Diana McCaullay of JET has published a new book called Huracan. We loved her last one, Dog Heart, and can't wait to read this one.

http://www.dianamccaulay.com/huracan.htm




Congratulations and best of luck on the book, Diana.
-TBNet

Congratulations on the new book Diana. I loved Dog Heart so I can't wait to get a read off Huracan!!

Wishing you all the best with the book.

Listen to Diana, in her own voice, chat it up with Joanne Hillhouse (Wadadli** Pen founder) on matters literary and the chores of projecting the "universality" of her stories beyond these shores.

Joanne Hillhouse: One of the things we try to encourage at Wadadli Pen is writing with a Caribbean sensibility – writing that’s reflective of our unique consciousness and journey as a people; this is not meant to be genre limiting but to reinforce the idea that great stories, the landscape against which they’re set, the characters that populate them, the imagination that drives them, and so on doesn’t just exist out there, somewhere else, that these stories live in us, that we can produce great literature too.
Can you speak a little bit to how your sense of being a Caribbean person informs your writing and, if it does, do you find this limiting in any way or as I think it can be, liberating?

Diana McCaulay: I’m definitely a Caribbean writer. Sometimes, like now, when I’ve just launched a book, and I’m thinking about what next, I think about whether or not to write another book set in Jamaica. And I find myself floundering immediately. It’s partly because my books and stories have a very strong grounding in place, and I think I would have to go and live in another place, at least for awhile, to do that place justice.

But I want to fight against the notion that the Caribbean is not important – what did Naipaul say? “Nothing was created in the West Indies.”

Anyway, I want to fight against this idea that we have created nothing, are nothing, apart from a few small islands, really just playgrounds for tourists, I want to talk about the love I have always felt for Jamaica, about what it means to be an island person, about the very real challenges of our societies, but also of our vibrancy and resilience.

I think the Caribbean is fascinating. Once a Peace Corps Volunteer who worked with the Jamaica Environment Trust said ; “Jamaica is all the problems of the world writ small.”
I like that and thought it was true – the problems are so close to us all. I want to hold up a mirror to our societies, I want readers all over the world to see into our islands, our people, I want them to be fascinated and moved.

Of course we can produce great literature. But we need more readers.


Wadadli Pen Link:
http://wadadlipen.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/chatting-writing-and-publishing-in-th e-caribbean-with-diana-mccaulay

**Link to the Amerindian Wadadli people of the Leeward Islands (especially Antigua) and the adoption of its namesake for the local Rastafarian community there:
http://wadadliantigua.com/about-wadadli.html