NASSAU, BAHAMAS – In her introductory writing course through Poinciana Paper Press that starts next month, Bahamian writer and healer Helen Klonaris will help her students explore the sources of the fantastic—from the collective unconscious to myths, folktales and fairy tales, as well as various forms of fantasy writing—to help them generate transcendent writing.
For Klonaris, she sees fantasy as having the power to “make the impossible real” and reminds us that “we need wonder and magic in our lives”.
A Greek-Bahamian writer, teacher, and energy medicine practitioner, Helen Klonaris has been published widely in several journals. Her debut collection of short stories If I Had the Wings (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), was a BOCAS Caribbean Literary Prize Finalist.
Living and working between the Bay Area, California, and Nassau, The Bahamas for seventeen years, Klonaris recently settled permanently at home. Here, she returns full circle to where she began her writing career working as a human rights activist who founded and co-founded several socially significant organizations, as well as several literary journals, collectives, and associations.
“For me, writing has always been urgent and necessary,” said Konaris.
“As a young activist, here at home, writing emerged out of me as a deep need to hear myself, and to hear others speaking from the most isolated, the most hurting, the most violated places inside them, and to use words to liberate themselves, ourselves.”
Now, Klonaris combines her passions to create transformative experiences within the community, leading to the birth of her upcoming writing workshop, “Writing the Fantastic”.
For this, she has partnered with Poinciana Paper Press—a Nassau based-centre for writing, book arts & publishing that provides platforms, guidance, and opportunities for engaging with books and their allied crafts in order to nurture the diversity of narratives in Caribbean art and literature.
The five-week course will be offered both in-person at Poinciana Paper Press on Parkgate Road, or online via Zoom, and Klonaris promises that it will be accessible for writers of all levels. Helen’s prompts, exercises, and guidance will help them to identify the stories they feel called to tell, and the worlds they long to create. Each workshop cohort will help each other to encourage and shape these narratives, culminating in a reading of student work as a special finale.
“I love this genre because it reminds us that there are so many more realms of existence than the one we see, and when you know that, you also know that you are not a prisoner to the situations you may feel stuck inside,” Klonaris said.
“You can fly out. You can find the secret passageway underneath the bed and climb down. You can breathe underwater. You can shapeshift into a tree and back into a woman when it’s safe to do so. You can become the words on the page that tear down the house you are living in and the words on the page that build up a new one.”
Interested members of the public can sign up by registering at poincianapaperpress.eventbrite.com.
