Anthony Winkler reads part of his life story at the 2009 Calabash International Literary Festival, Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth. - Photo by Mel Cooke

A former Cornwall College student, writer Anthony Winkler may be used to his name being called last - or close enough for it to not make much material difference. The Calabash International Literary Festival follows the roll-call format of Jamaican secondary-level institutions grounded in the English public-school tradition, the readers in each session appearing in the alphabetical order of their last names.

So in the 'Three Jamaica's' session at the ninth staging of the festival in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth in May, Winkler read last, going after Stacey-Ann Chin and Edward Seaga.

He offered the huge audience a choice of literary fare and they reached for the short story, Winkler giving them a 'Greasy Leg' to hold on to. It was a riot of a story about a woman who figured out how to get money out of randy, inexperienced Cornwall students who did not know the difference between greasy upper thighs and the holy grail they paid an entrance fee to sample. The tables were, however, eventually turned on her.

The Sunday Gleaner asked Winkler if, when he had offered the audience that choice, he would have still read the story if they refused. He would not have. "I am there to entertain them. They are not there to entertain me," Winkler said.

At 67-years-old Anthony Winkler has been entertaining audiences, in person at readings or from the pages of his books, for a long time. Among his books are The Painted Canoe, Going Home to Teach, The Lunatic, The Duppy and The Annihilation of Fish and Other Stories. He has also written several textbooks.

Now he plans a trilogy, all the books grounded in the country he loves and migrated from to live in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, more than three decades ago. The first book, God Carlos, is about the Spanish conquest and invasion. The Family Mansion covers the English occupation and direct presence from 1635-1962. The completion of the series is a short story collection - including Greasy Leg - which Winkler says will "show Jamaicans acting out their culture without knowing it in different parts of the world, including Jamaica".

Winkler said the collection's title, Children of Rockstone, "popped into my head. Titles are a funny thing. They are often added on at the last minute. When I finished The Lunatic nobody liked it. Nobody around me liked it. At the last minute my wife Kathy called it The Lunatic."

So Greasy Leg, which Winkler did not like when he finished it, is in good company. "Writing is a funny business. I wrote it about a year ago, but I did not like it. When I was getting ready for Calabash I thought of it," Winkler said.

Having lived outside Jamaica for so long, Winkler does not find it hard to write about home. In fact, some distance may be required for proper observation and evaluation.

"I think it is almost the nature of the beast to do that. You are too close when you are there. The details of life can be pettifogging and they close in on you and you can't see it. I think you have to go away and think about it and come back to it," he said.

"The land of the imagination has no geography. It has no time. It has no place. It has no location. It is in your head."

Winkler does come back to Jamaica regularly and one novel, Going Home to Teach, does treat with his 'returnee' experience in the 1970s teaching at Moneague College in St Ann. The Sunday Gleaner asks if he would take on a classroom assignment in Jamaica again and Winkler says "I wouldn't mind teaching in Jamaica. I enjoyed teaching in Jamaica when I was there, when they said I was feisty".

"Jamaica is my home, ancestrally and genealogically, by blood, everything. If you look at the Jamaican writers who have flourished, most of them live over here (in the US)," Winkler said, naming Calabash founder Colin Channer and programming director Kwame Dawes among them.

The Sunday Gleaner asks Winkler if he has followed the daggering debate, which spiked this year as the Broadcasting Commission banned songs with that content from airplay and how dancehall's raunchiness relates to the sexual content of his books. Winkler replies that "Jamaicans are sexy but they don't like to admit it".

"Jamaica is the only place I know in the world where the women will feel up a man. You are walking together and they just check you out," he said, chuckling. "It is one of the more delightful features of the culture. The women are more uninhibited than anywhere in the world. They are more aggressive."

Then he speaks to dancehall specifically. "You can conceive in a kind of perverse way how the world looks at the penis as a weapon. It stabs," Winkler said.

And there is something else about Jamaica that has struck him on one of his annual visits. He told someone that he wanted to watch US college basketball and, in short order, three persons in low-paying jobs offered him the opportunity on their satellite dish systems.

"When it comes to having money stashed away, you can't beat a Jamaican," Anthony Winkler said.