Things I read or view or listen to that you might like too. Things will be added – up to about 20 or so – before this installment in the Reading Room and Gallery series is archived. For previous and future installments in this series, use the search feature to the right. Possible warning for adult language and themes.
FICTION
“A week after my friend went home – three weeks or so after my partner died suddenly of a heart attack – I forgot my house key in the lock. On the outside. I did it again, a few days later. Since then, I keep getting up in the middle of the night, making my way to the corridor that leads to my main door, peering into the dark to check if my key is in the basket, one which also holds loose change, rubber bands, and seed pods collected from walks.” – from “Forgetting” by Bijal Vachharajani in Adda
CREATING
Antiguan and Barbudan June Ambrose shouted out at about 4:51. Janet Jackson discussing her videos.
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Dancers acting out the movements that become the motions of the animated characters in the movie Encanto‘s presentation of “We don’t talk about Bruno?”
MISC.
A colonial era British tourism video showing some of what life was like (through that particular gaze, of course) in 1950s Antigua.
CREATIVES ON THE BUSINESS
“You’ve put so much effort in to this work, make sure you reap the benefits as well”
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“The rights! Are mine! OMG, that feels so good.” – Trinidad and Tobago writer Liane Spicer on the bumpy publishing journey of a bestselling books
CONVERSATIONS
“You want a middle of the road tightness, a tightness that is comfortable for you because you don’t want a headtie headache.” – Celene Senhouse discussing headwrapping in CREATIVE SPACE.
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“There’s a piece that I did that I call ‘8-8-21’ that I wrote after teargas Sunday last year. I call it ‘Freedom 8-8-21’…it starts by saying, I think, ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. When the youth are protest ready, they become revolutionary’. And it goes on from there and it just kind of encapsulates the entire Sunday, everything that happened that Sunday. Because I happened to be there. That was my personal experience. I was caught up in it. I was gassed as well… that piece means a lot to me not only because it was my experience but also it’s history, it’s chronicling what happened that day.” – Dotsie Isaac, in conversation with Joanne C. Hillhouse for her art and culture column CREATIVE SPACE
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“I think art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that’s uncomfortable.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Piton Noire discusses Commonwealth winning short story ‘The Disappearance of Mumma Dell’ by Jamaican writer Roland Watson-Grant.
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“It was really hard to always focus on what was to my immigrant mind like already kind of a luxurious activity…I felt frankly super exposed when we were all in the house and my children realized that my writing was just walking around the house a lot.” – Edwidge Dandicat on Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean
POETRY
“as if they were beacons/for the men who leave their self-control, unused, under their mattresses” – from ‘Ole Jezebel‘ by Karolyn Smith in Rebel Women Lit’s online magazine
ESSAYS
‘When she was allowed to write in her own voice, her brief pieces defied simple categorization. Were they short stories? Prose poems? Satires on the American upper-class? Her most lyrical compositions—like “Girl,” my favorite short piece of hers, a stream-of-consciousness dialogue of sorts between a mother and daughter—presaged, and occasionally would appear in, her first story collection. Her short work was sometimes mechanical, functional; at other times, it was like stepping into the luminous pool of a dream’s streetlamp, shadows rippling by at the light’s margins.’ – On the Darkness at the Heart of Jamaica Kincaid’s Children’s Mystery: Gabrielle Bellot considers Party by Gabrielle Bellot in LitHub.
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Great Art Explained – Jean-Michel Basquiat
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“The text opens with, ‘On the balcony of vigilance I sit’ which Lewis makes into ‘I sit on the balcony, alert.’ Two lines later, the poem reads ‘my lips are cracked like the trunk of a palm tree overlooking the river’ which Lewis turns into ‘like the roots of the palm tree.’ The latter image makes no sense, it fails to capture his contrast of the texture of cracked lips to the harsh trunk of a palm tree.” – from ‘Western Poets kidnap Your Poems and call them Translations’ by Mona Kareem in PoetryBirmingham.com
PRESENTATIONS
Mac Donald Dixon reading from his novel A Scream in the Shadows.
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“No matter what you are, what you do in life, if you have a dream, stick to your dream, pursue your dream…and just be you, be original, and someone will relate to it, and it will take you very far in your life.” – Andre Leon Talley
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Jail Me Quickly is a sequence of five poems written by Martin Carter and published in New World Fortnightly in 1964 and again in 1966.
The poems are:
Black Friday 1962
After One Year
What Can a Man Do More
Where are Free Men?
Childhood of A Voice
Dr Gemma Robinson offers insights into this period of Martin Carter’s writing with a general overview of the sequence and a detailed look at aspects of each poem. Readers are Konyo Addo, Jasper Adams, Stephanie Bowry, Stanley Greaves and Lloyd Marshall.
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“I thought I had died and gone to heaven because they were what I imagined publishers to be respectful thoughtful helpful with a terrific marketing team…” – 2019 Margaret Laurence Lecture with Olive Senior
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.
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