About Quiltras

Quiltras is a collection of incisive, bitter and amusing stories at the same time. A brief powerful book that brings together critical stories of subversive significance that are narrated in first person by women that interact –sometimes with mongrel dogs, also used as a metaphor– in peripheral areas of Santiago in Chile, places where opportunities seem twice difficult. How is love and friendship in this narrative space? Arelis´ answers reflects a world of inequality, abuse and machismo in which Quiltras can be read as a manifesto –that could be written from any dusty neighborhood of the world– of common women that have a good reason to rise their voices.

Quiltras also tackles issues like sexuality among women, care and love for animals, travels to Chilean villages, virtual love, adolescence and education in Chile from author´s critical and sharp point of view.

https://1804books.com/products/quiltras
 

Editorial Negra: Chilean pocket poetry echoing in New York City (article by Arelis Uribe)

Photo: Daniel Wang @dwangphoto

In early 2019, I was at a crossroads moment in my life: living in Chile and recently recieving a scholarship to move to NYC within six months, however, this amazing gift was preventing me of finding a regular job in my hometown. Excited about the future but desperately unemployed, an idea occurred to me: creating art. Particularly, making up zines.

​I'd heard about zines before—some friends I met in college printed their own drawings and poems, and photocopied them, merely for spreading creativity. After graduation, I started work as a journalist and author and later on I published my debut in fiction “Quiltras,” a collection of stories that has been highly praised by critics in Chile and abroad. Thus, once I was invited to host a writing course, which finished with a zines workshop where I learned how to make the classic one-page format.

​Thereby, jobless in 2019 I fancied: What if I make and sell zines?

​Since I couldn't think of anything new to write, I picked my favorite tweets. Are you on Twitter? It's microblogging on social media, and back in 2019 only 140 characters per tweet were permitted. I used every tweet as a verse, arranged them by topics—love, friendship, drugs, politics, feminism—and made up what I called "poetweets." Illustrations by Sofía Flores were added through friendly collaboration, and Vicenta Mendoza designed it as a one-page zine. I titled the piece "Cosas que pienso mientras fumo marihuana" (Things I Think When I Smoke Weed) for sounded funny to me and by then I used to be such a pothead. I'm rehabbed now.

​Long story short: I printed a thousand copies, and sold them all out.

 I paid my bills and went off to New York.

After landing in the big city, I restarted the project, this time founding a pocket poetry imprint: Editorial Negra. Allison Braden and Patricio Baeza translated my poems into English. I visited Endless Editions (a risograph studio in midtown, nearby The New York Times) and printed a thousand zines again, both in English and Spanish.

Afterward, I published another title "Everything Fits Harmoniously Into Everything Else," pocket poetry by Hernán Miranda. He's a Chilean poet born in 1941, who was my professor at Journalism School. I've always been fond of his oeuvre, so wanted to spread it among New Yorkers. Same story: I picked my favorite poems by him, Allison Braden translated them from Spanish, Jenny Frias aka Siempre Gótica drew the illustrations, and Maritza Piña designed it. A thousand copies were printed in fluor pink risograph at Endless Editions.

That was September 2019. One month later, Chile started burning all down.

​On October 18th, 2019, the Chilean people rose up against a system that has privatized social rights and divided the country into a rich privileged class and an impoverished working class. Whole families went onto the streets to protest. The government's response was police brutality. Cops shot directly into the population’s eyes. Now there are hundreds of half or completely blind citizens by the Chilean state. I'd recently moved to NYC, witnessing all this on social media or in the news. 

​Devastated by the idea of being away from home and safe from bullets, I used art as my weapon and contribution to the revolution: Editorial Negra made an open call for poetry regarding the Chilean uprising, and blissfully we’d got more than a hundred manuscripts.

​Authors Macarena Araya and Francisca Molina helped out in selecting the pieces for the zine. I wished to include as many poems as I could, so repeated the technique used for my own zine: I picked my favorite verses by different authors and shaped them into collective poems. This congregated style also sounded like a metaphor for revolution to me: something we hold up together. Later I learned this artistry is known as "centón" in the Hispanic literary tradition.

​Last, the same team was assembled: translator Allison Braden, illustrator and designer Maritza Piña. A thousand units of “Nuestro Fuego” / “Our Fire” were printed in Endless Editions, two hundred of them were gifted for free in Santiago de Chile.​

Now, I'm an art book-maker. I go to fair upon fair selling my zines. Still pay my bills.

​*This​ article was originally published en La Revista: https://www.larevista.nyc/editorialnegra

Congratulations, you have been awarded $5,000 from the City Artists Corps Grants!

Proposed creative public engagement outline*

My creative public engagement proposal is an art-making workshop, called "Creative Writing Picnic!". It will be a 120 minutes in-person meeting on DIY culture, poetry, and zines for up to 20 people at Prospect Park.

Based on my experience as Founder & Publisher at "Editorial Negra"—a Latin American poetry press based in New York—, I will offer a space for attendees to gather, talk, write, and listen.

The session will be divided into two sections: First, I will present Editorial Negra’s literary press project to the public. I’ll do this by giving its whole collection of six zines to attendees at no cost. Furtherly, I will offer a poetry concert to collectively read some of the zine's poems.

For the second stage, I will host a creative writing workshop. I am a published author of three books of narrative (fiction and nonfiction), and I’ve been holding literary workshops and book clubs for a wide range of audiences since 2014. So, I will invite assistants to draft short poetry passages, prose, or storytelling, based on their own experiences during the pandemic or their current concerns on politics, environment, arts, etc. Then, they will have time to voluntarily read and share their pieces within the group. Finally, I will show them how to succinct their creative writing work into a one-page zine—the simplest do-it-yourself book that has ever existed.


How do you plan to promote your creative public engagement?*

The first promotional space I count on is social media. Editorial Negra and I are on Instagram (@editorialnegra, and @uribearelis, respectively), and together both accounts sum +13,000 followers. This community is integrated mainly by literary art lovers and Spanglish speakers living in New York City. Thus, I will design digital ads to promote the Creative Writing Picnic, and I will use the power of my social media influence to spread the invitation to join the event. I also contemplate paying for online ads if needed.  Finally, I will trust the power of word-of-mouth.

You are very invited to:

 

Description course: Language as Action Narrating Change

"...When we discovered we ourselves were the language..." -- Valzyna Mort James Baldwin said that the job of writers is to work to change the language. And that it takes a long time to do that. Writer/activist/educator June Jordan said: "We worry words. That's what poets do." In her poem "Belarusian 1, Valzyna Mort wrote: "...when we discovered we ourselves were the language..." Poet Adrienne Rich wrote : "...the moment of change is the only poem." In this class we will study and engage language as a live organism, poetry as a site for discovery. We will read poems mostly by contemporary and newly published poets living in the U.S (not necessarily identifying themselves as "of" the U.S.) and writing in English, who are, in my estimation, shifting culture, "becoming the language." The works we will engage disrupt conventional labels and terminologies, dare to re define, open up new spaces of human and poetic ecologies. The poets whose work we will explore include Ross Gay (National Book Award nominee, permaculturist, teacher), Aracelis Girmay, Michaela Moscaliuc, Yesenia Montilla, Tina Chang, Li Young Lee, Tracy K. Smith, Natalie Diaz.... and work the students bring to the class to share. The class will also write and share their writing. In April, national poetry month, the class will participate in "30/30" -- writing a poem a day and sharing it with the group. Guest poets to the class, tentatively, include: Tina Chang, Mihaela Moscali, Alexis De Veaux, Yesenia Montilla.