Bahamas Writers Summer Institute 2010.

By Helen Klonaris

FOR YEARS I had been envisioning a school or center of sorts where writing and social justice work might come together. Unable to sustain my writing life in Nassau, for various reasons (another story, really), I left Nassau in 2005 in pursuit of a Masters of Fine Arts in writing. I found a very special program in San Francisco in which to do that, and in the process experienced a different model of teaching, and of learning. I was inspired by this model, a graduate MFA program called “Writing and Consciousness” and when I graduated in 2007, I knew I wanted to create something similar in The Bahamas. In 2008 I approached Marion Bethel, a friend and sister writer, and asked her if she might work with me to envision a writing institute. She was very willing and the following year, Bahamas Writers Summer Institute (BWSI) emerged. BWSI is co-founded and co-directed by Marion Bethel and I. We work collaboratively and our collaborative approach shapes everything that BWSI embodies; we are assisted by our program coordinator, Christi Cartwright.

The first BWSI was held in July, 2009. We had seven writers and scholars on our teaching team, and twenty-five students – beginning and more advanced writers who craved the opportunity to come into contact with other Bahamian writers, and practice their craft in community with each other.

The program was five weeks long, during which time participants read works by other Bahamian and Caribbean writers, read and learned how to critique each other’s work, attended readings by published Bahamian authors and talked about what it means to be a Bahamian writer. It was the first gathering of its kind; some folks said it was ‘like church’ because it gave them a sense of hopefulness that being a writer in the Bahamas was possible.

So much of what BWSI gave people is not measurable; how do you measure being able to value your words, your stories, yourself as a writer? How do you measure valuing your imagination in a place that often requires us to shut down our imaginations, because, the truth is, imagination is powerful, is dangerous, can show us new ways of being in the world that would upset the status quo… or it can also show us the realities we are already living and that we’ve been taught to turn a blind eye to. The responsibility of a writer is that profound. But what I can say is that participants from last year’s program have gone on to publish locally and abroad, to found a publishing press (Sonia Farmer’s Poinciana Press), and to form writing groups in which they continue to support each other’s writing process and work. These are all extremely important markers of a growing and thriving literary community. In the hopes of continuing to support this growth, BWSI will continue to create space for writers and those exploring the possibilities of writing to gather, and learn the craft.

Last year we were extremely fortunate to have Obediah Smith, a very well known and well-travelled poet, teach the poetry workshop, and this year, that workshop will be taught by BWSI’s co-director Marion Bethel, a prize-winning, esteemed Bahamian poet whose work has travelled far and wide across national and international borders.

Lelawatee Manoo Rahming, another prize winning poet and fiction writer (she won the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA) 2001 Short Story Competition) will be teaching the fiction workshop; Dr. Ian Strachan, prolific playwright and scholar, will be teaching the playwriting workshop; Travolta Cooper, award winning screenwriter and director of the 2009 documentary Founding Fathers: Sir Stafford Sands will teach the screenwriting workshop, and I will be teaching the memoir workshop.

We also want to make note of Krista Walkes and Angelique V. Nixon, both amazing scholars who will be joining us to teach Caribbean Literary Theory and Caribbean Literary Imagination – both courses that complement participants’ explorations of writing and their roles as writers.

Because both Marion Bethel and I have for most of our lives been involved in some form of social justice work, the program is very much focused on writing as a socially engaged activity – that is, we believe that writers are not separate from our communities, and that as writers we can either perpetuate the stories that have oppressed us, or, we can speak back to those stories, interrogate them, and use our imaginations in the service of re-writing old stories, and writing new ones. This is the purpose of our theoretical seminars – to really examine the ways we look at story - at literary texts, the choices we have of the kinds of lenses we use to look at ’story’ and how to apply those lenses to our own work. It is exciting work we are doing at BWSI. And I think people come away from it changed in important ways.

Why did we feel a program like this was necessary? Because our libraries are often dusty and in disrepair; because we wanted young people to recognize the power in their voices and stories, in their ability to write down what they know, and to write it well; because we feel that Bahamian imagination is at stake; because we want our writers and our society to have a better sense of our connections to our Caribbean sistren and brethren; because if we don’t tell our stories (in poems, in plays, in films, in novels, in memoirs) who is going to tell them for us???

Workshops will take place from 4pm to 9pm Tuesdays through Fridays, between July 12th and July 29th. For more information or to receive an application, please call BWSI at (242) 325-0341or write BWSI at bahawsi@yahoo.com. Deadline for applications is June 30th.♦bf

Helen Klonaris has been a writer and an activist for most of her life.