Im a writer and editor, born (6 May, 1975) and bred in Port of
Spain,
Trinidad, and still here.
Im the editor of The Caribbean Review of
Books
(2004present) and the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat
(20032006, then 2012present). Im alsoa co-director of the
contemporary arts space and network Alice
Yard, and
programme
director of the Bocas Lit Fest, an annual literary festival. My essays
(often on Caribbean art and artists), reviews, etc. have been
published in various books and periodicals. My book of poems The Strange Years of My Life
was published in 2015.
Some notes to flesh out the above, in case anyones interested
(last
updated in
January 2010, i.e. fairly out of date):
My professional career began when I was all of fifteen, when I
started
a holiday job at Sandpiper Ltd., probably the first desktop
publishing
firm in Trinidad and Tobago. At Sandpiper, under the guidance of
my
friend Mary Adam, I learned the
rudiments of copy-editing and proofreading (as well as some
basic
design skills), I operated a big old Linotronic
machine, and
I was a keen assistant in the little bookshop, Folio Books, that
occupied the ten-by-ten-foot room at the front of the office. Some years later,
after
reading English at the University of the West
Indies at
St. Augustine,
I worked for a few months as a sub-editor at the Trinidad Guardian,
and have had no desire to work at a newspaper ever since. I then
found
myself in the publications wing of a large advertising agency. When Id
had enough of that, I quit in order to head off and see the
world, etc.
I got as far as San Francisco before being summoned back to
Trinidad to
join the staff of Caribbean Beat.
(Id been a sort of freelance books editor for the magazine for
a
couple years before that.)
In 2003 I was made editor of Caribbean
Beat, and began working on a revival of The Caribbean Review of
Books.
(In
its
original
incarnation
the
CRB
was published in Jamaica and edited by the late Samuel B.
Bandara.) The
first issue of the new CRB
appeared in May 2004.
At
the end of 2006, I started what was meant to be a sabbatical
from Caribbean Beat in
order to have
more time for both the CRB
and my own writing. A few months later, Id decided on something
more
permanent than a sabbatical.
In the last few years, off
and on, Ive been working on
a book about Guyana, tentatively titled Imaginary Roads.
When
people
ask what sort of book it is, I usually tell them if I knew that
Id be much closer to finishing it. I suppose its best
described as a
travel book, with elements of cultural history, autobiography,
and
maybe even fiction. My research was supported by the one-year Rex Nettleford Fellowship
in
Cultural
Studies, which I was awarded by the Rhodes Trust in July
2007.
When I was an undergraduate at UWI, poking around in the
library, I
came across a series of essays written by C.L.R. James immediately
after he left Trinidad for the United Kingdom, describing his
first
impressions of London. They were published in the Port of Spain Gazette in
1932 and
then all but forgotten (only one of the essays was reprinted in
book
form). A few years later I edited and collected them in Letters
from
London (Prospect Press,
2003). In early
2007, I began working
on a second major editorial project: a revised and expanded
edition of
V.S. Naipauls Letters Between a
Father and Son,
published by Picador in
2009. Thanks
to this project, I visited the Naipaul archive
at the
University of Tulsa, where, apart from the correspondence files,
I read
part of the manuscript of The
Enigma
of
Arrival.
In the last ten years Ive written more book reviews, long and
short,
than I care to remember. Theyve been published in the Trinidad Guardian, the Trinidad and Tobago Review,Caribbean Beat, the Stabroek News,
and the CRB. Ive
also
published profiles of writers, essays on various subjects, bits
of
reportage, and, more recently, pieces on contemporary art in the
Caribbean. Choosing
My
Confessions is a sort of online anthology of all
the above. I also
write poems. Im
slightly shy about this, and if asked am likely to change to
subject,
but some of my poems have been published in magazines in the
Caribbean
and elsewhere; see here.
I started my personal weblog, blandly titled Nicholas Laughlins blog
etc.,
in
October
2002,
as
a
sort
of
experiment
that
I
suppose
is still in
progress. Back then I
wrote: Im
fascinated by the stream-of-consciousness possibilites of the
blog
form,
though frankly I dont expect many people will find my personal
stream
of
consciousness particularly gripping. Experience has shown that
my
expectations were more or less accurate.
In early 2006 I began
contributing as a volunteer author to Global Voices, the
web-based non-profit that aggregates, curates, and amplifies
the
global conversation online by promoting the efforts of citizen
journalists. You can see my GV contributions at my authors page.
At
GVs summits in
Delhi in 2006,
in Budapest in 2008,
and in
Santiago de Chile in 2010, I
met several dozen of my impressive, accomplished colleagues and
was
freshly inspired by the do-good possibilities of the WWW.And I tweet. (So doesthe CRB.)
I was a member of the advisory team for Galvanize 2006,
a
six-week contemporary arts programme that ran in Port of Spain
in
September and October. About a year later, I
joined
the advisory team for Alice
Yard, a small but very lively
contemporary
arts space in the Woodbrook neighbourhood of west Port of Spain.
Im
now a co-director of
Alice Yard, along with architect Sean Leonard and artist Christopher Cozier. Weve hosted an eclectic series
of
exhibitions, artists projects, performances, readings,
screenings, and
other events, with the support of a growing network of younger
artists,
designers, musicians, and others.
Inspired in part by the
creative ferment of Alice Yard, in late 2009, together with my
writer
friends Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan, I launched Town,
a
modest
journal
of
literature
(mostly
poetry)
and
art,
published
via
broadsides posted in public places in Port of Spain as well as
online;
an experiment in low- (or no-) budget publishing.
I enjoy travelling and would spend more time on the road if I
could
afford it. You can read some of my occasional travel
observations and
meditations at Amours
de Voyage,
and
at
my Flickr page
you can
see photos of some recent trips.
(Dont miss the photoset from my
mountain-climbing trip to Venezuela in March and
April
2007.) What do I look like? Heres a set of self-portraits.
What do I sound
like?
Ive recorded a few podcasts with my friend Georgia Popplewell at Caribbean Free Radio.
You can listen to me interviewing Jamaican
writer Kei
Miller, describing a visit to
Yeatss grave
in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, and rambling through a
soundseeing
tour of Mt. St. Benedict. Afterwards you may
agree with me
that I have a face for radio and a voice for print.
I like Susan Sontags idea of the writer as someone interested
in
everything. When it comes to the game of foxes and hedgehogs,
I
am decidedly a fox. But Im trying to develop more hedgehogly
habits.
