Award winning book launched amid calls for writers to collaborate
By Kim Lucas
Stabroek News
June 26, 2003
Ruel Johnson, winner of the 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature, launched his first book on Tuesday evening at the Castellani Art Gallery in Georgetown amid resounding calls for local writers to work together.
Copies of the book, ‘Ariadne and Other Stories’, go on sale from today at the cost of $1,000, but the young author said the time had come for writers to support each other in an effort to get the best literary output.
“What we need to do is network...look at each other’s work honestly as writers and interact to make sure that the best literary output is gotten,” the 22-year-old Johnson told the audience.
Local writers have often complained about the lack of a reading public. According to former Information Minister, attorney-at-law Moses Nagamootoo, the situation could be remedied if corporate citizens got on board as buyers and made books available to schools. Johnson’s book was published with the help of furniture giant Courts (Guyana) Inc. and Guyenterprise Limited.
“Being a local writer takes a lot of courage and daring [but] there must be respect for local writers, decency in the treatment of local writers and create an awareness for local publishing...we need much more support. Corporate citizens must do their part,” Nagamootoo said.
Roopnandan Singh, President of the Association of Guyanese Writers and Artists (AGWA) echoed these sentiments but suggested that the problem was not the difficulty of getting the works published, but more with people not reading enough.
“We just can’t throw good funds down the drain [but] we have to keep trying.”
Four months ago, while still in manuscript form, the work was adjudged ‘Best First Book of Fiction’ among the many submissions for the 2002 Guyana Prize. In a recent interview with Stabroek News, the young author said he had realised part of his dream of publishing his work locally.
Johnson said he had opted for a local publication of the book so that the Guyanese reading public would be able to buy it at an affordable price.
“I wanted to get the book at a low cost for the local audience and a wider circulation. There would have been some time waiting on an overseas publisher, by which time, the interest in my work would be faded, and even so, the amount of copies that would have been filtered down here [would have been minimal]. But my preference has always been to have a local publication.”
Johnson said he had also sent his work to the Macmillan Caribbean Writers Series, but because some of the stories were too explicit, he did not hold out much hope of his collection being published through that medium.
The author is conducting a number of book signings, the first held on the night the book was launched. Johnson also revealed that he hoped to travel to Trinidad to promote his book.
Just last week, he visited Canada, where he joined other authors, poets and storytellers at a Caribbean-Canadian Literary Expo at the Design Exchange in downtown Toronto.
‘Ariadne and Other Stories’ was named after a story within the collection, which Johnson said he had the most fun writing. He described the story as having the least ‘parochial’ scope of all the stories.
A graduate of President’s College, founder/leader of the Janus Young Writers Guild and the 2001 editor of the Chronicle Christmas Annual, Johnson had also submitted a collection of poems, ‘The Enormous Night’, for the Guyana Prize. The collection, said to “show great promise and real engagement with the craft of poetry” was short-listed.
“Poetry is a hard sell. If I am printing that, I would print it here, but it would be more an obligatory thing than an economic venture...people have less of an attention span for poetry,” he told Stabroek News. For him, poetry belongs more in literary circles.
Johnson is currently working on a novella about contemporary Guyana and the current “tensions”.
Despite the setbacks most persons experience when writing locally, Johnson holds firm to the belief that writers resident in Guyana, who are writing about local issues, “with no metropolitan pressures by publishers milking an overseas niche market,” can write critically successful books.
