How I Write 2018

In January 1938, the Ministry of Education of Uruguay organized a “South American Vacation Course” at the University of Montevideo, which had a stellar moment with the conferences that brought together for the first time the three most prominent Hispanic writers of the moment: the Uruguayan Juana Ibarbourou, the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Chilean Gabriela Mistral.

In these memorable days, each of the poets explained the craft of writing, where the inspiration for their verses came from, the nature of their literary commitment and their personal way of facing blank paper.

80 years after that historic event, the Chileans Carla Guelfenbein, María José Viera Gallo, Natalia Berbelagua and Elvira Hernández will meet in “How I Write”, a meeting of writers that seeks to recreate and pay tribute to that moment, also paying tribute to our Nobel Prize in Literature Gabriela Mistral on her one-month anniversary and her 129th birthday.

These four outstanding writers will face the same question that the Uruguayan minister proposed in the late 1930s: how do they write, what are their influences, their recurring themes and what led them to this strange way of living, what inspires them.

The writers, each in a different decade of life (one in her thirties, another in her forties, another in her fifties and the last in her sixties), have established themselves as the most unique female voices of contemporary poetry in Chile and the continent.

The meeting, which has the support of Comunidad Mujer, will be moderated by the Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Letters UDP Cecilia García – Huidobro and the writer Ricardo Brodsky.