Some voices, mine included, just demand to be heard.

 In May 2008, shortly before the tsunami of newspaper layoffs, I left the St. Petersburg Times, where I had been a columnist and editor for five years. 

 One of the hardest things about leaving the newsroom is thinking of yourself as anything but a journalist. After 20 years of seeing the world through the lens of who, what, where, when, why and how, how do you  stop asking questions, being inquisitive? 

             Here's the good news. It has not been easy, but it has been educational. 

I soon learned that when you discard your "journalist" name tag and press pass, folks tell you things they'd never say to any working journalist and invite you to meetings where you hear information that would make a great scoop for the next day's front page. In other words, you get to see how things really work. However, that insider's view is very seductive. After all those years of being on the outside, you get to come inside and sit at the table. But the insider’s view is only a small part of the picture; it’s mostly about self interest, not the public interest.

Old habits die hard. Certain instincts can't be buried simply because you're no longer on the media's payroll. So I'm still asking why, how and when. 

After I left the newsroom I worried that I'd find a job that would stifle my ability to write and say what was on my mind. Thankfully, I've hit the intellectual jackpot, sort of.  I teach journalism at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Fla., where they expect me to teach and write. Publish or perish is actually part of the job  description.  Also, as adviser to the Famuan student newspaper, I can try to influence the next generation of journalists as they hone their craft. And that's only half of my story.

 Being in academia has opened a window for me to pursue the kind of writing that I put on hold when I walked into the newsroom two decades  ago. I became a journalist because I believed that toiling as a newspaper reporter would provide the training and discipline I needed to tell the stories of my people - people of color, Caribbean immigrants, people from Montserrat - the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. I believed and still do that too many stories would otherwise go untold if scribes like me didn't tell them. So now, more than ever,  I have the passion to write those stories about the peanut vendor who sat on the side of the road under the grafted mango tree, the old woman who supported herself by selling sugared donuts and ice cream at the park during cricket matches, the boy who cried at night because he was afraid of the dark, the girl whose lifeless body was found under the sandbox tree.

             TropicZone will tell the story of the Caribbean diaspora - our loves, our losses, our triumphs, our failures. It will be a forum to examine and highlight the best we have to offer. As someone who grew up on Montserrat, one of the smallest and least known islands, I will also dwell on the people of Montserrat who have been scattered to the four corners of the earth since the explosion of the volcano in 1995. This blog will serve as a bulletin board for progress on my oral history project, Under the Evergreen Tree (see upcoming posts).

 But this blog won’t be all serious stuff. I promise to have fun. Expect to see stories about sports - especially cricket and soccer; music, literature, politics, even religion, all told in text, audio and pictures. I will use this location to update readers on my journalistic, literary and cultural projects. Of course, in order for this to work, there must be a dialogue - you'll hear from me; I’d love to hear from you.