NOTES FROM A WRITER'S BOOK OF CURES AND SPELLS
	Marcia Douglas knows the underside of paradise very well; she grew up in Kingston- Jamaica's bustling capital, the place she has referred to as the "edge of the world" and the setting for her long-awaited second novel, NOTES FROM A WRITER'S BOOK OF CURES AND SPELLS (Peepal Tree Press, November 15, 2005.) The seed for this book came from childhood recollections of squatters in a Kingston cemetery, their clotheslines stretched above tombstones, a young girl singing amid the dead. This story travels the riff of a Marley tune and comes from afar. NOTES has at its center a Jamaican writer, Flamingo, whose life becomes intertwined with her fictional characters: Dahlia, a young girl growing up in ghetto Kingston; her beautiful one-eyed sister, Alva, who dreams of fashion design in New York; their brother, Paul, who through his love for the coconut cakes in Mrs. Ying's (the Chinese shopkeeper's) showcase, comes to be called "Made in China;" and a Rastafarian Madonna who sits on a windowsill stealing keys, bottle caps and hair pins as people pass by. Through poverty, immigration and Jamaica's political upheaval, the siblings are dispersed, and it is Alva who solicits the help of Flamingo to bring the fictional family back together. In the world of this novel, storytelling serves as a metaphor for healing and the ability to tell a story is an act of magic. Modeled after a writer's personal notebook, the novel makes a one-of-a-kind signature with pages embellished with the drawings Flamingo cannot stop herself from adding to the margins, an appendix of related found material, dream fragments, notes, clippings and photographs of a series of Jamaican soul dolls - one for each character- made from island seeds, pods, moss, twigs and other findings.
Part of the proceeds from this book go toward assisting Balmagie Primary, an inner city school in Kingston, Jamaica. Read an excerpt from Notes NOTES FROM A WRITER'S BOOK OF CURES AND SPELLS Peepal Tree Press: Leeds, November, 2005

B ella is a kin-owl- a shapeshifter- who knows the story of how God created Jamaica and how She laughed when She saw what She had done. Through the generations Bella lives on, in one incarnation, then another, always meeting suffering with fortitude, hiding the burden of her strange nature from others. Some of the women whose lives cross hers are young Gracie who seeks comfort for the pain of waiting for her mother who has immigrated to New York, and Mrs. Cummings, who teaches Gracie about the plants in her garden and sends her to look for the mysterious, white star flower known as Madam Fate. Soho Press, New York: 1999 and Women's Press, London: 1999. "Extremely lyrical and meditative, Marcia Douglas' Madam Fate is a poetic feast for the imagination." - Edwidge Danticat "...so flesh-and-warm human- all expressed with such a glory of Caribbean English- that what you are reading is a novel which is hugely uplifting, charged with a revolutionary spirit of language and empathy." - The Morning Star "a story which tickles the senses and delights the imagination." - Library Journal "earthy, lyrical and tragic" - Boston Sunday Globe I n Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom the reader is taken on a journey of light, from the rural flicker of the firefly, the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile in the USA, to the sense of connectedness and arrival suggested by the image of the eight-pointed star. It is also a journey of the voice, traversing back and forth across the Atlantic and across the continents, pushing its way through word censors and voice mufflers and ending in tongues of fire. Peepal Tree Press, 1999 Click here to read a poem and a Poetry Book Society interview with Marcia Douglas. "Richly evocative... the attractiveness of this collection is much more than simple exoticism" - Robert MacFarlane/Times Literary Supplement "A rich and very welcome book." - Poetry Book Society Bulletin "Douglas understands that if we lose our stories and the stories of those who came before us, we lose our sense of who we are." - Asheville Poetry Review