The Kei Miller reading

Jamaican poet and novelist Kei Miller

It’s often said that once you acquire a DSLR and a lens that’s more than a couple of inches long, it’s only a matter of time before you start getting requests to photograph weddings. Fortunately for me, most of my friends are either already married, sworn off marriage, or unmarriageable. This, however, doesn’t stop them from organising other kinds of events, which is how I found myself in the role of (unpaid) official photographer at a reading by the Jamaican novelist and poet Kei Miller held last night at the Reader’s Bookshop.

Covering a reading is a far easier task than photographing a wedding, I’m sure. There’s no chance, for instance, of your battery running out just as the couple is about to lock lips at the altar, no obligatory shots of the wedding party in its various permutations (couple-with-parents-and-ex-spouses, couple-with-parents-and-current-spouses, groom-with-mother-that-can’t-let-go, couple-with-branch-of-family-that-still-talks-to-each-other, couple-with-estranged-siblings, etc.), and unless it’s an outdoor reading, it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to venture near the Botanic Gardens, the grounds of the President’s House or Wild Flower Park. Once you’ve made sure you’ve got at least one serviceable photo of the writer you’re pretty much off the hook, free to experiment with weirdly-angled shots of bookshelves, piles of books, slumbering audience members, people’s feet.

I first met Kei in front of Jack Sprat’s bar at the Calabash Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica. I challenged him to guess what Nikipedia (whom he had corresponded with, but never met in person) looked like. He declined the challenge, which led me to think he was a wise man. Last night, I learned that he’s also an excellent reader, especially of his poetry, and also a passionate commentator on his own work and craft.

After being introduced by Nikipedia, who, as editor of the event’s co-sponsor, the Caribbean Review of Books, was also the chief organiser of the proceedings, Kei read a series of excerpts from his first novel (to be released in 2008), followed by a handful of selections from his two books of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies and the upcoming There is an Anger that Moves. In between, he fielded questions from both interviewer Nikipedia and the audience with thoughtfulness and grace, not to mention a breathtaking lack of pretension.

Listening to Kei

I’ve only read some of the stories in The Fear of Stones (which was shortlisted for the Best First Book award, Caribbean and Canada, in the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes) and a few of the poems, but I look forward to reading more of Kei’s work, and I’m certain that he won’t ever ask me to remove any of the photos of him from my Flickr page, as the person who eventually beat him out for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize did this morning (NOTE: the photo linked to is not the one the author asked me to remove). A perfectly good photo, with perhaps the person’s mouth doing something slightly odd, but hardly disfiguring, taken not in some paparazzi-friendly location but while the individual was on stage accepting his prize. And there I was naïvely thinking that Bernard Henri-Lévy had the market cornered on writerly vanity.

Technorati Tags: kei miller, jamaica, trinidad, caribbean, literature, books

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