From Statutes to Stories
One woman’s journey leaving law to become an award-winning writer
“It’s a privilege to do what you love,” Celeste reminds me as we start chatting. While it may be a privilege, for Celeste, it’s also a well-earned reward. Newsday WMN caught up with the lawyer turned writer just a few days after her being awarded a prestigious Pen America Literary Award in the Short Story Prize, Emerging Writers category.
The decision to switch from being a full-time lawyer to writer was one that she had considered for some time until her choice became abundantly clear. “I was standing by my kitchen sink one day, doing the dishes, when it really just became an overwhelming thought. I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. I wanted to do something that I really loved.” Like many families, we didn’t grow up well-off — so my pursuit of law was a practical one. It was the thinking at the time to pursue law as a means to a better end,” she explains.
Originally from San Fernando, a graduate of St Gabriel’s Primary School and St Joseph’s Convent, Celeste would go on to pursue law at the St Augustine and Cave Hill campuses of the University of the West Indies as well as High Wooding Law School before practicing in Belize. “I had been a lawyer for over ten years at this point and I finally spoke to my husband about the idea of leaving law to focus on writing; a sort of sabbatical if you will and though I was nervous about it, he was supportive of the idea,” she recalls.
Taking a year off in 2011, she admits that it wasn’t immediately easy to get to work. Creative writing is a whole other passion — one that requires, as she explains, a period of intense writing, followed by gestation of what is written and some space to allow for new ideas to spring forth. When a series of family tragedies would strike during her sabbatical though, something changed. “Writing was what I always knew. I recently found my first ‘novel’ that I wrote as a child, no more than ten years of age. It was a mystery ‘novel’, no doubt inspired from my reading Famous Five and Secret Seven stories at the time. So when things went wrong, I went back to what I knew as a child and that was writing.” From this space, over the course of seven months, a novel would emerge — but this was to be just the start of Celeste’s journey.
“I didn’t know much about publishing, so I reached out to several local writers who had been published but didn’t get much response. It was only when Rosalind Carrington replied that I was able to gain some traction. She would introduce me to Sharon Miller and these two women were the only ones who gave me the time of day. So many people just didn’t even respond! So I am grateful, everyday, that they did,” she details. In the course of editing her novel with the mentorship she received, she would come to realise that though she had the basic novel idea down in words, it was her craft of writing that needed something more. She explains further, “People think that in writing — well we all learn to write, so a writer simply puts words to paper, crafts a story and then goes out there, gets published and wins an award right?” she says with a laugh. “There probably should be another word for what we do — but it’s not as simple as ‘writing’ implies. It’s a different craft altogether; a very solitary profession that requires hours and hours of work and a certain disposition. As a writer you not just have to be able to tolerate solitary confinement but also somehow enjoy it.”
Celeste is right. Unlike many other art-forms that can emerge and transform in the public eye — like artists who put work out, photographers who feature their craft on Instagram or musicians on Soundcloud or Youtube, writing very much happens ‘in the dark’. Writers seldom put work out for comment, then take it down, improve and put it back out as the story has already been concluded in the readers’ minds. To improve her craft, she applied to Lesley College, Boston, to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing and successfully started her study there in 2014. But there was to be another family surprise — though this time, a happy one. She would learn in her second semester that she was pregnant with her first child. “I had to take some time off to give birth in the third semester of the program but pregnancy and motherhood had such a profound and positive effect on me. I suddenly had less time so I had to manage the demands of the program which required hours of detailed, annotated reading and preparation of several stories per semester alongside the fact that I was now very much a mother,” she explains.
On completing her thesis and graduating in 2016, Celeste would now look to transform some of her thesis into a marketable book. Over the course of that year, three of her stories would also be published in literary magazines across North America with Six Months being the first of these — published in the literary giant, New England Review. “It was so surreal when I got the email. I was on the phone literally ordering a pizza and in the middle of selecting ingredients I read that acceptance email from the Review. I only really believed it was happening when I finally saw it published!” she admits.
The response from Caribbean readers, the diaspora and North American readers was profound. She points out that the response surprised her, “Caribbean people love to read, but more than that I think when we see a story posted about us, by us, because it’s so rare to have ourselves portrayed authentically — it stirs something in the reader.” The New England Review too would be taken by surprise somewhat and go on to do a follow-up interview with Celeste and forward her work for several more potential awards including the Pen Award which she would win earlier this month.
As much as it is a privilege to do what one loves, Celeste’s story also shows that it often takes much more work than most people consider. “There’s no one prescriptive way to getting your work done and published as a writer. You do however have to practice your craft everyday. The MFA program helped keep my head in the game and get my writing done. The hardest part is the discipline to commit to it every day. I don’t advocate writing every day — but you have to commit to it either in reading stories that are similar to what you want, or just coming up with ideas — but it takes work. We live in an ‘instant’ society today — where people think success is overnight. The reality is that I have been working on some of these stories since 2014,” she points out. “There’s no substitute for hard work and I would not have been here if not for Rosalind and Sharon who really were there for me. I do hope that in my own way, that I am giving back through my characters and stories and by helping to give the Caribbean people a voice.”
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Celeste’s work will next appear in the New England Review’s anthology of short stories and in her own work currently slated to be titled Pleasant View.
Kieran Andrew Can is a freelance writer with over 200 exclusive interviews with people across the Caribbean (where he lives), the United States and the UK. He also once met Will Smith and this happened :)
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This article originally appeared in the Newsday. Copyright Trinidad Newsday.
