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Tag Archives: Guyanese-Canadian Author Ken Puddicombe

The Writer’s Life: My Author’s Website

28 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in The Writer's Life

≈ 64 Comments

Tags

Author Rosaliene Bacchus, Guyanese-Canadian Author Ken Puddicombe, The Author’s Website, Yahoo Small Business website design tools

Photo of Rosaliene with Gloria, Owner of Gloria’s Restaurant in West Los Angeles, California

I am no computer systems geek. So, imagine my consternation on January 25th when I received an email from Yahoo Small Business regarding the latest change in their webhosting services. Since 2007, I have been using their Yahoo SiteBuilder to power my business website, rosalienebacchus.com. The monthly fee for their webhosting services is a good fit for my super-tight budget. With the assistance of Richard Wagner’s book, Yahoo! SiteBuilder for Dummies, I managed to create and maintain my own website. Whatever it lacked in professional appearance, my website attracted numerous visitors for its rich content for those interested in doing business with the United States and Brazil.

Over the years, I survived the disruption and frustration of each upgrade to the Yahoo SiteBuilder editor. That is all in the past now. Beginning this coming March 31, Yahoo will discontinue support for the system powering my website. While I still clung to the old and familiar, the company had moved on to newer website creation tools. They are putting the old editor to rest. My website will become an orphan.

After D-Day, I will no longer be able to edit or update my website. “You must create a new website,” Yahoo informed me. They provided me with two options: make a new business website myself or use a team of experts to build my website. Neither option appealed to me.

After nine days of resisting the inevitable, I emailed Yahoo Small Business enquiring about maintaining my domain name and links to the vast content on my soon-to-be-orphaned website. Both needless concerns: I have received no response to date.

With trepidation a week later, I clicked the link provided to learn more about creating my own website. Fear of the unfamiliar is a terrible master. I can do this, I assured myself. Each breakthrough was cause for celebration. As I got better at creating new pages, I even had fun with the creative process. I had to let go of my international trade content and focus on creating an author’s website. For over six years now, I no longer provide international trade services. The time to move on had long passed.

On February 26th, carefully following Yahoo’s information guide, I successfully published my website using the same domain: www.rosalienebacchus.com. My new author’s website is filled with photographs and empty spaces. The website Menu is also not fixed, which I find a nuisance. My son, an electronic games designer, explained that these features facilitate viewing on the smaller laptops and smart phones.

My Home Page features my journey to becoming a writer as well as a link to an interview with Guyanese-Canadian author Ken Puddicombe in which I share my writing process. I hope that the reviews and praise provided on the page promoting my debut novel, Under the Tamarind Tree, will entice more readers to buy my book. For those readers wishing to learn more, my website also offers “Behind the Scenes” information about my debut novel.

Snapshots and links to my Short Stories, published on the Guyana Journal website, are also available for free reading. I have yet to determine how I will archive my monthly featured poets on my Poetry Corner. I am still in the learning process. Creating the dropdown box for “Behind the Scenes” was a major achievement. Yay!

Since I am not active on Facebook and LinkedIn, I would love to have visitors connect with me through My Blog, Three Worlds One Vision: Guyana~Brazil~USA.

I would love to get your feedback. My new author’s website is still a work in progress.

“The Punt Trench” – Poem by Guyanese-Canadian Author Ken Puddicombe

16 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Guyana, Poetry

≈ 41 Comments

Tags

Guyanese-Canadian Author Ken Puddicombe, Immigrant nostalgia for the old country, Poem “The Punt Trench” by Ken Puddicombe, Poetry Collection Unfathomable And Other Poems by Ken Puddicombe (Canada 2020)

Punts to be loaded with cut sugar cane – Sugar Estate in Guyana

My Poetry Corner August 2020 features the poem “The Punt Trench” from the first poetry collection, Unfathomable And Other Poems (2020), by Guyanese-Canadian author Ken Puddicombe. Since retiring from his accounting work, Puddicombe has been pursuing his love of writing. To date, he has published two novels and a short story collection.

His poetry collection is filled with nostalgia of his boyhood days in Guyana. As an immigrant living in Canada since 1971, he writes in “Nostalgic”:

Immigrants.
As they grow older, the yearning
For a return to the old country increases.
Memories plague them, of a childhood in a familiar spot.
Any little incident will send their senses reeling and take
them back in time and place.

The punt trench is a recurring memory in Puddicombe’s poems. For readers unfamiliar with Guyana’s coastal lowlands of sugar cane fields crisscrossed by canals or trenches, a legacy of Dutch colonizers (1648-1814), a punt or cane-punt is a flat-bottomed iron barge for transporting harvested canes along the system of canals or punt trenches from field to factory. About 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 3 or 4 feet deep, the punt is drawn by a mule (in the early days) or tractor, attached by a long chain, moving along the punt-trench earth dam or unsurfaced road. The punt trench also serves as a drainage canal during low tides and periods of flooding, controlled by kokers or sluices.

Seawall with Koker or Sluice – Guyana
 

Puddicombe’s memories of the punt trench are somber and haunting. The title poem, “Unfathomable,” the longest narrative poem with seventeen stanzas, recounts the tale of the unfathomable death of his playful and daring friend—crushed between two punts moving along in a convoy on their way to the sugar factory.

The punts in the mule-train linked
With short lengths of chain hooked
Into metal clasps welded at the front
And rear of each craft. Six mules up front
Kept the convoy moving, each animal
Bound to a punt by a length of chain.

Lincoln was clinging to the connecting
Chain between two punts in the middle
Of the convoy, hanging on for a ride,
When the distance narrowed swiftly
Between the punts.

“Drowning” describes the time the author/poet almost lost his life in the cocoa-brown waters of the punt trench. Though he could not swim like the older boys, he plunged into the deep / Murky, swirling pit of the Punt Trench, made murkier still when his feet stirred up the mud and silt at the bottom of the trench.

On his first return visit to Guyana in 1987 after a sixteen-year absence, Puddicombe questions whether one could ever really go back to a time and place long gone. In his poem, “Middle Road,” the street where he had once lived, he finds The bridge over the Punt Trench where / I fell into the water now collapsed, the Trench / Filled in with debris.

In the featured poem, “The Punt Trench,” he reflects on the changes over time in four stanzas, each beginning with a different theme: Memory, Despair, Change, and Hope. His Memory of the punt trench as Fast moving torrential / Waves flashing through / The Koker to the raging Atlantic is no more. Instead, he feels only despair.  

Despair.
The Punt Trench is a dumping
Ground filled with debris and
Castoffs. Empty shell of a car.
Rusting frame of a bicycle. Bags of
Garbage piled in mounds. A dog’s bloated
Carcass. Tall paragrass and wild eddo bush
Reaching to the sky.

The punt trench, once a haunting memory of youthful joy and dread, is now a symbol of the decay of a neighborhood and of a nation; of promises not yet realized. It is not the change promised by the founding leaders of the independent nation.

Change.
From the Koker in Public Road
All the way to the Backdam
The Punt Trench is now Independence
Boulevard. Every time the breeze zips
Across from the north-east,
It reeks and fills my
Nostrils. Repulsive
Odours.

Only birdsong brings the poet Hope that Life goes on!

As the author and poet acknowledges in “You Can Never Go Back,” the final poem in the collection, the places of his idyllic youth have changed or no longer exist. People are no longer the same. Yet…some among us grasp a dream of returning to a time we consider our days of glory. Life goes on, for better or for worse, with or without us.

To read the complete featured poem, “The Punt Trench,” and learn more about the work of Ken Puddicombe, go to my Poetry Corner August 2020.

Quote

Book Review: Under The Tamarind Tree by Rosaliene Bacchus — Ken Puddicombe -Writer

04 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Reviews - Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus

≈ 76 Comments

Tags

Book Review, Caribbean Fiction, Guyanese-Canadian Artist Joan Bryan-Muss, Guyanese-Canadian Author Ken Puddicombe, Multicultural Fiction, Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus

 

Great news! I’ve received the first review of my debut novel, Under the Tamarind Tree, soon to be released. The reviewer, Guyana-born Ken Puddicombe, is the author of three historical novels Racing With the Rain (2012), Junta (2014), and Down Independence Boulevard & Other Stories (2017). He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he owns and runs a small press.

Do check out his review.

COVER ART BY GUYANESE-CANADIAN ARTIST JOAN BRYAN-MUSS

 

UNDER THE TAMARIND TREE Copyright 2019 By Rosaliene Bacchus 284 pgs Published by Lulu Press, Inc. USA Review by Ken Puddicombe The fruit of the Tamarind Tree holds a puzzling allure to people in the tropics, its tangy and acidic fruit devoured obsessively, even as it stimulates the taste buds with spasms of unpleasantness […]

via Book Review: Under The Tamarind Tree by Rosaliene Bacchus — Ken Puddicombe -Writer

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