Michael Reckord, Gleaner Writer
"I think I want to try something different with this class," the lecturer said to his dozen or so students crammed into a tiny classroom on the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus' Arts Administration block.
This was back in March at the start of a five-week-long, one-night-a-week course in creative writing. Some of the graduates of the course will be reading from their work this afternoon in the New Arts Block.
The dreadlocked lecturer, Kei Miller (born 1978), has been doing 'something different' for decades. You'd never know from the reading of his academic and literary successes that in high school he often got Fs in his subjects, that he dropped out of his English programme at the UWI because of poor grades and that he has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
These personal tidbits were doled out to the class in between information on improving one's writing skills. The personal stuff did more than titillate; it inspired. If he could do so well after a poor start, perhaps his students could, too.
He gets a too-brief introduction in Kingston Noir, a recently published book of short stories about the city's underbelly. He is "a poet, novelist, and essayist. His most recent books are The Last Warner Woman and A Light Song of Light. Miller is also series editor of Heinemann's Caribbean Writers Series and he lectures at the University of Glasgow where he recently completed his PhD".
Elsewhere, you learn that he holds a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from the UK's Manchester Metropolitan University, won the Jamaica Observer Literary Prize for both fiction and poetry in the same year that his first poetry collection, Kingdom of Empty Bellies, was published in 2005 and his collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones and Other Stories, was published in 2006 and shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize.
You'll also learn that the Journal of Commonwealth Literature describes him as "one of the finest Caribbean poetic talents to have appeared in recent decades" and that his fiction has been widely praised for its daring interrogation of Jamaican homophobia and religious intolerance. To us in the creative writing class, he was a knowledgeable, well-travelled, laid-back lecturer who guided us down a quirky, surprising, ultimately rewarding path to enhanced writing skills.
We won't quickly forget these tasks he set us:
- Write an elegy for a village that has died.
- Observe yourself doing something and write objectively about it.
- Tell the class about some aspect of your mother that you didn't like.
- In three minutes, write the words of: a five-year-old girl who wakes at midnight and hears her parents having sex; a stuttering madman who used to be a musician hearing voices while in Papine square; a pretentious social-climbing secretary at lunch at Strawberry Hills; an 800-year-old wizard explaining the use of a magic cup to a boy.
- Write a eulogy for a friend who has died.
- In 10 minutes, list 20 synonyms for 'vagina'.
VARIED GROUP
We were a motley lot, with ages ranging from early 20s to mid-70s and a variety of occupations - lawyer, lecturer, musician, guidance counsellor, minister, and graduate student, among others. Uniting us was a desire to also express ourselves in writing.
Dr Miller's assignments generated many intriguing ideas and excellent compositions. It quickly became apparent that the class was not one of literary neophytes. Sharon's eulogy was about a friend who, when she was dying at age 24, asked to be buried in her mother's wedding dress. It would be her only opportunity to wear one.
Olivene wrote in the third person about herself in a titillating, sado-masochistic sexual encounter. Was it an imaginary one? The rest of us are still wondering. Joel produced a long, high-quality fairy tale which, he claimed, he wrote in three hours. Judith wrote a poignant account of a village emptied after the departure of the SS Empire Windrush, on which the first wave of Jamaican emigrants sailed for England in 1948.
With each passing class, Dr Miller revealed more about himself. Though he used to skip classes in high school and often got failing grades for course work, at exam time, he'd settle down and end up with good passes. When he tried the same strategy while at UWI, how-ever, the good grades didn't come and, at one stage, he dropped out.
He copes with his ADHD 'disability' by writing two books simultaneously - one poetry, the other fiction (either short stories or a novel). So when he gets bored with one book, he can turn to the other. He's totally consumed "for a couple of years" with whatever book(s) he's writing, is emotionally drained after it is finished, and takes the next few years off from writing. Then he gets "anxious" and must start writing again.
His love for writing began in high school with Olive Senior's collection of stories Summer Lightning. It caused him for the first time to be interested not in the story he was reading, but in its language. The "trick" in how poetry works, Dr Miller told us, lies in juxtaposition. As the poem leaps, apparently haphazardly, from image to image, the reader's mind automatically tries to bridge the gaps and experiences insights. Facilitating insights and making the familiar seem unfamiliar, so the reader can experience his world in a new way, is the function of creative writing, he said.
Dr Miller emphasised the voice of the writer in the course because, he said, it was a myth that a writer has a single voice. He or she needs many voices to portray the multitudinous world.
He introduced 'Chekhov's gun' to some of us, explaining that the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov taught that if there's a loaded gun in the beginning of a story, it should be used by the end. This was an illustration of a principle of unity in fiction: a story should contain nothing extraneous.
In class, he hinted that he was not a big fan of dub poetry but then, last Friday, I learned he thought it was dead - or almost dead. To an audience of mainly lecturers in the Department of Literatures in English, he gave a talk titled 'A Eulogy for Dub Poetry'. Admitting the topic was "problematic", he said that, with the essay, he was "performing an autopsy", even while not declaring dub poetry actually dead. The poetry, he said, was the "voice of a revolution", and revolutions don't live forever.
While with the early dub poets - Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean 'Binta' Breeze - the poetry had "a great sound, a mighty fury", today dub poetry makes "a faint sound". Concluding, Dr Miller said that dub poetry will probably continue to live "a sort of life" in festival presentations and the like and, while it is probably not the voice of today's poets, it is a poetry we can identify with and should remember.
The essay will be among a collection of Dr Miller's, due out later this year.
Source: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130510/ent/ent4.html
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