Carib Lit Plus (Early to Mid December 2020)

A reminder that the process with these Carib Lit Plus Caribbean arts bulletins is to do a front and back half of the month, updating as time allows as new information comes in; so, come back, or, if looking for an earlier installment, use the search window. (in brackets, as much as I can remember, I’ll add a note re how I sourced the information)

Books on Film

Let’s talk about Antiguan and Barbudan filmmaker Shabier Kirchner who is about to make his feature film directorial debut with the adaptation of Jamaican writer Kei Miller’s acclaimed Augustown. As I mentioned in my CREATIVE SPACE series, the cinematographer who made his directorial debut with the self-produced short Dadli (which I talk about and link in another CREATIVE SPACE) has allied with Oscar winning director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Widows, Shame etc.) who will be executive producing the film. The two previously collaborated (as director of photographer on all five chapters) on Mc Queen’s Small Axe anthology series (which I still haven’t had the opportunity to see so I hope this vid doesn’t have too many spoilers but I won’t deny you an opportunity to hear from the creators including Wadadli’s own Shabier Kirchner who opens his intro with “Live all the way from Antigua!”). Love it!

Remember you can find interviews with Shabier and reviews of his work here on the blog.

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Late Caribbean-British writer Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song has been adapted for the visual medium. It premieres on PBS on January 31st 2021. Here’s a teaser trailer.

The Long Song – published in 2010 – followed on the success of her phenomenal Small Island – publishe din 2004 – which was made in to a BBC mini-series in 2018. Levy died in 2019. (Source – stumbled upon it on YouTube)

Book of the Year

ETA: See Kudos (below) for the short listed nominees. What’s your choice for book of the year? Rebel Women Lit, a book club out of Jamaica, initially, wants to know. This is your opportunity to be a taste maker (why let the awards and critics have all the fun?). As we said when we did the Antigua and Barbuda Readers Choice Award for the first time, it’s an opportunity to share the love – boost a book and author that you like. Rebel Women Lit’s Readers’ Choice Award, meanwhile, is Caribbean-wide. First there’s the nomination process, then the voting process, and then in later January will come the celebration of the winners. The categories are 2020’s Best Caribbean Novel (Adult, Teen & Tween), Poetry, and Non-Fiction book. They’re also celebrating favourite Caribbean Literary Critic of 2020 and Best New Content Creator (including Booktubers and Bookstagrammers). I’m excited about this; are you? Nominate by December 10th; vote between December 13th and 31st. Winners will be announced January 3rd 2020. Read the full Rebel Women Lit newsletter here. (Source – Rebel Women Lit newsletter)

Event

December 14th 2020 will be #CATAPULTDay, a day when all the efforts of the past months by artists across the Caribbean, those fortunate enough to be recipients of grants via this programme, will be in the spotlight. The organizers (American Friends of Jamaica, Kingston Creative, and Fresh Milk Barbados) have been promoting the various outputs of the grant recipients – especially the salon activities – for several weeks going back to September-ish. But on December 14th 2020, it climaxes with a special series of posts. As a grantee, I’m looking forward to it. Use the #CATAPULTday and #Catapultartsgrant (alternatively or additionally search #caribbeanculturematters #artsmatters #artsspacecaribbean #artecaribeňo #culturematters #creativecommunity) across social media, so you won’t miss a thing. CATAPULT is @catapultartscarib on Instagram and that’s probably a good point of nexus. #CATAPULTday starts at 8am EST (9am AST) and ends at 5pm EST (6pm AST). It cannot be overstated how important this initiative is. Under this initiative, artists across various disciplines and across the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish speaking Caribbean have had the opportunity to create (via the Stay at Home Residency), connect (via the Lockdown Virtual Salon and Digital Creative Training), and communicate their work (via the Caribbean Artist Showcase, Consultancy Vouchers, and Caribbean Creative Online grants), backed by that vital component – money. More of this, please.

I certainly appreciated it.

There is clearly a hunger for it, 2020 or not, as applications came from all over the Caribbean – only 1% of applicants and awardees from Antigua and Barbuda*, so we could do a lot better. But I’m thrilled to be joined by another Antiguan and Barbudan grant recipient, whose vid I just checked out. She is Aisha Joseph, a protegee of both Veron Henry and his father the late Eustace Manning Henry of Hell’s Gate, who is pursuing a bachelor of arts in steel pan fabrication and its art form in the US. “I find pan building to be very therapeutic,” she said in her facebook live. “I love that I’m creating something that so many people have come to love and gravitate towards.” It was such a relaxed and personal walk through the process of pan building, and interesting as that was, my favourite bit (this is a literary site after all) was the self-penned poem she shared. ‘Me ah de Pan’, it is called, and to excerpt the poem’s personification of the pan making process, “it reminds me of pregnancy, except instead of giving birth to a baby, you get me; a sweet melodic and harmonic symphony.” Nice. ETA: I am informed of a third Antiguan and Barbudan awardee (so I’m double checking the numbers received, posted below). She is Raena Bird whose bio asserts a passion for visual arts and her social media indicates that a November 2020 JINK, PAINT & NYAM event (which seems to be part of a series of private paid art events under the banner Wardartli) was made possible by the grant.

*Breakdown of applicants and awardees by Country (per Catapult) – Anguilla (3 applicants – 1%); Antigua and Barbuda (4 applicants – 1%; 2 awardees – 1%); Aruba (6 applicants – 1%; 3 awardees – 1%); Barbados (37 applicants – 9%; 19 awardees – 8%); Belize (4 applicants – 1%; 1 awardee – 0%); Bermuda (4 applicants – 1%; 2 awardees – 1%); Cayman Islands (1 applicant – 0.25%; 2 awardees – 1%); Curacao (2 applicants – 0.49%; 1 applicant – 0%); Dominica (6 applicants – 1%; 3 awardees – 1%); Dominican Republic (14 applicants – 3%; 9 awardees – 4%); Grenada (5 applicants – 1%; 3 awardees – 1%); Guadeloupe (8 applicants – 2%; 5 awardees – 2%); Guyana (11 applicants – 3%; 3 awardees – 1%); Haiti (21 applicants – 5%; 8 awardees – 3%); Jamaica (153 applicants – 38%; 97 awardees – 41%); Martinique (5 applicants – 1%; 2 applicants – 1%); Puerto Rico (19 applicants – 5%; 13 awardees – 6%); Saba (1 applicant – 0.25%; 2 awardees – 1%); Sint Maarten (4 applicants – 1%; 4 applicants – 2%); St. Kitts and Nevis (3 applicants – 1%; 2 awardees – 1%); St. Lucia (1 applicant – 0.25%; 1 awardee – 0.42%); St. Vincent and the Grenadines (2 applicants – 0.49%; 2 awardees – 1%); Suriname (4 applicants – 1%; 1 awardee – 0.42%); The Bahamas (18 applicants – 4%; 8 awardees – 3%); Trinidad and Tobago (66 applicants – 16%; 40 awardees – 17%); US Virgin Islands (3 applicants – 1%; 3 awardees – 1%).

(Source – My involvement as a grant award recipient; the curiousity that led me to ask certain questions and do additional research)

Kudos

Several Antiguans and Barbudans and Wadadli Pen fam made the short list of the Rebel Women Lit Book Club Caribbean (Readers Choice) book awards. Check them out here; then go vote. (Source – YouTube live announcement via Rebel Women)

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Big up to Bocas, the Trinidad and Tobago education administrators, and writer Lisa Allen-Agostini who deserve kudos for this initiative – the kind of initiative we need to see replicated across the Caribbean. It’s the Write Away! Young Adult Literature Project funded by the Scotiabank Foundation. “The Write Away! Young Adult Literature project is giving all schools access to five virtual creative writing workshops via the Ministry of Education’s School Learning Management System. Led by the award-winning author Lisa Allen-Agostini, the workshops break down the essentials of creative writing….it is designed to keep students and teachers motivated and engaged in online learning this term. It also gives students access to exciting, culturally-relevant books of all genres that can foster a lifelong love of reading. …In addition to the virtual package that all schools can access, nine secondary schools in the Write Away! project receive books for their school libraries to facilitate book clubs and reading groups, and guided writing support for their students from the Bocas Lit Fest and workshop facilitator Lisa Allen-Agostini. The best writing from students in the Write Away! project will be published next year in an e-book, launching the next generation of writers-to-watch from Trinidad and Tobago.” Details here. (Source – I may have seen it first on Lisa’s blog or a Bocas email)

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The Caribbean Writer Volume 34 prize winners are Carmelo Rivera of Vieques and St. Croix (the Daily News Prize for an essay or fiction from the BVI or USVI), for ‘About My Identity Journey’; BVI-lander resident in Grenada Eugenia O’Neal (the Canute A. Broadhurst Prize for short fiction), for ‘Harold Varlack’s Return’; Jamaican Natalie G.S. Corthésy (the Marvin E. Williams Literary Prize), for ‘The Helper Experiment’; Rajiv Ramkhalawan of Trinidad (the Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize for a Caribbean wrier whose work best expresses the spirit of the Caribbean), for ‘An Unkept Heart’; and Rohan Facey (the Vincent Cooper Literary Prize for exemplary writing in Caribbean nation language), for ‘Fi We Language’. (Source – email from The Caribbean Writer)

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Mary Quinn, the grand dame of poetry in Antigua and Barbuda, was honoured posthumously (she passed in 2019) on December 3rd 2020 by the governor general of Antigua and Barbuda for “faithful and meritorious service in education and the literary arts”. Her eldest (Paul Quinn) and youngest (Lydia Quinn) children accepted the award. (Source – Lydia Quinn’s facebook page)

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Lorna Goodison has completed her tenure as Poet Laureate of Jamaica, earning praise from the Culture director as she exits. “Throughout her tenure she has elevated brand Jamaica globally and right here at home. The focus work of Lorna in the field of education and culture at varying levels through the deep examination and careful production of Jamaican poetry helped propel Jamaica forward and we are extremely proud of you,” the Minister said. Goodison’s final production is New Voices: Selected by Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2017-2020. Read more at Jamaica Observer online. (Source – N/A)

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Caribbean writer Nalo Hopkinson has been named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master of and by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for her contributions to the genre. The award recognizes lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy. It will be presented at the 56th Annual Nebula Conference and Awards ceremony, to be streamed between June 4th and 6th 2021. Nalo continues to make inroads in the genre not known for its diversity since the publication of her first novel, the award winning Brown Girl in the Ring, in 1998. “Naming Nalo as Grand Master recognizes not only her phenomenal writing but also her work as an educator who has shaped so many of the rising stars of modern SFF,” said SFFWA president (author of her own engaging fantasy series) American writer Mary Robinette Kowal. Kowal said that Nalo’s nomination got “unanimous approval”.

“She will be only the eighth woman, the second person of colour, and the first Caribbean writer to be named a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master, and she is amazing.” – MRK

Some of you may remember that Nalo was a guest of the Caribbean International Literary Festival (later rebranded as the Antigua and Barbuda International Literary Festival before fizzling out altogether) in Antigua and Barbuda in 2006. That’s her third from right alongside other guest and local writers (from left Althea Prince, Elizabeth Nunez, Verna Wilkins, and on the other side of Nalo, Marie Elena John and me – Joanne C. Hillhouse). Nalo was born in Jamaica to Guyanese writer Slade Hopkinson, and grew up in Trinidad, Guyana, and Canada where she’s spent the bulk of her life; she currently lives in the US where she works as a professor when not writing. (Source – Twitter originally then I scouted for more information)

As with all content on Wadadli Pen, except otherwise noted, this is written by Joanne C. Hillhouse (author of The Boy from Willow Bend, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, Musical Youth, With Grace, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure/Perdida! Una Aventura en el Mar Caribe, and Oh Gad!). All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed it, check out my page on WordPress, and/or Facebook, and help spread the word about Wadadli Pen and my books. You can also subscribe to the site to keep up with future updates. Thanks.

Reading Room and Gallery XVIII

This page is for sharing links to things of interest around the internet. It’ll be sporadically updated; so, come back from time to time. For the previous reading rooms (I, II, III, Iv, v, vI , vII, vIII, Ix, x, xI, xII, xIII, xIv, xv, xvI, xvII), click the links or use the search feature to the right, to the right.

ON PUBLISHING

“#3 Not following guidelines.
Double check all guidelines before submitting to a magazine. Is there a word count requirement? Should your name be removed from the piece? Should your document be in Word, pdf, or rich text format? If it’s an email submission, do they want the document attached, or pasted into the body of the email? Do they accept simultaneous submissions? Don’t risk getting your piece being tossed out because you didn’t follow the rules.” – (here at Wadadli Pen I know this one well) – read the rest of the list of mistakes writers make when submitting.

CREATIVES ON CREATING

“My advice for young writers is to keep reading widely and for pleasure. And don’t get discouraged! So much of it is just mule-like persistence. That’s what I feel I learned this time around. There were many times when Swamplandia! failed and I had to pick it up and try and write it again. There were stories in my collection that were just duds, they’ve been voted off the island, and it was only because I had this material commitment to getting them out the door that I was willing to keep working at them. I really do think that’s the best advice—to keep at it.” – Karen Russell

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“An interesting insight into the process came when the pair considered how they had arrived at rather different descriptions for the location of the windmill-giants – Jull Costa has them ‘on that same plain’, whereas Bush situates them ‘in the nearby field’. It transpired that, rather than seeking a literal translation of the Spanish ‘en aquel campo’, each had pictured what they read the original to mean and then found a way to render the image in English.” – Ann Morgan on dueling translations of Don Quixote

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“Not only do I not see movies as I write, I can’t visualise, well, anything. At all. I don’t even dream in pictures. I have absolutely no concept of what it would be like to see things that no one else can see.” – Jo Eberhardt

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“It happens too often that beginning fiction writers fail to give their characters jobs or occupations. Weak stories by beginning writers often feature adults who are wealthy without any discernible means of income or who perform the indiscernibly ambiguous task of “work.” Characters are described as working each day, but the reader is never told what they do or how their daily jobs affect them or their interactions with others. Characters do not earn money; they simply have it. There are no bills, no expenses, and, of course, no financial struggles.” – Amina Gautier

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“So here you have a man at the beach, but he can’t enjoy it; he has to sit, because of his paranoia, with his back to the water, sitting in a chair; he wears a Hawaiian shirt but there’s a bullet proof vest under it; he likes a red wine spritzer but it tastes like Skittles which is very loaded…Trayvon Martin had a pack of Skittles.” – Rowan Ricardo Phillips, born in New York to Antiguan parents, reflecting on his poem News from the Muse of Not Guilty after a reading of the poem, from his collection Heaven, on CBC Radio.

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“You start from building this world with their rules, and then you just follow logic in order to come up with the rest of the details. So once you have this simple fact that you’re treating couples in a certain way and single people in another way—and there’s a bit of a concept that this is almost like a prison drama or something, at least in the first half of the film—then you pick up on those things and you borrow things from other kinds of situations … We tried to get into the heads of people that would be in charge and what they would come up with.” – Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on the making of his film The Lobster

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Writing other…Mary Robinette Kowal provides some insight to culturally sensitive approaches to doing so.

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“The second thing is reminding myself: You don’t have to write anything that you’re not deeply interested in. Every time I remember this, it’s a relief and a surprise.” – Rita Mae Reese on curing the affliction of not-writing.

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“I use traditional women’s techniques, such as sewing, beading and applique. I incorporate found objects in my work; they are clues towards understanding my story and that of women in general.” – Heather Doram

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“So much of what the filmmakers did in creating and then editing their work is what we writers strive for when polishing a manuscript: pinpoint the heart of the story and stay true to it, cut what can be lost, and always direct conflict and pacing.” – Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton w/ Elena Greene discuss The Lord of the Rings’ adaptation from book to film and what writers can learn from the choices the filmmakers made. It’s a five part series that begins, here.

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A long form interview on the arts is a rare thing, especially in a Caribbean print publication, so kudos to Jamaica’s Observer for this series of poetry month features, this one spotlighting American Tim Tomlinson, co-founder of the New York Writers’ Workshop, in conversation with Jamaican-American poet and artist Jacqueline Bishop. Tomlinson’s book Yolanda, an Oral History in Verse, is focused on the Phillipines but his connection to the Caribbean – his time spent visiting and diving in various islands and countries but most especially the Bahamas is explored as well. Essentially, this interview is about both his journeying as a person and how that has informed his writing, how he creates, generally, and specifically in the case of Yolanda. W/thanks to Jacqueline Bishop for sharing, here have a slow as you sipping your iced tea kind of read:

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“That was one of those magic moments. That came out pretty much whole cloth. Every now and then you ride the tiger. Most days the tiger rides me, but every now and then I ride the tiger. That’s my favorite chapter in the book. The opening chapter of The Given Day is another example. It’s my favorite chapter in The Given Day. It was written in two nights. It was rewritten extensively for prose, but it just came out.” – Dennis Lehane

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“When I closed my eyes, I could smell flue-cured tobacco. I could feel the hot sun beating down on me. I could hear the southern accent of a teacher whose voice reminded me of poetry.” – Shannon Hitchcock on the inspiration for her book Ruby Lee & Me

VISUAL ART

Online gallery of Netherlands artist Marijke Buurlage.

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“Nature is completely indifferent to the human endeavours whether they are good, evil, otherwise, whatever.” – Lori Landey and Beth Harris discussing Joseph Mallard William Turner’s Slave Ship

NON FICTION

“How many times over the years
I have explained
This.
Celie and her “prettier” sister Nettie
are practically identical.
They might be twins.
But Life has forced on Celie
all the hardships
Nettie mostly avoids…” – Is Celie actually Ugly? By Alice Walker

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“Why, I asked my brother, did you like the film so much? So many messages. Look at the title. Everyone has problems underneath. Just because you are smart doesn’t mean u can work everything out yourself.” – Sejal Shah writing on Ordinary People

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“You must read to develop a deeper understanding of literary elements, such as character arc, subtext, voice, and narrative distance.” – Chuck Sambuchino in his article The Pros and Cons of getting a Creative Writing MFA at Writer’s Digest

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Kei Miller’s essay in this BBC piece resonates with me – it’s truthful and thoughtful and bold as so much of his writing is even when speaking of his tentativeness writing the issue of race -how our whiteness and blackness mediate our interactions. That said, I feel that same prickle of disagreement I feel stir in me whenever a black person, black writer (especially if they’re from colonized or formerly colonized places like I am) say, I didn’t know I was black until… because it’s not my truth (my blackness didn’t limit my sense of possibility but the reality is that, like class and other things, our blackness or shades of blackness was and remains a way of separating ourselves from ourselves) even in the predominantly black places I have lived (including Kei’s Jamaica). The Caribbean is not insulated from these issues, though they are not as starkly or sharply or consistently experienced in whiter places like the US and UK. Beyond my own experiences (some touched on in my February 2016 Essence article Mirror Mirror and issues of colourism/shade-ism explored in my book Musical Youth), this fairly recent memory comes to mind: being in a roomful of children of different shades of black, in a public child-friendly space, right here on our predominantly black island, only to have another adult, call out to one of the children, “black boy, black boy” with a tone and cadence that suggested “bad boy, bad boy” and to have him look up, in full acceptance of this (internalizing it). My aside aside, give the audio clip a listen; it’s a really engaging and touching reflection from one of the Caribbean’s best.

INTERVIEWS

“A writer always benefits from being a kind of outsider. That is why I try not to belong to anything too much. [Alienation] makes you an insider-outsider . . . sharpens [your] sense of observation. You look at things with detached eyes. Even some words. Pondering these English words with your Creole eyes. . . . There always is a sort of dialogue going on [within] most artists anyway. They just soak things in that they ultimately try to reproduce some other way. I think having this dual lens has been very helpful.” – Edwidge Dandicat

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“Grounded in the realities of our history and geography, but unbounded in their imaginative possibilities” – Philip Sander describing the work of Nalo Hopkinson jumped out at me as the very thing I’ve been trying to define when I speak of a Caribbean aesthetic as a criterion for (but not a limitation of) Wadadli Pen submissions.

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“Shorter doesn’t mean faster or easier! Short story writing is a very different art from that of the novel, from pacing to character development. So for a novelist, it can actually take longer and be more of a stretch to try her hand at writing a short story. A rewarding challenge, certainly, but definitely a challenge.” – Lauren Willig

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“I remember myself as a young child, my mother had books inside here, and one of them dealt with the Haitian Revolution. I was ever so proud of Toussaint L’Ouverture. I was just proud. I mean, there he was, sitting in the same book with Napoleon and all of these other great men. So, for me, the Haitian Revolution was very significant. I don’t know how it is in popular memory, because right now everybody’s sorry for the Haitians—and “sorry for” in the sense of, “We’re better off” or “They can wear our old clothes.” So I don’t know about it in the popular memory. But certainly historically, Haiti served to frighten late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments. Frightening them, and as a matter of fact, had them even more repressive towards their black enslaved workers because their fear of Haiti was so strong. So, I don’t know that it has popular resonances, but certainly for nineteenth-century politics, it did.” – Erna Brodber interview at SX Salon, a Small Axe Literary Platform

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“What’s interesting to me is that of the women who have read this, every single one thinks that it is absolutely sexy and totally horny. Then I was like, ‘oh, so this is erotica’. And I was reminded again that erotica does not need to be explicit. And, of course, what is erotic and what we find sexy and will respond to viscerally in that way is entirely subjective.” – Leone Ross

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“The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.” – Marlon James’ Vogue interview

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“There’s a place for everything…” – says Barbados’ Shakirah Bourne in this NIFCA interview:

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“To move past the ugly parts of history, you have to acknowledge them, on all sides, and this is what I think historical fiction can do so well: show how we got from there to here, but told through characters who see themselves not as history but as completely modern.” – Andrea Mullaney, author of The Ghost Marriage, 2012 Commonwealth Short Story winner for Canada and Europe

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“The area where I spent my childhood years was surrounded my trees, and always seemed just on the edge of wilderness. That area has changed so much, but there is still that space in my imagination that’s the same…” – Danielle Boodoo Fortune, Woman of Colour interview

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“What I’m trying to bring out is the power of words themselves, the power and musicality of words.” – Clifton Joseph

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“Reading was such a sanctuary when I was a teenager, I wanted to see if I could tell a Jamaican story, a Caribbean story, that would interest even an urban teenager.” – Diana McCaulay re her new book Gone to Drift

FICTION

“In April of 1945, after facing only minimal resistance, Rhett was part of the Allied force that liberated a concentration camp named for the beech forests that surrounded it. The day was damp and overcast, with a heavy ground mist that sometimes hid the heaped bodies and sometimes revealed them. Living skeletons stood at the fences and outside the crematoriums, staring at the Americans. Some were horribly burned by white phosphorous.” – Cookie Jar by Stephen King

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“In death, we live far more richly than we do in life. Our lives are pale shadows in which we are preoccupied with the business of living. It is in death that we take on nuance and colour. We seep through the floorboards of houses, spread out and nestle there. We whistle through windows, ruffle curtains and inhabit the minds and memories of others. We take on a resonance that only memory provides. We become deities. We become ancestors.” – from Ayanna Gillian Lloyd’s Walking in Lapeyrouse

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“There was no rebuttal. She ended the call. From the decanter on side board, she poured herself a drink. The rum quelled the chill in her stomach — a chill reminiscent of rain-fly wings brushing against her skin. Where did they find him? They were hunting him for so long. Did he put up a fight? Errol had a point: There was really no need for her to kill him herself. But she wanted to.” – H. K. Williams’ Celeste in Moko

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“They’ve taken you, in the rolling melody of their steps and song, to the river Aripo inside the forest, and when they sit and beckon you to come join them, their feet, you notice, are not as they’re supposed to be. It’s a peculiar thing to miss, really, backwards feet. You sense that your own feet have been treading air when they come into contact once again with the marshy forest floor. You look back into the bush where you think you came from, and you want to go home.”- Wenmimareba Klobah Collins

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Edwidge Dandicat reads and discusses Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl and her own Wingless. And here’s Girl, so you can read along.

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“My wife is happiest on Sunday afternoon, when I leave the house. We have been married five years – too soon for us to take pleasure in each other’s absence.” – from Radio Story by Anushka Jasraj – Commonwealth Short Story winner for Asia

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“After years of working like a dog, clawing his way to fame and fortune—forfeiting family in the process—Desiree and the people of the island had broken down his mighty reserve and rewarded him with passion, friendship and the happiest times he’d ever experienced. He loved living in a place where everyone was aware of who he was, but not impressed or intimidated by what he had done. He admired the lack of social divides, that the Chief Minister played dominoes with ‘The People’, and that his best friend and “liming partner” was her cousin, and his Captain.” – Trudy Nixon’s Anguilla Boat Race, part of Akashic’s Mondays are Murder series

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Mary Akers said about ‘Viewing Medusa’ after it had been posted at The Good Men Project: “For all you writers out there, this story’s publication is a testament to persistence. It won the Mary Mackey Short Story Prize, it was the story I submitted for my successful Bread Loaf waiter application, but for ten years, I tried unsuccessfully to get it published. I submitted it to 101 journals, 100 of whom rejected it before Matthew Salesses believed in it and brought it out into the world.” Here’s an excerpt from the story:  “I found myself unable to look away as she slurped her soup, dipping the pieces of dasheen in the broth and sucking them dry after each dip. When the soursop was served, she peeled away the bumpy green skin and slurped the fruit into her mouth, rolling it around until the smooth brown seeds were free, spitting them onto her plate. Soursop juice ran down her wrists and dripped off her elbows to the floor. I thought of Miss Connie, later, on her hands and knees, wiping up the stickiness while shaking her head at the lack of manners displayed by scientists.” – the voice/point of view and descriptions work well together to create a clear picture of the part of Dominica in which the story (which feels less fiction and more here’s how it happened) is set – the beauty and ruggedness in the landscape and the character of the people as compared with the visiting (presumably white) scientists, to create as well a certain mood of foreboding, and to suck the reader in…even if it spits that reader out the other end with questions, or rather one lingering question: so wait, she nar go do nutten? – Read the whole of Viewing Medusa here.

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“The fuel tank was empty. He’d collapsed from sunstroke and dehydration. He’d been raving incoherently. When he finally recovered he’d lost all memory of where he’d left his men. A Lysander was sent out to look for them but nothing was ever found. The unforgiving maw of the Sahara had simply swallowed them up.” – Bully Beef and Biscuits by Guy Carter – this was the 2015 winner of the Mogford Prize for Food & Drink Writing

POETRY

“In Trinidad, everyone knows

the Pitch Lake but few have been

few have seen the dark and strange

surface, the vast dirt a mind of its own:

asphalt lake as constant as change.” – from La Brea. Read that and other poems by Andre Bagoo in Moko.

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“No one sees my tears
wafting through the branch clusters
weeping airy patterns into the jungle silence.” – from Mangrove Armour by April Roach in Moko

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“We read menacing messages in the scowls
of passers-by. Some circle around,
mark the territory with treads of footprints,
count down days to our departure.” – Camp by Althea Romeo-Mark in Moko

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“…crushed lemongrass
overcooked tourist flesh sizzling in the noonday sun
barnacled, rusted boats off Devonshire Dock
my neighbour’s garbage ripped open by feral cats
overpriced perfume – from Trimingham’s, I think
‘mountain fresh’ detergent scent of laundry drying on the line
frying fish and sun-ripened fish guts
Baygon and stale beer
overripe cherries
Limacol and sweat..” – from Kim Dismont Robinson’s Scents of Bermuda: Or, All De Smells That Accosted My Nose One Day When Ahs Ridin My Bike From My Momma’s House on Norf Shore To My House in Smif’s Parish

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‘In the roaring of the wolves the doctor said “Do you feel tenderness”
She was touching me’ – Niina Pollari, sharing and discussing her poem Do You Feel Tenderness

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“There’ve always been Sunday mornings like this,
when God became young again
and looking back you see
that childhood was a Sunday morning.” – Kendel Hippolyte (Sunday) – be sure to also check out the Dunstan St. Omer Red Madonna that accompanies the poem.

BLOG

“I think I had a very different vision of myself when I was young, and definitely thought I’d have a family and be a loving parent by now. Instead I’ve birthed books” – Zetta Elliott

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“Neglected authors fascinate me. While the particulars for their disregard may vary over time and from culture to culture, one thing remains constant: their perseverance despite official recognition. Such is the case of Eliot Bliss, a ‘white, Creole, and lesbian’ Jamaican novelist and poet whose collected poems have been resurrected by Michela A. Calderaro in Spring Evenings in Sterling Street.” Geoffrey Philp

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“Getting to the place in yourself that is beyond influence is the radical edge.” – Brooke Warner

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“…exploring a new space is a thing of wonder and an entirely individual experience…” – Sonia Farmer, blogging her Fresh Milk residency in Barbados

Reading Room XV

This page is for sharing links to things of interest around the internet. It’ll be sporadically updated; so, come back from time to time. For the previous reading rooms, use the search feature to the right, to the right.

FICTION

“So, Damian spent his time climbing trees in our backyard, acting like those TV monkeys. He mimicked them: jumping on me like those babies did their mommies. It’s cute when they do it. But when he did it . . . well, things broke. My arm, leg, and, once, he yanked so hard on me I herniated a spinal disc.” – Read Mindy Halleck’s full story.

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‘“Did you pack a snack and a sweater?”

Charlisa pointed to her backpack. “They’re in my satchel,” she said, waiting to see if Sister Rita would notice she’d learned the word.’ –
Read the full award winning story by Brenda Scott Royce here.

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I’m putting this in the fiction category though Moko’s Firing the Canon includes visual arts and poetry as well, because I mostly talk about the fiction here (you can and should read the whole issue though).

VISUAL

“A definite powerful conversation piece, the mural sends a strong message to our society and demonstrates what can be accomplished when youths are empowered and encouraged to affect change.” Read more about this mural, created by youths of Antigua and Barbuda.

WRITERS ON WRITING

“Although you the writer are indeed doing the writing, your narrator is the one telling the story. And that narrator is not you. Sure, your narrator could be a slightly more neurotic or jealous version of you, or someone very different from you, or somewhere in between, but he or she is not you. Yep, even when you’re using first person.” – Janelle Drumwright

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“While too much detail and description can bog down the pace of a story, the reader still needs adequate description to frame the story.” – Zetta Brown, introducing How to Create a Fictional Setting by Michelle Gwynn Jones.

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“Very often your dialogue can become stilted unless you are a good listener, and if you listen you’ll discover that people interrupt each other.” – Maeve Binchy – Secrets from the Writing Club

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“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything. Or a broken billboard. Or weeds growing in the cracks of a library’s steps. Of course, none of this means a lot without characters the reader cares about (and sometimes characters—‘bad guys’—the reader is rooting against).” – Stephen King, read more at Writer’s Digest.

BLOG

From Antigua to London to the US to the Bahamas…Linisa George’s Brown Girl in a Ring is indeed well-travelled. In this post, a Bahamian actress reflects on performing it in the country’s annual Shakespeare Festival. Check out what she had to say about the experience in this posting – You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do on her blog The Little Lady’s Diary.

AUTHORS ON PUBLISHING

“Most writers I know continue to work on their submissions for years, even after acceptance, feeling they can always improve. So don’t get egotistical about what you want to stubbornly believe is your final draft. Accept that most writing is never final, even amongst the best.” Read more of Ralph Monday’s article : The More Lines Cast Into the Water, the More Fish That Will Bite (and Other Tips on Submitting to Lit Mags)

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“Never give up” plus *bonus* Supernatural gifs. Read more on self-publishing after publishing by Jennifer Armentrout here.

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“Instead of sending the manuscript out to other potential markets, I waited…and waited…and waited for a response from Arabesque. I eventually got despondent and put the whole publishing idea on indefinite hold. (Pro tip: DO NOT DO THAT!)” – Liane Spicer at Novel Spaces

VIDEO

“Books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else’s mindset, so that for a while at least you look at the world through different eyes.” – Ann Morgan talking about her journey Reading the World. (click on the image for the vid)For For my thoughts on the book that her journey birthed, check Blogger on Books ll

POETRY

“And somewhere inside him, he wanted/ to be here for all of it: all the repeating shapes and pegs/ of that life-long game where the more things changed,/ was the more they stayed the same.” – Vladimir Lucein’s Overseer: Detention

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This one started showing up in my social media timeline after the November 2015 Paris attacks. I decided to look it up and share it. It’s by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire:
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

Read all of What they did Yesterday Afternoon

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by David Crawley

INTERVIEWS

w/David Baldacci:

‘A former lawyer, Baldacci still attacks his writing career as if preparing for a high-stakes defense. His typical day currently involves a few hours of work on his second Decker thriller, another few hours drafting Book 3 of Vega Jane, and another few hours on a screenplay. “During the course of the day I might work on three or four different projects, but only when I run out of gas on one do I move on to another,” Baldacci says. “I write until my tank is empty each day. I don’t count words or pages or whatever—that seems like an artificial goal for me.”’

w/Claudia Rankine:

‘“Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” What was in your mind when you wrote that line?

When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of blackness in their minds. Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked “like a demon”. And I don’t disbelieve it. Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.’

w/Brenda Scott Royce:

“When I struggle to think of ‘what’s next’ in a story, I draw a blank. But then I’ll be listening to NPR or shopping for groceries or having a random conversation with a stranger, and something sparks an idea. Meeting someone with an unusual occupation always makes me wonder, could one of my characters do that for a living?”

w/Marlon James:

“At some point you have to accept writing bad on the way to getting good. That you can write one hundred pages and only use twenty. I’m at the stage where that is no problem for me. I’m a very sloppy writer and I don’t rewrite, I don’t reread, until I’m done. I write everything straight to the end.”

Pamela Taivassalo Wikholm travelled from Sweden to Antigua in 2015 and interviewed a handful of local artistes – Joanne C. Hillhouse (writer), Tian Winter (singer), Mark Brown (painter); see interview links for all three below.

w/Tian Winter (Popreel TV):

“If it’s singing, just sing; someone will hear you, something will happen.”

w/Joanne C. Hillhouse (on Popreel radio):

“The writers from here that I knew and I have great respect for them were the calypso writers people like Shelly Tobitt and Marcus Christopher because when I was coming up calypso was the literature that I would hear that had some relevance to my community,, the other literature that we read was mostly from America or from Britain.”

w/Joanne C. Hillhouse:

“The characters come to me. They don’t always reveal their stories fully, so for me writing is a journey of discovery. Like I can’t always see where it’s going but I’m kind of wandering my way through it and trying to figure out what is it all about.” – Antiguan and Barbudan writer Joanne C. Hillhouse on Sweden’s Popreel TV.

w/Tian Winter:

“If you have a dream, don’t let anybody, no one, not your mother, not your brother, no one, kill that vibe, kill that dream out of you, don’t let them out that fire.” – Antiguan and Barbudan soca artist Tian Winter on Sweden’s Popreel radio.

w/Mark Brown (on Popreel radio):

“I need to paint things that people are not saying enough, and people find hard to say, and hrd to encounter, and hard to read, and hard to speak about.”

w/Mark Brown:

“At that time I didn’t know what it was called but I knew that I lived in a very imaginary world.” – Antiguan and Barbudan artist, Mark Brown’s interview on the Popreel TV programme on Swedish TV.

w/Eric Jerome Dickey :

“I walked from the undergraduate degree in Computer Systems Tech, but I carried the knowledge with me. Every class I had taken at the University of Memphis to complete those requirements; from English, to Physics, to Sociology, to Latin, to Electronics, to kicking it in karate class with Bill Wallace, it all went with me.”

w/Nalo Hopkinson:

“The Caribbean region. Writers from there are producing wonderful literature that takes language, story and form and bends them into creations you would never have believed possible.”

w/Carol Ottley-Mitchell:

“CaribbeanReads is a small publishing company dedicated to serving talented Caribbean authors. Our aim is to make publishing more accessible to potential Caribbean authors and to increase the number of high-quality books about and for the Caribbean.”

w/Ision Hutchinson, Tanya Shirley, and Christian Campbell:

“I know there are some people who are just born with exceptional talent, but for the rest of us, I recommend workshops with reputable poets, constant revision of the work, an openness to criticism and an insatiable desire to read poetry.” (Tanya Shirley in S/X Salon interview)

NON FICTION

“The self-governance of trees is mysterious and moving, though not always elegant.” – read all of Summer Edwards’ descriptive and reflective Fairmont Trees

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“When someone dies their silence becomes a sort of held note, a key on the piano pressed down for so long it becomes an ache in the ear, a new sonic register from which we start to measure our new, ruptured lives. A white noise. Maybe this is why there is so much music in dying: the funerals, the singing, the hymns, the eulogies. All those sounds crowding the air with what the dead can’t say.” – Read all of Ocean Vuong’s The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation

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“…getting a whooping from her was like getting a beating with fresh plucked feathers. I cried mostly because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings…” – Yvonne McBride, The Ballad of Broad Street

As with all content on wadadlipen.wordpress.com, except otherwise noted, this is written by Joanne C. Hillhouse (author of The Boy from Willow Bend, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, Musical Youth, With Grace, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure, The Jungle Outside, and Oh Gad!). All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed it, check out my page on Amazon, WordPress, and/or Facebook, and help spread the word about Wadadli Pen and my books. You can also subscribe to the site to keep up with future updates. Thanks.

ABILF – Flashback

So, word is, there’s no Antigua and Barbuda International Literary Festival this year (2011). That’s really too bad considering the event’s potential, but perhaps not too surprising given its financial struggles since its debut in 2006. This post flashes back to the promise of that first year.

From left Elizabeth Nunez, Verna Wilkins, Althea Prince, Nalo Hopkinson, and Marie Elena John.

Althea Prince, Elizabeth Nunez, Verna Wilkins, Nalo Hopkinson, Marie Elena John, and me (Joanne C. Hillhouse)

Antiguan writers (standing) S E James, Marie Elena John, Rosalyn Simon, and me (Joanne C. Hillhouse); (seated) Althea Prince, and Jamaica Kincaid with a young writer and fan.

Hopefully we haven’t seen the last of what was then the Caribbean International Literary Festival.