Entering its fourth year, the summer workshop for writers under the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute (BWSI) is gearing up for its intense three-week focus on writing workshops, seminars, lectures and readings this coming July.
This year however they are eyeing significant expansion, opening up the workshop to Family Island participants, inviting an extra guest writer to discuss and share their work, and even creating an entirely separate program for high school students unable to take the summer workshop itself.
Already, BWSI has begun a pilot program at a high school that they hope to expand to all high schools in order to foster a love for writing and literature. Under the directorship of College of The Bahamas Professor Ada McKenzie and T.A. Thompson Senior Mistress Deborah Thompson, 20 students at T.A. Thompson Junior High School attend a Junior Writers Club and learn how to hone their craft.
The club, says BWSI co-founder and coordinator Marion Bethel, satisfies the interests of students under 16 years of age who may not be able to take the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute, and also teaches them the value of creative writing at a level unmatched by high school curriculum.
"We want students to be able to know from an early age that this is a possibility for them," said Bethel. "Many don't have the exposure to creative writing in the way that nurtures you to be a writer if you want."
The coordinators are also eyeing a way to expand its summer workshops as well. Besides campaigning to Family Island participants and writers from the diaspora in order to grow its student body, they also look towards inviting more guest lecturers to the summer workshops.
Every year, BWSI invites one Bahamian writer and one guest writer from our Caribbean neighbors to share and discuss their work with the students of the workshop.
The visiting Caribbean writer also gives master workshops in a genre of their choice as well as a special lecture free and open to the public. Such sessions provide these emerging writers with their special knowledge of the writing craft in their field, says BWSI co-creator and coordinator, Helen Klonaris.
"When we have the privilege of great writers visiting us and giving us just a half hour or hour of their thoughts about society, about the world and the Caribbean, it's an incredibly rich moment because we are hearing from someone who has delved into the politics of being a human being in their writing and looked for meaning in their stories and then they share that," she said.
"It's great because we don't get to have community with them on a regular visit, so we're lucky to have them visit us and speaking to us about what they know."
This year the guest writer from the Caribbean is Jamaican-born, award-winning fiction writer Patricia Powell. Her awards include the Bruce Rossley Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Powell has taught creative writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Currently she teaches at the graduate creative writing program at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Her books - "Me Dying Trial", "The Pagoda", "A Small Gathering of Bones" and "The Fullness of Everything" - examine the politics of identity in The Caribbean through trials of displacement, disconnect and marginalization.
Such a body of work speaks directly to this year's theme for BWSI, "Coming Home: Migration, Absence and Presence in the Caribbean Imaginary", which Klonaris points out is particularly significant in examining contemporary Caribbean identity and literature.
"I adore how Patricia is able to focus in on the intimate and the personal and highlight the problems of society in a personal way," said Klonaris. "She looks at migration and disconnect on personal levels and she deals so courageously with the issues of gender and identity and how to survive."
"She asks: how can we move past this, how can we heal this?" she continued. "Those are such fundamental questions we need to be asking particularly in the Caribbean and in The Bahamas, and I think it will resonate with many Bahamians because these are the kinds of questions we've been asking these days."
Meanwhile, in an attempt to grow their program, BWSI will be featuring two Bahamian guest writers who will give special presentations of their work, added Bethel.
Established Bahamian poet, performer and architect Patrick Rahming will share his rather large and varied body of work in an evening of poetry and lyrics.
"It's definitely Pat Rahming's time," said Bethel. "He has a body of essays and poetry and lyrics, which has made a great contribution to literature in The Bahamas, and he's one of the more established Bahamian writers who continues to write and to give commentary on the Bahamian writing scene. He has older as well as more contemporary collections of work so it will be interesting to see his journey as a writer."
Meanwhile, the writer and producer of many award winning films, such as "Children of God", Kareem Mortimer, rounds out the Bahamian guest writers, taking a departure from the usual poet and fiction writers the summer workshops tend to choose.
Though BWSI has always offered workshops in screenwriting and playwriting, with the selection of Mortimer as guest writer, they hope to highlight a rapidly growing segment of the literary landscape in The Bahamas.
"There seems to be a real interest in film and screenwriting in The Bahamas and it seems to be taking off in a real way," said Bethel. "We thought we'd add value to the entire program by having Kareem come as a screen writer and a producer. It's such a substantial medium right now in addition to fiction and poetry."
All lectures and presentations by the three guest writers not only benefit the students of the Summer Institute, but also the wider community as they are still free and open to the public. Such a move, said the founders, really speaks to the core of the program, which is to create and grow a community of writers and critical thinkers in The Bahamas, and to strengthen the legacy of Bahamian literature and its relation to strong Bahamian and Caribbean identity.
"I think that The Bahamas is coming into a new articulation of its literary tradition and I think we're feeling that we can meet the literary traditions of other Caribbean countries and communities in ways that we perhaps haven't felt until now, and we're proud of it in a way that we haven't been before," says Klonaris.
"Writers are important because they define who we are as a people, we help to create a public discourse around who we have been and who we will be," she continues. "That's why it's really important that those who appreciate what we're doing and have the ability to support it financially take that step forward to support us."
Indeed, with the vision to grow the summer program beyond its seasonal occurrence and to touch the lives of students and Family Island emerging writers, BWSI is in need of funding more than ever. Its effects just in the past four years can already be seen as talented young Bahamian writers gain confidence and skill in their craft and publish on a global level, turning the eyes of the world to our Caribbean nation that for so long had been passed over in the literary canon of The Caribbean.
BWSI has become a nucleus around which writers are coming together and taking up the mantle to take Bahamian literature forward, and it can only do so if it has the support from the very community that writers work to define and uplift. They've received generous donations in the past from Cable Bahamas, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Inter-American Development Bank, yet they need more support than ever.
As Bethel points out, many writers came together to form initiatives in the past which have advanced literature and yet failed to continue - not because the drive wasn't there, but only the funding and support. BWSI, they hope, can be different.
"BWSI's intervention in the development of literature in The Bahamas is significant and important and vital," she said. "This is an effort to make a lasting impression in the Bahamian literary development. Because we know the history of these past institutions that have come and gone for many different reasons and the significance of the work we do, the support we need is really critical to keeping the institution going."
For more information about BWSI, to apply or to donate, please visit www.bwsi.wordpress.com, email bahawsi@yahoo.com or call Marion Bethel at 325-0342.

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