Five Questions with Andrene Bonner

 

What do you want readers to know about Long Walk to Cherry Gardens?

Long Walk to Cherry Gardens, the second in the literacy fiction series, is the story of a protagonist with whom they will make a deep emotional connection long after they close the book on the final chapter. In the story, an abandoned adolescent boy, Roderick Brissett, is growing up in Olympic Gardens, an emerging garrison in Kingston, Jamaica, during the 60s and early 70s. Cherry Gardens, an affluent neighborhood, becomes Roderick’s Valhalla, a metaphoric utopian society of his dreams. Set against the backdrop of a post-colonial and recently independent society, themes of class, race, culture, identity, kinship care, and education are examined to tell of the transforming power of love.  

 

2.      What fascinates you about Roderick?

My interest quickens; I am on the edge of my seat when Roderick enters any space. What is he going to say? What is he going to do? It is heartwarming and admirable to experience his inquisitiveness. He wants to know and is going to ask others. When answers are not forthcoming from folks he thinks should know, he puts on his detective hat, searches the crevices and corners, following every lead. This is when he puts both head and gut to work. Most children Roderick’s age just want to go to school, hang out with friends and play. But he sets goals and goes after them fiercely. Although selling on the streets is not a lofty goal for children, Roderick takes advantage of available resources as insignificant as stones to create beautiful and marketable Stone Art. Roderick is a resilient young boy with this uncanny way of balancing his feelings with the ebb and flow of daily life.   

 

3.      What is the most important lesson or lessons you have learned from writing these novels?

I have learned that writing is a disciplined process in which I set clear goals and carve out quality time. I wrote Long Walk to Cherry Gardens while commuting on the New York City subway, roundtrip, between home and school.  During that time, my characters would tell me what to write against complex emotional arcs. As I got deeper into the human suffering through Roderick’s character, it became more apparent that children do not have the tools and must look to parents, teachers, and mentors for help. Childhood is sacrosanct, and children, including the child in adults, want their humanity validated. The rub happens when grownups like Aunt Hope, in Long Walk to Cherry Gardens, are less than empathetic. As a result, I research, observe and write accordingly.

 

4.      You’ve had a long career in many artistic disciplines. What would you say to a young artist about how to create and sustain creative passion?

Go easy on yourself. Overnight success is a myth. Furthermore, The Arts are not static. It is a fluid process that changes as the world and cultures shift. Instead, be prepared to adapt to change. The artist’s journey has bumps and detours on the road. If you have sights on Hollywood, the Broadway stage, or Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry, guess what? The best talents descend on those regions in record numbers. They come from all over the world with tremendous skills. In order to distinguish yourself within this pool of talent, start by learning all you can about your craft; it is going to serve you in the end. 

Regina King enjoyed her life but took it all in by paying attention to the directors when she was a child actor. Now, what she has done as a producer, director is highly regarded by the entertainment industry. Her ability to adapt to change continues to influence the trajectory of her life as a creative. I remember John Tesh, the broadcast journalist whose voice I just love to hear. One day, I saw an announcement that he was going to do a piano recital. Imagine how surprised I was but happy to know that he had another well-developed talent to unleash on the world.

Passion resides deep in that place inside of you where you feel excited about it all the time. Be honest about what you are feeling and why. Then go explore.  I had to take inventory of my many interests in the arts and ask myself these questions: Which art forms am I passionate about investing my time, energy, and available resources? Am I in this for the money or the love and appreciation of art? Your “why” will keep your passion burning. In addition, what you do or how you serve can be shaped by or influenced by several of my areas of interest.

Here is how I sustain my creative passions of teaching, writing, and drama. I help young people to identify what they are drawn to in the wide-open fields of the arts. I work with students at different ages and stages of their development, from elementary to high school seniors. Whether I am teaching English Language Arts or Dramatic Arts, I co-create a classroom with my students that becomes an incubator for new energy, a safe place where they can be themselves, be vulnerable and bounce off the walls.

An elementary school student in my online English class sings her prose and informational passages. When she is ready, she asks me permission to dress up in costumes. She uses her imagination to connect with the theme or tone of a story and immerse herself in it.

Before the pandemic, I had written a play for a strong male lead. One student became absorbed by the role and wore his ankle-length coat to class over his school uniform for several weeks. He was attending a school that wears uniforms. However, this student was determined to take risks to channel his character and did.  

There was a student who hated literature but loved and excelled at sports. What did I do? I wrote a play about sports so he could access literature through a sports theme.  

My bossy students get roles of producer and director. It is a pleasure to experience them developing leadership skills. I recall one 7^th Grader saying to her peers, “Please leave your ego at the door.”  My talkers make the best poets and orators, and do I encourage them.  

These are some of the ways that I nurture creativity in my students, and I, too, get the satisfaction of watching and growing with them.   

I retired from teaching in the public school to have a more hands-on approach in a smaller specialized setting. Now interventions are more immediate, and I get to make adjustments in real-time. Additionally, my Literacy Gateway Institute educational solutions framework allows me to teach a younger demographic because we have to start early.

 

5.      What are you working on now?

I am working on the third novel in the Roderick Brissett literacy fiction series. My collection of Short Plays About Sports for Young Actors, which uses sports to teach literature, is forthcoming. Parents and guardians can look forward to Wings: Role Playing To Awaken Your Teacher Mentor, a collection of short plays to help them develop co-teaching skills. A book of praise poems is also in the offing.  

 

6.      Brawta: You’ve also written many non-fiction books such as Stories To Heal Your Life So You Can Help Your Child Succeed. Are there any crossover themes in Long Walk to Cherry Gardens?

Yes. Education and what it means to children, especially boys, who are failing at higher rates than our girls is a central theme. Parents are asking, “How can I help my child to succeed? How do I do that?”

Through Literacy Gateway Institute (LGI), I provide parents and teachers with a new system to define the parent-teacher partnership and co-teaching model. One of the LGIs solutions was writing these academic wellness non-fiction books and providing professional development for teachers and co-teaching skills training for parents. Stories to Heal Your Life So You Can Help Your Child Succeed focuses on the psyche of parents as in Chapter 5, “Never Too Old To Learn” and Chapter 33, “Adaptability.” Both reveal some problems parents face and give them strategies to adjust. Back in the 1960s, during the period of Long Walk to Cherry Gardens, some parents could not meet with the teacher, let alone, co-teach. For many parents, it is still problematic in 2021. Working with parents and children in the same space during the Covid-19 pandemic, where the regular classroom is no longer the physical space, further exposed the need for innovative approaches to learning.

It is much easier for everyone to meet using the LGI model. Educating the parent along with the child is the new ethos. In Long Walk to Cherry Gardens, in Roderick’s case, his aunty couldn’t make it to school, so the neighbor did it for her. Whether the story is set in 1960s Jamaica or is a real experience in immigrant communities in Brooklyn, New York, parents feel the same anxieties about their children’s education. I see many children in my classroom who are living in the United States without their parents. That is why I started Literacy Gateway Institute. The problems are universal, but our approach has to be unique. For example, LGI’s curricula, wellness tools, and books can be tailored to the unique problems experienced in a specific cultural group. Our co-teaching model helps us crossover kinship care themes, child labor, advocacy, mindfulness education, self-care, integrity, resilience, literacy, and hope. There are so many themes that intersect in both my fiction and non-fiction works. My book publishing list is a long one. 

 

About the Author

 

 

Andrene Bonner is an educator, playwright, and author of four non-fiction books about student resilience and the parent-teacher partnership. No Life in Olympic Gardens and Long Walk to Cherry Gardens, the first two in her literacy fiction series, tell the story of a boy’s heartrending search for identity and education. She is a Westchester Black Scholars Motivating Teacher of the Year and founder of Literacy Gateway Institute, an educational solutions business. She trains parents to become co-teachers and develops literacy curricula and wellness tools. Firelight is her collection of Black Historical and Cultural Dramas that includes: Ruby, a full-length musical that teaches the Harlem Renaissance, Blue Mountain Queen, a dramatic play about a 17th-century female freedom fighter, Nanny of the Maroons, and Room One Eighty: The Forgotten Students of Outerbrook High, a play about a boy in a struggle to help turn his failing high school around and escape the dark side. Bonner holds a Master of Science in Education, a Master of Arts in Language and Literacy, and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts, Dance, and Directing. She is an alumna of the Lincoln Center Education Learning Labs for Artists and Educators. Bonner served on the board of the Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival and currently serves on the board of the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre West. 

 

"El Numero Uno" Opens at the Jamaica School of Drama

Pamela Mordecai's play, El Numero Uno, opens at the School of Drama in Kingston, Jamaica, on 10 March, 2017. 

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About Pamela Mordecai
Pamela Mordecai was born in Jamaica. She has published five collections of poetry, with a sixth, de book of Mary, to appear in fall 2015. Pink Icing, an anthology of short fiction, appeared in 2006, while Red Jacket is her first novel. She has published five children’s books and her poetry for children is widely anthologized – indeed, one of her children’s poems recently appeared in The Guardian (UK) in a list of “top ten poems to remember and recite”. She has also written many textbooks and edited or co-edited groundbreaking anthologies of Caribbean writing. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Canada Writes CBC Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize (U.K.) and her short fiction for the James Tiptree Jr Literary Award. She is the recipient of the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary and Bronze Musgrave Medals, the Vic Reid Award for Children’s Writing, and the Burla Award. Pamela lives in Kitchener.

Five Questions With Shara McCallum

1.   Why the title Madwoman and not Mad Woman?

The reason is that ‘Madwoman’ is a proper noun and is the name of the character that speaks, is sometimes addressed, or is at other times spoken of in third-person throughout the collection. While she reflects and refracts ideas of ‘mad women’ or ‘madwomen’ in literature, cultures, and myths across time and various places, she is a specific figure of my imagination with her own story. She experiences various forms of ‘madness’ (rage, grief, dislocation of the self) and, at her most extreme, veers toward being mad as rass as we would say in Jamaican English. I first wrote about this Madwoman in a couple of poems that appeared in my second book. I’d really not given her another thought until some years ago when she started speaking to me, and this time she was noticeably more unhinged. As I’ve said elsewhere I think, in some measure I wrote these poems to try to determine who she was and to try to get at the origins of her ‘madness.’

2.   Would it be fair to say that the various “madwomen” are really innocents who refuse to conform to a maladjusted society?

I think that would be too easy and let her (or the versions/avatars of the Madwoman throughout the book) off the hook. Who of us is every fully innocent? Even in childhood, I think we are all capable of acts of cruelty. Maybe rather than an ‘innocent’ I would say Madwoman is someone seeking to be a good person. But she also wants to cast off societal conventions, and being seen as good and being defiant of social norms are often in direct opposition, especially for women. I think the way Madwoman most wants to achieve goodness (rather than to be seen as good, as these are not the same things in my mind) is that she wants to be truthful and to never look away from what is difficult. She also wants to be generous and to try to see the good in others, even those who she feels have wronged her in some fashion. But these desires are set against the fact that below the surface in all of us lurks rage and sadness and fear, waiting to be potentially vented, and she knows this too. She also recognizes that even if one does not mean to hurt others and is therefore “innocent” in our aims, this does not always matter. How many times have each of us come up against the fact that if someone feels wounded by something we’ve said or done, then in their minds we are responsible for their injury regardless of what we intended? When we are in relationships with others, we are not in full possession of the definition of ourselves. To most of us, this is troubling to varying degrees at different times in our lives. Only narcissists seem able to completely dismiss others’ perceptions and truths and this is not a good thing. I think I may have veered away here from answering your original question but the link to some part of what you initially asked is this for me: in these poems Madwoman is struggling with her right to self-definition set against the way other individuals in her life and in society and culture writ large see her, or don’t in some instances see her at all.

3.   There seems to be a divide between the young “madwoman” and an older “madwoman.” Is there a real difference? And if so, what is the difference?

Yes, there are differences and a divide. The younger madwoman, in childhood, believes in magic and beauty and myth. The older madwoman, the adult version, wants to believe in these things, but often finds they break down in the face of what she has witnessed as truths of human nature and experience. The rupture in her is a kind of crisis of faith. There are several origins for this, but the ones she confronts most often in this collection are violence, death of loved ones, and other pivotal forms of loss.

4. Madwoman plays with identities, especially as they relate to memory and fiction. If this is true, does this playfulness arise from “problems distinguishing fact from fiction”?

In part, absolutely so, and this also speaks to the fallibility of memory. Thanks to advances in scientific understandings of the brain, we know now that memory is imagination as it is a kind of factual recall. The other reason for the ‘play of identity’ (and I like that phrase very much) has to do with what I spoke to earlier—the pull in the Madwoman between self-representation and the gaze of others and of the culture at large.

5. Catherine Clement in Opera, or the Undoing of Women claims, “Opera comes to me from the womb. They will tell you hysteria is a sickness…Do not believe it. Hysteria is a woman’s principal resource.” Do you agree with the sentiment and could a similar claim be made about your poetry?

In poems, I am often drawn to areas and moments in our lives where the self appears to come apart. In that regard, I could see ‘hysteria’ as a useful term for my poetry, though if applied with some caution. Obviously ‘hysteria’ is a loaded word and was, as Clement alludes, for a long time a medical diagnosis exclusively for women, used to dismiss and contain their bodies and minds. We still contend with the latent idea of women as ‘hysterical’ and thereby inferior to the ‘rational’ man, and this feeds into how we continue to view gender and treat women and men alike. In Madwoman, I am writing from the vantage point of a woman, or about a woman, who is often approaching the line between ‘madness’ as productive versus destructive. But there is a sizable variance between the kinds of ‘madness’ I address in this collection and actual mental illnesses. Clement’s statement is very provocative and I can see that she seeks to reclaim the term from its negative connotations and for metaphorical purposes in her usage. Still, my answer to your question is ‘yes’ with qualification: I would say ‘hysteria’ is a great source of power for the Madwoman, and these poems, when harnessed.

About Shara McCallum

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, UK and other parts of Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. Her personal essays appear regularly in print and online. Recognition for her writing includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry, and other awards. She is Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bucknell University.