More authors who read in schools for Child Month 2016

Melanie Schwapp:

I read at Holy Childhood Prep. School to the Kindergarten classes. I read Abigail’s Glorious Hair by Diane Browne and ‘Lally-May’s Farm Suss’ written by me.  

Abigail’s Glorious Hair sparked a lively discussion about hair and the joys and stresses of combing it. Many of the girls were thrilled to show that they had the same hairstyle as Abigail. Some of the boys expounded on going to the barber and the fact that they did not have to comb their hair every day.

 

Lally-May’s episode with the rolling half and Jonkanoo had them mesmerised and a little frightened, because many of them had never heard of the myth of the rolling calf, and only a handful had ever seen Jonkanoo. Again, a lively discussion of ‘scary’ things and how brave they were when they had to face frightening things. A few of the boys demonstrated some karate moves that they would use to fight the Jonkanoo if ever faced with the Lally-May scenario. 

Bio: 

 

Melanie Schwapp was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She attended Montego Bay High School in St. James from 1st to 5th form, then was enrolled in St. Andrew High School for Girls in 1982 to sit her A’level exams.

Two short migrations at two key stages of her life, opened Melanie’s eyes to the cultural and social discriminations in society, and thus began her quest for understanding through writing. At the age of five she moved to England with her family, where she was awakened to the nature of colour prejudice, and then during her late teens and early twenties, she attended the University of South Carolina, where the subtle traits of discrimination cemented her interest in the social repercussions of these prejudices.

 

Although Melanie has written recreationally all her life, her first published work was a children’s book, Lally-May’s Farm Suss in 2005 in which she revives a Jamaican myth and several cultural aspects through the eyes of a child. Her second publication was the novel Dew Angels in 2011 where she explores the hidden aspect of prejudice and other social handicaps in Jamaican society. Having fallen in love with the rural lifestyle while growing up on her

grandparents’ farm in Montego Bay, Melanie also does small garden landscaping and interior decorating. She is a devoted mother to her three children and a sometimes devoted wife to her husband. She resides in Kingston.

 

 

 

Diana McCaulay:

  I read at Hopefield Prep on May 9th from my new YA novel Gone to Drift, which placed second in the CODE Burt Prize for Caribbean literature and won the Lignum Vitae Vic Reid Award, both in 2015. The children seemed to enjoy the reading – they were very engaged and had lots of questions.

Bio:

Diana McCaulay is an award winning Jamaican writer and a lifelong resident of its capital city Kingston.  She has written two critically acclaimed novels, Dog-Heart (March 2010) and Huracan (July 2012), published by Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom.  Dog-Heart won a Gold Medal in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Creative Writing Awards (2008), was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize (2011), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2012) and the Saroyan Prize for International Writing (2012).   Huracan was also shortlisted for the 2014 Saroyan Prize. Her third novel, Gone to Drift (February 29, 2016) is published by Papilote Press, placed second in the Burt Prize for Caribbean Literature and won the Lignum Vitae Vic Reid Award in 2015. 

Diana won the Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean writing in 2014, for her non fiction work-in-progress Loving Jamaica: a memoir of place and (not) belonging. 

Diana founded the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) in 1991 and still serves as its CEO and guiding force.   She was a popular newspaper columnist for The Gleaner (1994-2001) and her short fiction has been published by the journal Eleven Eleven, Granta On Line, Fleeting Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, Afro-Beat, Lifestyle Magazine and the Jamaica Observer’s literary supplement, Bookends.  She was the regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2012, for her short story The Dolphin Catchers.  

Diana was born into the Jamaican upper-middle class and has spent a lifetime pondering questions of race, class, colour, and privilege in Jamaican society.  The honest and penetrating insights in her novels and stories come from sharp observation and profound self-reflection.  Hers is a uniquely authentic voice from a background which usually turns away from all that she unflinchingly faces.

 (I am having all sorts of challenges with the font, as I capture the words of the authors. So apologies for that, but I think you will enjoy what they have to say, what motivates them. I love hearing why authors write what they write.)

 

 

Morning coffee: and stories we cannot write or tell?

 

On a recent Saturday, after thinking about it for some time, I finally had ‘morning coffee’ with writers – three children’s writers, one adult and one poet, a male. The first time we have had a male for any meeting here. (And my husband joined us because he knows the poet, and actually seemed to enjoy our literary conversation)   We were supposed to be looking at the usual, the viability of children’s writing, marketing and other miseries. However, as we always do, we wondered off agenda to things of general interest, bearing in mind that anything we actually mention can be considered fuel for creativity. And this time, here with us  was a writer writing in another genre. Our poet wondered if any of us had ever considered writing poetry. It turned out two of us had. I have known him from he was a young poet of 19 or so, impressing us with his poems at the gate at the bottom of a hill on which his cousin, my friend, lived. I think she and I were about 14.  How far we have all come. Bona fide writers.

We talked; our poet was astonished as we addressed the matter of gatekeepers in the world  of children’s books, no violence, nor reality as faced regularly by sectors of this society, etc. So he said, (paraphrased of course) ‘You people can’t express your creativity fully; you have to be aware of what teachers, schools, the ministry will say? Silence for a moment as we considered this. (I think personally that we are so aware of this that it may be second nature to us now, or it will be to our editors.) We all talked at once. My friend, also one of my editors, told him of a story I wrote which one teacher said he didn’t like  because the child was rude (she was inclined to have an opinion about things and children who answer back or have opinions are not role models, in his opinion). My friend also indicated a series of YA books where there was a bit of the supernatural, and some parents in another territory found that objectionable as Christians. Well, we know that there was objection to Harry Potter for a similar reason, and if I think far back enough, I come up with one of my favourite books, Are you there God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. I recall being astounded that in the early 80s there was a problem with this book in the USA because the characters discussed unmentionable female body functions, and I think it would also fall into the ‘opinionated’ children category.

I cast about for examples of real life which have made it into print for our region. I mentioned Bad Girls in School, by Gwyneth Harold (Harcourt Education, 2007) which I knew was used  in some schools. I also  mentioned Inner City Girl  by Colleen Smith-Dennis (LMH, 2009, and third place Burt Caribbean Award winner, 2014,) as one which certainly dealt with the realities of  life, the other side of Jamaica, far away from middle class norms and niceties.   I also told our group of  a visit two of us made to read at  a library  in a rural town. We read! The children then, with great pride, read a story they had written for us. It focused on a young man who was stealing goats in a  village.  The villagers caught him and chopped him with their machetes (true to life) and he was put into hospital where he could at length consider his evil ways. The children may write it, but we can’t.

So after our little ‘coffee morning’, I gave this further thought. And sometimes when you give further thought, you attract things to you. So I was sitting in an establishment, and one of the young ladies started telling us about her life. It was hard, unbelievably hard. I’m sure my eyes opened wide; I’m sure my mouth fell open. I know I kept saying, “Oh, Oh”. It was not that I hadn’t heard that story, or a version of it, before. It was that I knew her, and had no idea that she had had such a hard life, that indeed she was the heroine of her own life, as I told her. And that sounded so hollow in the face of the obstacles she had overcome, just to become a ‘normal person’.

I wondered if I could write her story, do it justice. I even considered coming straight home and writing down the main points before I forgot them. However, I don’t think the gatekeepers would pass it, too sad, too hard, to really true to the  life of some.  I wondered if  any of us could write it. Then I remembered Dew Angels by Melanie Schwapp, (HopeRoad Publishing, 2013). Dew Angels is a well written book, story harrowing and ringing true, and you feel you need to see how it works out. I think that Melanie  or Gwyneth could have  done  justice to my ‘real-life storyteller’. But the question is, could I write my storyteller’s story? Honestly, I don’t know. There’s so much to overcome,  even if it culminates in success. There’s so much  emotion.  So maybe it’s not only about the gatekeepers, when all is said and done.