 Digital Books Out of Collection Sá da Costa Youth 1001 Detectives SOS Informatic's Anthologies Comics A series of rituals that are known to those who have tried to walk on the pathway of creativity were followed in the first attempts at writing fiction: from the sheet to the drawer and then to the bin - thus is the sanctified destiny to the earliest ventures. When the texts finally cross the self-denial barrier - always the first obstacle that the works must seep through - they are faced with another challenge: enter a literary contest. It was 1979 when the Ministry of Culture´s General Office announced in the newspapers a competition for plays. I had in my hand two surviving texts of the self-denial era: Saltimbancos and Memórias Intra-Uterinas. Both were fortunate to escape the shredding claws of the drawer and after a while I received a letter informing that the latter had won second prize whereas the former was awarded an Honourable Mention A few weeks had passed when the censor residing in my alter ego decided to read the texts and the most unbelievable act of censorship was committed: He placed Memórias Inter-Uterinas in the expurgatory index and he went to the Ministry of Culture´s General Office with the intent of erasing the text. It was not an easy task to convince the employees of such famed Office to retrieve the text and to give up the prize. There was no memory of such sacrilege and this attitude questioned the competition´s rules seeing that this possibility had not been foreseen. After having spent gallons of saliva and all of his rhetoric capabilities he managed to recover the only copies of the play and its original burnt to a crisp. This was not an unconscious act seeing that it took time and reflection. Much was learned by this deed: The text lacked meditation and development. It had come to life with a series of congenital deformations and therefore abortion was the best option. Following the first prizes, the next mission was to have the texts read out to those for whom they were written for. The taste for a literature aimed at the younger ones has not vanished; theatre, pedagogy and research texts still are on the forefront of an editorial project and the 559.700 copies, of the released books as well as the prizes won during a decade are a partial witness to a life´s literary career. |