And it all begins now…the hard work that is!

Sammy the British Council driver comes to pick Julie and I up and sweep us off the British Council building. He is immaculate , dressed in his Italian suit and warm smile. But underneath there is a steelyness which is awe inspiring. He has three daughters and each one has been planned to be born 5 years apart so he can spread out the costs of sending them all to University. He is a man of resolute focus and infinite plans.

The British Council is housed in the Cultura Inglesa – a huge white modern building of glass and white steel, built swiftly in 12 months and financed by business. Money talks in Sao Paulo, and the architecture as ever is stunning, aglow with water and light. Space is a dimension in Brazil which never gets ignored. No wonder this country boasts great footballers, architects, designers and performance artists. Space is the canvas they all possess and play with in a country which could enfold Europe with in it almost  three times over.

We meet the Director of Operations, Stephen Rimmer, with his immaculate zen garden on his desk; Liliane who I have met in London months before, who looks like the model she once was, and has quickness which is lightning-bright; Malu who is the warmest  and most delicate person on the planet with a dancer’s precision; and Pedro who met his Brazillian wife on the internet and runs the Nucleo project for finding and encouraging new playwrighting in Brazil. They are all special, committed and exuberantly playful people.

Then the whirl of meetings begin –  first with the Nucleo project funders, then with FLIP  - the international literature festival at Parathy – the ensuing endless sequence of meetings interrupted by lunch with Munira Mutran who is the academic leader of the Nucleo project. She is indisputably elegant and mannered,  an ex British Council scholar who teaches at the University of Sao Paulo – one of the most prestigious in Brazil. Her home is spacious, designed by her engineer husband and built with love over time: ivy lacing the wall; inner courtyards, a beautiful garden room. But these walls contain the unexpected too : 100 ornamental  cats of every shape and size adorning her rooms behind glass cases. She says she has 3 real siamese ones, but we never see them. we only spot a dog called Chase, who seems determined to play ball and catch-me-as-catch-can.  And in the middle of lunch, surreally I find myself talking about James Joyce and WB Yeats. When I leave, Munira presents me with the Journal of Brazillian-Irish studies which she edits.

During the many meetings which stud the day, I am constantly struck by the enthusiasm  to embrace creative writing:.there is a hunger and passion for it. There is also a universal disbelief that Arvon can courses which cover 24 different genres of creative writing. How can there be so many forms?  Literature is such a young and restricted culture here. Brazil may have its great dead authors – like Clarice Lispector and Jorge Amado -  but living authors tend to only sell 3000 books if they sell well.  This is partly explained by the extremely low literacy rate and the extreme poverty. But there are other explanations too. As Guilheme from the Cultural Institute of Sao Paulo explains, ‘the Spanish look down on us and say we have no literature. They say that we take too much for our oral culture and that our writers take too much influence form the spoken word  tradition which is simple and the popular.’

So it seems that the literature scene here  is the opposite of the UK – which is embracing the spoken word as progressive and positive precisely because it reaches out to the people. In Brazil, spoken word is seen as reductionist, common and simplistic:  the culture is trying to move away from the popular, to create a distinct literature of its own, and build a vibrant, distinctive tradition of the written word. It is only just beginning – like all stories do.

Because in this culture, of heat, light and space, the body and not the mind is the tool for cultural expression. Music rules, Then football,  dance, art, design and architecture too. Brazil is a culture where the body rules in all its sensuality and exuberance. It boasts a corporeal and unashamedly extrovert aesthetic – so different from the British introverted attention to the inner workings of the imagination and mind. Perhaps climate determines culture. So what will happen to cultural distinctiveness with accelerated climate change?

That evening I give the first of my lectures  on the Arvon Magic. It’s in a bookshop in the middle of a Shopping Centre. In the front row are a boy of 4, and two girls of 8 and 10, with translation headphones resolutely clamped to their ears. They listen to me earnestly as I speak. Watch the slides of our  Arvon writing houses as they flick up on the screens. At the end, and many questions later, the children take the postcards I give them of Lumb Bank in Yorkshire. Write the first word which you think of when you wake up tomorrow I say to them, and see what journey that word takes you on….

Later that evening Julie and I taste our first Brazillian cocktail. A Ciphrani. One sip and you feel as if you have blasted into space and will never come back again ever.  I topple over the edge of sleep.