The Off-the-Page Story

The term off-the-page story, a familiar phrase in some publishing circles, refers to the life events, experiences, and conversations that inform a writer’s published work. Those ideas often deal with how writers see their work and how they view themselves as creators. This off-the-page, authorial narrative often develops in tandem with the writing. The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop has become part of the off-the-page story for the fiction and poetry featured in this section. The discussions, questions, and interactions in the workshop have helped to support and inform this work and future publications of CCWW alumni.

With the inaugural UK event, the workshop travels through the Diaspora just as the journal has so often done. Long a staple of Callaloo, special issues have featured writers throughout the African Diaspora, including Ethiopia, Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico. Those on-the-page collectives mirror the London gathering, hosted by the Department of Caribbean Studies at Goldsmith’s, University of London. The journey continues in May when Callaloo travels to the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados, where instructors Maaza Mengiste and Gregory Pardlo will welcome writers and poets to the inaugural Caribbean workshop.

Callaloo has become a creative home space for writers where the ideas of identity are as varied as the migration experiences. In her The Guardian essay “What makes a ‘real African’?” Maaza writes powerfully about “the cultural and geographic mobility” of contemporary African writers, a distinction that I believe applies to black writers in the United States, the Caribbean, and wherever their migrations have taken them. Maaza notes that the imagination travels as well as the body. I believe that sense of personal Diaspora shapes the contours of the individual narrative voice, and I saw that reflected in our five fiction writers and the talent and variety of their work. I appreciated the individuality of the voices as well as the commonalities of our personal experiences and craft approaches. Callaloo poetry instructor Vievee Francis stresses the importance of interior mapping, and perhaps that interiority is the craft’s homeland, a foundation for any narratives connected to culture and region.

In London, I returned again to the work of Albert Murray and his “spyglass tree” where his Train Whistle Guitar narrator Scooter describes what he sees, remembers, and imagines in concert. I have discussed his work in previous Callaloo workshops, and in 2013, the year of his passing, that legacy remains important to my work in fiction. While I was growing up in Albert Murray’s home-state Alabama, I saw his work on the shelves of the Montgomery bookstore Roots & Wings, a fitting name for a bookstore focused on the work of black writers. To paraphrase journalist Hodding Carter, roots and wings are the two lasting bequests we can leave for future generations. Perhaps this too is a fitting description of the community of writers I met in London and at previous Callaloo workshops. The spyglass tree is both rooted and mobile. The lens of the glass is shaped by the interiority and the experiences of the writer. Our literary travels start and end where we choose, on the page and in our experiences. It remains heartening to see that spirit of mobility, through the world and our imaginations, flowing through our workshop spaces.

Ravi Howard

Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Sion Dayson, Aisha Phoenix, and Karen Onojaife

Michael K. Taylor © 2013