This review was published in the Stabroek News' The Writers' Room on November 1, 2020. “My mother is a star, one of many bright jewels who sing praises in the skies, who view us from on high…She watches me now from her old throne, one more twinkle in the constellation Pushya, a figure as distant as the …
Continue reading Hindu cosmology as family drama – A review of Star Daughter by Shveta Thakrar
It’s not often that a book excites me so much that it makes me want to write a persona blog post on top of a review. It's even rarer that a book makes me struggle to find the exact words I need to articulate what it means to me. I thought that this would just …
Continue reading Why I have hope for the Future of Caribbean Futurism – A personal Blog
Originally published in the Stabroek News Writers' Room Two weekends ago, I scratched something off my bucket list: I attended the Bocas Literature Festival. I was grateful that Bocas decided to keep the show on the road, pandemic or no pandemic, by opting to go fully virtual for its 10th anniversary. Although I was only …
Continue reading Reclaim, Restore, Return: A Teaser Trailer for Caribbean Futurist Fiction
Originally published in The Writer's Room in the Stabroek News In early February, while attending the Commonwealth Writers’ Workshop at Moray House, I was introduced to Nalo Hopkinson’s work. Our workshop facilitator advised me to explore Hopkinson’s work because of my interest in writing Caribbean speculative fiction: a literary genre of writing that covers everything …
Continue reading The World of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
Every writer has that thing that haunts them, the evasive, wispy flickering of a story, essay or poem that lingers at the backs of their minds. It makes their fingers twitch, makes them mutter lines of dialogue or exposition that bubbles up from their subconscious to become almost real, almost tangible. It is at these …
From mid-December 2018 to now, I have been attending every literary event Moray House has hosted. I learned about Edgar Mittelholzer, A.J. Seymour, Egbert Martin and Ian McDonald. I learned about the contexts in which they wrote, about how they worked to promote our literary tradition here in Guyana. I even had the honour of …
Continue reading I saw the future today – My experience at the Commonwealth Writers Workshop
My angst about my education has been around since high school, I recently (re)discovered. A few months ago, while cleaning up my still cluttered spaces at home, I found a small collection of poetry I wrote when I was in high school. I must have been around 15 or 16 years old when I penned The …
I did a lot of things differently this year. I didn’t write nearly as much about books as I wanted to (at least not publicly) as both the good and bad parts of 2018 swallowed me whole. But amid the ups and downs of this year, two things stood out for me: my personal reading …
Continue reading Writing Journals and Twitter Threads – My Year of Reading, 2018
As you walk down the main road of the Turkeyen Campus, you too may overlook one of its least appreciated features. Art is everywhere. Murals adorn the fronts of some building and students’ paintings hang in familiar offices. One mural - a life-like representation of Guyana’s forest ecosystem - is even indoors, sprawling over the …
Continue reading Unlabelled – The underappreciated art of Turkeyen Campus
A few months ago, Carinya Sharples wrote an excellent piece about fear in Guyana. She spoke about how Guyanese - both resident and diasporic - are always channelling fearful narratives among themselves. Some of this fear is warranted, of course, but so much of it seems...exaggerated. I have grown up on a diet of fear. …
