“Grandfather” is one of the stories from Adults, a short story collection by Rae Wiltshire.
Wiltshire, 26, is an award winning playwright and director, who is currently completing a Degree in English at the University of Guyana.
He describes the stories in the collection as semi-autobiographical as they were inspired mostly by his childhood. “It’s kind of like a mixture of childhood and fiction,” he explains.
One of the stories in the collection, “Me Fuss Fineral,” won the second prize in the 2018 Guyana Annual Open Short competition.
Wiltshire notes that in Guyana “children aren’t really sheltered.” As a result, “A lot of the things that happen in the collection are things a lot of them would have experienced from small,” he says.
It was Wiltshire’s goal to examine the narrator’s relationship with the “adult world” and the impressions that his interactions leave on him as he grows up. “I wanted each story to stand on its own, so each adult leaves an impression on him from his experience with them,” he explains.
Like in “Grandfather,” the stories are all told from the perspective of a young boy, which can belie the sometimes serious subject matter at the centre—grief and suicide in this case.
The story is based on his own observation of a relative processing a death (the relative did not commit suicide as the character in the story does) and his experience of what was happening at the time.
Wiltshire says that he found it easier to write from the child’s perspective as it made the narrator’s observations less self-conscious. “…They are so curious and never have any inhibition about feeling stupid or offending people. It was probably the easiest thing I ever wrote because I had no fear about expressing the child’s feelings,” he adds.
All the stories are written in Creole—as opposed to his plays, which are written in “Standard English”—as he intends for them to be for a Guyanese audience. “It was easier and that’s how I talk. My language has changed a little bit but I think that when I was younger that’s how I spoke, I think I’m a better short story writer in Creole,” he says, while adding that he can also hear the characters better as a result.
While his short story collection has been completed, it has not yet been published although Wiltshire hopes to self-publish them in order to raise funds for a series of a short films he is working on.
Submissions for The Writers’ Room can be sent to
Read our guidelines online at: https://bit.ly/2GknVWP.
