Fi mi yaad

Day job: A&R at a small label on Maxfield Avenue. Night job: speculative fiction, three drafts in, one actually finishing. The music and the writing are not as separate as people assume. Both are about who gets to tell which story. I spend my days listening to artists working out who they are in sound, then go home and try to do the same thing in text. Marlon James is the reason I took speculative fiction seriously. Not because of *Black Leopard*, though that book broke my brain in a good way. Because of what he said in an interview about genre being the place you go when realism can't carry what you need to say. I read that on my phone at half two on the 22 bus to Portmore and had to write it down. Lorna Goodison is the other one. Her poem 'For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)' is not speculative at all and is still the most important thing I've read about what Caribbean women carry. The current project is a novella about a woman who inherits her grandmother's ability to move through time but can only go backwards. Set partly in Kingston and partly in 1958 during the West Indies Federation vote. Louise Bennett would have had opinions about that vote. I've been reading her dialect poems to get the speech rhythms right. I'm not interested in American sci-fi's version of the future. We have our own futures to imagine.