Academics sign story books at local store

(CNS): A former UCCI professor returns to Cayman this month to share his latest collection of short stories later this month, a few days ahead of the current UCCI president, roy Bodden, who will be sharing his collection of Caymanian stories he overheard as a boy, A Gathering of Old Men.  The two academics will be holding a signing at Books & Books in Camana Bay on the Monday 23 and Thursday 26 July. Keith Jardim taught English at UCCI and hosted a local reading club and writers’ workshops before leaving Cayman in the summer of 2010. Bodden is one of Cayman’s best known writers, cultural historians and a former politician but is now the university’s top man.

In his collection Bodden delves into his boyhood memories of listening in on conversations by the old men who gathered at his ancestral home, the Guard House, as they talked about everyday life and the issues facing an evolving Cayman Islands.

Expanding on the themes explored in an earlier collection, Stories My Grandfather Never Told Me (CNCF, 2007), the stories explore how the forces of colonialism and imperialism, globalization, racism, greed corruption, a toxic expatriacy and the search for identity, helped to define the Caymanian personality.

Meanwhile, Jardim will be presenting Near Open Water, his latest collection of stories from regional societies that seethe on the edge of chaos, where crime encompasses both the rulers and the ruled, and where representatives of the state are as out of control as the youth.

"The stories play nicely with the disjunction between place as redemptive and place as punitive/purgatorial. The sense of foreboding that pervades all of the stories is impelled by this tension … the work is 'postcolonial' in the very best sense of that critical label,” says Lois Parkinson Zamora, Professor of English, History, and Art. University of Houston.

Both free events will include an author presentation, group discussion and book signing.