One day to Calabash 2010

Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, is 85 miles away from Kingston. It's so far away and simple that it feels like another world even in ordinary times. But these are not ordinary times in Kingston. So when the 10th anniversary of the Calabash International Literary Festival begins at Jake's in Treasure Beach tomorrow, its usual large contingent of Kingstonians should feel especially relieved.

"This year's Calabash is taking place at a time when many of us Jamaicans are feeling a need to recommit ourselves to life, to love, to peace and to art and ideas," said Colin Channer, the festival's founder and artistic director.

Tomorrow's opening night at the three-day free festival will feature live performances by Etana and Freddie McGregor. It will also include a screening of Trevor Rhone's classic film Smile Orange and readings by several writers. One of these writers will be Russell Banks.

Banks is the author of 16 works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling and The Reserve. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, have been adapted into award-winning films.

Ten questions were posed to Banks as he readies for another Calabash festival. He was thoughtful and witty in his replies.

What did you enjoy most about your first time at Calabash in 2005?

The incredible warmth and enthusiasm of the audiences. I felt like a rock star. Those people come to listen, and they bring their ears with them. So if you're going to read to them, you've got to read very, very good.

What are you looking forward to most of all this year?

Mixing with some old friends - Wole Soyinka, Sharon Olds ... Channer, Dawes and Henzell (sounds like a law firm, doesn't it?) - and making new friends.

You have an interesting personal history with Jamaica.

I travelled to Jamaica often in the late '60s and early '70s and then in the middle '70s made a home for myself and family over in Anchovy (near Montego Bay) for a couple of years. I still have friends in Jamaica, and my ex-wife is now married to a Jamaican and has a house there. My novels, The Book of Jamaica and Rule of the Bone, were deeply influenced by my time in Jamaica.

How did that history inform the way you processed the current news reports about the events in Kingston?

I could tell at once that it was local gang violence, probably with political implications, that was being way overblown by the US and UK media. I remember from the mid-70s when I was living in Jamaica I'd run into a bunch of kids burning a tyre in the road and making a lot of noise, and a few days later friends in the 'States' would send me hysterical accounts of Jamaican "riots" in Time magazine and the NY Times and Washington Post. That coverage scared American tourists into going to Puerto Rico instead and crippled the tourist industry and got Michael Manley, who had been dating Fidel Castro, replaced by Eddie Seaga, which pleased the US State Department immensely. I doubt the coverage is being orchestrated by the CIA or State Department this time. But white Americans and Brits love to scare themselves with images of black shirtless youths burning tyres in the street - it sells papers and makes TV news exciting.

Do you mind being described as a political writer?

Not as long as it's meant as a compliment. Sometimes it's meant as a diminishment, however, and that can put me off my feed for a day. Because I'm first and foremost a writer, one who only happens to have strong political views.

As you look at American literary fiction today, are you seeing a general rise in quality or a decline?

You know, I can't say I keep track of American fiction in any general way. Mostly, I keep track of the work by my own generation - Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, William Kennedy, and a dozen more - and these are giants, producing a world-class literature that's going to be read and studied for many generations.

What was the inspiration for your most recent novel, The Reserve?

Hard to be specific because as for any novel there were half a dozen inspirations, personal, political, historical, philosophical, literary, and so on, all kind of braided together. One important source for the novel, however, is the place where I live most of the year, in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York near the Canadian border, a vast wilderness where there are a number of exclusive private clubs that operate in the region a little like plantations. The class divisions that result from the presence of these clubs and the surrounding hardscrabble villages that depend on them for work fascinate me. They can be seen as a metaphor for all kinds of class divisions in the US generally, but also between rich and poor nations, the colonisers and the colonised.

Vanessa Cole in The Reserve and Hannah Musgrave in The Darling (the novel that came before it) are two posh American women who are mentally off-kilter. What is it that you find so fascinating in this social type?

Sane, balanced, rational women just aren't that interesting or sexy to me. I speak as a man who has been married four times and has four daughters, a granddaughter and a 96-year-old mother.

Your novel Continental Drift turns 25 this year. What do you think your character Vanise Dorsinville would say about the earthquake in Haiti, her homeland?

She would think the gods must be angrier than they have ever been and would not know who to blame.

You're reading with the American poet Sharon Olds tomorrow evening. What do you admire most about her work?

Her incredible authenticity and directness, her refusal to fudge the truth, no matter how unpleasant or unwelcome. And then there's the beauty of her language.