How’d you come up with the anthology’s name?
As I explain in the intro, an iron balloon is what Jamaicans call a singer who’s been trying in vain to bus’ out—get a hit song. The idea is that you must be made of iron if every attempt to bus’ you doesn’t seem to work. Before this anthology came it was generally believed that emerging writers based in Jamaica were doomed to failure because the tools to make them bus’ out didn’t exist. Of course the most important of the missing tools was access to training—workshops. So the name Iron Balloons was chosen as a wink, really, because we’d done something that many people thought of as impossible. We put an effective workshop system in place and got real results.

Why were opportunities there so scarce?
I discuss all of this in the intro, which I call the “The Kingston 12 Overture.” By the way, Kingston 12 is the postal code for Trenchtown, where Bob Marley and many other great reggae singers came from. One of the things I look at in the intro is the relationship between music and literature in Jamaica, specifically why the music establishment has been so successful at developing local talent and the literary establishment has not.

Was it difficult to select the work?
No. I just got into the headspace of the great Jamaican record producers whose work I admire so much, people like Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, Augustus Pablo and Lee Perry. To quote from the intro: “They’d select the best combination of known and new voices from their stable, consider each work in terms of pace, subject, style, and mood, then put them in the sequence that would have the best effect.” And that’s exactly what I did.

And in this case, who would be your stable?
The tutors and students in the Calabash Writer’s Workshop, which is one of the key components of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust, which I founded with the support of Kwame Dawes and Justine Henzell in 2001. Internationally, we’re known for our annual festival, which brings together writers from around the world for three days. But in Jamaica we’re also known for our workshops, which came on stream in 2003. These workshops have been immensely successful, producing students who’ve gone on to selective graduate writing programs in the States, get published, and win nominations for prestigious international awards.

Do you have a favorite work in the anthology?
I do. But I don’t think I should say what it is. The book has been well received, well reviewed. It’s gotten major reviews all over the world, for example, in The New York Times, The Boston Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Time Out Chicago in the States; The Times Literary Supplement in England; and The Toronto Star in Canada. Different reviewers make specific reference to different selections in the book.

However, reviewers always make a point of praising your contribution.
Oh … “How to Beat a Child the Right and Proper Way.” Well, yes. That’s true.

The New York Times didn’t reserve its praise.
That’s true. It called the work “a big breath of a piece, fifty-four pages long, and something of a tour de force, spoken in various registers of Jamaican English.”

Tour de force. That’s nothing to sniff at.
Well, I don’t know what to say except that there are people who think they’re right. But here’s the thing—in some ways I can’t take full credit for the story, because it’s based on an incident that happened in my family. We’ve been telling this story and laughing about it since the early 1970s.

What incident is this?
Well, when my sister Claudette tells the story I think she’d like to think of it as The Great Insurrection of 1972. When my mother tells the story I think she thinks of it as The Great Ass Whuppin’ of 1972. The real event and the fictionalized account have the same basic arc, the same basic characters, the same tensions—a public confrontation between a rebellious teenage girl and her domineering mother that escalates over the course of an afternoon and evening and ends in an act of spectacular violence.

The mother beats the daughter with an electric cord … in the shower.
True. And by the way, my mother didn’t use an electric cord. She used a belt.

One of the things that strikes me about the story …
Bad choice of words …

I’ll give you that. A notable thing about the story is that it’s quite funny.
It has always been funny in my family. We just couldn’t figure out what was going through my sister’s mind. She was acting like she didn’t quite remember who her mother was. But this is not what makes the version in Iron Balloons so funny. To begin with, the voice of the story is funny. The mother narrates the story herself in a regular Jamaican speaking voice filled with the kinds of unintentionally funny moralizing, turns of phrase and grammatical inconsistencies you often hear in the voices of self-educated working-class people who’ve clawed their way to the middle. But what makes the story really funny is the mother’s dogmatic belief that her daughter is wrong and she’s right. Now what makes the story really, really, really, really, really funny is that by the time the mother gets to the halfway point of the story you don’t want her to beat the girl—you want to beat the girl yourself. The story gives you the vicarious thrill of putting on a whuppin’ on a kid who just won’t listen. You just want to beat the daughter’s ass.

This is not the only boundary-testing story in the book.
You’re right. “Siblings” by Ruddy Wallace is about a brother and sister’s rational decision to commit incest. “Sugar” by Sharon Leach is about a hotel worker who’s offered money to participate in a threesome with a married couple from Texas.

A few of the stories also deal with the spirit world, religion if you will.
Well, Jamaicans have been grappling with religion for centuries. Christianity has always had to defend itself there, at first against the many African and African-inspired forms that took root there with the arrival of slaves, then the rise of Rastafarianism in the 20th century. Jamaica is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the nation with the most churches per square mile in the world—fertile ground for religious war.

So are you willing to name a favorite story now?
It might be “Marley’s Ghost” by Kwame Dawes. It’s about a schizophrenic guy who thinks he’s Bob Marley. One of the really fantastic things about this story is that you learn more about Marley through this guy’s imaginings than you could ever learn from reading ten biographies. But I also have a special place for “Parting” by Alwin Bully. It’s about a man who tries to pick up a woman at a party in Trinidad and discovers that she just might be a medium. When she offers to connect him to the ghost of his son who killed himself some heavy, heavy stuff goes down. Heavy but important you know. Iron Balloons is like a reggae album. It takes you through a range of moods.