Search results for ""Author Jacqueline Bishop""

Winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Non Fiction. Beginning with the promptings of the erotic title story, Jacqueline Bishop came to see the hybrid format of this book, with its mix of short stories, essays and interviews could begin to encompass her desire to see where she had arrived at in a creative career that encompassed being published as a novelist, poet, critic and exhibited as an artist. How did these sundry positions connect together? What aspects of both conscious intention and unconscious, interior motivations did they reveal?The stories, none more than a few pages long, can be read at several levels. The mentor who teaches the child gymnast a contortionist’s erotic positions, the adoptive mother who shoots down ex-partner and adopted child when the former debauches the latter as the subject of pornographic photographs; the relationship between tattooist and the woman who offers her naked body for decoration are all sharply and persuasively realized as short fictions, but they also hint at a writer’s interior dialogue and can be read as parables about the relationship between the free imagination and the controlling and even potentially betraying power of art.The essays explore more conscious areas of expression. They deal with the experiences of maternal separation, family histories and mythologies, the search for grounding in the life of a Jamaican grandmother, the relationship with a male writing mentor, travel to Morocco, the inspiration of the writing lives of Jamaicans Claude McKay and Roger Mais and how 9/11 showed her how deeply she had become a New Yorker.The interviews, which investigate sometimes her writing, sometimes her art, and occasionally both, provide context for the stories and the essays. They are at their most revealing when interviewers ask Jacqueline Bishop questions she hasn’t asked herself.

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"Fauna" is not just a collection of individually rewarding poems but a carefully structured whole. Using metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica and images drawn from painting as the over-arching devices, Bishop explores the tensions between plenitude and emptiness, presence and absence, the nourishing and the poisonous in her memories of the rural Jamaican childhood that has shaped her. There is the lushness of scene, but also the way that 'the smell of mango' will always be associated with childhood trauma, or the richness of avocado contrasted with the allamanda who admits, 'Everything alive develops a defence...Mine is poison; all parts of me are toxic'. There are imagined scenes that are highly focused and there are the blurred images of the father who is always at the edge of the photograph. And from the perspective of New York, Bishop sees herself as another kind of fauna, the Jamaican birds who can be found everywhere. 'In North America three or four species/have been identified from the peculiar way they sing.' This is a moving and heart-felt collection, but Bishop never allows the siren voice of longing for return to become sentimental. Always there is the drive towards the artist's desire to remake the world and to work meticulously at what can be left in, what must be taken out.

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The patchwork is an apt metaphor for the region not only because of its colourfulness and the making of something whole out of fragments but as an attempt to make coherence out of disorder. The seeking of coherence was the exact process of putting together this book and foregrounds the process of Caribbean societies forging identity and identities out of plural and at times conflicting and contested groups that came to call the region home. Within the metaphor of the patchwork however is the question, where are the vernacular needlework artists within the visual art tradition of the Caribbean? The introduction sets out to both clarify and rectify this situation, and several common themes flow through the following essays and interviews. Themes include that that the land and colonization remain baseline issues for several Caribbean artists who stage and restage the history of conquest and empire in varying ways. That artists in the region amalgamate as part of their practice and seem to prefer an open-endedness to art making as opposed to expressing fidelity to a particular medium. That artists and scholars alike are dismantling long-held perceptions of what Caribbean art is thought to be, and are challenging boundaries in Caribbean art. These are among the issues addressed in the book as it looks at ecological concerns and questions of sustainability, how the practices of the artists and their art defy the easy categorization of the region, and the placement of women in the visual art ecology of the Caribbean. The latter is one of the most contested areas of the book. Readers should come away with the sense that questions of race, colour, and class loom large within questions of gender in the Jamaican art scene and that the book, dedicated to Sane Mae Dunkley, aims to insert vernacular needleworkers into the visual art scene in both Jamaica and the larger Caribbean. Audience will include researchers and scholars of Caribbean and African diasporic art, college students, those interested in post-colonial studies, Caribbean artists, art professionals interested in a wider, globalized view of contemporary art; students curious to know about the many phases of art production throughout the Caribbean. General readers interested in the culture of the region.

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This beautiful collection of interviews, conducted by journalist, poet, novelist and artist Jacqueline Bishop, features insightful and entertaining conversations with many of Jamaica's most significant writers including Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Marcia Douglas and many more.

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Jacqueline Bishop is the founding editor of "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters." She lives in New York City.

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Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, before coming to the United States to attend college -- and to be reunited with her mother. She is the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters and is presently editing a film on a group of Jamaican untutored artists called The Intuitives. She has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Macomere, Renaissance Noire and Wasafiri amongst other journals. She lives and works in New York City ... the 15th parish of Jamaica.

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