SAN­DRA L BLOOD

My Cul­ture and Me, a colour­ing book de­signed and pro­duced by au­thor and po­et Keeron Isaac, 28, her­alds T&T’s many won­ders, in­clud­ing birds, Car­ni­val, cui­sine, and tra­di­tion­al mas char­ac­ters. It is part of his pub­li­ca­tion, Po­et Tree, the first in­stal­ment in a tril­o­gy of po­et­ry.

The Ari­ma cul­ture en­thu­si­ast is an avid an­i­mal lover and na­ture fa­nat­ic who loves con­nect­ing with new peo­ple and un­der­stand­ing their sto­ries.

While grow­ing up he suf­fered from asth­ma and ad­mit­ted that his love for books was not al­ways there. How­ev­er, with some en­cour­age­ment from his moth­er he de­vel­oped an in­ter­est in read­ing and every­thing changed.

“I then re­alised the world of read­ing was not as mun­dane as I thought,” Isaac said.

“This new­found love for read­ing found me fin­ish­ing an en­tire book in un­der three hours, or even fin­ish­ing a book bor­rowed from the church li­brary be­fore I reached home. I im­me­di­ate­ly knew that one day I would want to cre­ate my own.

“I can now con­fi­dent­ly say that the pan­dem­ic re­lit that de­sire, which I had for­got­ten for a while. Writ­ing po­et­ry and cre­at­ing books is very cathar­tic to me. I love every mo­ment of it! It’s an es­cape from a busy, fast-paced world. Every­thing goes silent for me.”

Isaac strong­ly be­lieves that read­ing and writ­ing can be se­ri­ous crime pre­ven­tion tools and cat­a­lysts for men­tal well­be­ing.

In pri­ma­ry school, es­say writ­ing was one of Isaac’s weak­est sub­jects un­til he start­ed tak­ing read­ing se­ri­ous­ly, and went on to score full marks in SEA Cre­ative Writ­ing.

He re­called, “In high school when many of my peers shunned Lit­er­a­ture class­es, I looked for­ward to them. I of­ten topped the class or got per­fect scores on ex­ams. It raised my self-es­teem. Lit­er­a­ture nev­er felt like study­ing for me. It was just an ex­ten­sion or branch of who I am.”

At Arou­ca Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School and lat­er at Hillview Col­lege, Isaac was made to read po­ems. But it was a class as­sign­ment to write a po­em for Moth­er’s Day that boost­ed his con­fi­dence.

He de­scribed dis­cov­er­ing his abil­i­ty to cre­ate po­et­ry as a gift from God. From then on, he made reg­u­lar con­tri­bu­tions to his school mag­a­zine, de­bat­ing and oth­er lit­er­ary pur­suit.

A po­em he wrote in Sixth Form, I am Jazz, im­pressed his teacher who told him: “‘You have a gift’.”

Isaac said writ­ing po­ems gives him peace and his writ­ing is in­spired by na­ture, fam­i­ly, cul­ture, faith, love and loss.

How­ev­er, his lat­est project is dif­fer­ent be­cause he’s telling sto­ries with­out words.

The pic­tures in the colour­ing book in­clude a fan­cy sailor do­ing his dance, dame lor­raine, Ju­nior Bis­nath and a moko jumbie stu­dent, each evok­ing a sto­ry of T&T’s cul­ture.

“To me, that is mag­nif­i­cent,” Isaac said.

The 36-page soft-cov­er book is avail­able at Ama­zon, Wal­mart On­line and Barnes and No­ble.