Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

Last Wednes­day I wrapped the of­fi­cial ac­tiv­i­ties of my writ­ing res­i­den­cy with a gala read­ing at the St George's Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus. It was the cul­mi­na­tion of my ser­vice ac­tiv­i­ties here.I felt es­pe­cial­ly proud when Grena­di­an writer Cindy McKen­zie took the stage to read an ex­cerpt from her man­u­script Force Ripe. Cindy had been one of five par­tic­i­pants in my in­ten­sive wo rk­shop for writ­ers of in­ter­me­di­ate to ad­vanced prose fic­tion. The work­shop ran week­ly through­out March.

Cindy came to the work­shop with her work at an al­ready ad­vanced stage. It is a nov­el about a girl­child com­ing of age dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion, and in­cludes some ex­tra­or­di­nary de­tails of life in Grena­da dur­ing the 70s and 80s. I am hop­ing it will soon find a pub­lish­er and every­one will have a chance to read it them­selves.One of Cindy's con­cerns is that the whole man­u­script is writ­ten in Grena­di­an Cre­ole. While I (of course) don't ob­ject to it, she's en­coun­tered some re­sis­tance from oth­er read­ers.It's a ques­tion that has come up in near­ly every work­shop I've done here over my res­i­den­cy: how to nav­i­gate the use of Caribbean cre­oles in our writ­ing.As some­one who wrote a week­ly col­umn in Trinidad Cre­ole for some years, I have to come down on the side of us­ing the lan­guage.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers

To read the full ar­ti­cle, pleas­esignup­for your Free Tri­al of the Dig­i­tal Guardian.

No pay­ment de­tails re­quired, for your Free Tri­al.