I don’t read self-help books very often, but last October, my good friend, the artist Maharanie Jhillu of artful.592, introduced me to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. At the time, I was stressed about a writing project that was not going well. While I was grumbling to her, she recommended Big Magic. …
Continue reading Big Magic – Five steps to creativity without fear
When I saw the cover of The Deep by Rivers Solomon, my mind immediately bounced back to the 2013 Animal Planet docufiction Mermaids: The Body Found. A friend of mine had told me that The Deep was more about memory and history, but still with the image of that mockumentary in my head, I somehow …
Contrary to our hopes for this year, the spectre of 2020 has followed us into 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging on across the world, and now a new, more infectious mutation of the virus that forced England into lockdown has already jumped borders and oceans. The year is already off to a bad …
The Bad The most cliché statement of this decade is definitely “2020. Am I right?” 2020 was a BAD year. The pandemic. The widespread disregard for community safety and the unnecessary politicising of preventative measures. The unnecessary fall outs of the BLM protests in America and Nigeria and other countries. The natural disasters. The political …
Continue reading 2020 – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Personal Recap
WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead “For the kid scanning fairy tales for a hero with a face like theirs."And for the girls whose stories we compressed into pities and wonders, triumphs and cautions, without asking, even once, for their names.” Raybearer, dedication page Photo of Jordan Ifueko taken from jordanifueko.com Christmas came early for me this …
Continue reading Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko – The Legend of Tarisai the Just
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 …
