A Speculative Fiction
Ana Karina Luna
Lua Negra Cartonera, 2024
224 pages
Synopsis | Testimonials | Photos | Excerpt
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Choosing what to live, to be conceived, to be born.
Who can remember the most numinous and shocking experience of the human being?
The journey of choosing a new life and the subsequent 9-month stay around and inside the “Great Vase” told from the perspective of an adult — not a baby.
This adult is a thinker, but also a paranoid soul — the more unmoored this soul gets, the more it spills out confessions of all the contradictions in its hybrid and neuro-diverse mind.
An astonishing journey that mixes the poetic, the scientific, the mystical and the existential to attempt to transmit such a wondrous moment — the most supernatural of all experiences: to be generated.
In a “room”, in the cosmos, a paranoid soul with self-belief issues is presented with five astrological mandalas (or natal charts) and struggles to pick one for its next earthly life. Each mandala has a singular trauma (and that produces a gift), but the soul finds it hard to choose its own pain. Worst: a last-minute fear of going crazy goes off when it’s told the one rule: “neurosis is itself the mechanism of surviving”. As conception is coming at full speed, so its paranoia intensifies: the soul could choose to give up at any minute, but it wants to experiment life. Temporarily living in its Merkabah (an energetic vehicle), the soul disguises its fear thinking, writing, and chatting with itself, and five telepathic loving beings accompanying its “9-month choice-journey” before birth — they might be part of its psyche or not, and the soul thinks they switch gender in accordance with its own self.
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“This is a very significant piece of work. I consider it interesting writing, thinking, and ‘imaginality’ with great intuitive segues. It is more similar to my own work.”
- Richard Grossinger, American writer, curator of Sacred Planet Books, member of the Inner Traditions editorial board, founder and former publisher of North Atlantic Books, and a founding copublisher of ‘Io’, a seminal interdisciplinary literary journal that ran from 1964–1993.
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“What a wonderful prose writer!”
“One more time, I am so happy. How well you write. How happy I am. And I realize that it is the writing of someone who has challenged herself, trained herself, studied; someone who isn't just complying. Someone who has asked more of herself. Very interesting, very interesting. You are independent, it is something of your own form, itself. This is a sophisticated text, this is sophisticated language. It is not because of what is said, but how you say it, the words. At the beginning, the text already says: ‘I came, I’m here’, and this is good. Yours has this; this beginning, as we read it, says: ‘Wow, there is strength here’. It’s something in the language itself, chosen things. There is a certain sophistication.”
- Nilton Resende, writer, short story writer, poet, director, playwrighter, screenwriter, actor; director of the award-winning ‘A Barca’, based on the homonymous short story by the great Lygia Fagundes Telles (of whom Nilton had the honor to be a pupil). Master and PhD, Adjunct Professor of Literature at UNEAL (Alagoas, Brasil).
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“Honestly, the first thing that came to mind was: poetry in prose, richness of language…”
- Christine Hernandez, acccounting/HR at Vulcan
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“I finished reading ‘The Dive’. It was really good! Lots of reflections, some anxieties. Now in a period of gestation and observation. Nowadays there are many books that ‘shit’ rules about Being... What a pain! Your work is original, authentic, intelligent, interesting. Your book captivated me. It surprised me. I recommended it to about 40 people.”
- Marcello Melo, psychologist
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Lua Negra Cartonera is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by a women writer. It produces high-quality literary books in the artisanal’s format of the Cartoneras, an important Latin-American movement that gives publishing autonomy back to writers while fostering their writing — in this case, the author’s best writing comes out of an ancestral-avant-garde deep thinking style that produces original reflections while keeping that vital connection with the reader.
Lua Negra’s physical books are handmade. From literary creation — this author’s biggest passion — to illustration, to artisanal production, to publication — everything is forged by a woman-author-publisher-artisan in her home-studio-temple. Often, she’s helped by other wonderful women.
The Cartonera is a Latin American movement of writers and independent publishers who recycle cardboard boxes to produce books in a sustainable and artisanal model. It was started by garbage collectors in Argentina. This author chooses, collects, dismembers and cuts recycled cardboard boxes that become book covers, illustrated by hand. In many of the Lua Negra Cartonera's books the reader will also find various orginal artworks by the author herself, such as the delicate geometries that adorn some pages in the poetry books. The books are sewn together one by one: each one is an original, therefore. Cartoneras “disrupt” the order of publication and restore the autonomy of the writer.
Lua Negra means “black moon” in Portuguese and it is another word for Lilith. Like Lilith, Lua Negra Cartonera was born out of good options in the path to publication. But, contrary to the usual biblical demonized Lilith, this is a positivized Lilith — determined to be construtive and productive. The author’s past as an architect, graphic designer, typographer and visual artist — as well as a long-time craftswoman (origami, paper-making, engraving, sewing, drawing) — gave her the necessary tools to build herself both content and form. Sewing poetry really ended up being more special than she thought.
The National Library, in Brasil, classifies the CARTONERA BOOK as an Artist’s Book, for which they have a Fundraising Project. It is also called Book-Art or “Libro-Arte” in Spanish, and Book-Poetry.
More on the Cartonera Movement:
Taking Form, Making Worlds (book) →
Cartonera Publishing Project (site) →
Cartonera Publishing (site) →
Lua Negra Cartonera Catalog (in PT) →
“I am more lost than an atom generated in a laboratory; I don’t know what they ask of me... A minute goes, and then (yes!) I just notice a mandala floating on the table. What a heroic vision: I haven’t even started this feat yet and this all seems like a lifetime to me; to penetrate five lives like that, out of nowhere, like a street gypsy; out of nowhere, to peep into fables of enormous developments that will come to be, and yet, it is only the life of a single soul.”
- excerpt from “The Dive”
ANA KARINA VASCONCELLOS is a writer who produces poems, short stories, chronicles, essays and novels in English and Portuguese. She is also a Visual Artist, Oraculist, has a degree in Holistic Therapy, and a BA in Architecture & Urbanism. She lived for 17 years in Seattle, USA, where she was a Graphic Designer and founded Miss Cline Press, a letterpress shop where she printed poems on century-old presses similar to Gutenberg's. In Brazil, she founded Lua Negra Cartonera, an independent publisher of handmade books by women authors, where she works as a writer, designer, illustrator and artisan, and through which she has published 6 books, 4 of poems and 2 novellas: Getting out of the Ether Pool – Illustrated Poems (2017), Crazy Girl Wants to Dance – Poems & Geometries (2019) and Mário (& Rosina) – A Novella (2020), a collection called the Double-Book (2022), also offered as two individual books: A Woman Tears Down Patriarchy – Poems of Revenge (2022) & Adages of an Enslaved Woman – Poems of Pity (2022), and The Dive – A Drama of Fantasy / Novella (2023). She practices, studies and researches the therapeutic uses of Tarot and Astrology; studies crystals, floral essences, energies and polarities; She is passionate about integrative medicine, improvised dance, spontaneous movement and the practical applications of quantum physics, phenomenology, organic nutrition and alchemy. She is fascinated by Dionysus. She lives in Maceió in a temple close to heaven where she keeps her feet firmly planted in the gardens of the earth.