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>>>AWARDS, PRIZES, etc

Small Axe announces 2015 literary competition winners

The Small Axe Project has announced the 2015 winners of their annual literary competition. There are four winners across two categories, poetry and short fiction. The first prize winners, who will receive 750 USD and be published in the prestigious journal, Small Axe, are Damian Femi Rene (poetry) and Mark Ramsay (short fiction). The second prize winners, who will receive 500 USD and will also be published in Small Axe are Daisy Holder Lafond (poetry) and Gabrielle Bellot (short fiction).

In the past seven years, the Small Axe Literary Competition has made a significant contribution to the growth of Caribbean literature, attracting young writers from across the Caribbean and its diaspora. This year, the winners reflect a cross-section of the Caribbean. Rene lives and works in St Lucia, Ramsay hails from Barbados, Lafond lives in St Croix, USVI, and Bellot is from Dominica.

Winners from past years have gone on to achieve recognition in Caribbean and international literary circles. Vladimir Lucien, the 2013 first prize winner in poetry, later won the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Sharon Millar, the 2012 short fiction winner, went on to win the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. And Ishion Hutchinson, the 2010 poetry winner, won both the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2011 Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize.

The competition also recognizes a shortlist of entrants whose work merited special commendation from the judges. The judges for poetry this year were Jacqueline Bishop, John Robert Lee, and Lasana Sekou; their chosen poets for the short list are: Jennifer Celestin, Summer Edward, Juleus Ghunta, Arielle John, Alicia Valasse, and Hanétha Vété-Congolo-Leibnitz. The judges for short fiction this year were Colin Channer, Curdella Forbes, and Tiphanie Yanique; their chosen writers for the shortlist are: Christine Barrow, Shakirah Bourne, Kevin Hosein, Hazel McShine, and Brandon O’Brien.

More information about the competition, including previous winners and judges, as well as how to enter and deadlines for next year’s cycle, can be found at smallaxe.net/sxsalon.

>>>NEW IN BOOKS

Professor Miller’s Marking Milestones [pic: milestones]

Professor Errol Miller, Professor Emeritus of Teaching Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, recently launched his new book, Marking Milestones – 21 Keynote Speeches about Successful Institutions and Outstanding Leaders.

The book, which chronicles the professor’s many speeches, debuted on November 12, 2015 at The Mico University College’s Enos Nuttall Lecture Theatre.

According to Miller, the book celebrates institutions and individuals in Jamaica and the Bahamas that have helped to shape their countries’ landscape. “[It commemorates] those who had a conscience about injustices and the needs of their times and acted to mitigate them; those who looked up, looked out and defied the realities of their times and worked to transcend them; those who stayed despite the times and left a legacy; those who continued the work that others had started and made contributions that added value,” Miller said.

According to Miller, the book was dedicated to his grandmother, Louise Dahl nee Aldred, who told him stories about Bishop Nuttall, in whose memory the lecture theatre at Mico was named; his mother, Joyce Miller, nee Dahl, who is 94 years old and was present at the launch, and to his wife, Sharon, who was also in attendance.

Rt Reverend Stanley Clarke, bishop of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, who was guest speaker at the launch, said that Miller, in his many speeches, “highlighted the Calvary Baptists of Montego Bay, John Wolmer of Wolmer’s Trust, the Baptist parsons who founded Calabar High School and Mary Morris Knibb of the Moravians, whose consciences drove them to invest in others regardless of the gender, class, colour, cash, age, religion or creed of the beneficiaries and provided education for generations of children without expecting personal benefit in return”.

Miller was the first chancellor of the Mico University College and a past principal of Mico. He was also president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, and chairman of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica. He was also awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree by the University of the West Indies.

The event was well-attended. Among the many distinguished guests were the Most Honourable Professor Sir Kenneth Hall, former Governor General of Jamaica, who wrote the foreword for the book; Prof Neville Ying, chairman of the board of Mico; Dr Ryland Campbell, pro-chancellor of Mico; Dorothy Pine-McLarty, chairman of the Jamaica Electoral Commission; Orrette Fisher, director of elections; Maxine Henry-Wilson, director of the Jamaica Tertiary Education Commission; and Norman Allen, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association.

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Writer credits: Charmaine Morris, Nicholas Alexander

Author News:

>>>BOOK PRESENTATION [pic: boxill]

CAP: Prof Ian Boxill (right), S Carlton Alexander chair, Management Studies, University of the West Indies (UWI), presents a copy of his newest book From Unipolar to Multipolar: The Remaking of Global Hegemony to Vice-Chancellor of UWI, Sir Hilary Beckles, at a presentation at UWI on November 26, 2015. Looking on are Elsa Leo Rhynie, chair, GraceKennedy Foundation, and Phillip Alexander, in whose names the chairs are named. Prof Boxill, Prof Dale Webber, and James Moss Solomon Snr, chair in Environmental Management, presented reports on “Research Collaboration& Engagement” prior to the book presentation.

[PHOTO: GARFIELD ROBINSON]

Publisher plans release for Neruda’s first poetry collection [pic: Neruda]

A non-profit publisher has acquired rights to the late Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda’s first collection of poems, which has never been translated in English, and has launched a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign to help get it released.

Copper Canyon Press announced last Monday that it plans to release Neruda’s Crepusculario in 2017. The Chilean poet was 19 when he self-published the book in 1923, and allegedly sold his father’s gold watch to raise money. Crepusculario is a variation of the Spanish word for twilight, crepusculo, and has been referred to as Book of Twilight or Twilight Book.

Copper Canyon, based in Port Townsend, Washington, already plans to publish a collection of recently discovered Neruda poems, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda, in 2016.

Garcia Marquez’s ashes to be held in his native Colombia [pic: garcia marquez]

The cremated remains of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez are making their return journey home to Colombia and starting in December will be exhibited in the Caribbean city of Cartagena where he began his writing career.

The decision to permanently exhibit the remains at colonial-era cloister in the port city’s historic downtown was the result of an agreement reached between authorities and Garcia Marquez’s family, Juan Carlos Gossain, governor of Bolivar state, said.

While books such as One Hundred Years of Solitude are infused with Garcia Marquez’s reminiscences from his Colombian upbringing, many speculated his ashes would remain in Mexico, where he lived for decades and received a state funeral following his death in 2014 at the age of 87.

Colombian friends of the author, who is known almost universally as “Gabo,” celebrated the decision.

Garcia Marquez, who was born in a banana-growing hamlet near the Caribbean, arrived in Cartagena in 1948 and immediately landed a job as a journalist at local newspaper El Universal while continuing his law studies.

The walled city was the setting for one of his best-selling novels, Love in the Time of Cholera, and his family still maintains a seafront house there as well as a foundation established by the author to train Latin American journalists.

The building where Garcia Marquez’s remains will be kept is owned by the University of Cartagena.

Signed editions of Harper Lee novel offered for $1,500 [pic: harper lee]

How much is a signed Harper Lee novel worth? Her publisher is offering a special edition of Go Set a Watchman for $1,500.

HarperCollins Publishers announced Wednesday that 500 collector’s editions are available – leather-bound with gold foil stamping, inside a velvet-lined cloth box. HarperCollins said that Lee, 89 and in frail condition, signed the books during the past few months.

Prices on eBay for signed Harper Lee books range from $1,000 for an anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird to $15,000 for a signed and inscribed first edition of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

Go Set a Watchman is the unexpected second book by the press-shy author and has been on best-seller lists for much of the year despite mostly negative reviews and simmering doubts that Lee was fully aware of the book’s release.

Written in the mid-1950s, “Watchman” was completed before “Mockingbird,” but takes place 20 years later in the same small Southern community. The depiction of “Mockingbird” hero Atticus Finch as a racist opposed to integration startled readers and critics and set off an extended debate about one of literature’s most beloved characters.

Lee, a Monroeville, Alabama, native, had long said that “Mockingbird” would be her only book.

Long-lost Faulkner play published for the first time

NEW YORK (AP) – Twixt Cup and Lip, written soon after World War I and being published for the first time, is a one-act comedy in which a modern, free-thinking woman finds herself courted by two men and changes her mind at the last moment.

Compared to other plays from the 1920s, Twixt Cup and Lip was not uncommon with its matter-of-fact references to sex and drinking and the characters’ unending cigarettes. Even now, audiences might laugh at such lines as “Marriage is stylish again, you know” and “I thought all men papered their room with actresses and fat girls in bathing suits.”

But the name of the playwright is the real attraction: William Faulkner.

Written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, Twixt Cup and Lip was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli, who over the past few years has also tracked down long-lost and obscure works by F Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. The play appears in the Strand’s holiday issue, which went on sale recently.

“Faulkner wrote this at a time of great change in society especially for women,” Gulli told The Associated Press recently.

“This work is unique in that it showed a side of Faulkner that was comical yet that at the same time explored the nascent theme of the independent jazz era female which F Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker carried on further.”

Faulkner, who died in 1962, is an acknowledged giant of American fiction, but in his early years was more likely to write plays and poetry. Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, believes Twixt Cup and Lip was written in the early 1920s, when Faulkner was part of a theatre group at the University of Mississippi.

The play’s title is lifted from an old English expression “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” meaning a seemingly settled event can still unravel. But readers will find nothing suggesting the tragic vision and anguish about the Southern past that made Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and the Fury and other Faulkner novels some of the most influential and haunting works of the 20th century.

“He’s showing a knack for comedy and a knack for dialogue, too,” says Rieger, noting that years later Faulkner worked on Hollywood screenplays. “You’re not seeing the trademarks from his more famous works, although the techniques he’s perfecting here would serve him well.”

Around the time he wrote Twixt Cup and Lip, Faulkner also worked on the one-act The Marionettes, a romance based on Faulkner and his high school girlfriend (and future wife) Estelle Oldham. Rieger says Twixt Cup and Lip also may be drawn from Faulkner’s relationship with Oldham.

“Not long before he worked on those plays, Estelle had caved to her parents’ pressure and married another man,” Rieger said. “Faulkner may have had some resentment that she didn’t stand up for them and used the play as a kind of wish fulfillment – imagining her as more independent.”

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Afterword:

The Spirit That Guides Us expected to benefit the Caribbean [pic: huie]

A movie to be shot in Jamaica in 2016 is expected to change the course of history in how films are produced and distributed, while reaping financial rewards for Caribbean communities. The film, The Spirit That Guides Us, is a story written by Jamaican-born author Anthony Huie and is an intertwining of spiritualism and natural life in Port Antonio.

Huie and his team are raising funds for the pre-production of the film, which he said will benefit not only those who contribute, but especially those across the Caribbean who assist in promoting the campaign.

His plan is not just to have a production team fly into his hometown, shoot the film and leave the community high and dry. He wants to give back to the Caribbean.

This approach to film-making is also expected to drive tourists to Jamaica during its shoot in the winter months of 2016. Huie and his team have launched a crowd-funding platform on Go Fund Me to raise $750,000 for the pre-production budget. Those who donate $US1,000 to the project will have the unique opportunity to visit Jamaica for a week during the movie shoot, receive meals and accommodations, be on set with the director and cast and actually be in the movie in the crowd scenes. “It is just immersing yourself into the culture, meeting the people; just kicking back and enjoy a vacation in a unique way where you are being welcomed as a member of the family,” Huie said.

Those interested in contributing to the funding drive or to learn more about the campaign can visit: www.gofundme.com/spiritthatguidesus

In the meantime, Huie has also received the ringing endorsement of the Jamaican government in having this film shot in the resort town of Port Antonio. “The Jamaica government has so far sent us a wonderful letter of endorsement and the mayor from (Port Antonio) where the story is actually written has equally sent us a wonderful welcome. They are preparing to welcome all visitors as if they are a long lost family member,” Huie said.

The Spirit That Guides Us is told from the point of view of a Jamaican child who got left behind when his parents immigrated to Canada. The movie will be produced by The Griffin Group Production Company from the US.

====================

‘In the Dark Places’ has solid, multilayered plot

In the Dark Places (William Morrow), by Peter Robinson [pic: dark places]

Peter Robinson’s intelligent series about Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks deftly explores contemporary issues that by their nature often take place in the urban areas of Yorkshire, England, with the occasional trip to London. But in his 22nd outing, Banks and his team of first-class detectives take to the Yorkshire countryside to investigate crimes that target farms.

In addition to its solid, multilayered plot, In the Dark Places also works as an adroit look at isolation. Farms located miles apart can allow crime to grow undetected and breed a kind of disconnect that comes from living so far from the nearest neighbour. Alan and each member of his team are acutely feeling the emotional emptiness of having few close relationships.

The Homicide and Major Crimes team isn’t happy about investigating the theft of a local farmer’s tractor. But the new police commissioner wants rural crimes investigated because they involve expensive farm equipment and specialty livestock. John Beddoes’ neighbours consider him “a hobby farmer” with his upscale vehicles, a rapeseed crop that supplies a high-end oil maker and free-range pigs and chickens sold to local quality restaurants.

The missing tractor becomes linked to a possible murder when blood is found in an abandoned World War II airport hangar that may be used as a transfer site for stolen equipment. The investigations lead to the disappearance of two young men, one the son of a local farmer, and uncover a gruesome discovery at the crash site and small, illegal slaughterhouses.

The novel’s brisk plot is complemented by Robinson’s strong characters who continue to intrigue. Alan and Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot both ponder their loneliness, wondering why they so often let friends and lovers drift away. Yorkshire’s isolated landscape and the distance between farms add to the detectives’ ennui. Only Detective Sergeant Winsome Jackman, long a fan favourite of Robinson’s series, seems to be in a good place with a growing attraction to a former veteran who shares her interests.

Robinson continues the high standards he has always brought to his series with In the Dark Places.

‘Safari’ memoir from founder of Abercrombie & Kent

Safari: A Memoir of a Worldwide Travel Pioneer (Harper), by Geoffrey Kent [pic: safari]

Geoffrey Kent, founder of the Abercrombie & Kent luxury tour company, grew up in colonial Africa and hunted an elephant at age 15 in 1957. After killing “the most beauteous and magnificent beast” he’d ever seen, he vows, “If I ever shoot an elephant again, it will be with a camera.”

It’s one of many moments in Kent’s youth that planted the seeds for his adventure travel empire. Indeed, the first third of the book is the best part as young Kent, raised by British parents on a farm in Kenya, is kicked out of school and decides to become the first person to go by motorcycle from Nairobi to Cape Town, 3,000 miles. When he appears bearded and mud-stained at the Ambassador Hotel in Salisbury – now Harare, in Zimbabwe – the doorman declines to admit him until he presents a letter of introduction from a friend of his parents. He’s then escorted to a suite where he gets a bath and an excellent meal.

“This is really the life,” he thinks. “Adventure by day, fresh sheets and a spring mattress at night.” That formula is the key to his future.

Among the book’s gems: He and his parents pick the name Abercrombie to go with Kent because it sounds “grand” and “will put us at the top of the yellow pages.” He hires the head barman, chef and maitre d’ away from his father’s country club to staff his new business. And he sells his first trip to an American whom he guesses to be a rich Texan because he’s wearing a Stetson.

Name-dropping begins on page one as Kent goes on safari with Richard Burton. Amid accounts of trips with everyone from Lauren Hutton to Jeffrey Katzenberg are humble asides like this: “As a boy, I never could have dreamed that one day I’d accompany the Prince of Wales to visit my old … friend, who’s now the Sultan of Oman.”

Death-defying moments punctuate the narrative as Kent expands his company to exotic locales around the world. He describes A&K clients being led to safety during the 2008 terrorist siege of Mumbai and recalls personally delivering ransom money to free a group in Southern Sudan that included Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill. Kent also describes A&K’s efforts to protect gorillas in Uganda while establishing a camp there. But there’s no mention of the 1999 attack in Uganda by Rwandan rebels who murdered two A&K clients and six other tourists. A spokeswoman for the publisher said it was omitted because the book is a personal memoir about Kent’s adventures.

Kent’s achievements are truly impressive. But what starts out as a rollicking account of adventures ends up 300 pages later reading a little too much like something else that begins with “adv” – an advertisement.

PAGE FOUR:

Fiction:

Open Audition

By Charmaine Morris [pic: fireside]

I fake so many climaxes that I now gain pleasure simply from the anticipation of the end of yet another embarrassing hook-up with Glen. I groaned and grunted along with him, getting loudest at the moment he was most rigid then relaxing against the bed as if drained and spent and couldn’t go anymore, when in fact I was just getting warmed up. But I didn’t blame Glen. He just wasn’t the type of man I wanted to spend my nights with. He was good for conversation and foreplay and was one of the few men who would hold me close after and actually say nice things. In other words, except for the actual sex, Glen was perfect. But it wouldn’t last – couldn’t – and it was best that I ended it.

I turned to him in the dark and listened to him sleep. He was snoring lightly – a comfortable sound that made me uneasy. I would really miss our dates and jovial arguments. I could talk to Glen for hours without getting bored, so what was up with the bad sex? No matter. What was done was done. I kissed his forehead and froze when he stirred. He settled once more, allowing me to climb quietly from his bed, gather my clothes and make a figurative run for it.

It was my mother who introduced me to Glen. She was the President of the Marry My Daughter Fan Club. Relentless in her pursuit of a suitable husband for me before my clock ran out. I was also in pursuit but not for the reasons my mother thought. I wasn’t thinking of my biological clock or children for that matter because I knew it would work out one way or the other. I was looking for a man who could satisfy me in and out of bed and one who wouldn’t sleep with every woman he met. I may be a bit loose for a woman but I had morals.

Glen phoned me for the entire week after that night when I snuck out of his bed. One evening I came home to find him parked outside my apartment complex and I quickly reversed and hid around the corner until he left. I avoided his calls to the office and I hid beneath the drapes when he pounded on my door, pleading for me to open up and let him in. Eventually, he got the message and I felt like a heel for choosing the coward’s way out rather than facing Glen and telling him right off that we had no future together.

He told my mother. I hadn’t thought he would and was disappointed that a grown man would run to the woman who’d set him up to complain that her daughter had dumped him for no good reason. My mother accosted me about it – at the supermarket, no less. (We shopped at many of the same places and often on the same day.)

Without much preamble she said, “Why would you treat Glen like that?”

“Stay out of it, Mother.” I was reading the label on a can of beans, searching the ingredients for the deadly MSG.

“How can I stay out of it?” she continued, as though I hadn’t said anything. “I told him you were very nice and that the two of you would be perfect together.”

“You shouldn’t have lied.”

She sucked in a breath, almost loud enough to pull all the produce from the supermarket shelves down her now widened mouth and into her already plump body. I almost wished it were possible because at least then she wouldn’t be able to talk. She ignored the shoppers who were staring as though we were the latest road fatality. I attempted to push past her. She blocked my path with her trolley.

“Jesus, Mother! Not now.”

“Then when? You never want to talk about these things. You live your life like nothing matters and when someone wants to help, you throw it back in their face.”

“So don’t help.”

“Do you want to end up like me?” She waited for an answer and when it was obvious none was forthcoming, she continued. “Do you understand that in a few years, men won’t find you attractive? And then you’ll have to take what you can get?” Her voice was too loud for the narrow aisles.

“Like you and Dad, right?”

I regretted it the moment the words came out of my mouth. Of course I hadn’t meant it, but I was angry and wished for once that she would shut up and stay out of my life. But it was said and she was offended. She threw back her shoulders, forced her head high and peered down her nose at me.

“I married your father when I was young and because I wanted to. I loved him…we loved each other.”

“Then why did he leave?” It was as if I couldn’t stop myself. I was reminding me of her. Of when my mother put her foot in it and no matter what, she couldn’t help the words that spurt forth, sinking deeper and deeper. I was already up to my knees.

She didn’t answer me. I cautioned myself then, but I couldn’t help myself; I had to have the final word.

“He left because you made him miserable with your meddling and you never knew how to stop with the jealousy.”

She sniffed, and I felt bad. She said, “He left because of that whore he used to work with.”

“He left because you were so convinced that there was always something going on with him and another woman that eventually he gave up and decided to do what you accused him of.” I leaned in close to her. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. In the far recesses of my mind a voice was telling me to stop, to push on, to leave it alone, but at the front there was another voice – a stronger voice – goading me on, saying it was time someone told her what for. “Your nagging made the old woman who begged on the corner seem attractive. Dad did the only thing he could – jump into bed with a woman who knew when to shut her mouth. With parents like you, no wonder I stink at relationships.”

My mother’s eyes clouded and a tear spilled.

“Oh, Mom…I’m -“

“Forget it!” She shoved the trolley hard, bumping into mine and detaching it from my hand. She stormed off, moving fast, the trolley rattling and bumping as it hurtled along. I saw then that we did have an audience and one that didn’t appear too pleased.

In the space of a week I was able to reduce a good man and a grown woman to snivelling weaklings. What was it with me and men and what was it with me and my mother? We couldn’t go 20 minutes without arguing – usually about my life and how single I was. Technically I’m never single for long – not if you count one-night stands and quick hook-ups.

As I emptied the grocery bags, I thought about the men I’ve had and how, after all of that, I was still alone and loveless, as my mother would say.

I saw Martin at the bar at Fantasy. Dressed in tight jeans and a white linen shirt, he was irresistible. We danced to a few songs and had a couple drinks. Skipping the first-time conversation, we made our way to my apartment.

I watched him dress in the early hours of Sunday morning and knew I wouldn’t see him again. He looked much better than he was in bed.

Paul was also good-looking. We met at a clients’ meeting. I knew instantly that I wanted him. He went home with me that night. The door hadn’t properly closed before our lips were locked and we tugged at our clothing. Always touching and kissing, Paul hated when I looked at other men. He couldn’t believe I was faithful and soon ended the relationship.

Chris and I met at a party just after high school. That summer was the best time of my life. I was standing with a group of girls on the opposite side of the room, pretending to be older than my 17 years. I didn’t hesitate when he raised his hand and called. Years later, he confessed – he hadn’t even been calling me – but he didn’t regret the mistake.

We dated for a while and then he left the country. Whenever he came home to visit, we would get together. One night while we lay naked on my bed and he slowly ran his finger down my back, he told me he was married. “What did you say?” I was unsure of what I heard.

“I can’t keep this from you any longer. I have to be honest,” he said in a whisper.

“Leave,” I said. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Chris tainted my taste for men and it was a good six weeks before I was out and about again.

Charley was no Prince Charming, but he knew his stuff. He could drive you crazy with his fingers. Despite his rough manner, he had very gentle hands. We met one night at the club when I’d had a little too much to drink. Our performance on the dance floor was heated and I can’t quite remember what we did when I took him home. I saw him a couple times after but without the drinks, his groping was a turn-off.

A friend introduced me to Colin. The paleness of his eyes against his brown skin was striking. Although we hit it off immediately, we never slept together. We kissed and touched but nothing more. When I asked him about it he said, “You’re too much for me. I could never match up to what I’ve heard about you.” I think he’s gay.

Last week I was a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding when a guy I met a couple times before at her house asked me to dance. His name was David. “Let’s go somewhere we can be alone,” he said as we slow-danced. I led him to the room that was being used to store the gifts.

The thought of someone walking in at any moment excited me. When it was over we headed back to the dining hall. He stood by the door and looked at me. His face was flushed and then he said: “Maybe we shouldn’t go in together.”

“Why?” I replied, puzzled.

“My wife might see us.”

“What do you mean, wife?” I said stupidly.

CONCLUSION NEXT WEEK

The end of love

By Nicholas Alexander

When, at the end of love, you decide

callously to turn on some music;

to shut out the reality of your own

unconcern, like a door slamming shut

to muffle the sound of music-

Woman, wholly disappointed, know

I too will grow weary

of this room and, one day,

emerge

with a new song of love upon my lips.