Featured Writing
“Cathedral Rock”
Valparaiso Fiction Review (read more)
While he sits at a picnic table at a riverside campsite, Noll tells his younger brother about the day he swam the town rapids alone. His wife has decided against joining him on this weekend visit, wanting some space, and he’s thinking of the swim rather than his problems at home. His parents’ constant warnings about the river—don’t ever go in by yourself, and never without a life jacket—were ever-present, but he was determined to defy them. . .
“A Walking Tour of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street”
Los Angeles Review of Books (read more)
Told through the eyes of a fatherless boy, the novel is based on Naipaul’s time living with extended family on Luis Street in Woodbrook, a district outside Port of Spain. . . As Naipaul’s older sister, Kamla, recalled in Patrick French’s “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul:” Her name was Lorna Lange and she said to me, “Kamla, I know you, so don’t come with any style to me, I lived all my life in Luis Street until I got married and came south, I know Hat, Hat is Topi, you can’t fool me, and Man-Man is Thakrine’s son, I know Bogart, and the drunken chap who started running a whorehouse.” She knew every single character in “Miguel Street.”
The fact that Naipaul’s characters were seemingly pulled from Luis Street and delivered whole to the page became particularly interesting to me during my first trip to Trinidad in 2007 when I learned that I was staying in a house featured in the novel. I had traveled to Port of Spain to research a book about a Trinidadian musician I’d met in Los Angeles, and stayed on Luis Street.
