Accepting a cup of hot tea, Senior shuffles through a thick stack of photocopied sheets, arranging their order and stapling where necessary. She has spent the morning before our conversation collecting examples of the criticism and scholarly writing concerning her work. "It can be hard to find she remarks.

She's brought them, she explains during the course of our talk, because over her 20-odd years as a published writer she's developed a certain humility concerning what is happening in her own work. "Obviously the work operates at many levels," she says, "and one of these levels is the subconscious. Sometimes I'm astonished at what people see in my work, and -- though I wouldn't admit it to them -- I'm forced to admit to myself that, boy, yeah, they're very astute. I started out thinking that I'm very conscious of everything I do, but I've backtracked now; sometimes people do say the most astonishing things."

Viewed as a whole these seemingly disparate projects reveal an intricate coherence. Senior writes about identity from the perspective of a contemporary Jamaican woman still not entirely certain of her own place in the world. Her search for a personal identity takes her through Jamaican culture, at all its many social, racial, economic, and historical levels, and eventually includes an uncertain national identity in its questing.

Still, if I could balance

("Ancestral Poem,"

Talking of Trees, 1985)

SENIOR HAS BEEN in Canada, writing and teaching writing, for the past four years, although before that she divided her time between Jamaica and the wider English-speaking world. Many of her earlier poems deal with her sense of displacement at leading a life juggling worlds and cultures. Her stories, though, and the poems in Gardening in the Tropics, have tended to focus almost entirely on "Home," which is to say Jamaica specifically, and the concept of home in general.

In one absurdly comic story in Discerner of Hearts, a deranged man who has returned from 20 years of "study" in England launches a legal suit against the Queen for allowing his heart to be removed and replaced with a clock. His father, trying to ease the conscience of his wife, who blames herself for her son's madness, strikes Senior's clearest note on the subject:

"Lawd, woman, is foreign mad him ... I will never forget the day. We send off a good-good boy to England dress in him suit and tie, looking like a little Englishman before him even reach. Is them place there mash him up. People not suppose to go so far from home. It weaken yu constitution. You nuh see how much people round here gone mad from foreign?"

All this could be seen as a simple, postcolonial agenda enacting itself in metaphor on the page, but Senior shrugs off labels and schools of thought in favour of a broader concept of her art. "I'm writing about people and about basic human emotions," she insists. "I don't particularly care for labels, mainly because my life has been a struggle to break out of all these boxes into which I was born, and therefore I don't want to put myself back into one. If people want to stick on all the labels that relate to race or gender or whatever, I'm not going to quarrel with it, but I'd like my work to be considered for the intrinsic value of the work itself."

On the other hand, Senior feels less discomfort with the idea that wherever she may live she is a Caribbean writer, but this is as much a matter of chosen subject as cultural placement. The immediate world she is trying to capture on the page is the Caribbean reality she is most familiar with, both from personal experience and extensive critical observation.

So the cultural xenophobia present in many of her characters is less a politically motivated construct than an accurate reflection of the society she observes with such intense scrutiny. To illustrate, she points to Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean, a sociological study she published in 1991, which details the social, political, and economic structures determining the lives of the women she so often uses as characters in her fiction. Much of the information in Working Miracles is supported by oral histories collected from around the entire English-speaking Caribbean, and the book is written with Senior's characteristic respect for authentic voice.

Combine this authoritative text with her work as a collector of folklore, and her years of experience as a journalist in Jamaica, and you begin to see why her focus remains so consciously narrow. Senior knows these people intimately; she is these people. Her childhood was spent split between the twin realities of poor country parents and more well-to-do relatives to whom she was sent for her schooling (similar displacements can be found throughout her fiction, as well as in Working Miracles).

"I feel I can write for all of that society," she says, "because I lived that experience. And I want to write about those people who do not have a voice of their own. I feel very strongly about that."

Winning the 1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize must have helped dispel any anxiety about being restricted to a regional audience. She won the prize (the very first CWP ever awarded) for her first book of short fiction, Summer Lightning and Other Stories, a slim collection of stories that, by her own description, draws heavily on her childhood experiences of displacement and isolation from familial emotion. "When I wrote the stories in Summer Lightning," she remarks, "I was still feeling my way, and the Commonwealth Prize greatly helped my self- confidence. Though I'd always wanted to be a writer, it's just not that easy in a society like Jamaica, and I needed confirmation that I was on the right path. And, of course, there was some money involved."

Are there any plans for a novel?

"I have, in fact, written a novel," she admits, shyly. "It's a bottom-drawer novel, although people have read it and said it should be published. I didn't set out to write it; it just came and I was obsessed by it. But, to be honest, I feel much more comfortable, temperamentally, writing shorter fiction and poetry because I like to really polish my work and spend a lot of time on it, and that's so much easier to do, of course, with something short.

"Although," she adds, laughing, "my short fiction does seem to be getting longer, and really, I have no agenda as far as writing is concerned. Who knows, tomorrow I may go home and write a novel, I can't tell."

Senior attributes a good deal of influence on her work to the Duppy and Anansi stories (folk-tales featuring spirits of the dead and animal trickster figures) that are told to children from generation to generation in the Jamaica of her upbringing. These tales are referred to from time to time in her own stories, and often play a central role in the relationship between sympathetic adults and children. And the same tone of matter-of-fact storytelling drives the narration of Senior's own work.

"I don't like to speak of literary influences, but I would say that the writers I am most profoundly impressed by now," she offers, attempting to explain her literary aims, "are the Latin Americans. Someone like Garcia Marquez is so brilliant because he has found a way of writing about his society that does not follow the conventional path, either of writing or of how he uses history in his work. What I find exciting about this writing is that it's saying we don't have to measure our world against any other. You, the reader, must recognize that this world has a coherence. I think the same thing is happening with Caribbean literature, with African literature, and Australian, and Canadian to some extent; writers are claiming their place in the world and saying, My place is as good as your place."