This autumn Small Wonder, the festival dedicated to short stories, is hosting Bahamian writer and LGBT+ activist Helen Klonaris as its British Council International Writer in Residence.
The festival takes place in Charleston, once home to the Bloomsbury group.
A human rights activist, Helen Klonarisā early years were spent raising awareness around issues that ranged from capital punishment to violence against women to discrimination against LGBT+ Bahamians. She also co-founded organisations and journals such as The WomanSpeak: A Journal for Caribbean Women’s Literature and Art. Much published in journals and anthologies, with Amir Rabiyah she co-edited Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, published by Trans-Genre Press, 2015. Her debut collection of short stories, If I Had the Wings, is just out from Peepal Tree press. Itās dynamite. These stories take your breath away, her award-winning story Cowboy has already had me in tears.
When she heard about the residency she wrote:Ā “I was quite emotional when I found outā¦ Iām an islander, and I like to think of short stories as small places where the possibilities for transformation are potentā¦These times need our stories, I think.”
I caught up with her by internet transatlantically:
HK: Iām speaking to you from a lesbian land collective in Mendocinoā¦ itās pitch black and thereās a full moon out and I can hear a lone bull frog braying down by the pondā¦
MJ: Youāre involved in too many amazing projects to mention, when do you manage to write as well?
HK: I like writing in bed. Maybe thatās because bed is so closely connected to dreaming and for me writing comes from that place, the unconscious. Iām intrigued by the way a story begins with a persistent image, and how I walk around with that image, just watching and listening, until it tells me where it wants to go and how. Writing is this dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconsciousā¦ the conscious mind asks questions, the unconscious mind sends pictures, sounds in response and then they are in this very long conversation that becomes a story.
MJ: You live between your native Bahamas and California now, right? How differently did you experience the LGBT+ communities there?
HK: Yes, when I first moved out to the Bay Area I felt as if I had missed a pivotal moment in US LGBT+ history, that somehow all the battles had already been fought, whereas, in the Bahamas, our communities are still emerging politically. There isnāt a great deal of visibility. We donāt have LGBT centres, or Pride parades, or large advocacy groups; we do have specific people who are spokespersons for the community, who are doing an amazing job of keeping LGBT issues in the public eye and ear. I was actually a founding member of one of the first out LGBT organizations in the Bahamas ā the Rainbow Alliance, which sadly doesnāt exist anymore.
MJ: Can you say a bit more about why āthese times need our storiesā?
HK: I suppose I have always lived with a sense of urgency ā a feeling that the everyday I was living in the Bahamas was so impacted by the legacies of colonialism and slavery, for example, that I could not pretend otherwise. I think I became a writer to talk back to āthese timesā. I was also a daughter of Greek immigrants, a queer Greek Bahamian girl growing up in a deeply religious community and country, one where you could not question the status quo without being told āGod said so,ā end of story. Well I didnāt think it was the end of the story, in fact, I thought, we need a new story. Lots of new stories to upset, upend, break out of these old stories and live something we havenāt imagined yet.
And now, here I am years later living in the US at a time when the leadership of this country is unabashedly calling us to build walls, keep immigrants and Muslims out, institute ālaw and orderā as a response to the continued police aggressions (and killings) of men of African descent, and ignore Indigenous rights, womenās rights, and on and on. What Iāve noticed in these first months of this leadership is the overwhelming feeling that people like myself are powerless. The machinery of the government is huge and rolling out and thereās nothing we can do about it. Except there is. A story may be a small thing. But itās like the tale about the Emperorās new clothes. Itās the child, small, young, closest to the unconscious who can see what is actually happening and says exactly what is needed to wake everybody up. Thatās how I see short stories. And thatās why theyāre so important right now, because we cannot afford to be asleep to the lies of power.
MJ: What has given you the strength to keep going?
HK: I come from an incredible community of writers in the Bahamas ā poets like Marion Bethel and Lelawatee Manoo Rahming and Lynn Sweeting and Patricia Glinton Meicholas whose folk tale āThe Gaulin Wifeā so inspired my own story āThe Dreamersā about a boy who grows wings and fliesā¦ so many othersā¦they are my roots, they have been a tremendous part of the shaping of my identity as a Bahamian writer; their work remembers me to myself over and over again when I have despaired that as an island woman my life was somehow too small to matter. I know that isnāt true. Islands are the engines of evolution, I heard a scientist once say. And like islands, yes, stories are sites of extraordinary possibility.
MJ: What are you looking forward to at Small Wonder and whatās next?
HK: Iām looking forward to meeting other writers and to reading from my brand new book, meeting folks who are short story loversā¦ Iām looking forward to being on the land where Virginia Woolf walked and wrote, where her sister Vanessa Bell lived and loved and paintedā¦ Iād love to run into their ghosts in the garden. Now that If I Had the Wings is out in the world, Iām working on finishing a collection of essays ā personal essays on imagination and whiteness and what it might take to transform a white supremacist consciousness. And creeping upwards through my unconscious is a novel, or what feels longer than a short story. Weāll see. This festival is giving me ideas and already thereās a new short story that wants to be told. Maybe it will show itself when I get to Charleston. I hope so.
Small Wonder takes place at Charleston, Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL from Wednesday 27 September 27 Ā – Sunday, October 1. http://www.charleston.org.uk/whats-on/festivals/small-wonder/
If I Had the Wings Helen Klonaris; Peepal Tree 2017. Ā ISBN13:9781845233464 Ā Ā£9.99
For more information, click here:Ā www.peepaltreepress.com
www.peepaltreepress.com
Maria JastrzÄbska co-edited Queer in Brightonās anthology and was co-founder of Queer Writing South.
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