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| You can reach for the light or buckle under the walls people build in your path |
THERE'S ALWAYS a beginning. Though
deciding where that is poses the problem for many writers, whatever story
they're about to tell, even their very own.
I have set about
excavating the extensive archives of bygone Brew columns and
then some -- a small sum really -- of my total written Media arena works. It is
a task that will remain incomplete because, truth be told, I have no way to get
at all the writing I did as a media professional.
Looking through
my home I have had to ask, "What box is that piece in? Which drawer does
that story inhabit? And you bit, upon what shelf?"
The columns
should be okay. I have my own cut files and some printed copies. Also, the Head
of the University of the West Indies' library surprised me a while back when he
revealed they have my entire column body of work uploaded. A super source to
stop the gaps in my collection.
However, there's
all the features I did; all the society page chronicling (NO, not the
hoity-toity typical fare. I had fun with tilting things into intriguing
angles); all the guest or special pieces I'd rendered for different
"pull-out" sections of the paper. And that's only counting the second
newspaper I wrote for; don't get me started on the first.
Understand: all
and any work I accept to do is important to me; but still I did not see
newspaper writing as vital to my existence ... the way I felt writing fiction
was.
There seemed to
be a gulf between being a chronicler and becoming a storyteller. I was young.
There was so much I had to learn. I know better now.
Want it? Write away!
The beginning of
my columnising was born out of an ending. I had just put my resignation letter
on the desk of my then Editor in Chief.
Not so I could
hop post-haste to another media house, as is the accepted norm here in TnT:
people leap-frogging to the competition of today only to leap-frog back the way
they came a year or less later, to remake their recent employer into the
competition again (though, I use that c-word loosely, with all I know of local
Media).
I did not have a
job lined up. What I did have was enough of the slighting and disregard.
The Editor in
Chief refused to accept my resignation, pressed me to reconsider, asked what I
wanted (I actually hadn't thought I'd have such an option, so I was without any
formed idea), then offered me, at what was considered a fairly young age to
have such a thing in my sweet nation, a column.
A COLUMN in a
daily newspaper!
"Think about
it," he urged.
Like I even had
to ...
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