Callaloo’s Workshop in the United Kingdom: Our Stakes in the USA and Beyond

A number of circumstances of the 2013 calendar year afforded us opportunities to share directly and more broadly some of Callaloo’s projects from which readers, academics, and creative writers here in the United States have long benefited and enjoyed. I am referring specifically to the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW) and to the Callaloo Conference, each of which remains free and open to the general public, wherever we stage them. However, in this Editor’s Note, I will focus only on the workshop, which assembled at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London in the United Kingdom. Thanks to Professor Joan Anim-Addo, Director of the Centre, along with Marl’ene Edwin, her research assistant, for hosting the CCWW, which was the first we have ever held outside the United States. We have also planned a CCWW to serve the English-speaking Caribbean, which will be led by Maaza Mengiste (fiction) and Gregory Pardlo (poetry), at the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados (May 18–24, 2014). One of our primary goals, as we long ago stated, is to serve—and to share Callaloo and its various projects with—the peoples of the African Diaspora. Hence our creative writing workshops in English-language sites in the Caribbean and, most recently, in the United Kingdom.

According to poet Vievee Francis and novelist Ravi Howard, U. S. American writers who led the one-week long CCWW sessions at Goldsmiths, London, the 2013 November gatherings in the UK were some of the most productive, and challenging, workshops we have assembled during the last five years. No wonder. As soon as we advertised the workshop, a sizeable number of new and emerging poets and fiction writers, especially from the United Kingdom, applied for admission to the workshop. (However, a number of writers living outside the UK applied, and four of them were also admitted. Consideration for admission to each CCWW is blind, based exclusively on the work each applicant submits for admission.) The greater the number of applicants, the more competitive the admission and, unfortunately, we were able to accommodate only seven participants in the poetry writing session and an even smaller number—only five, in fact—in fiction writing. This widespread interest, along with the high quality of the applicants’ writing samples, not only signaled a positive future of the CCWW in the UK; it also clearly announced our need to expand our UK project to mirror what we have in the United States: a two-week long engagement with twice the number of participants, taught by four workshop leaders. In other words, we hope that the finance supporting the workshop improves in the very near future so that we can reach a greater number of writers in the UK and elsewhere.

In this issue of Callaloo, we are proud and honored to publish work from some of the participants in the first UK session of the CCWW, which, again, was led by Vievee Francis and Ravi Howard. The workshop leaders’ selections of fiction and poetry for this issue of the journal not only represent the quality of the writing of the participants; the selections that follow also suggest the high standards of instruction and the judicious judgments that CCWW’s instructing leaders offer. Referring to her experiences as the poetry workshop leader, Vievee Francis contends that the Goldsmiths, London, gathering “was one of the most satisfying and productive workshops in my tenure of Callaloo’s providing such experiences.” And the poetry and fiction from the CCWW participants in this issue of Callaloo indeed represent that aesthetic satisfaction and craft-driven productivity of the two workshop groups.

I am very proud to say that our four continuing workshop leaders—Vievee Francis, Ravi Howard, Maaza Mengiste, and Gregory Pardlo—are prize-winning writers, who are dedicated to the necessary teaching they do in each workshop setting. National prizes aside, these are excellent writers and master teachers, who, as I announced two years ago, will be asked to lead writing sessions in...