Novel Niche

07/05/2024

The Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers was transformative to my sense of self as a Trinidadian writer, to my ability to name myself as one of us, proud and openly.

It brings me such pleasure to be editing The Cropper Foundation's forthcoming climate justice anthology, Writing for Our Lives, alongside the esteemed Funso Aiyejina. His 2010 workshop tutelage, with Merle Hodge, helped immeasurably to guide and sharpen the writer I was becoming, was allowing myself to be. In his hands, this anthology is poised to resonate powerfully. I'm honoured to assist and work with him to bring it to urgent light.

Urgent, because our Caribbean is on the frontlines of environmental crisis. I'm grateful to Omar Mohammed, Ardene C. Sardine, and the full Cropper team for taking up this charge, and channeling it through our stories. Never have they mattered more.

Fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction submissions to Writing for Our Lives are now open: https://thecropperfoundation.org/writingforourlives/

Please read all guidelines carefully before sending in work. Entries close June 7, 2024. Writing for Our Lives is a Today Today, Congotay! project, funded by Open Society Foundations, implemented by The Cropper Foundation.

07/06/2023

"No!
I will not still my voice!
I have
too much to claim—
if you see me
looking at books
or coming to your house
or walking in the sun
know that I look for fire!"

Guyanese poet and political activist Martin Carter was born on this day, June 7th, in 1927.

06/08/2022

"Wherever I walk, I see sites irradiated by love, petrified from it: a bus stop turned inside out, metallic and whining. A pair of crusty sneakers slung over a high wire, tongues tangled in each other. When I read you, I am that alert to what loving does, to the space it makes. I read you then wander, aching and rudimentary in my longings."

The second letter of is to "Blue Anther" by Richie Hofmann.

Image: Hauling in the Net, posted at Flickr by Denish C under a Creative Commons License. Dear “Blue Anther”, What are you going to do with my blood? Wherever I walk, I see sites irradi…

01/08/2022

We, the word-passionate, speak often *of* the poems that animate our lives, haunt our dreams, enrich our fantasies. What if we started speaking *to* them?

Welcome to by Novel Niche: Writing Letters to the Poems We Can't Quit. Each entry will be a letter to a poem: not analyzing or decoding, not scrying for meaning, but speaking to it like a friend, a lover, a stranger, a soulmate, an enemy, a being.

In honour of the beginning of The Sealey Challenge, the first letter is to "Object Permanence", by Nicole Sealey.

Image: Lovers, posted at Flickr by Ferdinando Vella under a Creative Commons License. Dear “Object Permanence”, I don’t know the creature I am made in love. I reacquaint myself wi…

30/07/2022

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”

Happy Birthday to Emily Brontë, born on this day in 1818. May all the moors be haunted, bright and fierce, in your honour.

25/02/2022

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian journalist, author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, born in Ukraine. 🇺🇦

26/03/2021

"Look at we place, again, closer. Look and listen to this gridwork of dirty streets, doubles vendors, metal-grille shopfront, government plazas, all near to dubious, reclaimed waterfront, and tell me you eh love this place bad, as much as you cuss it."

Today's close reading from the poems of Colin Robinson's You Have You Father Hard Head (Peepal Tree Press) is "Connel, Morning", taking us deep into Port of Spain on a foreday morning.

https://novelniche.net/2021/03/25/and-i-am-the-man-laughing-connel-morning/

Image: Port of Spain, Trinidad, posted at Flickr by Georgia Popplewell under a Creative Commons License. If you have spent any time at all in Port of Spain, you will know — like this poem kno…

25/03/2021

"What name do we hold in our soft viscera, hoping to mewl it into the night? What name do we want to wave hard, like a flag?"

Read "I Have No Name for my Father", the fourth of seven close readings from Colin Robinson's You Have You Father Hard Head (Peepal Tree Press), a series made to honour and celebrate his poems.

https://novelniche.net/2021/03/24/and-i-am-the-man-laughing-i-have-no-name-for-my-father/

Image: Black Boy B***y, posted at Flickr by nathanmac87 under a Creative Commons License. We are who we are because of those who made us, or so we’ve been told. We model our lives in the shad…

24/03/2021

The poem understands, and waits patiently for us to understand too, that the many stations of death have their own allotted times: that there is the public-facing death, and the several that fewer and fewer know about, til you are distilled to the one death you can hold in your hands, can scoop into your mouth or lay on your tongue like ashes.

"The Plural of Me", the third of seven reflections on the poems of Colin Robinson's You Have You Father Hard Head (Peepal Tree Press).

https://novelniche.net/2021/03/23/and-i-am-the-man-laughing-the-plural-of-me/

Image: Red Gift, posted at Flickr by Eric Martin under a Creative Commons License. If we are lucky within our sorrow, those who die before us tell us exactly how they wish to be mourned. You can ta…

23/03/2021

"The poem asks us, what do we do when we get to the brink of our potbellied, pen*s-throbbing want? What would you do? Can you declaim it in lines as hot, and holy, and activated in sweat and sulphur, as these?"

This is "Waiting for your Gun", the second of seven close readings of poems from Colin Robinson's You Have You Father Hard Head (Peepal Tree Press).

https://novelniche.net/2021/03/22/and-i-am-the-man-laughing-waiting-for-your-gun/

Image: Jump, posted at Flickr by Scott McLean under a Creative Commons License. We never know when we’ll be called on to dive. Robinson’s erotic poems have long been footsoldiers in the…

22/03/2021

"we must acknowledge that this is no idle quarry; this is a rich and unsentimental hoard: eight steps through brown blood, soiled linen, lagahoo energy and too little salt to say a heraldic suck your mudda to shame."

On , I begin my close readings of seven poems from Colin Robinson's You Have You Father Hard Head (Peepal Tree Press, 2016).

https://novelniche.net/2021/03/21/and-i-am-the-man-laughing-i-want-to-bite/

Image: Sargassum, posted at Flickr by stuartanthony under a Creative Commons License. The poem is telling us about shapeshifting. One of the earliest poems in Colin Robinson’s You Have You Fa…