For Women's History Month, Jacqueline Bishop interviewed Barbara Jenkins for last weekend's Sunday Observer Bookends column. The article, titled "Men, Often In Absentia, are Still Ever-present in Barbara Jenkins’ Work Because of Their Influence on Women’s Lives", is full of interesting titbits on Barbara's writing and her musings on life. On the subject of De Rightest Place, for example, Barbara says:
I think of De Rightest Place as a novel. But I’m not good at the lit crit genre defining thing. I’d prefer to leave that to academics who have standards and boundaries and definitions and examples and rules and exceptions. I think I wrote one story about a place, a time, a cast of people – does that make it a novel? I hope so. But then again, I wrote it in chunks, chapter-long chunks, non-sequentially… does that make it a collection of short stories? There’s a bar. There’s a woman who by default owns the bar. There’s a barman with an emotional stake in the bar. People come and go, but there are regulars, hardcore bar family. So, it’s as much about the bar, the period in Trinidad and Tobago’s political and social history, as it is about the main character and the patrons. On balance I’d say the bar owns the story.