If one were to con­sid­er some of top ar­eas where the Caribbean is well-known for punch­ing above its weight, one could count, in no spe­cif­ic or­der: sport (par­tic­u­lar­ly of the sprint va­ri­ety), the pro­fes­sions and the arts.

It can be ar­gued that of these three, the arts re­main the re­gion's most un­der-ex­ploit­ed op­por­tu­ni­ty for gen­er­at­ing rev­enue. This is ev­i­denced both quan­ti­ta­tive­ly and qual­i­ta­tive­ly in the al­lo­ca­tion of re­sources and in re­port­ing on the sec­tor.

Mind­ful of this con­straint, the British Coun­cil worked in part­ner­ship with the Bo­cas Lit Fest and the De­part­ment of Lit­er­a­tures in Eng­lish at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, Mona cam­pus, Ja­maica, to host a com­pre­hen­sive work­shop in re­view­ing books/lit­er­a­ture and vi­su­al arts aimed at An­glo­phone Caribbean arts writ­ers and cul­ture jour­nal­ists.

From Jan­u­ary 9 to 13, and based at UWI's Mona cam­pus in the Fac­ul­ty of Hu­man­i­ties and Ed­u­ca­tion, the work­shop brought to­geth­er a mix of eleven ear­ly-ca­reer and mid-lev­el pro­fes­sion­al arts writ­ers from Ja­maica, Ba­hamas, St Kitts & Nevis, Do­mini­ca, Bar­ba­dos and T&T for five days of high-lev­el, hands-on train­ing.

A thriv­ing arts sec­tor re­quires cul­ture jour­nal­ists writ­ing about and re­view­ing the arts for mass me­dia, a re­lease said. Across the An­glo­phone Caribbean, there is a short­age of trained, ex­pe­ri­enced arts writ­ers able to in­sti­gate in­ter­est in our cre­ative forms in the pub­lic sphere. This work­shop was there­fore de­signed to help emerg­ing arts writ­ers im­prove the qual­i­ty of their cov­er­age and con­tribute to en­hanced at­ten­tion to arts and cul­ture in the me­dia and broad­er so­ci­ety.

The work­shop cov­ered key is­sues com­mon to writ­ing about all cul­tur­al forms while fo­cus­ing on spe­cif­ic is­sues rel­e­vant to two key ar­eas of the arts: books and lit­er­a­ture, vi­su­al arts. For ex­am­ple, the role of arts jour­nal­ism in the cul­tur­al ecosys­tem, the crit­ic's re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to the writer or artist, sub­jec­tiv­i­ty vs ob­jec­tiv­i­ty; opin­ions vs fact, eth­i­cal and le­gal is­sues, and more.

In an ef­fort to ex­pand the NGO's man­date as a lit­er­ary de­vel­op­ment agency, Bo­cas Lit Fest made its first in­ter­ven­tion of this kind in Sep­tem­ber 2016 with its Food Mat­ters food writ­ing work­shop held in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries.

"We're very grate­ful to the British Coun­cil for mak­ing this de­vel­op­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty a re­al­i­ty be­cause we need to en­hance our cul­tur­al en­vi­ron­ment by giv­ing our crit­ics the tools of the trade. In the maze of in­for­ma­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion, we need some hand-hold­ing in help­ing make sense of it all, the rich­es and the non­sense," states Ma­ri­na Sa­landy-Brown, founder and di­rec­tor of the Bo­cas Lit Fest.

The writ­ing work­shops form part of an on­go­ing Bo­cas work­shop se­ries ded­i­cat­ed to cov­er­ing the lo­cal and re­gion­al cre­ative land­scape; fu­ture in­stal­ments will fo­cus on film, mu­sic, the per­form­ing arts and fash­ion. The web­site: www.bo­caslit­fest.com of­fers on-go­ing in­for­ma­tion on train­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.