“I ’m from here, but my parents are from XYZ.” This is the refrain of many children of immigrants here in the United States. My parents are from Trinidad, and I spent my early life in Flatbush, where I became used to patois in the corner stores and soca blaring at family parties. But when my parents got divorced midway through elementary school, we moved away from Brooklyn to Nyack, NY. Caribbean culture wasn’t as visible, and in many ways, I felt divorced from my culture.

This was a period where I retreated into fantasy, mythology, and science fiction, which appealed to me as someone seeking realities other than my own. And yet, many of these fantastical stories were through a white American cultural context. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started exploring more Caribbean folklore. I learned about mas characters and playing mas: the blue devils, the moko jumbies, and about douens, soucouyants, and lagahoos. Finding these folk traditions felt like returning to a world I had been cut off from.

What does it mean to be both from here and not from here, and how can we both learn from and use folklore—for me, specifically Caribbean folklore—to make sense of the world?

Unfortunately, in 2025, I, like many others, feel that familiar force of disconnection. The Caribbean diasporic immigrant community, like other immigrant communities, has been facing a myriad of pressures, including mass deportations, increased difficulty immigrating to the U.S., and a general air of uncertainty. The question of belonging—of who gets to stay, who gets to claim space—feels urgent. We are in a moment of acute political crisis, one that has laid bare some of the myths that we’ve been told about our government and American politics in general. In the U.S., we are surrounded by stories that are contrived but heralded as true—founding myths of this country, the illusion of democracy, the promise of the American Dream. Folktales, on the other hand, are often dismissed as unreal, yet they carry insights that feel truer than these histories we are taught formally in the classroom.

As a speculative fiction writer and educator who has taught 5th-grade to graduate-level courses in the general fields of English and media literacy, I can’t help but be concerned with the sociopolitics of storytelling, the crafting of stories, the weaving of worlds, and how this plays out in the writing classroom. For those students like me who have roots somewhere else but are undeniably tied to the United States, what does it mean to be both from here and not from here, and how can we both learn from and use folklore––for me, specifically Caribbean folklore––to make sense of the world?

I met up with the professor, storyteller, and author Soraya Palmer in our shared neighborhood of Flatbush to talk about the importance of folktales and their influence on our respective classroom practices. Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, which recently won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction and was shortlisted for the Pen/Open Book Award. She is also a licensed clinical social worker who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She currently teaches Graduate Fiction at CUNY City College, Writing Magical Realism for the Center for Fiction, and a class on using folklore to tell stories for Writing Co-Lab.

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Lyndon Nicholas [LN]: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? What led you to storytelling and folklore?

Soraya Palmer [SP]: I come from a family of storytellers. My parents were always into writing, telling stories. My mom actually went to Brooklyn College for creative writing. At that time, she had a hard time because publishers didn’t think readers would understand or be interested in the kinds of stories she was interested in telling. On the other hand, my dad would talk about the Rolling Calf and other Caribbean folklore. I grew up obsessed with fairy tales. I had all the Hans Christian Andersen books and would constantly tell stories. I went to college intending to do a creative writing concentration. Eventually, I went to Trinidad for a year and ended up taking some history classes. While there, I did free writes that ended up in my book, then eventually applied to an MFA program. The narrator that I have in my book came from a prompt where we had to write from the POV of an object, so I had this voice stuck in a book, and that morphed into the narrator. It landed me on this voice. . . . I didn’t know where it would go, but it was exciting! And I don’t think I would have come up with it if I hadn’t been pushed to think outside of the box.

LN: Your novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, interweaves Caribbean folklore and oral storytelling with contemporary life in a non-traditional way. What unique lessons from Caribbean storytelling traditions can students or writers from all backgrounds benefit from?

SP: Instead of having workshops with open prompts (which can tempt students to bring in recycled pieces from previous workshops), I will often have specific prompts in my classes because the workshops I had that did have prompts were my favorites. When I think about what I want my classroom to be, I want to push you to be your most imaginative self, tell the stories you’ve been afraid to tell, and really find your voice.

One of my prompts is to create a fairytale/folktale. We look at a few examples: Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” and this semester we did “How We Are Born” by Maisy Card because I always thought that was a cool reinterpretation of the lagahoo myth, as well as “The Husband Stitch” by Maria Carmen Machado. The things that students bring in are some of my favorite pieces to read because they’re so inventive. Sometimes they create their own. Sometimes they take elements from stories we read in class or stories they’ve encountered. You see something in them light up, and using these older stories forces something new.

LN: That makes sense: it makes them part of the stories that came before and encourages them to play. In a way, it’s about creating new space for one’s own story when existing narratives don’t quite fit. It actually reminds me of queerness in that there’s an underlying through line of resistance and subversion here that challenges expectations of tradition. Queerness has always been a part of storytelling, even when it gets erased. In your work, how do you navigate this tension between tradition and subversion, and what advice would you give educators who want to help students assert queerness and create new traditions through folklore?

SP: I think the topic comes up organically––writers I assign might be queer––sometimes it comes up just because we’re talking about the narratives of people’s lives, and that often involves queerness. I do talk about how folklore can symbolically push against traditional narratives and structures. An example of this would be the figure Anansi. Anansi stories didn’t start in the Caribbean, but there’s a unique way that those particular stories get told in the Caribbean. There’s this small creature that doesn’t have physical power but can overpower bigger creatures. That is very much the way that Caribbean people may have fought against colonization: through art and ingenuity. In my book, I had Anansi as a woman for that reason. I feel like also being a trickster, using deception, is often associated with women. With Anansi, it doesn’t have the same negative connotation, and I think that there are slippery tales without clear morals, good or bad. Anansi is also a shapeshifter, and a lot of this pushing back against a binary or a definitive shape can be read as very queer and nonbinary. There’s a lot in Caribbean culture that isn’t generally talked about in that way. For example, in carnival, there’s so much drag and gender transgression. It’s not labeled as such, but technically it is. It’s these instances that are always very interesting to me, especially because the Caribbean always gets framed as a homophobic place. In reality, the homophobia that does exist in the Caribbean is more a product of colonization and practices imposed on the area, and the people who inhabit the Caribbean often come from cultures with longstanding traditions that could be read as queer through certain lenses.

LN: It’s interesting because once people start talking about queerness, it often gets touted as “being political.” I firmly believe that teaching is inherently political, yet others don’t always view it as such. Similarly, folktales are often overtly or covertly embedded within certain political contexts and morph over time to meet the messaging of certain political moments. Given the current political climate, many teachers are figuring out how to authentically address politics in the classroom. How do you find yourself approaching politics in the classroom in ways that resonate with students?

SP: It’s tough. I’ve been kind of wrestling with questions like, “Am I supposed to be the voice of hope and have something hopeful to say?” But I abandoned that the first class we had after the election because I think we also need to acknowledge our grief, and false hope can feel forced. I brought in art supplies, and we spent a little time talking about the reading, but most of it I had them draw their mood. I asked them to “draw what world you might imagine/story you would imagine.”

There’s this quote from Adrienne Maree Brown: “All organizing is science fiction.” You have to imagine the world you want to create, and that’s what we do as fiction writers. There’s a way in which it can feel frivolous to be an artist when there’s so much going on, and also it is this thing that no matter how oppressive the world is, there will always be art and people fighting to express themselves. There will always be people needing to hear that, read that, see that kind of resistance.

Students will also bring things up and are politically active in their own ways. Many are doing their own organizing, fundraising for Palestine, and generally figuring out how to use art organizing for change. I’ve focused on the students as humans who are hurting right now and wanting to be there for them more than having intellectual discussions about it. I worked for five years at a youth center. I did teach, but it was a different kind of teaching. There, I was creating my own curriculum. I was involved with a leadership program for young people who aren’t always chosen for leadership opportunities. There were a lot of staff and young people who were either gang-affiliated or justice-involved. There were also many young people who were just from the community and interested in the mission. We developed a holistic, all-encompassing curriculum that tackled topics from the school-to-prison pipeline to mentorship.

Then and now, I’m always thinking about healing. Venting can be healing, but it can also feel de-mobilizing, especially when you don’t actually know how everybody feels. There’s such a wide array of opinions about voting, the Democratic Party, so much that can end up becoming the focus of contention in a classroom space where everybody might want to be right or conversely feel silenced. There have been times in class where I’ve had to find the balance between not allowing oppressive comments in the classroom but also not allowing gang up on a particular student for their beliefs. I know in my real outside life, I can get very quick to react when someone says something I don’t like and be quick to shut you down. Now, as a teacher, I’m in a different mindset. It is nice when you can create teaching moments in ways where students can learn and grow without feeling singled out or attacked.

LN: Right, in many ways, it seems that the collaborative and communal teaching—where knowledge isn’t just passed down from a single authority figure but built collectively—shaped how you think about education more broadly. It kind of reminds me of the idea of the novel and its relationship to folktales. Unlike the standard novel, which is seen to have one creator, folktales are often thought of as stories that come up from the masses. How do you find yourself contending with these kinds of standard conceptions of what a classroom looks like, and how does the more holistic, community-centered approach come into play in your classroom practices?

SP: I like to have a collective approach. I have students choose what kind of workshop they want and how much they want to be a participant in their own workshop. The standard model is for the author to be silent and not speak at all while everyone else tries to “fix the piece.” I try to push against that, but I think it’s hard because we’re so used to it. I try to come from a place of inquiry and curiosity, but it can be hard to do that because sometimes there are things that aren’t working.

From my experience in an MFA program, I know it can be very soul-crushing: professors can be very blunt, students can follow suit, and it can create a discouraging environment. I try to empower and encourage my students. It’s all a balance. It can be tough reading and trying to find the most positive way of saying everything. A lot of that comes from my background of trying to be more people-centered.

Because [folktales] belong to the collective rather than an individual, they aren’t fixed artifacts but living, evolving narratives.

LN: And it can be really hard in the traditional workshop when a student’s personal performance is 100% linked to their own talent. With folktales, rather than trying to impress or aggrandize, they teach us shared values, lessons, and ways of seeing that help us understand the world and our place within it—not as isolated individuals but as part of a broader, interconnected community. When I tell a folktale, I am not simply repeating it verbatim but shaping it through my own lens, rooted in the conditions of my time and place. This makes folktales a powerful tool for both historical and contemporary analysis. Because they belong to the collective rather than an individual, they aren’t fixed artifacts but living, evolving narratives.

SP: Yes, and still, creative writing is so, so personal. Your words as a teacher, a person with power, in the classroom hold all this weight. It can be hard to strike a balance between trying to help students be better writers and also letting them know they should keep writing. Even if their story isn’t working, that doesn’t mean you’re saying that they’re a bad writer. If I have any takeaways, it is to trust the intelligence of our students. Trust them to also meet themselves, and try to let go of their egos to be right and in power.

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Reading List

For those interested in folklore and other writing from the Caribbean diaspora, please check out this reading list!

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer

This novel blends Caribbean folklore and an oral storytelling tradition with contemporary exploration of identity, intergenerational trauma, and family myths.

These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card

This multigenerational, poly-voiced novel in stories weaves together different narrative perspectives that mirror how Caribbean folktales have multiple tellers.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

This collection of interconnected stories about the experiences of a Jamaican family in the U.S. captures how folktale narratives shift, evolve, and change over time.

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

This historical novel set in Jamaica captures the spirit of rebellion and resistance that undergirds Caribbean folktales and expertly integrates African spiritual traditions and oral storytelling.

The Jumbies by Tracy Baptiste

This YA novel merges traditional magic and Caribbean mythology and familiarizes younger readers with the Caribbean folktale figures known as jumbies.

Epiphaneia by Richard Georges

This poetry collection explores the ecological and physiological scars of colonialism and imperialism in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, working in the intersections of myth, memory, and oral folktale traditions.

Where There Are Monsters by Brianne McIvor

This short story collection twists, subverts, and reimagines supernatural Caribbean folktale figures into contemporary settings and shows the permeability of the folktale genre as a tool to speak on social issues today.

Caribbean Folk Tales: Stories from the Islands and from the Windrush Generation by Wendy Shearer

This collection of stories preserves a number of traditional Caribbean folktale traditions and stories that have been passed down through generations.

The Magic Orange Tree: and Other Haitian Folktales by Diane Wolkstein

This collection of Haitian folktales showcases the mixing of magical realism and cultural wisdom at the basis of Caribbean storytelling.

A Guide to Caribbean Folklore

This web page provides useful descriptions of some of Caribbean folklore’s most well-known myths, legends, spirits, and monsters.

Featured image: “West Indian Day Parade 2014” by IskoD on Flickr.