About Write Studio

About Write Studio will be in Galeria Monumental, Lisbon, from 16 Sep - 21 Oct 2025. Come and join our weekly Tuesday evening sessions so you can take part in our literary conversations and creations. We'll chat, we'll write (and read), we'll create! And we'll edit a fab literary magazine with participants' work, which we will launch at the end. Places are limited and enrolments are first in, first served, so make sure you don't miss out! ✨More info at the link https://aboutwritestudio.notion.site/welcome-to-literary-conversations-creations-2 ✨

This quote about "trama" is from an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri is an Indian-American writer who has lived in Italy since 2012 and began writing in Italian in 2018. Like the protagonists of the book she reviews in her essay (‘Beyond Babylon’ by Igiaba Scego, 2018), Lahiri feels she "has lived among and between languages" and "cannot claim to have an unadulterated or exclusive relationship with any one tongue." She can see the warp and weft of language systems and is fascinated by it. In the creative writing classes run by About Write Studio, Jhumpa Lahiri's eloquent short stories dealing with immigrant experience often come up for discussion. ✨Don't miss About Write Studio's upcoming Lisbon course! ✨

Longing, wonder, are powerful impetuses to creativity. Italo Calvino's story "Love Far from Home", written in 1946 and featuring a young narrator leading an itinerant life, is set in post-war Italy. The young narrator lies in bed in the dark listening as a tram passes by on the street and thinks of how far he is from home. He also entices a girl named Mariamirella to his room and they both stand at the window that "you have to go up two steps to get to. Outside, a reddish sea of tiles." The same story — your story — is taking place today in Lisbon, and not just because of the trams and the red tiles. Some of you will not just live it, you will also want to write it. ✨Read the full story here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VQdhrMdnl6l1og6Uz91it0b0pgdlJwps/view?usp=sharing and while you're there enrol in About Write Studio's upcoming creative writing course in Lisbon✨

Because we all have a model airplane story inside us... At About Write Studio we acknowledge that all narratives have a fundamental structure in that they must have a protagonist with a problem (a need, a conflict). Without a protagonist with a problem we might have a great text (we love those too), but it's not a narrative. Sometimes starting with classic narrative structure can be easiest, and that's where the 7 Steps Story exercise comes in. Little Lulu was a comic strip created in 1935 by American author Marjorie Henderson Buell (1904-1993). The character, Lulu Moppet, debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935. Canadian author Margaret Atwood loved the Lulu character as a child: "She was little, as was I, but this did not stop her for an instant. The eternal problem of the boys’ clubhouse—not being let into it, that is—was treated by her, by and large, with a phnuh. She had other, better things to do, and anyway, she—being the title character—was smarter, so there." Ah yes, the vexed issue of the boys' clubhouse... ✨Join us at our upcoming course in Galeria Monumental, Lisbon for more literary conversations and creations ✨

Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry or redacted poetry, is a type of found poetry where you take an existing text and obscure parts of it to create a poem. This can be done with markers, paint, pens... The blocking out design can also become an integral feature of the poem. At About Write Studio, we love experimenting with new ways to read and create texts. ✨Look out for our upcoming course at Galeria Monumental!✨
The poet featured in the video is Miranda, and About Write Studio fan. The book selected for erasure in the video was Robert Ludlum's 1974 suspense novel The Cry of the Halidon, which (shoot us) we felt no one needs on their shelves and was ripe for erasure.