot about whatever I’m doing. So I’ve
read lots about dictionary making. (Laughter) I do script-writing
too, and when I was doing a movie about Aboriginals in Brazil,
I had lots of reading about that. So it goes along with the work
usually.

CanWWR (Patricia): Of the Canadian writers that you’re acquainting yourself with, whom have you enjoyed? Who’s at the
top of your list for Canadian writers?
R.E.: I’m reading a woman now that I’m really enjoying. She
reminds me a lot of a writer who was my hero back then, Clarice Lispector.
CanWWR (Patricia): Oh yes, Lispector! I know Lispector.
R.E.: It’s Elizabeth Smart.

CanWWR (Lindsay): So do you find you’re a solitary writer?
Do you have a similar community like you had in your nineteen-

CanWWR (Patricia): Oh yes, By Grand Central Station I Sat
3

Down and Wept?

CanWWR (Patricia): So it’s very international isn’t it? That’s
fabulous. Are your meetings held electronically, or do you meet
in person?

R.E.: No, I’m reading, it’s called In the Meantime.
CanWWR (Patricia): She was a writer-in-residence here.

R.E.: No, we had a multilingual writers gathering in November
last year. The official name is Writers Beyond Borders. But the
demographics is immigrants/multilingual. We’re using this slash
because some people might not be multilingual. Suppose you
come from an English speaking country in Africa. But it’s a
culture that’s so different that it doesn’t matter. But most people
come from different linguistic backgrounds.

R.E.: I know, the people who lent me her book told me.
CanWWR (Patricia): I recommend that after that you return to
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, that was her
big break-through, scandalous novel—so scandalous that it was
banned in Canada.

CanWWR (Patricia): And you conduct your business in English?

R.E.: Oh, then it must be good! (Laughter)
CanWWR (Patricia): Her mother bought up all the copies that
she could and burned them. It was written in the late 40s but it
didn’t actually get reprinted until the mid-60s. She was fascinating as a writer-in-residence. Anyone else, besides Elizabeth
Smart?

R.E.: Yes. Because that’s the only language everyone speaks.
(Laughter)

R.E.: I’ve been reading lots of children’s literature. Kenneth
Oppel. Many of the locals here because I started reading some
people that I met. So Mary Woodbury, those were friends that I
had been reading.

R.E.: This is just the first version.

CanWWR (Patricia): I’m also fascinated with this dictionary
project.

CanWWR (Patricia): When will it come out?
R.E.: I’m a very lucky woman, so when it was almost over—it’s
a dictionary, so spelling is something important right? So we
were like, “Yea, it’s over!” Then we have a spelling reform.
(Laughter) So we just had a spelling reform that they’ve been
trying to do for the last twenty years or so and then they finally
do it now. So it’s already mostly adapted but some of the rules
that they changed—because it’s not only in Brazil—there are
things, especially hyphenated words, you just can’t trust your
own judgement because it’s open to interpretation. So we’re
now waiting for the list of words, of every single word, so we
can see how that will change. Book stores sell books but the big
business is the government programs.

CanWWR (Patricia): Kit Pearson, has she come into it?
R.E.: I’ve read some.
CanWWR (Patricia): Okay. So do you find that reading actually
feeds your writing or is your writing entirely separate from your
reading?
R.E.: No, I think it feeds it a lot. It’s actually dangerous. I can’t
read the same author for too long because otherwise I start to
write like that. So it feeds a lot, especially in terms of style.
CanWWR (Patricia): I’m really interested in the organization
you mentioned of immigrant writers. Has it just started?

CanWWR (Patricia): The libraries will buy them.
R.E.: But it’s not the school libraries that buys them, it’s the
government that buys them. So they buy like two million books
at once and then they send them. And it works much better
because they are such a big buyer they are able to really get
the prices down. So it’s good for the kids because they get the
books, and it’s good for the government because they pay less,
and it’s good for the publishers.

R.E.: Yes, it will be one-week old tomorrow. (Laughter)
CanWWR (Patricia): Oh! It started in Edmonton, did it? And
who’s part of the group?
R.E.: There are lots of people here, because we’re not getting
only professionals. It’s like if you go the Writer’s Guild you’ll
have the absolute beginner and the professional, so that’s what
we’re doing too. We have around one hundred people that are
in touch over the internet, and we have meetings with about
seventy people, but the core group is about fifteen people. Lots
of countries. We just had one from Madagascar. We didn’t have
anyone from there before. (Laughter)

CanWWR (Patricia): That’s excellent. Well, congratulations on
the project, and I hope it doesn’t take forever for the adjustment
for the reformed spelling. (Laughter)
CanWWR (Devorah): I have two questions. You’re writing in
English now, right?
R.E.: I’m trying to write in English. I had three or four books
4

published in Brazil since I moved here, and none here. So I’m
trying to write in English, but more and more I’m seeing that I
shouldn’t use all my time in English, because the market here is
very very small. My first poetry book was self-published. Then
I had a second poetry book that was a very small publishing
house.

that’s when they first started opening franchises of organized
crime in other cities. So when they got to my city it was like one
year you have one situation, the other year it was like, “What
happened to this place?”
CanWWR (Patricia): Well, this has been great. Thank you very
much. Thank you!

CanWWR (Patricia): Why did you leave Brazil?
R.E.: Because of violence, criminal violence. It was getting so
scary, absolutely scary. It was funny though, I went back two
times ever since I moved here. The first time was about the
same, but last year I went and I felt it was different. It was much
better compared to when we left. But it’s still very bad. The year
that we left, it was like a war zone. I had a gun on my head more
than once, or a knife. And it’s so every-day.
CanWWR (Devorah): What year was that?
R.E.: When I left, 2001. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes
tragic-comic. You can’t go to the slums and do whatever you
want. You need authorization to do anything. There was this
candidate for city council that ignored this rule and went to campaign there without asking for permission from the drug dealers.
It was close to the end of the year, so he went dressed as Santa
Claus, giving gifts to the kids, and the drug dealers tell the kids
to kill him! It’s the only country in the world where the kids
actually kill Santa Claus. (Laughter)
CanWWR (Patricia): I’m interested in the reason why it has
been such a violent society. Is it because of poverty, is it because
of a lack of enforcement of the laws, is it corruption? I know it’s
a combination of things, but what, in your view, is the leading
cause of the extreme violence in Brazilian society?
R.E.: Well, it is a combination. It’s hard to pin-point one single
cause. I think, for example, if you look at countries that are all
poor, it’s okay in a sense. Some of the countries are very tiny
and rich people, they kind of live outside of the reach of the
poor. But in Brazil you have a significant middle-class that’s big
enough to have all sorts of advertisements and so it’s so much
wanting and so little having. I think that’s part of it.
CanWWR (Patricia): No, I think that really captures it. So much
wanting and so little having.
R.E.: But there are other things too. One thing that’s very peculiar is that during the dictatorship the military had this brilliant
idea that they would get political prisoners and throw them to
the sharks. So they took them and put them along with the regular prisoners, the hard-core criminals. They thought they would
be massacred. But it happened the other way around. They
organized, initially to get better conditions, but they really liked
being organized. (Laughter) And ever since they’ve been better
and better. My city, it was scary because it was so fast. Because
5