My Friend, Charmaine again...

You sad, stupid deranged cunt: there are over 200,000 sites listed as hosted on the IP address 209.85.133.191, and over 2 million on 74.125.19.191. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when you mix paranoia, incompetence and technology. Still waiting on that scathing critical review of my book. Now you made me break my vow about not calling people idiots and cunts for the rest of the year.

Cropper Foundation Workshop 2010

THE CROPPER FOUNDATION
&
The Departments of Creative & Festival Arts and Liberal Arts
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Residential Workshop for Caribbean Creative Writers

Are you the next Walcott? Naipaul? Lamming? C.L.R. James? Olive Senior? The 6h Caribbean Creative Writers’ Residential Workshop sponsored by THE CROPPER FOUNDATION, and organised in partnership with the Department of Creative and Festival Arts, and the Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, will take place from July 5th to July 23rd 2010 in Trinidad and Tobago. Fifteen writers who have not published a novel or collection of short stories, poems or plays will be chosen from across the Caribbean to join this year’s residential workshops.

The 2010 Workshop will focus on fiction, playwriting and poetry and will be facilitated by Professor Funso Aiyejina and Dr. Merle Hodge at a secluded writing-inducing setting location somewhere in Trinidad. Support for Caribbean Writing is an ongoing programme of The Cropper Foundation that seeks to contribute to the development of the Caribbean on many levels and in different areas of interest. The writers' workshop is part of the Foundation's effort to encourage new Caribbean literary voices by providing practical advice on the craft of writing. The workshops this year will culminate with the Launch of the first Anthology of Cropper Foundation participants’ writings – ‘Moving Right Along...’ as well as a celebration of the 10th Anniversary of THE CROPPER FOUNDATION.

Over 80 writers from Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Commonwealth of Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean Diaspora (Canada, USA, France, and UK) have competed to take part in these workshops held so far in Grand Riviere and Balandra on the eastern end of Trinidad's north coast, on Gasparee Island off Trinidad’s northwest peninsula, and in Tobago. From the participants of this workshop series, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Bahamas) and Lenworth Burke (Jamaica) went on to win the Commonwealth Short Story Competition and the Jamaica Observer's Annual Fiction Award respectively; Ruel Johnson (Guyana) has won the Guyana Literature Prize 2003, Krishna Ramsumair (T&T) has published a number of short stories in local and international journals; Robert Clarke (T&T) received a Trinidad Guardian Writer of the Month award, as well as an EMA 2003 Green Leaf Award for journalism; and Tiphanie Yanique is now an Editor with “Calabash” and “Story Quarterly.”

For this year's Workshop, a maximum of fifteen participants will be selected from entries only from the Caribbean. The moderators will be novelist Dr. Merle Hodge (Crick, Crack Monkey and For the Life of Laetitia) and poet and short story writer Professor Funso Aiyejina, winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa) for The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories. They are both lecturers at UWI, St Augustine, in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Participants will engage with published authors and professionals from the publishing industry, as well as speakers from a variety of other disciplines including history, culture and political science. Applicants, twenty years and above, who are Caribbean nationals residing in the Caribbean, are invited to submit application forms and samples of their writing (five pages only) no later than November 15th 2009 to the following address: Writers Workshop, Department of Creative & Festival Arts, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. Works of prose fiction, playwriting or poetry, either published or unpublished, will be considered for this workshop.

For application forms and further information, please call Dr. Dani Lyndersay (868) 663-0442; Ms. Rhoda Bharath (868) 779-7457 or Ms. Marissa Brooks 662-2002 ext. 3040 at The University of the West Indies, or email: MarissaUWI@gmail.com.

Sex and the Single Writer

So I’m home alone and about to go into the self-indulgent, self-pitying pre-cathartic isolation that I resort to from time to time and – having finished all my “House” and “Two and a Half Men” DVDs – I have decided to try a new series, “Californication”, because I read somewhere that it involves a writer.

It’s Season One and before the pilot episode is finished it feels like the Universe is playing some sick joke and someone thinly disguised my life and made a series out of it – I’m now officially hooked. The thing with being a writer is that you spend so much time summing people up, categorising them, essentially type-casting them for storage and future use that there is little time for any continuous self-assessment. You spend a career dedicated to creating characters and assessing people as character types, that you begin to think that you are as, one young woman (or several, in fact) put it to me, some sort of “god”, someone above definition or characterisation.

There are moments however, and they usually occur – as is perhaps poetically just – through some encounter with creative work undertaken by someone else, that you see yourself and how fucked up you are and these are infinitely humbling. I’ve come to realise that I like the three shows listed above because I see something of myself in Gregory House, Charlie Harper and Hank Moody, the latter in particular. Were I to undertake a comparative review of the three characters, I would title it something in the vein of “The Return of the Byronic Hero”, which means in a non-fancy way that all three are colossal fuck-ups, as I am wont to be from time to time.

Of course within that ‘recognition’ there is the tacit acceptance that I am increasingly subjecting myself to categorisation as a type, and it doesn’t matter that is it is this lofty, darkly, romantic type, it is still a damn type and as a creator you shudder at the thought of you being typecast in somebody else’s work. Check out the Wikipedia definition of Byronic Hero and you see stuff like “high level of intelligence and perception”, “criminal tendencies”, “sophisticated and educated”, “self-critical and introspective”, “struggling with integrity”, “power of seduction and sexual attraction”, “a distaste for social institutions and norms”, “cynicism”, “arrogance”, “self-destructive behaviour”...all of which describe me to some greater or lesser degree.

So I’m watching Season One of “Californication” and I realise that I am a type. The basic premise of the show is that this blocked up writer with the potential to be brilliant, having produced a brilliant book or two in the past, is going through a shitty phase in his life where he drinks a lot and has sex with far too many women and is alternatively broke or flush with cash, while trying to win back the love of his ex and be a good father at the same time – Moody even has a predilection for black shirts and t-shirts matched with blue jeans. The most heartbreakingly poignant and beautiful line in the show for me is when at the end of one episode, Hank says “My family goes on without me while I drown in a sea of pointless pussy”, because it resonates with me. Not that I’m any fucking Don Juan drowning in a sea of pussy, pointless or otherwise, but from the moment you find yourself sipping on a rum and coke watching two hot women making out on your couch, you’ve got to admit that you’re at least knee-deep in it.

Abstinence is of course out of the question. Writing and sex are intertwined; “creation” and “procreation” possess the same etymological root; the existential statement of the permanence, the reality of creative writing, “the pen is” (the pen exists, is real, is present, a force) is an anagram for “the penis”, and ink (or its latest avatar, pixels) is nothing but a sort of symbolic jism on the white womb of the blank page.

Not that I haven’t tried it, the abstinence thing, because I have and genuinely, but then it becomes a thing and I have to express it and this somehow becomes an appeal for punani, perhaps even on a subconscious level, and then I get some and it feels empty and soulless afterwards and the cycle begins again. And I know why. Sex, the instinct towards it, is a biological imperative, the animal within us but we are not animal, or at least not all animal, and there is a stronger imperative which exists, “a crazy little thing called love”, and while I appreciate and can identify with the enormous amount of amazing T&A that is presented in “Californication” the moment in the show I ‘inhabit’ most completely is Hank reminiscing about time spent with his family and “Rocket Man” comes on, and I realise that I do in fact miss my earth, my wife – despite the tremendous shit we’ve put each other through – and that as utterly bacchanalian as my sex life has been over the past two years I would trade it all for one night spent tracing with my finger the curve of her spine.

Well...

... that seems to have ended that argument. Thankfully.

Look, Charmaine Valere...

Dear Charmaine,

I could take on this debate on several levels but let me restrict it to the literary. I am disappointed that this was the only response you could come up with relation to my queries about your poll.

First of all, I believe you have liberally embellished the qualifications and numbers of the respondents to your poll, but that is irrelevant to the greater context. Secondly, citing anonymity due to the fear of my virtual wrath is a cop-out, and an extremely weak one at that; you could have easily published some of the comments from all of these highly informed and qualified people without placing their [real] names. I agree that these people have every right to give their opinion on my book[s], but the only opinion that is represented is yours, and it is one that increasingly appears to be highly under-informed.

There are certain basic elements of literary criticism, and they are not generally summed up by the words "good to head-scratching bad." That said, what I have commended you on is your zeal in attempting to establish a critical reputation, thus leaving space for the simian act of puzzlement, the afore-mentioned head scratching. The incapacity or incompetence of the critic however is not a reliable reflection on the literary quality of the text - something I have kept in mind in my decision not to respond to the two published reviews I have seen of Fictions thus far, one of which you wrote.

Contrary to what you have implied, I have never offered any "lengthy, arrogant, incoherent explanations from a writer about his or her hintellectual intent"; this is the sort of thing I've criticised in Wilson Harris, and refuse to indulge in myself, outside of a discussion of technique in a writing class, or when I receive a proper critical challenge. I believe that the text should be the only basis for a critical appreciation of a piece of work, hence my not mentioning a word as to the intellectual intent of my book in my introduction to Fictions.

Here is my challenge to you. Having reviewed the book for CRB, it should be no trouble for you to post a no-holds barred critique of Fictions on your blog, give me that good dose of reality that I'm just begging for. You can even buttress it with the anonymous comments by your legions of qualified and discerning readers. They don't even have to marry me and make a child with me for me to ridicule them online.

This is the thing - I don't treat idiocy and incompetence lightly, and I am going to take pleasure in ripping your review to shreds, particularly regarding your tendency to run with the most obvious clues (inclusive of red herrings) while being blind to the richer meaning of the text.

I am going to save you some embarrassment by pointing out some of the basic errors made in your CRB review, so you can avoid repeating them.

* Only one of the two "journal stories" you referred to in your review is an actual journal story, and it says so in the title, "CCLE: A Personal Journal". The other one, "The Aviary" is a traditional first person narrative, doesn't even pretend to be anything else.

* Heat metaphor in "The Aviary", not the major theme. Only used as an opening and closing technique. Clue to a proper analysis of the story might actually lie somewhere, I don't know, in the title.

* Slave plantation reference in "Cumae", not so much a red herring as it is a red shark, as is the association with Guyana's colonial, slave-era past. The primary allusion is shamelessly and deliberately overdone but you missed it.

* You make the following statement in your review: "And the depiction of Walter Rodney as a talking head who only [my emphasis] gains 'bits and pieces of brain' as Smith's death vision is potentially a great talking point for the collection." Not only is this a trite assessment but misleading when you consider the context of the line, or indeed the line itself, from which the quoted part is taken.

"The bits and pieces of brain, as detail, came a little later."

There are of course several other blunders which together form part of a fairly brief, if meandering, review, but your problem is that you possess little capacity in your assessment of literature overall. Caribbean literature is often an easy critical avenue because much of it is retarded by pseudo-modernist, post-colonial prescriptions, perpetuated by mediocrities much like yourself with "a healthy respect for the Caribbean literary tradition", which by the way really doesn't exist, but you wouldn't know that.

Post-modern concerns and expression within writing coming out of the Caribbean cause you to scratch your head, but you can offer no cogent analysis for what is bad about what you say is bad. While I am adamant about the Caribbean/Guyana being the central subject of what I write, my literary 'tradition' is Borges, Nabokov, Marquez, Wallace, Walcott, Naipaul, Wallace and any other writer who has any sort of demonstrated ability in their craft. Artistic excellence is the only real tradition any writer should be concerned with, whatever society he chooses to focus on.

Taking the purported high ground and saying that the reason why my book has not been reviewed in the local press is because my 'friends in the media' are doing me a favour is disingenuous to put it mildly. There have been no competent book reviews in the local press period because there are no competent critics. If there is any consideration for me in the non-publication of a critical review of my work, it is due to fear of the very thing I am going to do to you pending your taking up my challenge to publish a more 'honest' review than the one in CRB: exposure as an incompetent sham. You can check my track record of eight years ago on the Coolie Tom Puss issue to see why.

Regarding typos in my work: I am currently reading a second edition of An Area of Darkness, produced by an international publisher, and marking the typos.

Fictions, Volume One, in winning the GT&T publication award, received the endorsement of not one but several people who know more than you about good writing...and lots more. Indeed, I declined a heartfelt offer from Ian McDonald to pen an endorsement for the blurb due to my lateness in getting it to print. I also went against the advice of a good friend whose critical opinion I actually respect to submit Fictions, as published, for the Commonwealth Prize for Literature - I decided against it because I couldn't complete the larger collection in time. That said, I did go as far receiving permission from the Regional Prize Committee to submit it, although as a rule they do not accept self-published work from the Caribbean.

You are completely out of your depth on this, and the more you insist on challenging my literary credentials, the more you are going to fail, as I have warned you. I am not some little blogger that you are engaged in some childish back and forth with, when you should be taking the time to educate yourself in the field you seem to have chosen. Privately claiming that I was Stolid Charisma was clearly not enough for you, you had to go embarrass yourself on a completely different level.

Regards,

Ruel

Janus Creative Writing Clinic

I will be hosting the Janus Creative Clinic beginning at the end of this month. The Clinic is aimed at providing participants with a strong foundation in the creative writing disciplines of Short Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Feature Journalism. Participants will be divided into two groups (afternoon and evening during the week) for the literary classes - short fiction, poetry and drama - while the feature journalism classes will be held on Saturdays.

Sessions for the literary disciplines are two hours each, two sessions per week, for a total of 16 hours; sessions for the feature journalism course will be three hours each, weekly, for a total of 12 hours. Basic info can be found below, and I can be contacted at:

592-696-1840
ruel.johnson@gmail.com


General Requirements: Name; Address; Telephone; E-mail; Sample of Writing

Duration: August 31 - September 26

Fee: $12,000 each for Drama, Poetry and Short Fiction
$10,000 for Feature Writing

Registration Deadline: August 21

Payment Deadline: August 28


Weekly Schedule
Monday
1-3 pm: Fiction Group A
5-7 pm: Fiction Group B

Tuesday
1-3 pm: Poetry Group A
5-7 pm: Poetry Group B

Wednesday
1-3 pm Fiction Group A
5-7 pm Fiction Group B

Thursday
1-3 pm Poetry Group A
5-7 pm Poetry Group B

Friday
1-3 pm Drama Group A
5-7 pm Drama Group B

Saturday
10am -12 pm Drama Group A
1 - 4 pm Feature Writing
5 - 7 pm Drama Group B

After One Year

After today, how I shall I speak to you? It's been going on a year now since I launched Fictions, Volume One and unfortunately I haven't finished Volume Two as yet.

My primary ambitions as a writer have been, perhaps in this order, to write 'about' Guyana, to do it the best, and to do it as early as I can within this finite and unknown span of years I've been alloted. I says "ambitions as a writer" because I have myself on this sort of loosely conceived schedule which has me venturing into the world of moving images in the not so distant future - movies, television, videogames.

I have come to realise that my internal 'Clock of Ambition' is out of sync with whatever Mean Time that is seemingly dictating the 'CoA's of most of my peers and contemporaries. Many people have their sights set on a car and a house at thirty; my goal is an international award for my writing, and the beginning of my career in film production, house and car being of secondary, maybe even tertiary, importance. Every now and then, I synchronise my CoA, and when I do I am a rabid conceptualiser and planner, granted with a C in the implementation department.

This is currently the phase in which I find myself, and I've had this sort of anti-climactic epiphany about the paucity of editorial services in Guyana and the capacity for growth in this area. This is where the entrepreneurial side of me kicks in and what I've been finding recently is that there has been a middle path between the two drives - the creative and the 'accumulative' - and that they don't have to be mutually exclusive. The problem is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus, editing papers some of which give you a headache after the first paragraph and then writing a paragraph or two for a short story.

In my next post, I'm going to write a little about how Guyana-blog culture has changed in the past year, particularly with the demise of the formidable Livinguyana.com, and the rise and reactivation of some other blogs.

Borges on the Development of Writing

I found the following article by Borges here:

The Writer's Apprenticeship

The poet's trade, the writer's trade, is a strange one. Chesterton said: “Only one thing is needful - everything.” To a writer this everything is more than an encompassing word; it is literal. It stands for the chief, for the essential, human experiences. For example, a writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

I published my first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires, way back in 1923. This book was not in praise of Buenos Aires; rather, I tried to express the way I felt about my city. I know that I then stood in need of many things, for though at home I lived in a literary atmosphere - my father was a man of letters - still, that was not enough. I needed something more, which I eventually found in friendships and in literary conversation.

What a great university should give a young writer is precisely that: conversation, discussion, the art of agreeing, and, what is perhaps most important, the art of disagreeing. Out of all this, the moment may come when the young writer feels he can make his emotions into poetry. He should begin, of course, by imitating the writers he likes. This is the way the writer becomes himself through losing himself - that strange way of double living, of living in reality as much as one can and at the same time of living in that other reality, the one he has to create, the reality of his dreams.

This is the essential aim of the writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. I am speaking in behalf of the many young men and women at Columbia who are striving to be writers, who have not yet discovered the sound of their own voices. I have recently spent two weeks here, lecturing before eager student writers. I can see what these workshops mean to them; I can see how important they are for the advancement of literature. In my own land, no such opportunities are given young people.

Let us think of the still nameless poets, still nameless writers, who should be brought together and kept together. I am sure it is our duty to help these future benefactors to attain that final discovery of themselves which makes for great literature. Literature is not a mere juggling of words; what matters is what is left unsaid, or what may be read between the lines. Were it not for this deep inner feeling, literature would be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be much more than that.

We all have the pleasures of the reader, but the writer has also the pleasure and the task of writing. This is not only a strange but a rewarding experience. We owe all young writers the opportunity of getting together, of agreeing or disagreeing, and finally of achieving the craft of writing.

(First appeared, under the title “Who Needs Poets?”, in The New York Times, 8 May 1971, and reprinted, in 1973, as an appendix to Borges on Writing.)

On The Process of It

It is 4.30 in the morning and my self-appointed deadline (the real one having expired two weeks ago) for a project looms some two and a half hours away. At this exact moment, I am listening to “Einer Wird Kommen” from the operetta, Der Zarewitsch – considering my circumstances, growing up in the poor neighbourhood of Tucville Terrace, and my present ‘snug’ apartment on Durban Street, I can understand somewhat why the girl that was on my couch three days ago would laugh when I played some of my beloved opera for her.

I added a total of about two hundred words to two stories intended for Fictions, Volume 2 over the past half hour, which may be considered progress in a time when I have not had the breathing space to put down a sentence. This ephemeral, nameless time of night, sometime between when the karaoke club across the street closes and when the sun announces that the serious business of the day is about to begin, that is the time that I write the most or the best, when I birth whatever it is that has been gestating in my mind for so long.

Sometime within the past half hour, I wrote, among others, the following words:

“Fatherhood is this strange gift, something that is happiness and more with an inextricable grief at the very core of it, the spectre of the sadness of Laocoon…”

I like them – I fought hard for them and while I may delete them altogether some time in the future, I believe that I have the right to enjoy them now. The files for the project I am working on are all open in front of me and it is the simplest of things to analyse the information and edit and rewrite, yet this simplicity does not find its way to my fingertips pounding away upon the keyboard. What comes out instead, are these words I am writing now and those that I added to my stories before I started this.

The process behind the production of art is often an inconvenient one – this ideal coalesces slowly in that unnamable place between your heart and your brain, or which perhaps coexists simultaneous in both of them, and often when you should be doing something more profitable or ostensibly useful it forces its way out, strangling everything else.

I recall a conversation I had with the girl on my couch, about expression or execution being the only real existence of art, and that the ideals or ideas which exist within the artist do no matter if they are not communicated via whatever medium the artist works in, something with which she disagreed. At this point in time, I see the seductiveness of the idea of the superiority of the conjectural work, or the pure unexpressed idea – you can walk around with the perfect novel or poem or painting in your head and still function efficiently within the strict economy of everyday life because you are not bound by the irresistible drive to express and craft and redefine.

This drive is something which is common to all true artists. One of my favourite songs is “Breathe” by Anna Nalick, which captures the process and its implications in these words:

“2 am and I’m still awake writing this song;
if I get it out all on paper it’s no longer inside me,
threatening the life it belongs to…”

As I wrap this up it’s now almost an hour since I started writing it, and after the last full-stop is typed and the file is saved, I will go make myself some coffee and try to put in as much work as I can in the final hour that remains for my project to be done. Sometime during the day I will publish this via the push-button publishing that is the Internet and the girl on my couch will read it but not comment because she is shy and is afraid that she may be seen as the girl on my couch, or that she may be several of a long line of girls on my couch which may have been true sometime last year but not now. We will speak about it on the phone or in person, or maybe just on the phone because in person I find myself possessed of this irresistible urge to kiss her as if that kiss were a poem and her lips the living pages on which it yearns to be written.

And with this project hopefully finished, or this phase of it, maybe in 24 hours I will be up, with the bills paid, and so much pressure gone, and my son asleep under the net on the bed, and I will add hopefully a few thousand words to my stories while listening to la habanera from Carmen, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”, even though she finds it funny that I actually really do love opera.

Bullshit versus authenticity

The earliest identifiable influence I recognise on my becoming a short fiction writer is, Bharati Mukherjee's, The Middleman and Other Stories. I came across a recent article on Mukherjee . What I like is her honesty in defining herself as an American writer, despite having spent her formative years in India. I am tired of trying to expose the bullshit that is the basis of Guyana-born writers calling themselves Guyanese writers and what they are writing "Guyanese literature" simply be virtue of being born here. Mukherjee writes:

"I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here... I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is that can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race."