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Michael Rothenberg, co-founder and coordinator of 100 Thousand Poets for Change is inviting Caribbean poets to participate in 100 Thousand Poets and Musicians for Change 2012, scheduled for September 29.

The event brings together poets, writers and musicians from around the world in a celebration of poetry and the arts. They’ll be organising activities in their local communities to inspire and encourage people to come together to promote “meaningful social and political change.” The events are held simultaneously around the globe. They can be big or small – poetry sessions, a concert, a demonstration, an art and craft exhibition, handing out poems in the street – whatever the organizers feel is appropriate.

Michael Rothenberg, who is also a poet, songwriter and publisher of Big Bridge magazine said last year’s event was a huge success.

“Last year’s event was history making. It looks like this year will exceed all expectation. We have over 550 events confirmed in 100 countries. And we are hoping that we can expand the involvement of Caribbean nations. People who want to organize in their cities can contact me at walterblue@bigbridge.organd I would be happy to sign them up. Also they can find us on our Facebook event page at http://www.facebook.com/events/189035231173286/ Stanford University has volunteered to continue archiving this event and we are creating individual blog pages for all participants. September 29 will be an amazing day!!”

Numerous participants in last year’s celebration echoed Rothenberg’s praise for the event, including the 100 Thousand Poets for Change Jamaica Chapter, as well as participants in Trinidad.

John Dorsey of Toledo Free Press said, “What really makes it [100 Thousand Poets for Change] different is, unlike so many other events, people seem to be listening and really coming together … Poetry is a great vehicle for social change and community transformation, but in the end the goal is to be able to really see others, to see that we are not only our differences but also our similarities. We are all human beings, no matter what our walks of life.”

US Poet, Peggy Sapphire said poets “worldwide gathered to carry forth a new vision for the world forged from the poetry, dreams and visions of impassioned citizens everywhere.”

Participating poets from Rochester, New York said, “100 Thousand Poets for Change” was the biggest reading EVER.”

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Graphicly lets you read your comics on the Kindle Fire, iPhone, and iPad

A new publishing platform designed to help authors and publishers distribute and market their books across multiple platforms has been generating buzz in US comic book circles since its launch in February this year, and it’s not just because of the nature of the service. The creators of the technology said they believe their customers’ books “should be available in every marketplace imaginable,” with support to properly market and promote them, and they’re working to achieve just that.

Graphicly, as it’s called, is an entertainment and digital content publishing platform that allows publishers and self published authors to upload, convert, publish, sell and promote content of all types across a variety of digital channels, including ebook stores like Amazon Kindle, Kobo and Apple iBooks (as ebooks and enhanced ebooks); the Apple iPhone, iPad and iOS Newsstand; Android devices, including the Barnes & Noble NOOK tablet and NOOK Color, and the Amazon Kindle Fire. An embeddable widget (HTML5 web app) also allows you to publish your content to any website or blog as well as Facebook. Graphicly says it’s the only distribution service offering books on Facebook, with more than 90% of its publishers using this channel.

‘Upload once, distribute anywhere’ is its motto, the idea being that it saves you from having to re-format and re-upload your book each time you use a different platform or ebookstore. Using Graphicly you can publish to one or several platforms and sell your work through whichever of the available channels you choose, via a customizable and embeddable reader or app, thus allowing readers to purchase the content through multiple devices from almost anywhere. Essentially, image-based content such as graphic novels will be tailored to suit each device.

Graphicly’s platform also delivers customizable, real-time analytics which help authors and publishers tailor their content to their audience’s mode of reading. You can also use it to determine how content is consumed, how often readers read a book or how much of it they’ve read, and more.

Graphicly touts itself as the only self-publishing platform that is optimized for image-based and fixed-format books, making it ideal for comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, art books, magazines and cookbooks. It takes no commission on sales. Publishers and authors retain all rights to their content and 100 percent of the net receipts from sales via the various retail channels. Users pay a single flat fee to publish ebooks across the various ebookstores and an additional charge for full-service conversion if requested, or for other optional services, including the production and publishing of apps. Publishing over the Web and Facebook is free

Micah Baldwin, the Graphicly founder and CEO,.is the former head of business development for Lijit, a blogging and publishing start up acquired by Federated Media in 2011. According to Forbes, Baldwin’s work “has also revolutionized your Twitter feed,” in that he invented Follow Fridays (#ff), “the Twitter trend that has been tweeted hundreds of thousands of times and seen by hundreds of million of followers.”

“Over the past few years, the team at Graphicly identified an unmet need in the digital publishing industry for automated tools to convert, distribute and promote image-based content,“ says Baldwin. “By opening up our proven digital distribution platform, we now provide these services, while giving authors and publishers full control of their content and revenue streams and a deep understanding of how readers are engaging with their content. We believe our customer’s books should be available in every marketplace imaginable, with the knowledge and support to properly market and promote them.”

Baldwin later told IGN Comics in an interview, “There is something fundamentally wrong when a publisher or author is spending their time and money marketing a middleman versus their own brand. It should be “come to MY website. MY Facebook Page. Come see MY books. Not go to Graphicly or some other app. Authors and publishers should be spending their time marketing and promoting their own brands, not providing free marketing to middlemen.”

Graphicly claims that “more than 400 publishers and 6,000 creators from major publishers such as Image Comics and Chronicle Books, to indie creators from around the globe,” use its platform.

Archie Comics is among the publishers that have teamed up with Graphicly and they’re now using the platform to sell comics through their Facebook fanpage.

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When was the last time you enjoyed a book so much, you felt you just had to tell someone about it?

It’s only natural, and for most of us, word of mouth is the automatic way of telling others about a good read. Lately, though, have you noticed how ‘word of mouth’ has evolved from vocal recommendation to online book discussions, and even full-fledged book reviews, accessible to millions?  Not satisfied to just talk about their favourite books, readers are increasingly going online and using bookseller and social-networking sites to inform not just friends and family but anyone who cares to know about the books they love or detest.

Goodreads, Shelfari and Librarything are some of the more popular social networking sites where readers can share their passion for books, discover new ones, make recommendations to other readers and create their own virtual bookshelf and catalogues online.  BookRabbit.com is another site that is just as interactive and appealing, though perhaps not as well known. Its stated aim is to “help readers discover and champion books.”

In the realm of online bookselling, however, Amazon reigns supreme. When it comes to offering readers a platform to recommend books and give them star ratings or say what they dislike about them, Amazon has got it down to a fine art – which is not surprising. The online giant, which touts itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” is the largest online retailer of books.

Perhaps better than most – including publishers who use Amazon’s website and the Kindle Store to sell their titles – Amazon understands the power of customer reviews and recommendations. Not long after it launched in 1994, the company hired editors and also used some of its staff to write book and music reviews. According to PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen, “Amazon later made deals with book review publications like Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, The Library Journal and the New York Times Book Review, to copy their reviews of newly published books. Over time, the literary editors hired to write reviews in those early years have either left or moved to other positions in the company, and customers themselves have become the main source of reviews on the site – though the Editorial Reviews remain.”

Steve Weber, author of ePublish: Self-Publish Fast and Profitably for Kindle, iPhone, CreateSpace and Print on Demand says, “ Good reviews on Amazon are particularly crucial for books by new authors and for niche books, and it stands to reason that they boost sales not only at that site but everywhere people are buying books, although we don’t yet know what percentage of buyers at brick-and-mortar bookstores made their choice by reading Amazon customer reviews.”

Editor-in-Chief of Midwest Book Review, James A. Cox says book reviews posted on the Amazon.com web site “will reach a larger audience than one printed, published or posted on any other newspaper, periodical, publication, or web site.”

Out of curiosity I checked out some novels and poetry and short-story collections by Caribbean authors currently on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, to see how they have been faring with customer reviews. Proceeding from the assumption that their books would naturally appeal to readers from the Caribbean, I wanted to see if they had been receiving feedback about their work. I also wanted to see if it was possible to determine what percentage of the customer reviews, if any, had come from Caribbean readers or originated from within the Caribbean. The books cited have all received critical acclaim. Here’s a sampling of what I discovered.

Author	Title	Amazon Reviews	Barnes & Nobel Reviews
Derek Walcott	Omeros (1992)	15	7
	White Egrets (2010 & 2011)	11	0
	Selected Poems (2007)	4	0
Mark McWatt	The Journey to Le Repentir (2009)	0	0
	Suspended Sentences (2005	2	0
Opal Palmer Adisa	Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories (2007)	0	0
	I Name me Name (2008)	0	0
Tiphanie Yanique	How to Escape from a Leper Colony(2010)	5	0
Earl lovelace	The Dragon can’t Dance (1988)	10	0
	Salt (2004)	3	0
	Is Just a Movie (2012)	0	0
Merle Collins	The Ladies are Upstairs (2011)	0	0
	Lady in a Boat (2003)	0	0
Austin Clarke	The Polished Hoe (2003)	29	0
	More: A novel (2010)	0	0
Colin Channer	Waiting in Vain (1999)	446	4
	Satisfy My Soul (2003)	117	11
Marlon James	Book of Night Women (2009)	69	27
	John Crow’s Devil (2010)	16	6
Elizabeth Nunez	Boundaries (2011)	3	1
	Anna In Between (2009)	4	0
	Prospero’s Daughter (2006)	9	0

 

Of the sampling above, Colin Channer and Marlon James received the most customer reviews on both Amazon and Barnes & Nobel. With respect to B&N, much of the feedback consists of star ratings and brief comments.

Needless to say, a lack of customer reviews on Amazon and B&N is in no way a reflection of the quality of a writer’s work, nor does it suggest that they aren’t getting any sales. With regard to the books cited above, it is highly likely that the bulk of their sales are being generated at brick-and-mortar bookstores within and outside of the Caribbean, including North America and the UK. In which case, word of mouth (the old-fashioned way) would be the primary mode of reader feedback. What the paucity of reviews on Amazon does suggest (at least to me) is that this ‘word of mouth’ is not filtering through online sufficiently– and not just at Amazon.com and Barnes & Nobel. Few online booksellers, if any, attract reader comments and reviews as regularly and abundantly as Amazon, including Barnes & Nobel. Moreover, their author book pages are arguably not as dynamic or appealing as Amazon’s. Many bookseller websites are also plagued by metadata issues. Metadata is the information that the sites provide about books, including the book’s title, cover, summary, publication date, category, author, publisher and price.

CEO of AllRoamceBooks, Lori James told Smartbitchestrashybooks.com “Metadata is important to all booksellers, but it’s especially vital for a digital bookseller. We rely on it to replicate the bookstore browsing experience. When the metadata is rich and accurate, we can even improve on the brick and mortar experience in some ways …  It can help readers find books they didn’t know they wanted or needed.”

You’d be surprised at how many online bookstores (and in some cases even publishers’ websites) provide wrong or incomplete metadata – or display books without covers. This can be a pain to authors, not to mention a turn off to readers, and it can put a damper on sales.

The general consensus is that customer reviews can help to create buzz (positive or negative) and it can make a big difference in how well a book sells.  Perhaps Caribbean readers can do more to help put the spotlight on fellow Caribbean authors by posting comments and reviews of their books on Amazon and other bookseller sites, as well as sites like Goodreads and also tweet about them on Twitter – regardless of whether or not the books were purchased online.

What do you think? Should we make time to go online and give feedback about the books we’ve read, including those written by non-Caribbean authors?

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Junot Díaz, in responding to a student who asked whether a writer should make sure readers get the contexts writers present in fiction, said, “When it comes down to it, I think that most people forget that on average, readers are very generous.  Which is to say, 99 percent of the planet doesn’t give a shit about reading. Most people don’t want to read, they don’t care about reading, but people who are readers are incredibly generous. They will stick through a book for a very long time.” Read more 

Derek Walcott: ‘The Oxford poetry job would have been too much work’

As his reworking of Robinson Crusoe goes on stage, Derek Walcott talks about Caribbean culture, his spat with VS Naipaul – and why he didn’t want the poetry job anyway. Read more in the Guardian

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With online education establishing the precedent that technology can serve as a catalyst to provide education to the masses, education administrators are starting to see the value in exploring technology as a means of enhancing the educational experience.  From online education’s humble roots grew an academic ecosystem with varied levels of education, from Project Management certification to even online graduate degrees.

Now educators from all levels of instruction are piggy-backing off this success and figuring out how to use digital devices, such as the e-reader, to make the classroom learning experience even richer and more dynamic. As e-reading devices grow in popularity, several colleges have already implemented pilot programs involving e-readers. These programs have demonstrated promise, but e-readers do come with limitations that must be addressed in order to maximize the overall positive effect that they can have on the North American classroom.

During the 2009 fall semester, Princeton University performed a pilot program testing the usefulness of e-readers in the classroom. A total of 51 students were given access to e-readers for use in three separate courses. While most students made positive remarks about their reading experience, many experienced more overall classroom difficulty, primarily due to a perceived decrease in note-taking and referencing abilities.

Through Educause Quarterly, Joan Wines and Julius Bianchi report on a similar case study performed at California Lutheran University in the 2009-2010 academic year. Forty students in two introductory English courses checked out e-readers from the university library. Each student downloaded digital versions of the assigned texts, and course materials were made available for use on the e-readers. Overall, the students involved in the pilot program demonstrated an expansion of vocabulary, a greater interest in the reading material, and better developed essays.

In both the Princeton and California Lutheran pilots, students used less paper. Digital texts already save paper and the impact becomes greater when students use e-readers for multiple texts. Additionally, paper usage is reduced even more when instructors make digital copies of the coursework available to students. This amounts to a notable environmental benefit.

The use of e-readers also provides a number of convenience benefits. As witnessed in the California Lutheran study, immediate access to a digital dictionary available on the e-reader helped some students expand their vocabulary. Moreover, some students reported that “seeing only one page of an assigned text at a time eliminated a bundle of little distractions,” allowing them to focus better on reading assignments. The built-in annotation features also made it easier for some students to keep track of notes. An article written by Scholastic notes that carrying an entire library on a single device may help reduce the amount of weight students carry in backpacks, and having immediate access to all necessary textbooks lessens the odds of students leaving vital materials behind.

Photo source: World.reader.org

In spite of the apparent advantages in current case studies, there are some limitations that must be addressed before the tool can provide the greatest possible classroom benefit. According to the Princeton report, “study and reference habits of a lifetime were challenged by device limitations.” Some students found their “ability to compare documents, or have more than one open at a time” hampered them to the point of distraction. Additionally, while some students in both studies found the available annotation and organization tools helpful, others found them lacking. In order for e-readers to better meet educational needs in the future, further improvements should be made regarding viewing options and writing tools. More educational publishers will also need to make digital versions of their textbooks available at a notably lower price in order to offset the cost of purchasing e-readers.

Studies already indicate that e-readers could have a positive effect on the North American classroom, especially in terms of student convenience and interest. Some insufficiencies still remain, but if e-reader manufacturers and textbook publishers address these issues, the benefit of e-reader use in the classroom can grow even more.

Brooke Folliot is an avid writer who writes about topics surrounding the rising emergence of online education and how it could affect the way students of the future learn, interact, and contribute to the world around them.  She holds a graduate degree in business and is currently considering further graduate work in the field of organizational behaviour.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to present prizes to Commonwealth Book Prize and Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners: ©Commonwealth Foundation

Six months ago the Commonwealth Foundation established Commonwealth Writers, an online hub to “inspire, inform and create a community of writers from all over the world” and to “develop and promote the best new fiction from across the Commonwealth.” The creation of the site coincided with the launch of the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, two new literary competitions to replace the twenty-five year old Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the more recent Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

Commonwealth Writers, the administrators of both the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, have now launched a new Publishing Portal equipped with a dedicated page for each Commonwealth country and an interactive map. It is hoped that the portal will stimulate discussions among participating writers and give them a platform to share opinions and ideas.

“We want to use this forum to explore publishing solutions, which could help create a fairer and more accessible publishing landscape for writers and readers,” said the administrators in their latest newsletter. Writers are encouraged to check out their country’s page and use the comment box to share their experiences.

“You’ll see a quote on each country’s page, some literary, some to inspire you and some to make you think.  We’ll also be running weekly country polls to discover how you feel about key issues,” said Commonwealth Writers.

They added: “Our first focus is on the Caribbean, in response to its desire to develop a new publishing infrastructure. As part of this, Commonwealth Writers has joined forces with NGC BOCAS Lit Fest and the British Council to support writers, writing and publishing. The Caribbean Literature Action Group AG) will be launched in Port of Spain on Wednesday 25 April. The quotes on each Caribbean country’s page are from research and interviews conducted with the members of CALAG. Please respond to these in your country’s comment box and add your own thoughts; in turn these can then be shared with CALAG.

“Building on this, there’ll be a publishing debate at Hay [Festival] and we’ll be at The Literary Consultancy in London to examine international perspectives on publishing on Saturday 9 June. This event will be chaired by Ellah Allfrey deputy editor of Granta.

“If you are not yet a member of our active online communities, please connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and the Commonwealth Writers website.”

The shortlists for the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prizewill be announced on April 24 and the five regional winners for each prize will be announced May 22. The two overall winners, one for each prize, will be selected from the regional winners. As part of a new global partnership between Commonwealth Writers and Hay Festival in Wales, the two overall winners will be announced there June 8. The prizes will be presented by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the winners will be talking to BBC Radio 4′s Harriett Gilbert about their work.

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“But a trick vessel is never filled

  Without secrets”

As with all new and wonderful mysteries, Andre Bagoo’s first collection of poetry, Trick Vessels, requires one to have ample amounts of time and quiet to properly ponder and appreciate the complexity of ideals, both subtle and raw, that are presented within.  Quite like a trick vessel itself, the poems are cleverly crafted to astonish the reader as they all flow from this one collection in three discernible yet undeniably linked ways. Some are shown as clear, refreshing and deceptive as water; others are as intoxicating as the headiest of wines, fragrant and dark-coloured. Then there are those that are a delightfully eclectic blend of wine and water.

This is not to say that the poems are divided into three sections. The trick lies in the deliberate structure of the collection that allows the reader to simultaneously become familiarized with Bagoo’s unique style whilst being surprised, jarred, quieted and thoroughly seduced by the startling individuality and charm of each piece. You never know which liquid will flow next into your mind’s cup.

Andre Bagoo

With a modern and edgy writing style, Bagoo’s dedication to writing is evident in the crisp and powerfully mind-bending concepts and images that are presented in pieces like “The Unnamed Creature Said To Come From Water”, “Landslide”, the prose poem “To the Centre of the Earth”, and “Rooms” to name a few.  We also get a clear glimpse into the energy, love and undercurrent cynicism of urban life through achingly nostalgic poems such as “A Window at KFC, Frederick Street, Near to a Goal”, “Golden Grove”, “Carnival”, and “My Father’s Car.”

“How to Put a Cat into a Hypnotic Trance” is, on the surface, an adroitly subtle example of how we have come to rely on the internet for even the most unlikely of therapies, but even the most straightforward-seeming poem has multiple layers. Or perhaps the trick is that there aren’t? There is also a treasure of a poem the length of only one line that somehow manages to be both pert and pertinent to any aspect of life a reader could wish to apply it to, the mark of a true poet.

The poems not only exhibit Bagoo’s style but his extensive understanding of history, art, politics and philosophy. The more the reader pours into the book the more is revealed. The poems become more intricate, filled with small epiphanies like those found in “Prima Facie”, “Dribble Cup”, “Prefaces for Seasons” and the title poem itself, “Trick Vessels”:

“I’ve been gulping sea spray

Walking along this country road,

Where a jumbie bird promises little deaths, like fireflies,

Where the asphalt, peeled,

Exposes tiny canyons of silver and quartz,

And a pothole that leads

To the other side of the world.”

Poetry has always been a challenging and deeply rewarding field. It requires inordinately large amounts of passion and humility. Even more than that, it requires writers and readers to think above and beyond themselves whilst looking inwards all at once. It is in itself a curious and magnificent trick. A vessel for our deepest and shallowest musings; our feelings of wholeness, of being fragmented, of simply existing as we are, as more and as less: reading good poetry is its second greatest reward; the first, writing it. As for what a trick vessel actually is, I would suggest that you go find yourself a copy of the book and journey with Bagoo as he explores this fantastic, ancient hoax through really brilliant, unconventional poetry.

Leshanta Roop is a twenty-four year young Trinidadian writer currently working on building her skills in poetry and prose fiction. She has had work published in the 2007 anthology “Heart to Verse: Wodlines from UWI” and is a past participant of The Cropper Foundation Writer’s Residential Workshop (2010). You can follow her blog, Side Project, at leshanta.tumblr.com.

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Joanne C. Hillhouse is hard at work preparing for the launch of her new novel, Oh Gad! It goes on sale internationally on April 17. A native of Antigua & Barbuda, Joanne is the author of Dancing Nude in the Moonlight.and The Boy from Willow Bend. Well known in literary circles throughout the Caribbean, she’s an avid writer and an award-winning freelance journalist. She graciously took some time off her busy schedule to talk with me about her new book, her sources of inspiration as a writer and the work she does nurturing young aspiring authors in Antigua.  

Oh Gad! goes on sale internationally from April 17. How has it been in the run-up to the launch? 

Joanne: Well, we have a launch event scheduled for April 16^th in Antigua. I’m looking forward to that. I held the book in my hands for the first time the other day and had a ‘how did I get here’ moment; and as I signed the copies ahead of the launch I found myself stopping from time to time to look at it or flip through it, hardly able to believe. I’m happy with the end result. But I am also overwhelmed and nervous as hell; though most days too busy, it’s been very busy, to focus on the nerves.

Joanne signs copies of Oh Gad! at Best of Books bookstore in Antigua in preparation for the launch

In an article in the online journal Antigua Stories you reminisce over the days when simple tasks like shelling peas, peeling carrots, and grating coconut used to be normal, everyday household chores for kids. Now you wonder aloud “how many of our kids know that pigeon peas grow on trees and not sealed in plastic on supermarket shelves?” You also lament the way that so little effort is made to preserve the memory of Antigua’s folk wisdom and the roots of the island’s cultural heritage. To what extent is Oh Gad! a product of those sentiments?    

Joanne: Interesting that you should ask that because beyond the personal narrative of the main character Nikki in Oh Gad! there are the political and economic tensions that she gets drawn into, which have a fair amount to do with that tug of war between development and folk culture, progress and preservation. In my lifetime so far, and I’m still in my 30s (by my fingernails), the Caribbean has modernized at a rapid rate. The article you reference spoke to not just the nostalgia for patterns past. I’m too much a child of my time to ever want to reverse modern conveniences; but the foolhardiness of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I have a respect for history, not just the epic ‘important’ bits, but the cultural and social history that help shape who we are. It’s a part of what I try to capture in my books from reminiscing on chasing butterflies during the summer in my first book The Boy from Willow Bend to ‘borrowing’ my mother’s pepperpot recipe for an epic pre-picnic cook-down in Oh Gad!

Oh Gad! is a book set in a fictionalized version of modern Antigua in which a woman, drawn back there by a great tragedy, tries to find a place of belonging within an Antigua in-flux. And at the centre of this is her estranged family who are about as roots as you can get, key characters in the coal pot making-slash-pottery tradition that goes all the way back to the plantation. Perhaps my father’s family’s generations’ old involvement in this old-school pottery making drew me into researching it, rendering it, celebrating it, honouring it in  the way that I do; by telling stories.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Joanne: I hope they find it to be an engaging read; interesting, thought provoking and entertaining. As always, I hope Caribbean people see a bit of themselves and I hope non-Caribbean readers see some of our common humanity. Beyond that I can’t really control what they take from it as part of what we take from works of art has to do with what we bring to them. Each person will take something different.

How were you able to land a publishing deal with Strebor/Atria/Simon & Schuster, headed by publisher and New York Times bestselling author Zane?

Joanne: I’d like to believe the manuscript had something to do with it. But really all credit to my agent, with a tip of the hat to Eric Jerome Dickey who recommended her to me, who believed in the work and worked her network until she landed a publisher who believed in it too.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s been about seven years since your last book, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight? Why did it take so long to see a new book and the first full-length novel by Joanne C. Hillhouse? 

Joanne: Has it been seven years? Wow. All I can say is, the process is different for each writer, and it takes as long as it takes, especially when you don’t have the luxury of investing in the story full time.

You’ve received awards and accolades for your contributions to the literary arts in Antigua & Barbuda, including as the co-founder of the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize, a creative writing programme for young authors. Knowing the daunting challenges that writers in the Caribbean face in trying to get published and recognized, are you comfortable encouraging young people from the region to aspire to a writing career?

Joanne: Yes… and no. Let me explain. Wadadli Pen isn’t just about encouraging them to pursue a writing career, it’s about encouraging them to express themselves through the literary arts, to value the literary arts, to value their voice, to realize that they have a voice. I believe writing can be a therapeutic process. I also believe it can be a valuable, make that a necessary, skill whatever career path you choose. But if there are writers in the group who wonder am I, could I, should I, dare I, then I want to reach them as well because I didn’t have that. I still don’t know if I could recommend a writing career to someone, in the Caribbean or anywhere else, if you want to live a safe and secure and financially stable life. But if you want to write, write. Life is both too long and too short to spend it doing something you don’t want to be doing. If you want to marry that writing with something else, a law career perhaps, do your thing.

Me, I never wanted to do anything but write. I became a journalist because I wanted to write, not because I was hungry for the breaking story, though being a journalist has informed my creative writing as well, so it hasn’t been a dead end as far as circuitous routes go. Now I freelance full time doing all types of writing and editing. I’m still very much a work-in-progress, and in part because of that, and because I’ve experienced how soul-crushing and confidence-shaking that cycling of submission and rejection and criticism can be, I don’t pretend to recommend anything to anyone with any certainty. I’ve found through my own trial and error, though, that you can find creative and interesting ways to turn this thing that you love to do, writing, into something that pays you. I’ve found too that with determination you can hang  in there and keep building to the point of not just seeing your book in print but having people tell you what reading it meant to them. That said, if big money is your motivation, you might get lucky, but this probably isn’t the path for you. And I tell them that too.

How are you able to juggle your work as an author, journalist, editor, producer and your many other creative-writing pursuits with family life and your personal needs as a woman?

Joanne: Sometimes not very well at all to be honest; still trying to find the right balance.

How important is writing to you?

Joanne: It’s not just something I do. It’s part of who I am. When I can’t write, or at least read, it feels like something essential is missing. Which is why even in the midst of deadlines and all the promotional activities, I recently applied to and got accepted to a writing workshop at Brown University. I’ve got to give myself a time out from everything else and get writing again.

Joanne is scheduled to appear at Poets & Passion – A Caribbean Literary Lime on Sunday, June 17 at St Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, along with celebrated authors Lorna Goodison from Jamaica and Elizabeth Nunez from Trinidad & Tobago.

Poets & Passion – A Caribbean Literary Lime, is a monthly showcase of weekend readings and book signings featuring a mix of distinguished and emerging writers of Caribbean origin. The inaugural session was held March 23 in Brooklyn at St. Francis College. It’s a production of the Caribbean Cultural Theatre.

The series have hosted several Caribbean literary icons, including novelist/historian Kamau Braithwaite (Barbados), dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (UK/Jamaica), novelists E.R. Braithwaite (Guyana), Merle Collins (Grenada) and Commonwealth Prize winner Robert Antoni (Bahamas).

For more information, contact the Caribbean Cultural Theatre at (718) 783-8345 or info@caribbeantheatre.org

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So you’ve finally completed the manuscript you’ve been struggling with for months. Now all you need is help with proofreading and editing to get it fine tuned and polished. As luck would have it, there’s an intriguing online tool available that purports to help writers with editorial feedback similar to what you’re likely to get from a critiquing partner or group.

It’s called AutoCrit and it’s the brainchild of Nina Davies, a writer and computational linguist from Australia. Using her background as a computational linguist (someone who combines linguistics and artificial intelligence applications to make computers understand and process human languages) Davies created the AutoCrit Editing Wizard, an instant book editor that shows you the problems in your manuscript with the click of a mouse.

AutoCrit identifies weaknesses such as repetitive words and phrases, redundancies, clichés, dialogue tags, slow pacing, lack of variation in sentence structure and highlights homonyms – routine mistakes typical of early drafts. It doesn’t suggest how to solve those problems. “The reason for this is that there are many different solutions and only you know what is best for your story,” the website explains.

Instead, Autocrit offers guidelines, leaving it up to the user to decide how to fix the flaws

Although it was intended primarily for fiction writers, Autocrit is reportedly also useful for other forms of writing, including articles and proposals.

To use it, you simply go to the web site, paste your text into the editing box and click “Analyze My Text.” It returns a report in seconds. There’s nothing to download or install. And since it’s web-based, you can use it anytime and anywhere.

You can sign up as a guest for a free subscription which limits you to 500 words. Alternatively you can opt for an annual membership of $47 or the platinum package of $117. Members can submit from 1,000 -100,000 words at a time, depending on the membership level chosen. Guests can only submit 3 times per day. Members can submit as many times as they wish.

Autocrit makes no claims to helping users identify plotting or characterization issues, or other shortcomings that are more intricate such as lack of emotional depth or the failure to “show” rather than “tell”. It can’t help with punctuation either. Whether or not it’s suitable for writers in general or primarily for beginners, it’s up to individual users to decide, bearing in mind you can sign up for a free trial, albeit it allows you to analyze just 500-words at a time.

The site also features a Writing Advice Centre, offering users a free resource of articles on various aspects of fiction writing. They’re written by published authors and subject-matter experts.

To date, Autocrit has garnered mostly positive reviews from users. It has been chosen as one of the Writer’s Digest 101 best Websites for Writers.

In a guest post on writer, Lucy Monroe’s blog, Autocrit founder Nina Davies explained her motivation for creating the site.

“The trouble with self-editing is that it is easy to miss problems. You read what you think is on the page, not what is actually there. Also, when you read your manuscript, you might realize that something is wrong, but not be able to identify the source of the problem. The Wizard solves these issues by showing you exactly where the problems are. With the wizard, you not only edit better, you edit faster, too. I wrote the Wizard in my spare time. What can I say, I’m a geek at heart. I’m also a computational linguist. (That’s someone who writes programs to help computers understand human languages). So I took what I knew about analyzing language and applied it to the problem of editing.”

She added: “I had fun writing the Wizard and I was really surprised (and pleased) when I discovered that other writers liked the Wizard, too. In fact, I was thrilled when Writer’s Digest gave it their seal of approval by naming it as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers.”

Davies is so confident she’s giving users value for money, Autocrit offers a 100% money-back guarantee within 30 days on paid memberships. She also gives writing advice on Twitter at @EditingWizard

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Antiguan author, Joanne C. Hillhouse, is about to launch her third book.

The novel, entitled Oh Gad! will be released internationally by US publisher Strebor/Atria/Simon & Schuster on April 17. In Antigua, a festive Midnight Launch party is scheduled for 11 pm on the night of April 16 at the Best of Books Village Walk branch on Friars Hill Road. Fans of the author will be able to get an autographed copy at three minutes past midnight.

“You have to be there to raise your glasses as the clock strikes midnight as Oh Gad! officially takes its place on bookshelves around the world,” a release announced.

Joanne is the author of two books of fiction; The Boy from Willow Bend and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight. In 2008, The Boy from Willow Bend was added to the Antigua schools reading list. Oh Gad!is her first full-length novel and her first with an American publisher.

 

It’s about Nikki Baltimore, a woman who was born in Antigua but grew up in the US with her father, separated from her mother and maternal siblings living in a village back home in Antigua.

Her mother’s death causes her to return home to a family from whom she has been alienated for many years. While there she is offered a job by the ruling government. She makes an impulsive decision to accept it and stay in Antigua. She soon becomes embroiled in political intrigue and the emotional cross-currents of romance and her relationship with her family. In the midst of this turmoil she journey’s headlong into a quest of self discovery as she struggles to understand her family, her own feelings towards them and the country she has never really been able to call home.

Joanne C. Hillhouse is much admired in her native Antigua and other parts of the Caribbean, both as a writer and a creative-writing tutor. She has been a mentor to many youths, helping them develop their writing skills and encouraging them to develop a love for reading.

In 2004 she was presented with a UNESCO Honour Award for her contribution to literacy and the literary arts in Antigua & Barbuda. She’s also A 2008 Breadloaf fellow and a recipient of the 2011 David Hough Literary Prize from the Caribbean Writer. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Tongues of the Ocean, Mythium, Ma Comère, The Caribbean Writer, Calabash and Sea Breeze.

In 2011 JCI (Junior Chamber International) West Indies recognised her as one of “ten outstanding young persons” in the region for her humanitarian work in Antigua, and her involvement in writing and reading programmes like the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize which she founded in 2004. The Wadadli Youth Pen Prize is a writing competition for young aspiring Antiguan writers. It also helps them to hone their writing skills and provides the budding authors with opportunities to promote their work and share it with their peers.  Over the years it has hosted writing workshops, and produced published audio recordings of winning stories. The winners have also gotten opportunities to share their work with live audiences.

Joanne is also an editorial consultant and an award-winning freelance journalist. She has published feature articles in Américas, Caribbean Beat, and CLR James Journal. She has also worked in television and film – including as associate producer of Antigua’s first feature length film, The Sweetest Mango.

For more on Hillhouse and her work, visit her page http://www.jhohadli.com or the her blog http://wadadlipen.wordpress.com – home of the youth writing programme she coordinates.