Ark Ramsay is a fiction writer. They received a Master of Philosophy degree from Fudan University in Shanghai – and were a recipient of the 2017/2018 Chinese Government Scholarship – as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Arts at Ohio State University. In 2019, they completed a residency at Fresh Milk Barbados.
Ramsay’s writing has been published in Small Axe (50), A-Line, Gertrude Press, and The Rumpus. Their work, “In Memoriam — My Drowning Island” was used as the lyrics in Ada M. Patterson’s video, A Ship of Fools.
They won the Irving Burgie Award in Literature in 2012 and first prize in the fiction category of the Small Axe Emerging Writers Contest in 2015. In 2016 they received an honourable mention at the Frank Collymore Hall Literary Endowment Awards. They were a finalist for the Story Foundation Prize in 2020 and were shortlisted for the 2022 Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship.
Ramsay is also a game designer. They co-founded Couple Six, Inc. – a Barbadian indie videogame company – in 2015. Two years later, Couple Six was selected for Demand Solutions Miami 2017 and participated in its pitch competition. The company is currently developing the game Le Loupgarou.
Who are your influences and what have you learned from them?
I draw inspiration from a number of writers who have helped me hone craft, but my truest projects are alive because of the Trinidadian poet Shivanee Ramlochan and the novelist Shani Mootoo. It is from them, and other queer Caribbean artists, that I learned how to remove another layer of clothing. Tell the stories which are risky, and therefore true.
What is the first work of yours that you released to the public? How was it received?
I placed in a competition held by Small Axe, a literary journal out of Duke University. So, they published my short story called ‘Semicolonized Mind’. I won some cash for it. I got to see my writing in print. I celebrated with friends. But overall, my first publication taught me that the journey of writing could not fixate on any end-point. It would be a long time before another journal picked up my writing, and I survived that desert only by returning to the work itself.
Which of your works are you the most proud of and why?
I’m proudest of two things. The first is a piece of flash fiction published by Gertrude Press, called Talking Bodies. Its a bizarre experiment, imagining body parts as being up for barter. The other is an essay, published by Meridian out of the University of Virginia, called ‘My Warming Body’. Which started life as a love letter, but grew into a meditation on being trans in Barbados, hurricanes, sea turtles, and finding a balm for climate grief. Both of these pieces are me at my bravest. Where I was willing to sit in an uncomfortable lack of answers.
How do you know when something is finished and doesn’t need anymore work?
I don’t. I have been tinkering with one particular short story for about ten years now. It has gone through dozens of revisions. Been Rejected. Thrown out. Salvaged, once again, from the digital rubbish bin. I think ‘finished’ work is just work that someone has taken from you and put out into the world.
Every time I return to something I am a new person, with new writerly concerns, and so the work warps again. Changes on me. I think the important thing to listen to is not when the work is ‘finished’, but when you are no longer able to ask it a question which it cannot immediately solve. That is the moment when it is ready, once again, to be tested in the world.
As an artist from the Caribbean, do you feel like you have an obligation or responsibility to represent and reflect Caribbean culture in your work?
I don’t think of it as an obligation. It is an inevitability. Even if I wrote a space opera set thousands of years from now, something about the Caribbean that I grew up in would find its way into that story. There is no running away from the place of your formation. And why should you?
