Zahra Gor­don

Win­ning the Com­mon­wealth Short Sto­ry Prize in May seemed to ce­ment for Sharon Mil­lar that she is a writer–a la­bel that for many years she ap­proached with hes­i­ta­tion and ex­pe­ri­enced with some dis­com­fort.

"When I was sit­ting on the stage ac­cept­ing the prize that's one of the things that I talked about; the fact that, now I can be con­fi­dent in call­ing my­self a writer," she said in an in­ter­view at Rit­u­als Cof­fee House, Mar­aval Road, Port-of-Spain.

The 46-year-old writer al­so found val­i­da­tion last year in win­ning the Small Axe Lit­er­ary Com­pe­ti­tion and com­plet­ing a Mas­ters of Fine Arts Cre­ative Writ­ing pro­gramme at Les­ley Uni­ver­si­ty in Mass­a­chu­setts, USA. She was al­so fea­tured in the New Tal­ent Show­case of the Bo­cas Lit Fest. Yet, af­ter all these ac­com­plish­ments Mil­lar's ce­ment isn't thor­ough­ly dry.

"I'm not con­vinced that this is some­thing I can live on. I have the time and space to do this now, but in terms of writ­ing be­ing vi­able I'm still not sure. I'm still not pub­lished yet."

Win­ning prizes has al­so brought Mil­lar some new-found at­ten­tion that the self-de­scribed "ex­tro­vert­ed in­tro­vert" is still com­ing to terms with.

"I re­al­ly don't like be­ing the cen­tre of at­ten­tion. It's been good but it's al­so been dis­tract­ing be­cause you sud­den­ly re­alise that so many peo­ple ex­pect dif­fer­ent things from you and it's very strange when you have a sto­ry that goes out and leaves you and you no longer have con­trol over it," she said.

The prize al­so put some of Mil­lar's doubts about her work at bay.

"Here (in T&T) you con­stant­ly ques­tion your­self. It's a small coun­try and there's a lot of di­a­logue about what con­sti­tutes na­tion­al lit­er­a­ture, and who has the au­thor­i­ty to write that lit­er­a­ture. To be judged by a pan­el of judges that's so di­verse was re­al val­i­da­tion be­cause they just get what we're try­ing to do as emerg­ing post-colo­nial so­ci­eties.

"There's still an in­cred­i­bly emo­tion­al re­sponse to work in this so­ci­ety. Peo­ple don't quite know how to come to work some­times so the con­ver­sa­tions about lit­er­a­ture can be po­lar­is­ing in a lot of ways and that's not do­ing us any good at all."

Mil­lar be­lieves that me­dia re­ports can be po­lar­is­ing as well and sees lit­er­a­ture as a way to per­form a bal­anc­ing act. She's cur­rent­ly de­vel­op­ing a nov­el from one of her ear­ly short sto­ries where the "an­ti-hero" will be thor­ough­ly ex­am­ined.

She said, "I'm re­al­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the an­ti-hero. There are so many char­ac­ters here and peo­ple are ei­ther glo­ri­fied or vil­lianised. That's what the av­er­age per­son is get­ting in the me­dia every­day–glo­ri­fi­ca­tion or vil­lainy. And, I think that fic­tion has to kind of fit a role to try and present more round­ed char­ac­ters. It's not that easy to point fin­gers at one per­son. How do bad peo­ple get to where they get to be? What makes them bad? Are they 100 per cent bad, 90 per cent bad, on­ly a lit­tle bit bad?"

Hav­ing the time to ex­am­ine these and oth­er ques­tions through writ­ing is a new chap­ter in Mil­lar's life. Grow­ing up, Mil­lar said she al­ways want­ed to write.

"Any­one who loves to read would want to write be­cause of that en­try in­to an­oth­er world–you lit­er­al­ly walk through the doors of an en­tire­ly dif­fer­ent world. So from very ear­ly on I re­mem­ber want­i­ng to try and recre­ate that."

In the late 1990s, Mil­lar par­tic­i­pat­ed in cre­ative writ­ing work­shops with the late Wayne Brown. When they were com­plet­ed she "re­turned to re­al life," how­ev­er.

And it would be an­oth­er 15 years–af­ter work­ing in ad­ver­tis­ing, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and writ­ing for mag­a­zines–be­fore she start­ed writ­ing cre­ative­ly again.

"Writ­ers need a pa­tron. Writ­ers need mon­ey and space. And I'm very lucky to have a sup­port­ive hus­band, but if I was 25 and I had to get up in the morn­ing and find a job to make car pay­ments, like I did, I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it," she said.

Mil­lar's re­turn to writ­ing, how­ev­er, has come at an op­por­tune time. She now sees her­self as part of a "lit­er­ary rev­o­lu­tion" in T&T and cred­its writ­ers like Bar­bara Jenk­ins and Alake Pil­grim paving the way for her.

So­cial me­dia has be­come im­per­a­tive to the rev­o­lu­tion Mil­lar is part of and that's some­thing she didn't en­tire­ly re­alise when she start­ed blog­ging in 2007.

Mil­lar en­vi­sions the lo­cal lit­er­ary move­ment as be­com­ing more vi­brant and giv­ing the pub­lic an al­ter­na­tive way to see them­selves. "I think the more peo­ple that write, the bet­ter. I think the more peo­ple that are pub­lished, the bet­ter.

At the mo­ment the on­ly thing that we have as a self-re­flec­tion is me­dia and that has to be hav­ing an im­pact on the psy­che of the coun­try. So I can on­ly write my sto­ry but if the sto­ries are com­ing from all over the coun­try, it would be­come hu­man­ised. I think that's the most im­por­tant thing. I think peo­ple re­al­ly have to learn to see the hu­man be­ing be­hind all the sto­ries that we hear."

To read Sharon Mil­lar's piece, The Whale House, which won the Com­mon­wealth Short Sto­ry Prize, you can vis­it Gran­ta mag­a­zine on­line: www.gran­ta.com.