What is the Writer's Corner?

In just over six months, this mortal coil of mine will reach the oft landmarked age of forty-five. The slings and arrows, and fortunes outrageous of the first twenty years of my life have only recently become subject to a sobriety-inducing clarity, that has allowed me to see where the finely stitched seams between my various traumas and my spirit meet. They are not one in the same fabric, yet they are intermittently bound together creating the beautiful complexity that is me. Maybe the gift of getting older is learning how to live and move comfortably in the truth of who we have been; to sashay down the runway of life proudly clothed in the truth of who we are. One of those truths, for me, has involved my career path. 

The second twenty years of my life has been dedicated to fashioning myself into the best actor I could be. My journey’s winding path led me down the familiar roads, byways, and cul-de-sacs that many other actors-to-be have tread before me. But a funny thing happened on the way to pursuing said goal. I realized it wasn’t enough. That acting by itself was never going to be. You couldn’t convince nineteen year old Peter, dutifully on his way to theatre school of this blasphemous notion. Acting being quite literally my only known means of escape versus simple escapism, I might’ve put hands on you at the mere suggestion. The sobering truth was that, in saying I wanted to be, was, an actor meant that I was in fact admitting to the world that I was an artist. Which I assure you, in a Jamaican conservative Christian household and community, is cause of great consternation, if not an outright reason to don oneself in sackcloth and ash. To be an artist wasn’t the flat, redundant definition of a person who creates art.  Yes, I was indeed a person, but more to the point , I was a person who was in dire need to express the ideas, experiences, and feelings that could only be articulated with the burning language that was buried within me; shut up in my bones. This led me back down forsaken pathways; back to the beginning; back to writing. 

If I had a talent for anything in my formative years, writing was the first one that I felt validation from. Like my older sister Sandra, I was also a reader. We’d both put in requests for our mother’s hard-earned money and take those few dollars to the infamous Scholastic Book Fairs that would overtake our elementary school library once a year. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Sky is Falling by Kit Pearson are books that always stayed with me. I had started writing my own stories in grades three and four, but that particular fire was eventually squelched for one reason or another. Grades seven and eight, I continued in my sister’s Sandra’s footsteps, and got addicted to Mary Higgins Clark thrillers. But by grade nine, the reading all but stopped. I couldn’t tell you why. I guess life happened. And baby, once life gets to life-ing there’s no stopping it. The proverbial floodgates opened, and it was sink or swim. I somehow managed to do a little bit of both. I was swept up in the highs and lows of the basketball fraternity that was the cornerstone of my high school. I bonded with other young black men and their hoop-dreams;  inspired by the fledgling Raptors inaugural season. I was formally introduced, slash indoctrinated into hardcore rap, and hip-hop culture at large. My newly awakened ears, rarely without a pair of earphones draped over them, eagerly devoured explicit lessons in lyricism, metaphor, rhetoric, and poetic narrative over break beats and chopped up soul samples. But outside of class assignments my pen stayed silent. It was in fact never a thought that crossed my mind…Until I turned eighteen. A couple of basketball championships, three rounds of summer school, and one arrest for petty theft later, I arrived in my OAC year, wiser for past mistakes made, and newly elected as President of our African-Canadian Club. Inspired by the MC’s, and poets I was now surrounded by and looked up to, I too began to sheepishly write my own poems. I had let go of the temper tantrums that I had become comically infamous for, and discovered, in the right spaces, with the right people, there was room for my thoughts and feelings to breathe. The decision to pursue acting came late that year. Outside of Romeo and Juliet, I had never read a play before. Beyond Prayer Palace’s annual Easter play, I had never seen live theatre. I was in the dark about so many things, but theatre school seemed like a light at the end of a tunnel I knew I had to get out of. But instead of a light, I found a burning eternal flame, that lit both my imagination and soul on fire. 

By my last year of theatre school, I had found the courage to write a play. Or better yet, I understood my need to write. To express what I couldn’t say with acting. But the loosening of my tongue couldn't happen solely with the influence of dramatist. It was one of my white theatre school classmates who first put Cornel West's Democracy Matters in my hands. It was presented to me as a gift, and in retrospect it was like someone putting a bow and arrow in Robin Hood's hands for the first time. A world of words, ideas, insights, and previously unimagined perceptions of myself infiltrated my thoughts, and the world's I'd lived in were being illuminated for the first time. However sacrilegious, my new scriptures were enclosed in the works of bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, James Baldwin, and W.E.B Debois. I thirsted to understand the works of Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, or Michel Foucault. I would’ve been a problem in my Sunday school classes if I had ever gotten a hold of James H. Cone’s God of the Oppressed. I wore my library card raw. And during the droughts of acting opportunities and income, I'd pull that first play out of its drawer or file folder and chisel away knowing full well, that with each stroke of the pencil or keyboard I was stepping closer and closer to the undeniable sensation and the deep rooted conviction of my own worthlessness. 

It’s a fact that I have always had a little bit of geek in me. And the older I’ve gotten the more comfortable I’ve gotten with letting my geek-flag fly. This can be said of me in regards to the actual writing process. Starting in my late teens, and evolving during theatre school, the act of journaling quickly became a necessity, not just to my creativity, but to my sanity. Beginning as a tool to reflect on exercises, or discussions in our voice, movement, and acting classes, post theatre school, the journals soon became the location for much more. Reading John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel also played a significant role not only justifying the importance of a journal, but also got me to switch from writing with a pen to pencil. As the years passed by and the journals piled up; evolving from dollar store composition books to soft cover Moleskine splurges, the internal tug of war that had been raging between my past and present self finally reached a stalemate. I began to resent and grow a strong distaste for the voice that would speak back to me when I’d re-read past journal entries. He sounded like some long-suffering, wounded animal that futilely kept circling back on past events that could never be undone, or unseen, but seemingly forever felt. Finally reaching the end of rope long wore through, I took the advice of multiple past journal entries and I found a way to begin therapy. The journal entries stopped. The unravelling of my inner turmoil I had determined was only possible in my journals, was now a reality elsewhere, and another light began to shine through a much more complex set of tunnels of which I found my way out. 

So what exactly is The Writer’s Corner? It could be a nook in your home that gets just the right amount of sunlight. It could be a park bench, with the perfect amount of shade, and potential for people watching. It might be the window seat on a busy train on the commute to work. There’s no telling where it could be, so long as you have the means, mind, and spirit to commit to speaking from that corner of your soul, that intimately knows the worth of all your experiences, and your right to express them. I wish this creative space to be such an outlet for those who are inspired to do so.