Caryl Phillips. Photograph courtesy Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo

The trinidad+tobago film festival/2010 programme offers a number of workshops for aspiring filmmakers, including a session on adapting literary works for the screen, led by Caryl Phillips.

The ttff provides this information:

The practice of turning a work of literature into a film is almost as old as the medium of filmmaking itself. Yet the potential for using Caribbean literature as a source for making films remains largely unexplored. In this workshop, facilitated by novelist and screenwriter Caryl Phillips, participants will get to grips with adapting a classic work of Caribbean literature for the screen. Using Jean Rhys’s short story “Let Them Call it Jazz” as his template, Phillips will take the participants through the necessary steps of adaptation before they attempt some writing of their own. Phillips will then critique the participants’ work.

Saturday 2 October, 9.00 am–4.00 pm
University of the West Indies, St Augustine
TT$300 (lunch included). Discounted price for students: TT$250
Pre-registration is required. Call (868) 621 0709 to register

About the facilitator:
Caryl Phillips is a St Kitts-born British writer. His work includes the radio play The Wasted Years (1984, BBC Giles Cooper Award), and the novels Crossing the River (1993, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Distant Shore (2003, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Phillips wrote the film of his own novel, The Final Passage (Peter Hall, 1996), as well as the screenplay for Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1986), and the film of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (Ismail Merchant, 2001). He is presently professor of English at Yale University.

Jean Rhys

. . . then there is the usual problem of fragmentation . . . which raises the question of whether a group of individuals linked to the same geographical area who nevertheless write independently of each other and without each other’s work in mind really form a common tradition. Which reminds me of that famous interview with Jean Rhys after she had been rediscovered — brought back from the dead, practically — and quite literally forced into the West Indian literary canon with Wide Sargasso Sea. She was asked if she considered herself to be a West Indian writer, to which she shrugged; English? No! French? Yet another shrug. . .

— Reacting to Jeremy Taylor’s review of Conversations with Caryl Phillips in the May 2010 CRB, Montague Kobbe muses over “Literary Caribbeanness: Fact or Fiction?” in Latineos.

The CRB’s editorial engine is running again, though with the occasional cough and splutter — we’re not yet at cruising speed, as it were. But our May 2010 issue — our first in a year — is under way, with the first new reviews appearing at the start of the month and another batch published this week. Eventually we’ll settle into a more or less weekly schedule, with new material going live on the site every Monday.

Thus far, the May issue includes reviews of Anthony Winkler’s latest novel, Crocodile, and Geoffrey Philp’s book of short stories Who’s Your Daddy?; of collections of poems by Grace Nichols and Jennifer Rahim; of a book of interviews with Caryl Phillips, and of a literary study called Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. We’ve also published the first instalment of a multi-part essay by Vahni Capildeo, recounting her recent visit to India for a literary conference — I hope this will be just the first in a series of longer prose narratives made possible by the CRB’s new format, in which we are unrestricted by printed page counts. And this week we’ve also published two new poems by Kei Miller.

The first of these, “This Zinc Roof”, is a sort of ode to the bare sheets of galvanised zinc — “this portion / Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat” — that both shelter and trap so many residents of the Caribbean’s desperate and depressed urban communities. When we planned to publish the poem this week, we had no idea that the events now unfolding in Kingston would give its poignant verses such a sharp and timely edge:

This that the poor of the world look up to
On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled
Heaven they could be lifted into….

This clanging of feet and boots,
Men running from Babylon whose guns
Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives….