BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ST. LUCIAN CREATIVE WRITING

Sometime in the eighties I began to compile a bibliography on the creative arts of St. Lucia. While the focus would be on creative writing – poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction), drama, - I made citations of whatever I could also find on the performing and visual arts. I created a section to cover related anthropological, historical, journalistic and similar literature which could throw light on the context of our literature. This was a selected listing. My interest was mainly in the creative, imaginative literature. While libraries, bookshops and personal collections formed the source of much of what I found, I also searched through many years of local newspapers and other kinds of periodicals to find and make a bibliographic record of our writers’ work. This would include, for example, letters written to the press by writers, their reviews of works of other writers and other kinds of writing, eg columns. At some point, I stopped working on the bibliography. However I was always conscious of the importance of such a work. Nowhere else do we have a comprehensive, published bibliography of our arts and in particular, our creative literature. St. Lucia’s contribution to Caribbean and international literature is well known, and deserves a compiled record. Since I abandoned work on the bibliography, many of the well-known St. Lucian writers had continued to produce collections, and are increasingly published abroad; many new writers have appeared; while many books are produced locally, many writers now use non-traditional publishers to produce their books; apart from poetry and prose, books on all kinds of subjects can be found on the shelves of bookshops. And this does not cover the abundance of material available on blogs and other kinds of web-sites. One notable web resource is the Saint Lucia Oral History Project conceived and produced by Marion Nelson and Allen Sherman. This provides information on writers and artists of St. Lucia. The increasing popularity of performance poetry also presents a challenge to keeping track of the work being produced in this area. Surprisingly, there have not been many audio and video productions of this oral poetry. The only other bibliography that compiles information on St. Lucian creative writing is that by Beverley Wood and Lorraine M Nero (2005), Beyond Walcott: an annotated bibliography of the literature of St. Lucia. They show that the period between the seventies and nineties was a prolific period of local publishing. Their annotations give an idea of the themes and concerns of the writers. They list a few works I had not been aware of. Their bibliography is listed in Section VI. At the invitation of Mr. Petrus Compton, the Chairperson of the Cultural Development Foundation, I began again the compilation of the bibliography. When I started this work I used a typewriter. When I had my first access to a computer, floppy discs ruled the day. Even if I had located those discs when I began the work again, they would be unusable. It meant therefore that my hard print copies of the original Ms. needed to be retyped, and organised in an appropriate bibliographic format. Ms. Anna Weekes, a former library colleague, has provided the clerical help and bibliographical expertise needed. Then I went around the bookshops and libraries to locate publications that had appeared since I stopped compiling records. Since I was interested also in unpublished manuscripts, I contacted writers to obtain titles and other information from them. For plays, I tried to find not only the date of the manuscript, but date of first production. Current newspapers and magazines provided updated information or reviews and other articles related to our writers. I rediscovered how many publications, even those produced by reputable local printing houses, lacked basic bibliographic information. Many carried no date of publication. I found a publication with no author’s name, no title, no date! Many had no title page, which provides author’s name, title, city of publication, publisher, date of publication and other information like ISBN numbers. I tried as much as I could to fill those out where missing. For some published works with missing information, I was able to contact writers to find the information. This bibliography covers materials from 1948 to mid 2013. 1948 was a heraldic year for St. Lucian, Caribbean and World Literature. Derek Walcott, with the help of his mother Alix Walcott, published 25 poems, and launched the career and literary life of the greatest poet and playwright produced by these Caribbean islands, of all languages. By 1950, his play Henri Christophe was produced. In 1992, his work was crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has continued to write and publish his plays and poetry and to garner prizes. In 2011, his White Egrets won the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize, when Walcott was 81. In early 2013, a new play on the lives of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, titled O starry, starry night opened at the University of Essex and later that year had its Caribbean premiere in St. Lucia. Other leading St. Lucian writers have continued to publish new work regularly. Their work is well known beyond the shores of this island. The Walcott brothers, Garth St. Omer and Stanley French are the senior writers and elder statesmen of our Literature, whose work has gained international prominence and attention. Many others have followed them into the halls of literature in English.