06th July 2009
The minute I landed in Las Vegas--a city ripe for the destruction by the God of wrath from my fundamentalist childhood--I knew my ideas about sex, sin, and scarcity would be challenged. But here I was in the middle of "Sin City" celebrating my fiftieth ...
06th July 2009
As our tour bus passed the stone angel at the entrance of the Hoover Dam, Kanan, our fellow passenger from Dubai, my wife and I marveled at the sheer genius that it took to imagine and construct this engineering marvel. As I gazed at the 726 foot concr...
06th July 2009
About two weeks ago, I was part of a group presentation at Miami Dade College on “The Millennial Generation” or as I like to call them, “Children of The Matrix.” Basically these are the children of the Baby Boomers who are now entering the wor...
06th July 2009
One of the questions that I am asked by my students in creative writing workshops is "How do I use allusions in my work?" The first thing that I try to explain is that the use of allusions is not confined to literary work--they are parts of language an...
06th July 2009
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
~Albert Camus
Blogging Extends Storytelling
Blogging and storytel...
06th July 2009
Driving in downtown Miami is usually an adventure for me because 7 times out of 10, I will end up with a flat tire near some alley littered with soda cans that have been used as makeshift crack pipes.
Last week Tuesday was one of those times. No, not ...
06th July 2009
Three simple words. But they are the most difficult words to say to a friend or partner and especially within Black and Caribbean families. This became painfully clear to me as I sat on a panel to discuss Reaching up for Manhood by Geoffrey Canada.
The p...
06th July 2009
A few years ago, I used to teach a research course in which I used Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol S. Pearson as a means for my students not only to identify role models in their particular discipline, but also for them to learn from their heroes...
06th July 2009
Adversity and being a writer, especially one from the Caribbean, are synonymous. And yet we continue despite the odds that financial or other types of "success" are stacked against us. Why? Perhaps its faith, stubbornness, madness, or the urge to give b...
06th July 2009
I was as nervous as one of the blue herons I’d seen on our Black River Safari. The moment was here and I still didn’t know which story I was going to read. I’d narrowed down the choice to two stories: “The Day Jesus Christ Came to Mount Airy” ...
06th July 2009
When I was sixteen, I hated Michael Jackson. Nearly every girl that I knew had a Michael Jackson poster on her wall. I'd enter the room and there would be Michael Jackson smiling above her bed--it should have just said, "Michael was here." Talk about a mo...
06th July 2009
If going under anesthesia is like slipping into that other life, then, I think, I've lost my fear of crossing over. For as I saw the white liquid rushing through the IV drip, the next thing I knew was walking along white, sandy beach lined with coconut...
24th November 2005
For those of you who are thinking about an ideal Christmas gift, especially for book lovers, Geoffrey Philp's Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas, is available in bookstores nationwide, online at Powell's, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com and many indepe...
