WA - Book Launches and Interviews

Book Launches and Interviews

Over the years, my books have found readers in different places and at different moments.

Book launches, interviews, gatherings, and conversations about literature have been part of this journey, which was born from the desire to transform experiences, thoughts, and feelings into words.

Here, I bring together some of these moments: records of book launches, interviews, gatherings, and other memories from my life as a writer.

They are images and stories of a journey built book by book, word by word, encounter after encounter.

Voices on the Author's Work

Words from writers, artists, and public figures who have found meaning in my work.

“By writing, ‘Poetry is dying in me / the dream is dying in me,’ Wanda Alves is being an actress, ‘performing,’ pretending, lying, living a character, upon a solitary stage of pencil and paper. Do you know why? Because neither poetry nor the dream is dead within her, who, fortunately, continues creating with the material of emotion, feeling, solitude, mystery, recycling and drawing upon her sensitivity and the eternal story of the human being.

Like every artist worthy of the name, she makes use of the arts of illusion and magic in the form of her beautiful and sincere writing.

How can such a beautiful, sunlit, Brazilian face speak with such understanding of solitude, abandonment, absence, the inexplicable, passion, and pain?

No science can analyze the substance from which artists and poets are made, those strange and imprecise sages and thinkers who build, beautify, and transform the world. Wanda Alves is made of that substance, rare, beautiful, and precious.”

Naum Alves de Souza — (posthumously)
Dramatist, director, set designer, costume designer, and visual artist

“Wanda pays little attention to facts. Facts matter little to her.

She prefers to immerse herself in the feelings within the facts. This is what makes her poetry so pranic and mellifluous.

We see light, shadows, and beauty. We see her soul.

We perceive that her writing has no limits; it is something diaphanous.

Her verses identify with everything and everyone.

A way of seeing life flow, letting pain pass, letting love pass, then pain again and love again, until emotions become gentler, softer, and more bearable.”

Fátima Guedes
(Singer and Songwriter)

“If I were to characterize the School of painting to which, without seeking it out, Wanda Alves found herself affiliated, I would try to experience the images, the insubstantial mist, the fairies, the ghosts, of all the hours in which Wanda writes — does not write — paints!

The chiaroscuro shadows of the Impressionist movement.

It is a pure, abstract, indefinable poetry, in which the verse is merely sporadic and, at the same time, evocative and probing of an inner world that offers itself and denies itself at once to our contact and companionship.

These are aspirations like Monet’s paintings, enamored with the ‘passion of light,’ or Renoir’s canvases with their ‘twilight moonlight’ and their ‘nocturnes,’ which kindle the melancholy of the night’s invitations to ghostly visions.

For all these reasons, you, dear reader and friend, will come to love Wanda’s solitude and receive the regal gift of her poems-as-life. You will love this soul that cultivates the chiaroscuro of solitude, even when she seeks its companionship, and that, even without wishing or knowing it, impresses us so deeply and so profoundly.”

Clóvis Natalini de Oliveira
(Professor, Poet, and Philosopher) — (posthumously)

“The wise tell us that we should read at least one poem every day, preferably in the morning, upon waking.

In this way, our minds might be invaded by a few verses that would supposedly watch over our sleep as they rest in a beautiful book on our bedside tables.

Unfortunately, this does not happen for most of us. We claim a lack of time, desire, knowledge, tranquility, or an excess of obligations. There are the children, the husband, the extra work, the need to watch the news first thing in the morning, and so on — a whole series of excuses that line up in the record of our abandonment of poetry in our everyday lives.

Reading Wanda Alves’s poems, a little each morning over the past week, I was able to see that the wise are absolutely right.

Her verses made me experience the most varied and profound of feelings.

Each one made me open the ‘little compartment of the soul’ in the magical exercise of living and/or reliving the exuberance of emotions so deeply human, contained in passion, love, pain, generosity, faith, freedom, devotion, contradiction, affliction, restlessness, anguish, communion, the sacred, the Divine.

Wanda Alves’s poems invite us to this therapeutic and sublime encounter between poetry and our journey through life. An encounter that awakens the opulence of our affections, of love and life repressed within us, capable of easing the ‘aridity’ that constantly marks our modern days, so deprived of gentleness, sweetness, and lightness.”

Ana Beatriz B. Silva
(Psychiatrist and Writer)
(Author of the bestsellers: “Mentes & Manias,” “Mentes Inquietas,” “Mentes com medo,” and others)

“Wanda Alves is an excellent actress because she first became known through this art. But then we see her poetry: it is strong, impassioned, full of beautiful images.

It is wonderful when art pours out through one’s pores, as it does in Wanda’s case. Better still when it is in someone so beautiful, somewhat chameleon-like… sometimes she seems as though she has stepped straight out of the backlands, her long hair loose, so beautiful, so wild; another day, one could swear she were an Indian dancer; light, delicate gestures, a sideways glance.

There is only one thing about Wanda that does not belong: the sadness she does not deserve. And that will evaporate from her poetry, which is more a muffled cry than truly an intimate murmur.”

Gardênia Garcia
(Poet and Pianist)

“There is great harmony in Wanda’s verses, giving them a distinctly feminine quality; a fluidity in the portrayal of complex feelings and emotions that leads the reader into landscapes, at times painful, almost intoxicated by the beauty that the words help to create.

Yes, her verses have color, scent, and even form!”

Ricardo Junqueira Figueiredo

(Journalist) — (in memoriam)

“The mirror that does not always reflect what we are, but certainly summons our contradictions.”

Wanda Alves invites us to “reflection.” The opposites, so constant throughout her poetic journey, stir us and make us taste annihilation even as they hurl us toward the heavens.

Within her “fertile silence,” there is an inner quest that continually makes her long for both immersion and flight. In her desire to discover her “tone, her rhythm, her nuances, her stroke,” she tries to hold on to time through passion, while consciousness tells her that time is already lost.

Without a doubt, words and colors are lanterns along the path toward encountering herself. Wanda wishes to celebrate her abundant and varied harvest with us, knowing herself to be “serene, beautiful, rested earth,” awaiting only a new sowing.

Guiomar Paiva — (Poet)

A connoisseur of Passion in its countless facets, Wanda Alves traverses yet another of its dimensions, allowing us to glimpse a little more of her mystery.

Her poetry represents a rupture in the inexorable current of time and its rhythms; it is not a matter of the movements of expansion and contraction of the universe, nor of their biological expressions in the physical body, but of the pause marked by that fleeting instant that is neither past nor future, neither systole nor diastole. It is the interval between inhalation and exhalation through which the yogi leaps from finitude into eternity. The Passion that then emerges is the overwhelming experience of the Sacred, already affirmed by Saint Teresa of Ávila.

It is when the Passion she carries makes it possible to “acquire the power to hear the whisper of the angels and understand them.”

Further on, the experiences of transcending time, drawing opposites together, and encountering the Sacred merge within her spontaneous and still-passionate voice, converging toward “collapse and reconstruction,” a true synthesis of the Indian divinity Shiva, lord of rhythm and movement.

We are led by the author’s hands in the search for imperishable light. When we arrive at that place where “Eternity remains,” Wanda leaves us, and what remains is the impression of her smile, at once gentle and mischievous.

Now she can be “old and be a little girl.”

How, then, shall we go on?

Perhaps it is not difficult: our soul has been touched!

Paulo Machado
(Psychiatrist and Writer)

Finally, “Identity” comes into the world with the purpose of revealing not the identity of one woman, but of Woman, whose voice had fallen silent for a long period.

Wanda Alves processes, through poetic language, the alchemy of the search for her/our identity.

She unveils herself and gives herself to the public without reserve, seeking to discover herself and to discover us within this silent dialogue of poetry. After all, whose voice is it?

Retrieving pieces, splinters of a mirror shattered into a thousand faces, identity builds itself and becomes a work of art. It transforms the creature into the creator, and the work takes shape in creative subjectivity, speaking through feminine sensibility — that private, singular space of intimacy; of the courage to open old trunks and doors long kept closed; and to express emotions, fears, anguish, passions, memories, desires.

Unveiling this guarded world is an arduous task. But Wanda “is neither a saint nor does she even wish to be a heroine. She wants to be a sorceress…” and, through the magic of the word, to read her own fortune.

…And she read: — “The color that would define her path, that would bring serenity to her heart and postpone her death,” would be POETRY, the bridge that would connect her to the OTHER, to her Identity, to our Identity, singular and plural, condensed into poems.

And so Wanda became verse…

A multifaceted work, “Identity” is the pulse of life. It is the reclaiming of the self in the symbiotic struggle with Thanatos.

And to know oneself as multiple is to transform oneself with every tide, a fish with wings, “To Fly… to fly!”, an ache to live as “Female/With a woman’s way of being (…)”

Mariângela Borba Santos
(Professor at the University of Southwest Bahia)

There are writers who record the world in words, and there are those who recreate it. Wanda Alves belongs to the second category. Her writing is not merely expression; it is lived experience, it is skin, it is breath, it is wise transgression.

This is not a book to be read hurriedly; it demands presence, surrender, and the audacity to feel.

Her words are portals that open to those who dare to cross them, to those who have the courage to plunge into their own being. Here, there are no ready-made truths or obvious paths. There are vertigos, there are abysses, there are flights, there are hands reaching out to the reader, inviting them to explore their own limits.

Wanda writes as one who dances between worlds, moving between the concrete and the ethereal, between the now and the timeless.

Wanda transforms us without our realizing it.

On every page, something shifts within us. A truth reveals itself and awakens. It is an invitation, but it is also a challenge. A call to cross the boundaries of being, to allow oneself to die and be reborn in words.

Because, in the end, it is not merely a book that we hold in our hands.

It is a mirror.

A map. A passage.

Welcome to the depths of Wanda Alves!

Clara A. de Sousa
(Professor and Philosopher)

Book Launch at Livraria Cultura