Una visión familiar de Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco (Testimonios)

El escritor Miguel Donoso Pareja confiesa que en su vida existieron dos modelos: el de su padre -hasta reconocer que no era capaz de emular al navegante y matemático-, y el de su tío Alfredo Pareja. Admira al escritor tanto como al ser humano: por su deseo permanente de aprender y la exigencia implacable consigo mismo, cuanto por su vitalidad. Recuerda las visitas familiares, cada semana, de su tío a la Península de Santa Elena, aprobaba en silencio las lecturas juveniles de Donoso, e impuso un quiebre de calidad con Las mil noches y una noche. Como estudiante en casa de su abuela materna en Guayaquil, el autor conoció a otro Alfredo Pareja: el de su agitada rutina diaria de escritor y hombre de negocios, visitaba su casa, fascinado por su inmensa biblioteca, a la que tenía libre acceso, poco después, su tío Alfredo iniciaría sus largos años de viajero, y se reencontrarían pocas veces, en Quito, en la década de 1980. El autor concluye la emotiva reseña con una breve síntesis valorativa de la producción de Pareja Diezcanseco.

Joaquín Gallegos Lara y «El síndrome de Falcón»: literatura, mestizaje e interculturalidad en el Ecuador (Dossier: Cuatro narradores del 30, relecturas en su centenario)

Los escritores ecuatorianos han creado un rico legado de imaginarios que apuntan a una identidad nacional que es, en el fondo, plurinacional e intercultural. Si bien los autores de la Generación del 30 plantearon con su narrativa un proyecto de nación que incluía a las diferentes culturas que la habitan –proyecto mestizo fallido, sin embargo, en tanto anulaba las diferencias y consagraba las desigualdades–, el protagonismo social de estas culturas en la década de los 90 complementa la propuesta surgida desde lo literario en los años 30. Adicionalmente, la auto-representación política actual de dichos grupos pone en tela de juicio criterios del ámbito cultural contemporáneo, uno de ellos es el del llamado «Síndrome de Falcón», que pretende ser una metáfora de la carga de representar a sectores sociales desfavorecidos, que ha pesado sobre los narradores ecuatorianos durante el siglo XX. Todo ello empuja el proceso de reconfiguración del panorama de la cultura ecuatoriana: la creciente participación de estas voces antes silenciadas, así como la emergencia de otras formas de contemplar al mundo natural, que suscitan nuevas lecturas de novelas clásicas como Don Goyo o La isla virgen de Demetrio Aguilera-Malta.

Entrevista a Francisco Proaño Arandi: se trataba de crear en el lector una sensación de angustia frente a la realidad (Homenaje)

En este diálogo entre el escritor Francisco Proaño Arandi (Premio latinoamericano José María Arguedas, La Habana, 2010) y el lúcido crítico y ensayista Alejandro Moreano, se pasa revista a los años de formación del narrador, la década de los 60, los tzántzicos, la creación de la revista La bufanda del sol, el Frente Cultural en Quito. Proaño, hurgando en la memoria, reconstruye los diversos momentos de lo que fue el debate político y literario de esos años, el peso de la Revolución cubana, las ideas y las propuestas del compromiso del filósofo Jean-Paul Sartre, las luchas anticolonialistas en África, Mayo del 68 y su repercusión en la juventud del mundo, los escritores del boom de la narrativa latinoamericana, su experiencia como diplomático de carrera durante procesos y gobiernos que se sucedieron en el Ecuador en los años 80 y 90. El escritor también da cuenta de lo que es su universo narrativo, las obsesiones, la presencia de una ciudad como Quito en sus diversas novelas y cuentarios, así como la reflexión que a través de sus personajes realiza de las complejas relaciones de la pareja. Diálogo que no solo significó el encuentro de escritores de una misma generación, sino de dos amigos que han sabido compartir la pasión por la escritura de manera vital.

Antiguas caras en el espejo o crónica de una época feliz (Homenaje)

En este texto, el autor presenta un recuento que es celebración de los años azarosos que le tocó compartir, en el ejercicio de la diplomacia, con el escritor y diplomático Francisco Proaño Arandi en los años 80 en varios países del continente. Se testimonia la experiencia intensa vivida en la Nicaragua sandinista, y en Cuba, enfrentando situaciones que, para Galarza, resultan inolvidables y vitales en medio de la heroicidad cotidiana de un pueblo del que prefiere siempre “hablar bien”. Reconstrucción de diálogos literarios en los que en su momento se definió el título de la novela de Proaño: Antiguas caras en el espejo. Esta crónica es un viaje a la memoria y un testimonio de una pasión compartida: la literatura y la práctica profesional de la diplomacia con sus paradojas, desolación y, a veces, reivindicaciones, crónica que nos participa de algunos hechos que hoy son parte de la historia, pero también de la amistad fraterna entre escritores que nunca han dejado de saber amigos.

Nelson Estupiñán Bass: escritor de dos orillas (Homenaje)

Este ensayo examina el significado y la función de la literatura escrita y leída desde la experiencia de la negritud en Ecuador, especialmente en lo que se refiere al ejemplo de Nelson Estupiñán Bass (1912-2002), a quien se considera uno de los principales escritores afroecuatorianos. Parte del problema que se analiza tiene que ver con cómo identificar el contexto social en el cual se lee la producción literaria de Estupiñán. De ahí, el análisis se mueve entre la llamada ciudad letrada y las áreas rurales del norte de Esmeraldas donde varias comunidades luchan por tomar control de sus propias representaciones. Por lo tanto, la pregunta que emerge tiene que ver con el rol conflictivo de un escritor afroesmeraldeño que pretende articular e interpretar las necesidades, los intereses y las historias que definen a los habitantes de la provincia de Esmeraldas mientras asume una posición jerárquica de un intelectual socialmente comprometido que, inconsciente y paradójicamente, deja sin voz a aquellas comunidades que, durante siglos, han hablado por medio de sus mayores y ancestros.

Unleashing creative writers : situated engagement with mobile narratives

The emergence of sophisticated multimedia phones in combination with improvements to the mobile Internet provides the possibility to read texts and stories on mobile handsets. However, the question is, how to adapt stories in order to take advantage of the user’s mobility and create an engaging and appealing experience. To address these new conditions, a Mobile Narrative was created and access to individual chapters of the story was restricted. Authors can specify constraints, such as a location or time, which need to be met by the reader if they want to read the story. This concept allows creative writers of the story to exploit the fact that the reader’s context is known, by intensifying the user experience and integrating this knowledge into the writing process. Interviews with authors and creative writers and two user studies explored the effects of this way of writing on both parties. The paper presents our preliminary research findings discussing this new experience that was found to be exciting and interesting by both sides.

The culture of contemporary writers' festivals

This thesis examines the culture of contemporary writers’ festivals in an international context. In the last five decades writers’ festivals have emerged in cities across the world, and during this time they have expanded their literary discussions and debates to include numerous other topics of broad interest to society. To examine the expanded popularity and function of writers’ festivals, this thesis establishes a new vantage point for theorising the content now typically generated by these events using concepts in urban festivals and public culture research. Importantly, the new vantage point addresses the limitations of current commentary on writers’ festivals which routinely claim they trivialize literature, and more generally, contribute to the decline of public culture. The thesis presents two case studies: one on the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia and the other on the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada. The first case study, which focuses on the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival, illustrates the many overlapping and often conflicting discourses as well as opinions productively discussed and debated at writers’ festivals. Key topic discussed and debated at the Festival include local topics about the host city—its history, literature and politics, as well as broader literary, political and celebrity culture topics. The diversity of topics discussed at the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival is typical of the majority of writers’ festivals similarly located outside the largest geographic centres of global literary production and circulation, and designated as ‘peripheral’ festivals in this research. The second case study on Toronto’s International Festival of Authors examines the ways in which the 2006 Festival almost exclusively focussed on literary and celebrity culture discourses, and promoted itself on these terms. The 2006 International Festival of Authors’ discussion and debate of a narrow range of topics is typical of the few writers’ festivals located in global centres of literary production and circulation, and unlike ‘peripheral’ festivals they are not experiencing the same growth in number or popularity. The aim of these ‘international’ Festivals is not to democratise their elite literary beginnings, but rather to promote ‘literature’ as a niche brand for quality writing that is valid on a global scale. This thesis will assert that while all writers’ festivals are influenced by the marketing desires of publishing companies, the aim of international writers’ festivals in marketing to a virtually and globally connected elite literary audience makes them more susceptible to experiencing declines in audience and author participation.

Fan writers [Författande fans]

[In Swedish: Varje dag ägnar sig mängder av ungdomar åt att skriva, läsa och kommentera fanfiction, berättelser baserade på karaktärer från redan kända verk. I fanfiction förflyttas förlagans miljöer och karaktärer in i andra sammanhang där nya historier skapas. Ungdomarna gör sina texter tillgängliga på olika nätsajter, där läsare över hela världen i interaktion med skribenterna kan kommentera och påverka. Detta möjliggör en kraftfull skrivprocess där aktörerna agerar som både författare, läsare och kritiker. Läs mer om boken på studentlitteratur.se]

Reflexive writers : re-thinking writing development and assessment in schools

Writing is a complex and highly individual activity, which is approached in different ways by different writers. Writers reflexively mediate subjective and objective conditions in specific and nuanced ways to produce a product in time and place. This paper uses a critical realist theory of reflexivity to argue that the teaching and assessment of writing must account for the different ways that students manage and make decisions in their writing. Data from linguistically and culturally diverse primary students in Australia are used to illustrate how four distinct reflexive modalities constitute the ways in which students approach writing. The paper offers a new approach to assessing writing for and of learning that considers writers as reflexive and agentic in different ways. It posits the importance of making visible and explicit the context and reflexive decision-making as writers shape a product for a purpose and audience.

Writers as performers : developing reflexive and creative writing identities

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be conceptualised as a performance whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations. In this paper I use theories of reflexivity and discourse to analyse interviews and writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students for evidence of particular kinds of writing identities. Findings indicate a clear influence of particular teaching strategies and contexts on the writing identities of students. I argue that making students aware of their writing choices, the influences on, and the potential impact of those choices on themselves, their text and their audience, is a new imperative in the teaching of writing.

Teachers-as-writers: Writing information texts in English and vernacular

Our contribution to this volume is not on the work of the teacher who inspires the child writer, but the teacher as the writer and illustrator of multilingual texts for classroom use that inspires the child reader. This chapter focuses on a first time teacher writer from Fiji, Bereta , who participated in a two day writing workshop known as the Information Text Awareness Project (hereafter ITAP). This chapter commences with an overview of the ITAP which was conducted in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012 with Bereta and 17 teachers from urban, semi-urban and rural contexts within the Nadi educational district. The politics of presenting Western ways of knowing to teachers from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts via a Western pedagogical approach is explored in the second section. We believe that this work involves a moral dimension that needs careful consideration. The third section outlines the eight stages of ITAP where teacher writers such as Bereta produced an English and a vernacular information text for use in their classrooms. The outline of the eight stages of ITAP is justified with links to the research literature. The final section recounts Bereta’s interview data where she talks about using the newly created English and vernacular information texts in the classroom and the community’s response to her inaugural publications. The findings may be of interest to those seeking to establish an adult writing cooperative to produce English and vernacular information texts for classroom use.

Mixed reality stories: How creative writers integrate virtual and physical realities

Mixed reality stories (MRS) unfold simultaneously in the physical and the virtual world. Advancements in digital technologies, which are now able to capture more contextual information about our physical environments, are enabling novel ways of blending the two worlds. To explore the process of creating stories from this perspective, we conducted a study with creative writers, in which we asked them to write a MRS script for outdoor running. While we saw instances of intentional connections between physical and virtual worlds in their work, we also observed the use of ambiguity or even deliberate contradiction with available contextual information. In this paper we discuss how these approaches can be beneficial for MRS and propose directions for future work.

Learning to write: Analysing writing samples as part of considering how children become writers

This chapter draws on a large data set of children's work samples collected as part of a five-year school reform project in a community of high poverty. One component of the data set from this project is a corpus of more than 2000 writing samples collected from students across eight grade levels (Prep to year 7) annually, across four years of the project (2009-2013). This paper utilises a selection of these texts to consider insights available to teachers and schools through a simple process of collecting and assessing writing samples produced by children over time. The focus is on what samples of writing might enable us to know and understand about learning and teaching this important dimension of literacy in current classrooms.

Contributions to the biology of the engraulid Anchoa naso (Gilbert and Pierson, 1898) from Ecuadorian waters

ENGLISH: One phase of the duties of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission is the gathering and interpretation of data concerning the life history of the commercially important bait species throughout the Eastern Pacific Ocean. During 1958 the Commission established a laboratory in Manta, Ecuador to study tuna. It was subsequently found that this fishery was dependent upon one species of anchovy, Anchoa naso, which was locally referred to as "colorado." During the calendar year 1959 approximately 380,000 scoops of bait were taken by the Manta tuna fleet (Schaefer, 1960), which at that time numbered about 23 vessels. Since then the fleet has increased by about 25 per cent and it is probable that the bait catch has increased also. Virtually nothing has been reported concerning the life history of this species. Hildebrand (1943) reviewed its taxonomy and reported standard lengths ranging from 32 to 135 mm. Peterson (1956) examined specimens from Central America and found them to range from 27 to 66 mm. He also indicated that the species spawned over a long period of time. The present report describes some aspects of the life history of Anchoa naso in Ecuadorian waters. The findings are based on 121 collections taken during the period March 1959 through June 1961. SPANISH: Una fase de las obligaciones de La Comisión Interamericana del Atún Tropical es la obtensión e interpretación de los datos concernientes a la historia natural de las especies de carnada comercialmente importantes en todo el Océano Pacifico Oriental. En el año de 1958 la Comisión estableció un laboratorio en Manta, Ecuador, para estudiar el atún. Se encontró subsecuentemente que esta pesquería dependía de una especie de anchoa, Anchoa naso, conocida localmente con el nombre de colorado. Durante el año calendario de 1959, la flota atunera de Manta, que en ese tiempo alcanzaba a unos 23 barcos, obtuvo aproximadamente 380,000 copas (scoops) de carnada (Schaefer, 1960). Desde entonces la flota ha aumentado en un 25 por ciento, y es probable que la captura de peces-cebo haya aumentado también. Nada se ha informado virtualmente sobre la historia natural de esta especie. Hildebrand (1943) revisó su taxonomia e informó sobre su longitud estándar, que varia entre los 32 y 135 mm. Peterson (1956) examinó especímenes de la América Central, y encontró que variaban entre los 27 y 66 mm. También indicó que la especie desova durante un largo periodo de tiempo. El presente informe describe algunos aspectos de la historia natural de la Anchoa naso en aguas ecuatorianas. Los hallazgos están basados en 121 recolecciones hechas durante el periodo de marzo de 1959 a junio de 1961. (PDF contains 30 pages.)