Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.
I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn't into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.
Pretty much everything I've written is a mix of excitement and fear.
We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.
I'm happy to not know what I think about stuff; I'm happy to change my mind. But it's relatively recently that I've been able to apply that to feelings. I used to like to know what I felt. I didn't want those feelings to be complicated or muddled or clashing.
As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.
If reggae comes from another country, you can have the relationship to reggae that I have to rock. But it's something I grew up with. It's probably something I appreciate more now. In the '80s, I was all about New Wave and synth pop - New Order and Depeche Mode and Eurythmics and Michael Jackson and tons and tons and tons of Prince.
I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.
I'd spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn't fit in.
In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.
