2009 Costa Book Awards

CHRISTOPHER NICHOLSON, the author of The Fattest Man in America (2005), has been shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award with his second novel, The Elephant Keeper, along with such literary heavyweights as Penelope Lively for Family Album, Hilary Mantel for her Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, and Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn.

Clive James, Ruth Padel and Christopher Reid have been shortlisted for the Poetry Award, while William Fiennes, Caroline Moorehead and the late Simon Gray have been shortlisted for the Biography Award.

Novel
1. Family Album (2009) / Penelope Lively
2. Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Hilary Mantel
3. The Elephant Keeper (2009) / Christopher Nicholson
4. Brooklyn (2009) / Colm Tóibín

First Novel
1. The Finest Type of English Womanhood (Hutchinson, 2009) / Rachel Heath
2. John the Revelator (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Peter Murphy
3. Beauty (Tindal Street Press, 2009) / Raphael Selbourne
4. The Girl with Glass Feet (Atlantic Books, 2009) / Ali Shaw

Poetry
1. Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008 / Clive James
2. One Eye’d Leigh / Katharine Lilalea
3. Darwin: A Life in Poems / Ruth Padel
4. A Scattering / Christopher Reid

Biography
1. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius / Graham Farmelo
2. The Music Room / William Fiennes
3. Coda / Simon Gray
4. Dancing to the Precipice / Caroline Moorehead

Children’s
1. Solace of the Road / Siobhan Dowd
2. Trobadour / Mary Hoffman
3. The Ask and the Answer / Patrick Ness
4. Guantanamo Boy / Anna Perera

ESSAY ... Annabel LYON

She Writes Fiction!
ANNABEL LYON, the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted The Golden Mean, talks about learning the craft of writing fiction

I’M A PIANO TEACHER. When people ask me what I do, that’s what I say. Until my book, Oxygen, was published I was secretive about writing fiction. Only a few of my students knew I had an MFA in creative writing; I think a few of them thought “Master of Fine Arts” meant art history or something to do with music. I let them think that. After the book came out, the kids in particular were (for a week or two) fascinated. They would confront me on the piano bench. “We saw you in the paper,” they would say slyly (of a review plus photo), like they had caught me doing something sneaky, shameful, and bad. Me! The piano teacher! They acted up more in lesson, laughing at me when I was clumsy and arguing with me when I was bossy, as though the walls between childhood and adulthood (tenuous at the best of times) had been fatally breached. She writes fiction!

At first I thought it was because they had no experience of persons who write fiction. They had never seen one before. One even asked how I had learned to do that, which was smart but sad—he knew you didn’t learn it at grade school. I know I didn’t.

My dad taught me to write when I was six. I don’t mean write as in read and write, shape my little letters, make endearing clumsy sentences like something out of stickle bricks—Today is Thursday! My pet ran fast—but write as in craft-honed, no-nonsense adult prose. I was not grateful. At six, you are already stitched pretty tightly into the world. Look both ways, brush your teeth, comb your hair, don’t scream, don’t shout, don’t be rude, listen to your teacher, eat your salad, practice your piano, don’t tease your brother. My thinking was, there’s more?

Here are some of his rules: If you’ve said something in six words and you can say it in four, say it in four. No underlining, italics, ellipses, or exclamation marks (which he called “screamers”). Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Get to the point. Don’t use big words to try to make yourself sound important. He taught me other stuff, too, newspaper stuff about typesetting and fonts and margins, that I’ve long since forgotten. Crucially, though, I accepted what he taught me about writing the way I accepted the truths of mathematics, becoming an instant mini-minimalist. No one expects you to have developed your own voice before you can make two plus two equal four.

Out of this small, tight prose style I gradually forged a small, tight ambition: to chisel out tough little sentences and stories and get paid for them.

Flash forward to the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, in 1994, when I started my master’s. Now some people would say this was a bad idea. In July’s Quill & Quire Bill Richardson accuses a writer of perpetrating the “fractured jargon of the MFA,” as though they were handing out large jargon-fracturing mallets at convocation. But, you have to understand, I had just finished a philosophy degree and was writing sentences like this: “If computational characterizations merely specify rules for the manipulation of symbols, it seems that information—the semantic content of such symbols—should have no effect on the computational level.” Writing fiction for two years seemed like cool water.

Literary people get very excited about literary programs: they are wonderful, they are terrible, writing can’t be taught, you can spot an MFA by her prose style (bad), you can spot an MFA by her prose style (good), it’s a useless degree, it’s a hothouse, a unique experience, if you’re good enough to get in you don’t need to be there, it’s nurturing, it’s killing, yada, yada. Me, I liked it; I found it helpful. I learned a lot of small, concrete things. I learned that every line of dialogue does not need “she said” or “he says” as a tag, and that adverbs appended to such tags (“he chortled heartily”) are usually mistakes. I learned that I had a weakness for lists. I learned to avoid lengthy descriptions of insignificant characters. I learned to treat a short story like a carrot and chop off the green woody stuff at the beginnings and the too-pointed stuff at the end to make it tastier. A lot of people come into the MFA program knowing these things already, but I didn’t, so I was grateful for the information.

In each of these apprenticeships, I was encouraged to adopt a particular style. My journalist dad held up Hemingway and The Economist (amongst others) as practitioners of the kind of taut, terse writing he admired. Most of my peers and teachers at UBC championed the well-made contemporary North American short story emotionally subtle, character-driven, realist. (Note the long, long shadow of Alice Munro.) The pitfall of any apprenticeship, as Bill Richardson and many others imply, is that you’ll come out sounding like your master, and I’ll plead guilty to that. I’ll bet most of my piano students sound a lot like me, too. Eventually, though, we all have to shuck off the school uniform and figure out what’s left underneath, and that’s when the process gets dangerous, and interesting.

Which brings me full circle, to the secrecy. The writing I’m doing right now is a mess. I tried to write a novel; it imploded. (Hollow core.) I tried to change my prose style (longer sentences, longer paragraphs, less cleverness, more depth) and went from sounding like someone who’d read too much Hemingway to someone who’d read too much Faulkner. I’m a kid again, locked in my bedroom after school, trying to make something good without anyone looking over my shoulder. My students, I think, are wicked smart little animals; they smelled one of their own.

This essay was originally published in the October 2000 issue of Quill & Quire

RECOMMENDED READS

Tina KISIL ... Footprints in the Padi Fields (MPH Publishing, March 2010)

TINA KISIL’S FOOTPRINTS IN THE PADI FIELDS is both a family portrait and a childhood memoir, set against the vanished world of bamboo huts on spindly timber stilts, a world where one’s prized possessions were makeshift farm tools and a buffalo or two, and where the dead were placed in stone burial jars. Those were the days when removing human heads was a form of sport and the only mode of transport was a pair of good legs.

The author takes you on a fascinating journey into a world seldom seen, to see how the Dusuns in Sabah on the island of Borneo lived at a time when wealth was measured by the amount of rice a farmer harvested and a hardworking sumandak made a more alluring bride than her pretty sister.

Written to preserve some of the old Dusun beliefs and customs, this engaging memoir is a delightful reminiscence of what it was like to be a child growing up in the 1960s when Sabah was still known as British North Borneo.

TINA KISIL was a loner in a brood of twelve. A misfit and a misunderstood child, her shyness often misconstrued as arrogance, she began observing people at a tender age and took refuge in the world of books. Forced to quit school at eighteen to help support her younger siblings through school, she was told by her mother to choose: be a nurse or a teacher. Since blood makes her faint, she chose the latter. After earning her teacher’s diploma, she dedicated the best 35 years of her life to her students. She now lives a quiet life in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, where she catches up on her reading and tries to charm her backyard into a garden. She still seeks refuge in the world of books.

OUT IN PAPERBACK ORIGINAL BY MPH PUBLISHING IN MARCH 2010

Colum McCANN wins the NBA for Fiction

IRISH AUTHOR Colum McCann has won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. The Dublin-born author received the award for his novel, Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009), an intricate portrait of New York City and its denizens in the 1970s. McCann is the author of the novels, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, as well as two story collections, Everything in this Country Must and Fishing the Sloe-Black River.

It's Kate & Vassanji!

KATE PULLINGER’s The Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Co., 2009), the story of a Victorian mistress and her maidservant in the heat and dust of 19th-century Egypt, has won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, while the Nonfiction prize went to M.G. Vassanji for his memoir, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), a sensitive and enlightening account of his visits to India over the years.

SU Tong wins the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize

BEST-SELLING Chinese novelist SU TONG’s The Boat to Redemption (Doubleday, January 2010) has been awarded the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. The Boat to Redemption is a picaresque, political fable set in a small town in eastern China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. It is translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. Su is the author of Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Rice (1995), My Life as Emperor (2006) and Binu and the Great Wall (2007), and a collection of stories, Madwoman on a Bridge and Other Stories (2008). He is the second Chinese writer to win the three-year-old prize. The first was Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) in 2007, also translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. Miguel Syjuco won the prize in 2008 with Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2010).

The MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009 RESULTS

NOVEMBER 14, 2009: The results of the MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009 has finally been announced. It has been a long wait, but hopefully one that has been worth the wait!

In the Adult Category, the grand prize was shared between TAN TWAN ENG (for “Some Things Will Remain”), the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Gift of Rain, and newcomer IVAN YEO MUN KIT (for “Clutch, Brake, Sellerator”), an advertising copywriter. The other shortlisted writers are Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize-shortlisted author SHIH-LI KOW (for “Pilling Time”), LEE EELEEN (for “The Englishman at Table 19”), ZED ADAM IDRIS (for “The Hunter and the Tigress”), and VINCENT FOO HIAP KHIAN (for “The Cobra’s Mate”).

In the Teen Category, the grand prize went to EMILY JONG CHAI LI (for “The Old Man”). The other shortlisted writers are CHOSITA CHEEPVASARACH (for “Staying and Leaving”), HOW HAN MING (for “Son of the Jungle”), LIAW LI WEE (for “The Domino Effect”), MUHD MUHAIMIN ZULKARNAIN (for “Complications”), and THAM CHUI-JUN (for “Canned Dreams”).

HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS!

PUBLISH YOUR TYPESCRIPT

MPH PUBLISHING is a small general publisher in Malaysia that publishes short-story collections, novellas, travel, memoirs, essays, health and wellbeing, humour, language, biographies, children’s literature, etc. Our editors are always on the lookout for well-written fiction and nonfiction for the Malaysian and Singapore markets. Specifically, we are looking for authentic voices, especially writers with something relevant and fresh to say. Email your typescripts to mphpublishing@mph.com.my for consideration.

SINGAPORE BOOK CLUB

REX SHELLEY: THE WRITER AND HIS WORKS
COME JOIN Dr Leong Liew Geok, Shova Loh and Dr David Fedo, as they discuss Singaporean novelist Rex Shelley and his works.

Rex Shelley, trained as an engineer, was a businessman and a former member of the Public Service Commission. He started writing fiction late in life, publishing his first novel, The Shrimp People, in 1991 at 61. It was the first substantial novel on the Eurasian community of Malaysia and Singapore and was a best-selling local paperback in 1991. He went on to write three other novels, forming a quartet of novels documenting the lives and experiences of the Eurasians of Malaya. He passed away on August 21, 2009. He was 78.

Shelley is best known for such works as The Shrimp People (1991: winner of the 1992 National Book Development Council of Singapore Award); People of the Pear Tree (1993: 1994 NBDCS Highly Commended Award); Island in the Centre (1995: 1996 NBDCS Highly Commended Award); and A River of Roses (1998: winner of the 2000 Singapore Literature Prize). He is the winner of the 2007 Singapore Southeast Asia Write Award.

Guest Speaker: Dr Leong Liew Geok
Leong Liew Geok is the author of two collections of poetry, Love is Not Enough and Women without Men. Editor of Ee Tiang Hong’s Responsibility and Commitment: The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo and More than Half the Sky: Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women, she has contributed entries to A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English; Singapore: The Encyclopedia and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction (forthcoming). She compiled and wrote the English section of the National Arts Council booklet, Literature in Singapore (2007). She taught at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, from 1981 to 2002.

Facilitator: Dr David Fedo
A native of Minnesota and a long-time teacher of literature and college administrator in the US, David Fedo is currently the Executive Director and Visiting Scholar at the Singapore branch of the Wheelock College (Boston, Massachusetts), Center for International Education, Leadership, and Innovation. He has published a collection of poetry, Carrots and Other Poems, and was on a panel at the recent Singapore Writers Festival 2009 which explored the works of contemporary Italian, Singaporean and American poets.

Guest Editor: Shova Loh
Shova Loh is a well-known editor in Singapore who has worked with many writers, including Rex Shelley.

Date: November 20, 2009 (Friday)
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Earshot Café, The Arts House, 1 Old Parliament Lane, Singapore
Admission is free. To register, please email info@bookcouncil.sg with your contact details. No, you do not need to have read the books before coming, though we certainly hope you will do so after the session. All are welcome.

The Singapore Book Club is jointly organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and The Arts House.

Peter CAREY ... Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber, February 2010)

Olga GRUSHIN ... The Concert Ticket (Viking, March 2010)

REMEMBER The Dream Life of Sukhanov, the wonderful début by Olga Grushin in 2006? Grushin is back with her second novel, The Concert Ticket (Viking, March 2010). Putnam will be publishing it as The Line in the US in April 2010. An interview with Olga Grushin is forthcoming on this blog.

Linden MACINTYRE scores the Giller!

AWARD-WINNING broadcast journalist LINDEN MACINTYRE has won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his second novel, The Bishop’s Man (Random House Canada, July 2009), a story about a conflicted priest who is instructed by the local bishop in Cape Breton to help protect the Catholic Church from a sexual abuse scandal. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most lucrative fiction prize at $50,000. The judges described The Bishop’s Man as a “brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding.” MacIntyre, whose first novel, The Long Stretch, was published in 1999, is also the author of a 2006 memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence.

Sarah O’REILLY talks to Hilary MANTEL

2009 Man Booker Prize-winner HILARY MANTEL talks about the process of writing Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2009) to SARAH O’REILLY

HILARY MANTEL is the author of 10 novels, including Every Day is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Fludd, A Place of Greater Safety, A Change of Climate, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall; a collection of short stories, Learning to Talk; and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Her new novel, Wolf Hall, is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She lives in England.

What made you a writer, and when did you realise that writing was where your future lay?
I realised quite late in life, as these things go. A lot of people know they’re going to be writers when they’re children, but I made a conscious decision to become one when I was 22, when, because of my poor health, I saw other career prospects slipping away from me. I knew I could write—you couldn’t take the decision otherwise—but what I didn’t know was whether I could write fiction. I didn’t seem to be what people call a ‘natural storyteller’. I had to learn that bit.

How did you first come across Thomas Cromwell, and when did you decide to write about him?
I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell’s story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I’d finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn’t easy to find out anything about him, but it’s in those gaps that the novelist goes to work.

When you eventually came to write about Cromwell, was there a discovery that helped you to unlock his character?
When I began writing Wolf Hall, it was the arc of Cromwell’s story, the transformation from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, that fascinated me. I wondered, ‘How is that done?’ You’ve got to try to answer that question—it’s the very kind of question that novels are for. But what made me sure that I could work with him, so to speak, was a letter he wrote to a friend in the 1520s, when he was an MP. It is a huge rhetorical description of the course of Parliament and all the business it dealt with, which finishes with a simple, and totally deflationary, line. I paraphrase: ‘And at the end of it, absolutely nothing changed.’ The wry humour in that letter showed me there was a personality that I could write about.

Another thing that drew me was Cromwell’s will, which he wrote towards the end of the 1520s. When you’ve seen somebody’s life so minutely taken apart, when you know who’s going to get his books and who’s going to get his second-best gelding, and you know the names of the people in his household, you become part of that life. You see his daily existence and routine and his whole system of orienting to the world. Seeing the will was like being able to go into Cromwell’s house and take photographs.

How did you find a title?
I liked the idea of a book that was always in progress, right up until its last words. Wolf Hall, the Seymour house in Wiltshire, is where we’re going at the end of the book. But, of course, I chose it primarily for its metaphorical resonance: who could resist it? The whole of Henry’s court is Wolf Hall.

‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’ is one of the less flattering descriptions given to Cromwell by the historian David Starkey. What persuaded you that this unlikely hero not only required, but actually deserved an advocate?
I think Cromwell’s been given a very hard time by writers. In fiction and drama he’s been caricatured as an evil figure in a black cloak, lurking in the wings with dishonourable intentions. In biography he’s missing, because his private life is almost entirely off the record.

David Starkey’s phrase works wonderfully to alert you to Cromwell’s role as a propagandist for Henry, but Cromwell was a lot more subtle than Alistair Campbell—or at least, more subtle than the popular picture of Alistair Campbell suggests. Cromwell didn’t deploy his heavy artillery unless he needed to. He was a persuader and a negotiator and, to a degree, a compromiser.

I think the picture darkened with the Victorians. Cromwell’s image hasn’t always been bad: in Elizabethan legend and literature he was a hero, but to the Victorians he presented a problem. He wasn’t a varsity man. Historians couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a member of the lower orders rising so high in the hierarchy. There was also a sentimentality about the medieval world, with Cromwell seen as one of its destroyers. This idea persists today.

How did you tackle the challenge of writing about a period of history that is so familiar to modern readers? And why did you choose to do so in the present tense?
The Tudors are the great national soap opera; their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. In writing the opening scene, of the boy being beaten up by his father, I was simply launched into the present tense. And I stayed with it because it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell’s head—the immediacy of his experience. Also, though we may know how it all ends, Henry and his court didn’t. They didn’t know that the War of the Roses had ended; because the Tudor claim was weak, they dreaded that civil war might break out again. Henry didn’t know he would have six wives—even when he married number five, he couldn’t have known it. The present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players.

How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?
Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character.

The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of. Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us about how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.

Can you talk a little about what it’s been like to live with a character like Cromwell during the writing of this book?
There’s huge exhilaration in following a career like this, charting someone’s rise and rise. I do think without doubt that you become completely involved: someone of Cromwell’s strength and optimism can’t help but get into you. But the downside of it is that sooner or later your character will fall from the heights. Living with Cromwell has been a good experience so far, but you’ll have to ask me again when I’ve executed him.

Near the end of the novel you write: ‘It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust in their rattling mouths. We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.’ How much of a responsibility do you feel towards your historical characters, who have had an existence independent of your imagination, when you pin them to the page?
In the lines you’ve just quoted, I am holding up my hands and saying to readers, you might think that what I’m doing in this book is dubious—it might even be thought reprehensible—yet we can’t help but reimagine the past; we have no choice. It is part of us, and we must acknowledge that it is we who reimagine it, we in the present moment, who can’t help but project our own insights and preoccupations backwards.

I think this creates a responsibility for the writer. I feel research must be as good as I can possibly make it, and guesses should be made only where there are no facts to be had. They must be plausible. Where gaps occur, the way you fill them must offer a possible version. I owe these characters as much scholarship as I can contrive, and all my care to try to get them right.

I should also say that it’s immensely rewarding to feel that you have, perhaps, succeeded in reanimating someone. There is a kind of magic moment where you feel your characters are really speaking, and you don’t have to think about their dialogue any more. I found that very early in this book, particularly with Thomas Wolsey. As soon as he began to speak, I felt that my job was simply to take down what he said, like a secretary. There is a peculiar pleasure to be had in feeling that you’ve brought someone back to life in that way.

You’ve written in a number of forms—short story, memoir, the contemporary and historical novel. Have any of these had a bearing on the composition of Wolf Hall?
Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you’ve invented or a person who is dead. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.

What I also found when writing Giving Up the Ghost was that whilst I could capture the entirety of my childhood experiences, I often couldn’t tell the reader why things happened, or how the event I was describing linked to another, and I think I carried this discovery into Wolf Hall. When Cromwell remembers an incident from his childhood—for example, he recalls plunging the head of another boy into a butt of water—he has no idea why he did it, and I knew from my own experience that these gaps and holes are part of the texture of memory. In this book I was determined to reproduce a life from the inside. I thought, ‘Let us try to see a man in his full complexity. Even if there are bits that he himself doesn’t understand and can’t add up, let me still include them, because that’s the experience of being alive.’

Can you describe your mood on launching into the Tudor period once more for the follow-up to Wolf Hall?
Exhilaration. I’m longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it’s because I want to know what’s going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, ‘How did this happen?’ And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it’s happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book. Also, I’ve been so heartened by the way in which Wolf Hall has been received. There’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history. I knew when I took on this project that it was going to be a very difficult thing to do. But, ha! Who’s interested in what’s easy?

Hilary Mantel is working on The Mirror and the Light, the sequel to Wolf Hall

Kim BARNES ... A Country Called Home (Knopf Doubleday, 2008)

KIM BARNES is a Moscow, Idaho-based novelist and memoirist who teaches writing at the University of Idaho. She is the author of the novel, Finding Caruso, and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—and Hungry for the World. Barnes’s second novel, A Country Called Home, was published in 2008 and has just come out in paperback.

Between the Covers

Fans queued up to meet writers and artists at a festival aimed at stirring fuzzy feelings.

By TAN MAY LEE

NEIL GAIMAN was there. That made a legion of Coraline fans swarm the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2009. Many clutched Gaiman’s latest fantasy/horror novel and his famous Sandman graphic novels. They formed a queue that stretched all the way outside The Arts House, the luminous white colonial building by the picturesque Parliament House and Singapore River.

According to Phan Ming Yen, the Arts House assistant general manager, “We are still putting the numbers together but the feel, especially from the long queues for Neil Gaiman, is that we may achieve, or at least will be close to achieving, our target of 25,000 visitors (for the entire festival). However, a festival is not just about numbers but also the quality of the discussions and exchanges held,” Phan adds.

Sadly, I missed Gaiman’s event. The SWF was held from October 24 to November 1, but I had to leave Singapore before he appeared on Halloween.

Fortunately during the first weekend, I ran into three other big names who demonstrated the popularity of comics and graphic novels over the wordier books.

In the Chamber room, where parliamentary debates used to take place, a sizeable audience—some armed with camcorders—gathered to see Mark Waid of Kingdom Come and Superman: Birthright fame; Sonny Liew, the Malaysian-born artist who broke into DC Vertigo, Marvel, and Disney; and Lat, who spoke “on behalf of the older generation, as I was famous in the last century.”

After the event, aptly called “Comics: A Timeless Narrative,” fans formed a queue across the corridor. Singaporean author, Wena Poon (the author of Lions in Winter, who launched her second collection of stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, at the festival), was the first in line to meet Lat. As the renowned Malaysian artist effortlessly doodled his trademark grinning, mop-haired character beside his autograph, she exclaimed how she grew up reading his comics and how he looked exactly like his cartoon.

SWF commanded the attention of Lat, and Malaysia’s distinguished writers—Wong Phui Nam, K.S. Maniam, newly-named National Laureate Anwar Ridhwan, and Baha Zain. They are the generation of writers who worry that—in Wong’s words at a pre-festival press conference—“In 10, 20 years’ time, Malaysian writing in English will be an adjunct to Singapore writing.”

The theme of the 13th instalment of the festival was UNderCovers. In his speech at the opening ceremony, Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, explained: “It is about thrills and mystery, the warm and fuzzy feeling when you get under the covers and indulge in a good read, or when once forgotten or silent histories or narratives are uncovered.”

UNderCovers thus offered a diverse range of authors. In the first half alone, hip-hop poet Omar Musa (whose father is poet Musa Masran) performed from his poetry collection, The Clocks, with pieces exploring his Australian-Malaysian heritage.

The 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize winner Miguel Syjuco spoke about writing “liberating” fiction. The Filipino writer’s debut novel, Ilustrado, will be released in May 2010.

Singapore’s O Thiam Chin, who recently released his short-story collection, Never Been Better, made his first solo author appearance. Shamini Flint, a Malaysian who lives in Singapore, launched another title in her Inspector Singh Investigates series of crime fiction, A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. At the full-house event held in the festival’s cafe, Earshot, Flint announced that her UK publisher, Little, Brown, has signed her for another two titles.

Aside from listening to soulful readings and admiring the festival bookstore’s collection of hard-to-find titles (the store, BooksActually, looks like a gallery of books instead of the usual rows of shelves), visitors were also treated to special performances and film screenings.

One of the most moving films was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a movie adaptation of John Boyne’s best-selling novel on the Holocaust, which delved into the unlikely friendship between a German boy and a Jewish boy. The Irish author was also at the festival to talk about his latest novel, The House of Special Purpose, set against the landscape of Russia this time.

The SWF is held biennially. Although there is talk that the joy of reading literature is also dying among Singaporeans, the National Arts Council has been sustaining the literary arts scene since 1991.

“The festival strengthened its role as a platform for new Singapore and Asian writing and made Singaporeans more aware of our writing in the four languages (English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil), and our connections and place in Asia,” says Khor Kok Wah, deputy CEO of the Council.

Reproduced from The Sunday Star of November 8, 2009

Wena POON ... Lions in Winter (Salt Publishing, September 2009)

WENA POON’s Lions in Winter, first published by MPH Publishing in 2007, is now published by Salt Publishing in the UK. Her second collection, The Proper Care of Foxes, was recently published by Ethos Books in Singapore.

Five million English-speaking Chinese, Indians and Malays live in Singapore today—an artificial port city created entirely by British traders in the 19th century. The Singapore-born, multi-lingual American writer Wena Poon describes herself and her fiction as an ‘accident of history.’ She charts the 21st-century journey of Singaporeans as they settle in the cities of New York, Los Angeles, London, Perth and Toronto. In Lions in Winter, Poon captures the true urban sophistication of New Asia and the journey of an eclectic people coming to terms with their cultural legacy.

Joshua FERRIS ... The Unnamed (Little, Brown, January 2010)

Nam LE triumphs again!

AUSTRALIAN Nam Le’s début collection of short stories, The Boat, has triumphed, again, over the cream of Australia’s novelists to win the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. The fiction shortlist includes such firm favourites as Murray Bail, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Flanagan, Peter Goldsworthy and Joan London.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction at A$100,000 is Australia’s richest literary award for fiction. It was established by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 to celebrate the contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. Le is the second début author to win the fiction award, after Steven Conte’s first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, won the inaugural award in 2008.

The Boat also won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008.

Andrea LEVY ... The Long Song (Headline Review, February 2010)

ANDREA LEVY, the best-selling and critically acclaimed author of the Orange Prize- and Whitbread Prize-winning novel, Small Islands, will be back with a new novel in February 2010. Her new novel, The Long Song, the story of July, born a slave on a Jamaican sugar-cane plantation in the 19th century, will be published under the Headline Review imprint. The book will be published in February 2010 by Headline Review in the UK, and in early 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Hamish Hamilton in Canada.

30th Anniversary Editions

1. Kane and Abel (1979) / Jeffrey Archer
2. A Woman of Substance (1979) / Barbara Taylor Bradford

THE WRITING LIFE ... John BOYNE

THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN AUTHOR
TAN MAY LEE talks to JOHN BOYNE about the worldwide success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which sold over five million copies worldwide, and the anticipation of his latest novel, The House of Special Purpose

“ALL I EVER WANTED was to be allowed to continue to write and for someone to publish my books.” For the longest time, John Boyne knew he wanted to be an author. He received his solid grounding in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and developed his creative writing skills at the University of East Anglia. He says, “The best writing courses provide an atmosphere of encouragement for a group of aspiring writers and allow them to work at their own pace and then take part in group discussions where all the good and bad elements of their writing are discussed. If they work right, then the student should feel empowered and ready to grow as a writer. Any writer wants readers and for students, this is the best way to get some.” Boyne also worked at Waterstone’s, the UK’s leading bookseller, and other bookstores, so retail and bookselling is all familiar to him, too. Despite knowing the ins and outs of the book industry, and having literary qualifications behind him, he still struggled with his first three novels (The Thief of Time, The Congress of Rough Riders and Crippen) for years before his big break with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which won him two Irish book awards.

Boyne’s seventh and latest novel is The House of Special Purpose. The Irish Times says, “Boyne’s novel ... is a work that chimes perfectly with our times.” It is set in Russia during World War I—1915, tracing the fate of 16-year-old Georgy Jachmenev, who one day steps in front of an assassin’s bullet intended for the heart of a senior member of the Russian Imperial Family. From being the son of a peasant farmer, Georgy becomes an overnight hero and goes to St. Petersburg to be the bodyguard to Alexei Romanov, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II.

“I travelled to St. Petersburg while I was writing the first draft [of the novel] in order to get a sense of the city,” Boyne says. In his book, he captures the historic times before Moscow took over St. Petersburg as the capital of Russia after two hundred years. One of the historic places he explored is the Winter Palace, which was the official residence of the Russian tsars before the 1917 storming of the palace during the Russian Revolution. Much of the novel takes place there. Today, the Winter Palace houses the Hermitage Museum, which is open to the public “so I was able to spend time in the various rooms and try to get the ghosts of the Imperial family to suffuse onto the page.” For research, Boyne read “nonfiction accounts of the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the lives of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra, as well as that of the monk Grigori Rasputin.”

As for the protagonist Georgy, Boyne says he was not inspired by a specific person, but he’s aware that “a lot of the heroes of my fiction tend to be ill-educated boys who find themselves in extraordinary situations.” It was significant for Georgy to be a librarian, too (at the British Museum, no less), as Boyne often has his heroes befriend a mentor who brings them to the world of learning, particularly that of books. “I came to books quite early myself and a part of me is in each of these characters but they certainly have far more exciting adventures than I had at that age!” he says. In 2008, his novel Mutiny: A Novel of the Bounty (or Mutiny on the Bounty) begins with its 14-year-old protagonist lurking around bookstalls to steal from a French gentleman, who later rescues him from being sent to prison.

The House of Special Purpose took Boyne 18 months to create from start to finish, the average time he takes for writing his novels. Although a diligent and consistent writer, his most famous novel for children, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, saw its draft manuscript completed in a week; in fact, Boyne reportedly wrote the entire book in two and a half days. “When I was writing it, the story certainly took me over entirely and I was absolutely concerned with the characters and the plot.” Boyne had been a serious student of Holocaust-related literature for about 15 years and this gave him the background of the Germans and Nazi concentration camps, with which he came up with the premise of Bruno, the son of a Nazi, who innocently and ill-fatedly befriends Shmuel, a Jew in a concentration camp.

“Of course, I spent the best part of a year then rewriting the novel and making serious decisions about which facts of the camps would remain intact and which I would change,” Boyne says. After it was published, the book went on to sell over five million copies and dominated best-seller lists worldwide, including The New York Times. It was also made into an award-winning Miramax feature film, directed by Mark Herman.

Despite his success, Boyne remains grounded when it comes to writing. “It’s not always smooth sailing,” he admits, “but I certainly feel confident that I know how to construct a novel and create interesting characters.

“I’m unlikely to start something and then abandon it. Once I’ve begun writing I’m very focused and very disciplined, particularly during the writing of a first draft, when I devote myself entirely to the story.” His daily routine begins at 7:30a.m. and he works on his new book until lunchtime. He does his editing and other work in the afternoons. “I try to write new fiction seven days a week,” the diligent author says.

For Boyne, a typical manuscript would have gone through about 10 drafts. “I write on the computer, print it out, write my changes all over the manuscript, feed those changes in and print again, allowing the process to continue until I have a script that has no red marks on it.” The rewriting is where the novel takes shape. “I see a first draft as a block of stone and somewhere inside it is a story trying to escape. You have to chip away until it makes some sense.

“I’m working on a new children’s book at the moment and it’s already up to the ninth draft!”

Curiously, the Dublin-born author has never set a novel in his homeland. “I seem to look abroad for inspiration in my writing,” Boyne admits. “I certainly want to write a novel set in Ireland one day, but I’ve decided not to do that until I have a good story to tell. At the moment I just don’t have one! But I’ll keep trying to find one.”

For now, Boyne is contented with his success and inspiration from other countries to fuel his creative imaginings. He also enjoys the perks of being invited to literary festivals around the world and has been invited to speak in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Britain, Australia and now, Singapore. “At the moment I know very little about Singapore but I plan on reading about it in advance—probably some contemporary writers, too—and I’m certainly going to make time to do a little exploration of my own. Perhaps it will show up in a future novel then!” he says good-humouredly. He describes himself as a voracious reader and tries to keep up with all the new novels every month by writers he admires as well as keeping an eye out for interesting débuts. Currently, he’s reading Glen David Gold’s new novel, Sunnyside.

One of the more affable and livelier authors, Boyne enjoys author appearances and book tours: “I quite like promoting books. I spent a lot of time alone in my study writing, so when I get the opportunity to travel and talk at festivals, such as the one in Singapore, it’s a great delight.” He even spoke at the Aberdeen Word Festival, defending the tradition of paperbacks that it would never lose out to “novels on computer screens.”

“It’s convenient to have all your music on one electronic storage system but books will always need to be printed.”

Even after seven books, Boyne believes there’s still more to come: “I’m still a young writer and I hope I have a lot of novels in my future and it’s important to me that I continue to have a large readership as I grow older.”

TAN MAY LEE graduated from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, where she was awarded the Bonamy Dobree Scholarship for International Students to do her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language. She also trained as a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Semantics Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She is the editor of Quill magazine.

Reproduced from the special Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

November 2009 Highlights

Novels
1. Invisible (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Paul Auster
2. The Story of Danny Dunn (Viking/Penguin Australia, 2009) / Bryce Courtenay
3. Truth or Fiction (Headline Review, 2009) / Jennifer Johnston
4. The Lacuna (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Barbara Kingsolver
5. The Art Student’s War (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Brad Leithauser
6. Lovesong (Allen & Unwin, 2009) / Alex Miller
7. Too Much Happiness (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Alice Munro
8. The Original of Laura (Penguin, 2009) / Vladmir Nabokov
9. The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) / Philip Roth
10. New York (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Edward Rutherfurd
11. A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta (Hamish Hamilton, 2009) / Paul Theroux
12. The Book of the Alchemist (Hodder & Stoughton, 2009) / Adam Williams

Stories
1. Ford County (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Grisham
2. A Good Fall (Pantheon/Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Ha Jin
3. Look at the Birdie (Delacorte Press, 2009) / Kurt Vonnegut

Poetry
1. Leavings (Counterpoint, 2009) / Wendell Berry

Nonfiction
1. Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill (Granta Books, 2009) / Diana Athill
2. Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt Publishing, 2009) / Vanessa Gebbie
3. Lit: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2009) / Mar Karr
4. Concerning E.M. Forster (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Frank Kermode
5. Bury Place Papers: Essays form the London Review of Books (London Review of Books, 2009) / Frank Kermode
6. Family Britain, 1951-1957 (Bloomsbury, 2009) / David Kynaston
7. Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Thomas Mallon
8. Contact! (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Jan Morris
9. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (Simon & Schuster, 2009) / Carol Sklenicka
10. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (Yale University Press, 2009) / Michael Slater
11. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2009) / Zadie Smith
12. Memoir: A History (Penguin Group USA, 2009) / Ben Yagoda

THE WRITING LIFE ... John Ajvide LINDQVIST

SWEDISH HORROR
JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST thrilled Swedish readers with his 2004 début on the social aspects of a vampire, Let the Right One In. Come 2010, there will be an English remake of the film adaptation, and with more horror stories under his sleeve, this Swedish writer is set to thrill and chill more fans. TAN MAY LEE finds out more about his spooks

JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST has, without a doubt, the most interesting and unconventional CV you would ever come across. He worked as a magician and stand-up comedian before dabbling in horror stories. Let the Right One In was his début novel about the much-bullied 12-year-old schoolboy Oskar who befriends his next-door neighbour, Eli, a 200-year-old vampire. It became a Swedish best-seller and was later translated into other languages and adapted as a film. Director Matt Reeves will release an English remake of the critically-acclaimed movie in 2010. For now, this year sees the English translation of Handling the Undead, tackling undeads that have risen from Stockholm’s city morgue.

When you were growing up, did you feel destined for an unconventional career route?
I was 12 when I seriously started aiming at becoming a magician, and I suppose that is unconventional.

You were a magician, a stand-up comedian, and now, a horror writer. How do you juggle this very fascinating combination?
Performing magic tricks and writing are both basically about teaching yourself a technique for making the impossible believable. Comedy and horror aren’t so different either. It’s about creating and describing an everyday situation in which you place something abnormal, something which sheds a different light on the situation, be it horrific or amusing.

What kind of research goes into your writing?
Very little. I tend to try to write about things I already know. For my second novel Handling the Undead, I had to visit a morgue but that was the greatest length I have gone to for research.

Your début novel, Let the Right One In, was set in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, where you grew up in. How would you describe Blackeberg to a traveller today?
My mother still lives there, so I go there every now and then. It is quite a nice, quiet suburb in Stockholm with lots of greenery and forests around it. Nothing threatening there ... anymore.

Although you write in the horror genre, there were universal issues tackled, such as the superior and the bullied; divides between rich and poor. Would you say these are the issues that will move readers to sympathise with the characters in all genres—whether horror, sci-fi, or fantasy?
For me, quite a lot of horror fails when it doesn’t make me care about the people to whom the terrible things are going to happen. Someone you don’t care about can be slaughtered with a chainsaw in a story and you don’t give a damn. Then someone you really care for steps on a nail and it hurts your own body. As for social or psychosocial comment, I find this to be an essential part of any story, otherwise you simply don’t take an interest, or you have bad taste in your mouth once the story is finished.

Is this your first trip to Singapore? What are you looking forward to experiencing at the Singapore Writers Festival?
Yes, this is my first trip to Singapore. I look forward to seeing how Singaporeans do things in a culture which I imagine to be quite different from my own. I am, for example, a smoker, and I realise that this can be something of a problem. Also, I am quite fond of skyscrapers.

This year’s theme for the Singapore Writers Festival is UnderCovers, aiming to promote alternative literature. Do you consider your books an alternative form of literature with a cult following?
I don’t consider my own writing to be alternative in any way, since I aim for readability. Only my subject matters can be considered “alternative.” And maybe the deep seriousness in which I write about absurd subjects. As far as a “cult following” I don’t see much of that. I live in the countryside, sit in my little house and make up my stories. I don’t go out much and do very few readings.

In Asia, we have our own versions of vampires and ghosts. European superstitions can be pretty new and foreign. Although you personally do not believe that any of the creatures in your books really exist, what are the Swedish beliefs in the supernatural that have been ingrained in your culture?
The best short story I have ever written is about trolls, and in my latest novel there is someting called a “spiritus,” a sort of magical insect that gives its owner supernatural abilities—both trolls and spirituses are taken from Swedish mythology. I tend to mix elements of Swedish folklore with more mainstream horror elements, such as zombies or vampires. But mostly I just write about people confronted with something they don’t have the mental tools to deal with—things from the other side. And I think this is a universal theme.

Could you recommend some Swedish literature to foreign readers?
Always start out with Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature). Move on with Hjalmar Söderberg. For poetry, go for Tomas Tranströmer. If you want something more modern, try Kerstin Ekman. Sorry that so many of the names contain the letter “ö.”

Outside the world of horror and books, what interests you?
I like Abba, romantic comedies, Singstar and Guitar Hero. I do watch horror movies when something good comes out, but it so seldom does. I also look forward to playing Resident Evil 5. Otherwise my main interest in life is my wife and son.

What do you think of popular culture?
What a question! Well, my answer to the former question does give away that I prefer popular culture to that other, distant culture. I don’t really know what that is. I am a great fan of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Samuel Beckett. But they are also part of popular culture, aren’t they?

Do you travel widely on book tours and personally trips?
No. I have too many things that I want to write about, and I simply don’t have the time. Also, I only go to other countries when it’s possible to bring my family and when it’s possible for them to come. Singapore was irresistible, though.

Now that you have seen film adaptations of your work, has it made you more interested in screenwriting and films?
I have already written the script for Handling the Undead and it’s due to start shooting next summer. Tomas Alfredson and I also plan to work together on my third novel, as we worked together on Let the Right One In. I hope I can continue writing the screenplays of my own books, as long as people let me.

How far along are you on your new novel?
I’m at the moment on page 420 of Little Star, which has unfortunately turned out a little too horrific. I have only something like 50 pages to go, but then quite the tedious process of cutting the novel down to 400 pages will begin. I started out thinking I was writing a 200-page book, but it’s always like that with me.

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Muhammad HAJI SALLEH

JEWEL OF THE VERBAL ARTS
Malaysia’s National Laureate MUHAMMAD HAJI SALLEH recounts the evolution of modern literature to TAN MAY LEE

IF YOU STUDIED ENGLISH LITERATURE for SPM (Malaysia’s equivalent of the British O Levels), you might have come across the poetry of Muhammad Haji Salleh. Unlike the English fascination with daffodils and autumn leaves dancing in the breeze, Muhammad’s reflections of padi fields and serene kampung [village] life would appear out of the usual round of things, yet at the heart of it, completely familiar, even nostalgic. He writes on Malaysian life and also champions the Malay language.

Currently, he is with the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. He recently completed a translation of Hikayat Hang Tuah (The Legends of Hang Tuah) and the Anthology of Classical Malay Literature and hopes to publish three books he is editing in 2010. He also writes two monthly columns in the literary and cultural journals of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP). His has been a lifelong dedication to the arts; and because of that Muhammad has played a significant role in developing the Malaysian literary landscape.

You have been a writer throughout your life. Has your writing journey taught you more about yourself?
Literature is at the heart of a culture, and a person without a culture has neither heart nor soul, however profitable or efficient their factories may be. They may turn out to be the machines they manage. Language is wonderful, and poetry is the jewel of the verbal arts. Writing is a talent that is given to everyone, and every nation has its own words for its own particular experiences. Personally, I, too, am part of a bigger community and language. But I think I can contribute to them in my small way.

As Malaysia’s National Laureate, you are often invited to become a Fellow at universities around the world. Do you enjoy these appointments?
I have been invited as a Fellow a few times, at universities in Berkeley, Michigan, Kyoto and Harvard. These are exclusive time when I can research and write without other demands. I get to meet and listen to renowned scholars, and camp in the best libraries.

As a poet, I get to meet famous authors and offer my perspective on issues. I often give talks and poetry readings during these stints. It helps put Malaysian literature on the map.

How often do you travel?
Quite often. Frequently to take up fellowships, embark on research, present papers and sometimes not-so-successful holidays. My life cycle is only two weeks long. After this period I must get out and go somewhere, if not overseas then to Kedah, southern Thailand or back to my house in Kajang, the town that smells of satay.

I notice that many internationally-acclaimed Malaysian authors (Tash Aw, Rani Manicka, Preeta Samarasan, Tan Twan Eng and Chiew-Siah Tei) are based overseas. Should Malaysian writers try to stay in their homeland or would you encourage them to explore so as to be observers outside looking in?
I do both: live overseas for periods of time, then return home. It’s a shared world now. Themes, languages and styles are shared. It matters not where a writer lives. Nobel laureate J.M.G. le Clézio lived in Africa, Europe and other places.

What are your best memories of places in Malaysia that have inspired your writing?
My memory is historical and also personal. For the historical, I dig deep into old texts like the Malay Annals, Hikayat Hang Tuah (The Legend of Hang Tuah), pantuns (Malay poems) and proverbs.

The personal ones mostly come from my youth in Penang—in Sungai Acheh, Bukit Mertajam and Seberang Perai. However my travels to Belum in Perak, Kuala Tembeling in Pahang, Semporna in Sabah, and Perhentian and Redang Islands are just as beautiful. I like nature in its most pristine state—these give me an exhilaration and poetic inspiration. There is a proverb: “If you want know about human beings, go deep into the forest.”

As a lecturer, you are used to presenting talks on literature to large audiences. When it comes to your own poetry, which can be quite personal, how much do you enjoy performing them? You once mentioned in another interview that you were a shy person and that’s why you were drawn to poetry. Today, poetry appears to be one of the most outspoken forms of literature. What are your views on this?
My poems have two faces: the quiet internal one with a personal face and fare, and also the external and public one. These represent the two sides of my own life. I do enjoy reading to an appreciative audience. Sadly, these types of audiences are quite rare in Malaysia. People tend to be engaging in extended conversation or political discussions when poets are reading here. My poems are fragile, and so are my moods for reading poetry. I am often distracted by these parallel presentations by members of my audience. And I go home quite depressed.

Some people today have it in their heads that they should write for money and not out of passion. Where does this mindset come from?
Unfortunately, we have been taught that the end result of education is money, and money is the stuff and matter of life. This is indeed tragic; we should make literature and the arts compulsory before all our future generations become wage slaves and moneybags. Our education system has created a few generations of unimaginative and quite illiterate young people—somehow the essence of life and education are missed but the junk and the rubbish are the ones that people go for.

The joy of life and education, too, is no longer around—what’s left are heavy, unwieldy schoolbags and drudgery. We need to teach our young that it is all right to think and have an opinion, and evaluate their own situations without quoting the newspapers or the ministers. To reverse this mindset, we have to reverse our education goals and systems. I am pushing for literature to be taught to all students—as they do in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English schools all around the world.

You have obviously witnessed the development of Malaysian literature over the decades. How has it evolved?
I think Malaysian literature is evolving slower than Indonesian or Filipino literature. We tend to shove it to the sidelines of Malaysian life. Luckily, there are some good talents like Wong Phui Nam, Baha Zain and Latiff Mohidin. There are also young non-Malay writers, especially from Sabah and Sarawak, besides those from the Peninsula. They are foregrounding their own communal experiences which have been under wraps for a long time. This is good. They also bring to the national language unique qualities of their own languages or dialects. Multicultural Malaysian literature is alive and kicking.

For awhile, you consciously chose to write primarily in Malay. Do you find that the level of Bahasa Malaysia is dropping or improving? Now that English, Chinese and French have taken over as the global languages of communication, what do you foresee as the future of the Malay language?
I took a long time to come to that decision of writing in Malay. We are all trustees of the language of our ancestors or of our country. English, though now an international language, was a colonial one that allowed little space for Malay to grow or maintain the prestige it had throughout the Malay Archipelago for almost two millennia. During the colonial years I was told that only English was the language of knowledge. But Malaysian language has a long history, from the times and kingdoms of the Srivijaya, Malacca and Acheh.

Generally, I think the Malay language is now more sophisticated; however, this sophistication is limited to a few people. The general public is not very sensitive to the beauty of the language or its uniqueness and see it only as a means of (rough) communication. This is a worrying scenario. But there is a study that says in 30 years, Malay (and Indonesian) will share the fourth place among the languages of the world with Hindi and Arab in terms of the number of speakers. With Malay returning to schools now, we may still catch up with the other languages.

What literary aspect of Malay do people tend to miss out on that stops them from appreciating the language more? For someone new to Malay literature, what should they start reading?
People tend to come to the language with huge prejudices, not least created by English. This is the biggest hurdle. If one lets oneself go, one would find the collective genius of the pantun and the proverbs. The pantun is used in at least 40 languages worldwide, and our proverbs are as wise as any. One can start with the short stories of Keris Mas and the poems of Usman Awang. Then venture into the more international styles of Baha Zain and Latiff Mohidin.

As a bilingual writer, what can you convey in Malay that you can’t effectively do in English and vice versa?
A nation’s dream, and nostalgia in a language that smells of childhood, passage and growing up. The smell of flowers don’t seem to be the same if you use their English terms—somehow frangipani is not cempaka, water lily is not seroja. How do you describe the heavenly smell of the petai or the durian if other people insist that they are smelly or have an odour of cottage cheese? Many culture-specific words like keris, Peranakan, mee udang or laksa barely bring over their shape or looks but not their connotations and cultural meanings. Then the music of Malay is different from that of English—it’s more gentle, more emotive and decorous. You must have music and decorum to give your poems a fuller life in Malay.

Just curious—have you always wanted to be a writer?
My father told me that as a young boy I wanted to be a teacher. But I never wanted to be a headmaster, politician or businessman. In those days, there weren’t many choices. So I became a teacher, and stayed as one for almost 45 years! This is a job where you work for others—a generation’s future. When you are successful you can feel it at the end of the class or lecture. There is more light shining in the students’ eyes.

I never had idols to emulate in the 1950s. But when I was in the upper secondary school, I realised that being a writer could be quite glamorous—you are studied for your ideas, language and style. It was in England in the 1960s that I read the works of famous writers like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Somehow their dreams of writing as a career were unsullied by expectations of money. So I read their works and biographies, and wanted to be like them.

Literature now also depends on its marketability. In your opinion, will literature be consumed by commercialism one day?
It is being devoured by predatory capitalism now. The really good works that don’t follow the tastes (oftentimes superficial) do not sell well, and those that sell well do so often not because of their ideas or verbal quality. People like Kenzaburō Ōe, who writes about special children, are resigned to the idea that good literature will not die, but will only circulate among the chosen few.

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Wena POON

FOXY STORIES
After the success of Lions in Winter, WENA POON is back with a new short-story collection, not to mention a sci-fi omnibus! TAN MAY LEE catches up with the feisty lawyer cum author

SINGAPORE-BORN American author Wena Poon created a stir in 2008 with her début, Lions in Winter, a collection of short stories on the migratory life of Singaporeans. Longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Poon was invited to read her stories at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, after which international rights for the book were immediately bought by Salt Publishing in the UK. Poon is now back with another collection, The Proper Care of Foxes, which has even more dynamic and diverse characters. The Proper Care of Foxes will be one of the 10 books being launched at the 2009 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. She also writes science-fiction and has self-published a sci-fi omnibus, Biophilia.

It’s been a while since we last met and since Lions in Winter. You’ve gone places since, including Ireland for the literary festival in Cork. What else have you been up to?
I practice law full time as a partner in a California law firm. Client and office matters keep me busy everyday. In the evenings, I review the proofs of my upcoming books and deal with editors, publishers, journalists and festival organisers. I travel a lot as a lawyer and writer. I was in Spain in July 2009 to meet a director friend of mine to work on a musical. Then I flew to the annual American Bar Association conference in Chicago, where I’m serving a two-year term as ambassador. This fall, I’m taking some time off work to go to Sweden, England, Singapore, Hong Kong and Ubud for literary events.

How can stories be versions of your own journeys?
I like stories that capture contemporary reality, yet acknowledge a solid intellectual debt to the past. In ‘Reuse, Recycle,’ one of the stories in the new collection, three siblings in a crumbling Victorian house in Texas sell off their dead mother’s things on eBay. In ‘Justin and the Cenotaph,’ an elderly Chinese Singaporean woman views the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on YouTube. These are not my own journeys. I create characters to illustrate my view of the world, but I take them down paths I’ve never taken to see what happens.

While Lions in Winter had very Singaporean characters and places, The Proper Care of Foxes travels far and wide. What binds the characters together in this collection?
They’re all part of the same universe. In college, I was influenced by writers like Voltaire and Antoine de Saint Exupéry. The Proper Care of Foxes is a book built around Voltaire’s famous yet enigmatic philosophy in Candide which is quoted at its beginning: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we must cultivate our garden). I interpreted this to mean that we have to nurture and protect what E.M. Forster calls our “eternal springs,” but at the same time we have to work hard and constantly create in order to justify our existence.

Voltaire wrote that “l’homme n’est pas né pour le repos” (man was not born for rest). I believe in work ethics. But in the pursuit of work and of excellence, we must not forget to forge relationships and to love. This is the theme of the fox, which comes from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince. In my mind, the fox fits nicely in the intellectual tradition of Voltaire’s garden.

‘The Proper Care of Foxes’ is about a Malaysian girl meeting an old friend in Somerset, so she could get laid before marrying a man she doesn’t love. How did the story come to you? Why did you choose it as the title story?
The unexpected love story of Edward and Meg came to me during a time when a lot of London bankers were laid off. I was reading The Financial Times on the plane. When people are fired in the UK, they call the notice period “garden leave.” Garden leave sounds appropriate for laid-off bankers and executives who finally have time to cultivate their soul and reflect on their life choices. I put down the newspaper and turned on my laptop. As Virginia Woolf said in the movie The Hours, “I have a first sentence.”

I began with the dialogue between Edward and his mother. In London, Edward calls his mum and says he’s been laid off. His mum tells him to visit her in Somerset. Edward’s been a busy banker all his life, so he hardly sees his mum. While visiting her, an email from Meg, an old classmate from Malaysia, hurtles like a blazing meteor into his life and changes it forever.

In my collection, I was keen to explore the forces shaping our contemporary morality, such as global recessions and the ubiquitous Internet. That’s why Edward’s story became the title story.

Your characters are flamboyant: an Asian sex tourist, a depressed transvestite, even the son of a Japanese man turns out to be Caucasian. What draws you to these characters?
I’m interested in taking Asian stereotypes and turning them on their head. In ‘Vanilla Five,’ a white baby is adopted by a Japanese couple in New York. In America, a lot of Asian babies are adopted by white couples, so what happens when it’s the other way around? I want to see what happens when you upset the applecart. It’s exciting for a writer to explore these roles. I hope it’s exciting for the reader as well.

The infamous “Are these stories based on people you know?” question: where did the colourful characters come from?
It’s easier to explain where the visual models for the characters come from. I don’t have a favourite character, but my readers love Siegfried, the cross-dressing hero of ‘Siegfried & the Avalanche.’ I have an old video of Brian Eno in Roxy Music and three trannies in Austin, Texas, to thank for the visual cues for Siegfried.

Apart from literary fiction, you also write science fiction. Tell us about the creation of Biophilia’s sci-fi universe and the female protagonist Imogen!
Biophilia is the summer blockbuster movie I have been waiting for. In action movies, women continue to be just the girlfriend or the mother. That’s not reflective of reality in America. Women are now running for President, leading multi-billion-dollar corporations and flying military airplanes. You can think of Biophilia as the new J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie, except that the leading role of Kirk is a woman, and the supportive role of Spock is a man. Imogen, the heroine, is impetuous, sassy, cool and brave. She’s not just a pinup—she actually fights. Kai, the hero, is like Q in James Bond—he builds machines for Imogen so that she can do her thing. The surprising thing is that both men and women love female action stars. Hollywood’s got it all wrong. I must fix it!

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... O Thiam Chin

A LONG-DISTANCE RUN THAT NEVER ENDS
JANET TAY talks to Singaporean writer O THIAM CHIN about his new collection of stories, Never Been Better, and the need to be pragmatic in pursuing one’s dream to write

O THIAM CHIN’s short stories have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies, including Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Best of Singapore Erotica, Silverfish New Writing 6 and Body2Body, and his début collection of short stories, Free-Falling Man, was published in 2006.

In this new collection of stories, O has created a series of unforgettable, deeply-affecting portraits of individuals whose intersections of loves and losses mark the dawn of awareness and longing in their lives. Never Been Better (MPH Publishing, November 2009) illustrates his literary versatility in the assortment of characters who occupy a world of ambivalence and false optimism, yet still persist in trudging on with strength and resilience. From free-spirited teenage runaways and a lonely child who collects dead animals to hidden family secrets and migrant workers who live squalid lives far away from home, these eclectic stories are heartbreaking, haunting, and rendered with a touch of grace, compassion and poignancy.

Tell us a little bit about growing up in Singapore and how you developed an interest in writing.
I’m a Singaporean born and bred and have lived in an old housing estate, Ang Mo Kio, for the last 31 years. When I was much younger, I spent my weekends in a kampung [village] in Choa Chu Kang with my grandparents and relatives. Growing up, I never saw myself becoming a writer at all; a policeman, yes, but not a writer—the idea never even crossed my mind. I think the first step towards my becoming a writer was my fondness for books since a young age. I got my first library card when I was eight years old. As I read more, I began to entertain the thought of writing my own stories.

Is your short-story collection, Never Been Better, your first book?
Well, it’s my first ‘official’ book published by a reputable publisher [MPH Publishing]. In 2006, I self-published my début short-story collection, Free-Falling Man, through an online publisher. This book is only available for sale online and at selected independent bookshops in Singapore.

Do you write full-time?
I did for almost seven months when I was writing and revising the manuscript for Never Been Better. Likewise for the last book, I quit my full-time job to write intensively for six months. When I started writing on a freelance basis in the early 2000s, I wrote mostly for parenting, lifestyle and entertainment magazines. I tried my hand at writing all kinds of stuff so as to expand my writing repertoire and experience. Every writer has to start somewhere to build his foundation and to learn the fundamentals of the craft.

Do you have a certain time or place when you write?
I used to write when I felt the need or urge to write, so my periods of writing were sporadic and irregular. But when I was writing Never Been Better, I decided to be more disciplined, to keep to a certain routine, and to put in a few good hours each day, no matter the state of my mind or mood. It was a struggle then and it’s still a pain now. Like what John Ashbery once said, “It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood ... Even if you don’t succeed, you’ll develop a muscle that may do it later on.”

To me, writing is like a long-distance run that never ends—I can only hope to develop the stamina, endurance and, of course, the muscles to continue running for a long time. I write mostly at home, but when I need a change of environment or become too distracted, I’d head down to the Central Library to write. On good days, I can clock in a four- to five-hour stretch of writing, but on lousy days, I’d slow-crawl to meet my daily minimum word count of five hundred.

Death seems to feature quite prominently in your stories. Is this a theme that has always been of interest to you as a writer?
Since young, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of death, and more exactly, the process of dying. There is something very elemental and profound about this final human state, this exit from life, how it can be different for everyone. Nobody dies the same death, and the variety of deaths may seem copious. More than just dealing with death, I want to know how the death of a person—perhaps, more importantly, the act of dying—can have an effect on another. Death, in and of itself, has so much meaning not just for the dying but for those alive who witness this act of passing on. In this alone, beneath the experience of the living remembering their dead lies an ocean of stories to be told. It’s a common theme found in any short-story collection anywhere, and a great part of its timeless allure is its unpredictability, the unfathomable unknowns that exist that made writers want to explore it in their writings, to touch death and to get away with it; there are simply so many ways to treat and deal with this subject matter.

Your protagonists are male, female, straight and gay. How hard is it for you take on different points of view as these different characters?
Usually when I start a story, I begin with the vaguest of ideas, like an image lurking at the back of my mind, or a persistent voice that refuses to be silenced, and work with what I have initially and build on it. The voice of the characters in the story will grow stronger and clearer as I keep writing. It’s almost like the story is writing itself out, moving in a certain direction, taking a particular outline. I rarely think about the movement of the plot or how the characters are developing until I have to face it, like coming to a bridge that I have to cross to reach the other side. The strange thing is, I will only find out how to move on with a story at the exact point when the bridge presents itself, never in advance.

All of your stories are set in what looks like a modern society. Why is ‘Peach’ different in this aspect?
I wanted to write a piece from the perspective of a much older person, like a grandparent, and in this story I wrote about a grandmother who talks about a significant part of her history and the beginnings of her marriage. As I wrote it, I pulled in other story elements, like the mythology of Sun Wukong, the changing nature of woman’s sexuality, and the old traditions of a long-gone past. I like the fact that the oral tradition of storytelling contained many elements of hyperbole—not necessarily of falsehoods, or lies—but of a mystical, mysterious nature that are shaped by the belief and culture of a particular time and place.

‘Exodus’ is a story about the lives of migrant Chinese workers who come to Singapore in search of better livelihoods. I found the descriptions of the Chinese workers and their living conditions vivid. You were able to capture their emotions effectively, which led me to wonder how much research you had to do for this story. Could you tell us how you came to write this story and the extent of your research?
It’s a common fact that China is facing the largest population migration in history where millions of workers are leaving the rural villages for the cities, in China and overseas. Singapore naturally has its share of this influx of migrant Chinese workers, this exodus of people leaving their homeland to seek a better life elsewhere. At every turn, you see them, holding down full-time menial jobs or seeking further education, becoming part of the human landscape.

Where I live, there are many Chinese workers who live together in small groups in tiny flats, scraping together a kind of living, a temporal community of sorts. While they have somewhat assimilated themselves to the Singapore culture, prejudices and discrimination still exist, on some levels, against them, formed mainly out of ignorance and fear.

Through the life of Yichang, the protagonist of ‘Exodus,’ I wanted to see the ‘new world’ through his eyes, so to speak; the excitement of leaving his hometown to seek employment in a different country, the joys of new discoveries, of new sights and experiences, the limitations of his abilities and skills, and the painful dawning of his newly-forged identity set against changing times.

I believe there’s a story to be told of a life of a man who chooses to leave behind his country, his place of origin, a safe and secure environment, and to seek a life somewhere else, the hopes and anxieties he brings and the reality he has to face. While I’m tempted to include snippets of real-life stories and scandals gleaned from news reports and my personal observations into this story, in the end I decided to just let my imagination dictate the story.

There are many social aspects considered in your stories. ‘Moths’ mentions a boy’s brother being sold because the family is poor. ‘Fireworks’ is about the lives of girls in a juvenile home. ‘Turning a Blind Eye’ deals with domestic abuse. Do you feel that these issues are important for you to discuss in your stories?
I never write with the objective of incorporating these social elements into my stories; it’s just integral to the overall storytelling. I guess it’s only natural since life, culture and society are made up of these components. It’s hard to dig into life without these issues surfacing somehow. When I write a story, I never seek to bring up an ‘issue’ or to address a ‘social concern’ in it; all that matters to me are the tiny details that make up the story that I’m writing. It’s only when I finish a story and take a step back and read it from a detached, discerning perspective that I realise a larger, more complex being has taken shape, possessing its own attributes, carrying a certain ‘agenda.’

Why is your new collection titled Never Been Better?
These words are spoken by one of the girls in ‘Fireworks’ at the end of the story when they finally decide to head back to the Home, where they were previously incarcerated, after escaping from it. By uttering these words, she expresses a barely-concealed, shaky sense of optimism, even as she battles with her fears of the unknown. I like the title for its ambiguity and subtlety. In a way, all the protagonists in the stories in this collection experience a certain, revelatory moment in which their choices, whether good, bad or ambivalent, are revealed for what they are, and they have to live it up or stick to it with the optimism and faith that each holds, whether it’s for better or worse.

Do you see yourself writing another collection of stories or will you be considering a novel as your next project?
I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing short stories. I enjoy writing them and there is a lot I would like to explore through this wonderful genre. In fact, I’ve just completed my first draft of a collection of 50 micro-fiction pieces, each story only 500 words long. The idea of this collection came to me as I wanted to create a holding vessel to house the few orphan pieces that I’ve been hoarding over the years.

Also, when I was backpacking through Japan in early 2009, I outlined 10 new short-story ideas that I want to write once the time is ripe. For this new collection, it has a more fantastical, mythical bent as I want to break away from the hard rules of realism, and from what I’ve been comfortable writing.

I can’t deny that I’ve been itching to try my hand at a novel for some time now. In fact, I’ve been treading slowly, working out the characters and plot in painfully small steps, and have completed three chapters so far.

What is your advice to would-be writers who have difficulty juggling their full-time jobs and writing?
Stick to your full-time jobs if you need a stable source of income, because writing fiction doesn’t pay at all, financially speaking. But if you want to write fiction on a full-time basis, be prepared to have sufficient savings. You have to be practical and pragmatic about these issues. It’s a cliché to say this, but you have to make sacrifices when it comes to writing, because, let’s face it, writing well demands a tremendous amount of effort and time. For me, I wrote while I was still holding down a full-time job, but it became too tiring after a while, and I knew that if I really wanted to write at all, I needed to choose, and so I did. I quit my job and I wrote.

What more do you think can be done to encourage writing and publishing fiction in Singapore and Malaysia? How important are competitions, creative writing courses and competitions in cultivating an interest in writing and publishing?
I think there’s now greater awareness of the resources that are available to any writer, be it writing workshops, mentorship programmes, or application for grants. For a new writer, I think it’s very advantageous if he can make full use of these resources and see what works for him and allow him to develop his potential. Each of us comes to the table with different abilities and talents, and it’s important to know what one wants at the end of the day because these resources can only do so much to spur you on, but the rest, seriously, is up to you. I’ve never attended any writing courses, but I can see the merits of them.

It’s always very hard for new writers to break any ground when they first start out, but one good way for new writers to get some exposure is to submit their works to the literary journals that are open to good quality writing, like the Asia Literary Review (ALR) or the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS). I’ve been very lucky as the editors were willing to take a chance with me and publish my stories. Also, I think it’s important to keep in hand some strong pieces that can be submitted when there are writing competitions—two pieces of my micro-fiction won prizes and recognition in this aspect.

Photograph of David Mitchell courtesy of Miriam Berkley

Who are your greatest literary influences?
It’s impossible to deny the kind of influence that Haruki Murakami’s works has on me—the worlds he create and the spells he cast over me. Because of the genre I write in, I draw inspiration from the short-story masters: Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders and Alice Munro. I also have a deep admiration for writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Cunningham and David Mitchell.

Who do you read for leisure?
I usually juggle a few short-story collections in one go. Now I’m reading the stories of Mary Gaitskill from her new collection, Don’t Cry, Michael Arditti’s Good Clean Fun, and the collected stories of Carson McCullers. When I travel, I usually bring along short-story anthologies like The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories—the diversity of stories and writers, new and old, in these annual anthologies make each reading a pleasurable experience.

JANET TAY is a litigation lawyer by training, but decided to leave the legal profession to pursue her first love—books and writing. She is now a book editor at MPH Group Publishing in Kuala Lumpur. She is also working towards a Master’s degree in English Literature at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She is the co-editor of Urban Odysseys: KL Stories (MPH Group Publishing, 2009).

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Miguel SYJUCO

AN ILLUSTRIOUS DÉBUT
2008 Man Asian Literary Prize-winner MIGUEL SYJUCO talks to ERIC FORBES about his unconventional début novel, Ilustrado, which begins as a murder mystery and evolves into a meditation on Philippine history and society

MIGUEL SYJUCO (pronounced as ‘see-hoo-co’) was born in Manila in 1976, and has lived in New York, Paris and Adelaide. In 2008, the manuscript of his début novel, Ilustrado, won the US$10,000 Man Asian Literary Prize and was awarded the Grand Prize at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, a significant literary award in the Philippines. He lives in Montreal, Canada. Ilustrado will be out in the late spring of 2010.

ON HIS LIFE
Syjuco was born in Manila and lived most of his life there, but left the Philippines to become a writer. “I now live and write in Montreal, which is a wonderful city, because it is a place where I can make a living as a writer, and I can also be free to write what I like,” he says, although he constantly wonders if he should return to the Philippines to do more. He quit working as a copy editor for the Montreal Gazette in February 2008 to focus on writing full time. He also hosts a weekly radio slot called The Biblio-File on CBC’s Radio Canada International where he discusses a book a week, and he tries to do two Canadian books and two international books a month.

ON GROWING UP IN THE PHILIPPINES
Syjuco’s comfortable background as the son of a politician led him and his classmates to engage in “justifications and rationalisations for why we’re not doing more than we’re doing.”

Growing up in Manila was both complicating and frustrating. “I found living in the Philippines to be very confusing. I think that we as a people are constantly beset by collective puzzlement because the country’s problems are so complex, the solutions so elusive, and the morality so skewed.” The Metro Manila traffic is the perfect metaphor for this state of confusion and he points out that one cannot “drive down the street without seeing beggars, street children, environmental rape, and the guarded and gleaming convoys of the rich and powerful parting traffic on their way to congress, or the golf club, or the mall, or home.”

He did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps although it was expected of him. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to stomach the compromises or hypocrisies necessary to succeed in Philippine politics.

ON BEING A WRITER
Syjuco failed his economics major in college, which led him to pursue English literature instead and he started writing short stories and some “very bad poetry.”

After graduating, during the dot-com boom, he started a city guide and lifestyle website with some classmates, which helped him learn with the rigorous trial and error of the self-taught. “As the editor, I had to teach myself how to be a reporter and reviewer, and my only teachers were newspapers, books and magazines.”

To him, a writer is “an interpreter of different truths.” He later left Manila in 2001 to do a master’s degree in creative writing at Columbia University, an experience he enjoyed tremendously “because they gave me a community of people as lost and as dreamy and as ambitious and as curious as I was.”

On formal creative-writing training, he doesn’t believe someone can be taught to write, “and that’s a good thing, because it proves that writing is still an art and craft. But you can indeed teach people the skills they need to learn how to work their material into something formidable.”

He then stayed overseas and worked some very odd jobs, which include being a bartender, Ebay powerseller of overrun ladies’ handbags and medical guinea pig. He also interned in the fiction department of The New Yorker, worked as a research assistant at Esquire, and served as a fiction reader for The Paris Review and managed to “make some sort of life” as a writer.

In 2005, “sick of hustling,” he went with his girlfriend to start a life in Adelaide, Australia. There, he worked as a reporter, copy editor, and then online editor at The Independent Weekly newspaper. He later obtained a full scholarship to do his PhD in English literature with a focus on creative writing. “So I quit my jobs and put all my eggs in one basket, and started writing Ilustrado.”

Syjuco, though familiar with the constant flow of rejection slips, nevertheless carried on writing. “So I wrote a second novel, a short-story collection, and was halfway through a third novel when Ilustrado was picked up,” he recalls.

His first novel, Ilustrado, starts out with the death of Crispin Salvador, a former lion of Philippine literature who is found dead in the Hudson River in New York. Suicide is ruled as the cause of death. His young acolyte, Miguel, is suspicious, because missing from Salvador’s apartment is a long-awaited manuscript that was to have been an exposé of the corruption of the Philippine ruling elite. So Miguel returns to Manila to investigate, but discovers that the story is as much his as it is his mentor’s.

“That’s the summary of the book, but the murder-mystery construct allowed me to pull the reader in so that I could attempt a broader meditation on Philippine society. The book collects the fictional Salvador’s oeuvre, and I therefore created his work: excerpts of a memoir, short stories, poetry, interviews, jokes, notes, biography, etc.” This allowed him to expand the novel’s scope to include Philippine history, without coming off as didactic, as he believes that the problem with a lot of Philippine literature in English is that they are often weighed down by self-conscious explanation to Western readers, or self-exoticisation to sell books to the West.

Syjuco’s criteria for good fiction is complex. “For fiction to be more than mere entertainment, it needs to have some weight to it. For it to have weight, it needs to tackle important quiddities. For it to approach quiddities, it has to have its grievances, because a world with grievances is just reality. But for it to be good and be read, it needs to be carefully written and beautiful and entertaining. To me, it needs to be all those things. The best fiction teeters on the fine line between being too simple and being too obscure—it has to challenge the readers, but it also has to reward them. And to understand that relationship with the reader, the writer needs to be engaged with the world.”

Like any life, writers are filled with “profundities and superficialities.” Syjuco enjoys “never, ever having to wake up to the shriek of an alarm clock ever again” amongst other things, such as reading good books being a required exercise to improve his craft. His flexible schedule allows him to take a week off whenever he wants to think about his work, and everyday life is potential material. “More than anything, I love being able to see how things connect and work out, and seeing my skills grow before my eyes,” he says.

“But like anything, there’s the flip side,” he warns. It takes tremendous amount of discipline to abstain from watching TV or simply dreaming of great novels, not to mention working long hours to meet deadlines. Books are either for review or study because there is no time to read books for pure enjoyment. Despite being an acclaimed writer, he has many issues: “Am I hamfisted? Am I relevant? Is my work worth reading? Have I lost touch with the world while I was at home sequestered at my desk? Am I pigeonholing myself into an ethnicity? Am I misguided in my experiments and theories about how my fiction works? Should I just quit and do something else?”

After working on Ilustrado, which will be published in 2010, Syjuco will work on his second novel, “I Was the President’s Mistress,” the biography of the Philippine starlet Vita Nova, as told to her ghostwriter, ironically named Miguel Syjuco. “It is a collection of her interviews as she talks about her rise from a very simple country girl as she slept her way through Philippine society to ultimately become the mistress of the president.” It has already been sold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Penguin Canada’s Hamish Hamilton.

ON WINNING THE 2008 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE
It was and still is an “incredulous experience” for Syjuco, a début novelist who was up against such published writers as Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Kaveri Nambisan, Yu Hua and Alfred A. Yuson. “I’m still stupefied that they gave me the prize, because I was up against some very strong and seasoned competition. This is my first novel. I’ve never even tried to write a novel in my life, so I was shocked that anyone finished reading it, much less liked it.”

Having struggled for years in getting agents and publishers to pick up his manuscript, he welcomed the big break. “I spent years sending my stories to competitions, my novel excerpts to agents and publishers, but nobody bit. It was many years of constant return to the proverbial drawing board, to rethink, revise, redo my work. Winning the prize was also reassuring that perhaps my ideas of how fiction can work—how the novel can function differently from usual—weren’t entirely daft. It’s still a very scary thing to have the literary world looking at me and my work.”

Syjuco’s novel will be published in 15 countries and 11 languages. “But now I deal with the fear that I only have that because I won the prize, and not because the prize got the book into the hands of the right people who would appreciate it,” he says. “Ultimately, the real test will be whether readers like it. If the book can make them think, feel and laugh, then I’m happy.”

ON THE KINDS OF BOOKS HE READ DURING HIS FORMATIVE YEARS AND THE KINDS OF BOOKS HE READS NOW
Like most writers, Syjuco’s literary diet was insatiable since a young age. He read almost anything he could get his hands on. He read the Hardy Boys series, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and The Bible, which all had a profound effect on him when he was young. So did comics—Marvel, DC, and later the works of Neil Gaiman. Fantasy and science fiction were his “gateway drugs into the addictions of literature.” In high school and college, he read a lot of American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever.

“Roberto Bolaño has been very important to me because I discovered him after I wrote Ilustrado and saw that here was someone also trying something unconventional and getting away with it,” he says on the literature he reads today. “I love Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Sadly, I’m very Western-centric in my reading, though I’m changing that more and more.” He says that Patrick O’Brian’s work “is like crack to me” and his favourite novel is still Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “It’s got everything—deep and shallow—to keep a pseudo-intellect like mine interested.” For inspiration, he goes to the books of Ryszard Kapuscinski. He tries to finish even those books he doesn’t like out of respect.

As for genres, he reads everything, but mostly fiction, because fiction is what he does. “I’m trying to read romance novels and crime writing, because I know there are many things—like plot development, sustaining readers’ suspense, etc.—that I need to learn for my own craft. But I’m finding it hard because I learn from their structures but I can’t get past the uninspired writing.”

ON THE CURRENT STATE OF LITERATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES TODAY
The state of Philippine literature has always been complicated and therefore very interesting. “We’ve had a very rich literary tradition, in English and in our native languages and dialects, but we’re not a country of readers.” However, bookshops in Makati still bustle with business, where people snatch up Harry Potter, The Alchemist and The Secret.

But then the Filipiniana sections of bookshops are usually overlooked. “If a Filipino writer publishes abroad, then usually that book will be displayed prominently in the bookshop, no matter how badly written it may be compared to those languishing in the section of local books.”

“Philippine literature,” Syjuco continues, “is freighted with so many issues. We ask: why doesn’t the world read us? I think the honest answer is that not all that comes out is of a high quality, and those that are of a high quality don’t have access to the agents and publishers that can get the book out into the world. I think we Filipinos need to work together to help each other refine our work and to push that work to a global audience. But sometimes—not always—we suffer from a crab mentality, pulling each other down.”

Syjuco provides an anecdote: “I’ve been working on my novel for nearly four years now, and after it received attention I had many from the Philippine literati asking to see it, saying they wanted to help me edit and revise it so that we could have a good showing internationally. Naive as I am, I sent out my manuscript to about a dozen fellow writers. Either they hated it, or something else deeper is going on, because I haven’t received a single bit of help from any of my countrymen. As I revised over the years, I’ve had Western editors, writing programme colleagues, and literary friends go line by line, poring over my work through multiple versions. But not a single Filipino has helped me. And yet, they are so proud of the book having won, and hope it will help shine a light on Philippine literature.”

ON SOME OF HIS FAVOURITE FILIPINO AUTHORS
His favourite Filipino writers “have always been Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, Nick Joaquin and Gregorio Brillantes.” Of the more contemporary authors, there’s Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, Antonio Hidalgo and Lourd de Veyra. “One fantastic writer is Clinton Palanca, whose prose is probably the most beautiful in the country, though he is between books right now and I do hope he’ll be coming out with something new soon.” He also names Jose “Butch” Dalisay, whose Solidad’s Sister was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007, a “wonderful stylist.”

“And we can’t forget the Filipino-American writers, who are an integral part of our national literature as chroniclers of the Filipino experience.” Names that come to mind include Jessica Hagedorn (Dogeaters), Han Ong (The Disinherited) and Bino A. Realuyo (The Umbrella Country), amongst others.

“And if we’re talking about poets, there are just too many to mention. We’re a culture of poets, though not enough people read poetry.”

Illustrado will be published in 2010 in Canada by Penguin Canada’s Hamish Hamilton, in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in the UK by Picador, in Australia and New Zealand by Random House, and in the Philippines by the University of Philippines Press

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Taichi YAMADA

SURREALISTIC, CEREBRAL, HAUNTING
Japanese novelist TAICHI YAMADA tells TAN MAY LEE that he looks forward to soaking up Singapore’s melting-pot ambience at the Singapore Writers Festival 2009

TAICHI YAMADA, whose real name is Taichi Ishizaka, is an acclaimed Japanese screenwriter and novelist. He worked at the Shōchiku film studios before beginning his career as a freelance scriptwriter and novelist. His novel, Ijin-tachi to no Natsu, first published by Shinchosha, Tokyo, in 1987, won the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize for the best human-interest novel. It was later translated into English by Wayne P. Lammers as Strangers. His other translated works are In Search of a Distant Voice and I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While.

Are you looking forward to visiting Singapore? Coming from Japan, how do you find Singapore’s unique multicultural and multilingual society?
It is very difficult for me to comment on this subject because I am from a monolingual country. We use only Japanese as the national and vernacular language. We have a lot of different dialects in each region until a few decades ago. Some are very different, but all the dialects still originate from Japanese.

We do import some words from other languages though. We see a lot of English, Korean and Chinese on names of stations and town guides nowadays. The population of foreigners in Japan has also increased over the years. However, we still do not get much opportunity to communicate with them in our everyday lives.

Thus, I am very curious to visit a place where four languages coexist. I’ve never been to Singapore before. I cannot even speak much English, so I’m a little worried about how well we can communicate, but I’m really excited about visiting a place I’ve never been to.

What are your thoughts on language in general?
I feel that literature can never be detached from its native language.

The recent years have seen an influx of English-speaking foreigners in Japan, and English-language schools are flourishing. What are your thoughts on the inflow of other languages—particularly English—into Japan?
The Japanese language consists of three letters: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji was brought from China, and Hiragana and Katakana were created from Kanji. We inherited a lot of words from China when we adopted Kanji.

During the Meiji era, Western influences flowed into Japan. Our ancestors learned English, German, French, Russian and so on to absorb Western culture. Many books were translated into Japanese and translation has become a Japanese specialty.

The common people may not be able to read or speak other languages well, but they’re still able to enjoy foreign cultures by reading translated material and gaining the knowledge from these cultures. Japan has been successful in using these influences and knowledge effectively to its advantage. English has greatly influenced Japanese culture today. It is a good thing for locals to learn English for work. However, I do not think English will ever be a vernacular language in Japan.

You write scripts as well as novels. What’s the difference between screenwriting and writing novels?
All screenwriting for movies, television dramas and stage plays are collaborative efforts with directors, actors, actresses, cameramen and other staff who are involved in the creative process. I enjoy both the risk and fun of creating a show with a lot of people.

Writing novels gives me joy, and also the difficulty of having full responsibility of completing every detail, such as the placement of every comma. Stylistics is in screenwriting also, but it is much more important in novels. Scenes in novels can also be spectacular. There are no limitations in creating storms or floods due to a tight budget, which screenwriters must consider. Television dramas and movies must also incorporate the schedules of actors, locations, studios and other factors.

What are you currently reading? How much time do you allocate to reading Japanese books and books in other languages?
I am currently reading Kiyoko Tamura’s I Will Leave This World Together With You. I am also reading a translation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up. What I read constantly changes. I read about 50 per cent Japanese and 50 per cent foreign literature.

Have you been to Singapore before? What are you looking forward to experiencing at the Singapore Writers Festival?
I am afraid I have never been to Singapore before. I cannot even speak much English, so I am a little worried about how well we can communicate, but I am really excited about visiting a place I have never been to!

Reproduced from the special issue of Quill produced for the Singapore Writers Festival 2009

THE MONKEY ISLAND ... Tom SYKES

IDEASCAPES
TOM SYKES on the invasion of the new wave of British science fiction

WHEN I WAS ONLY 11 YEARS OLD, I was introduced to Michael Moorcock’s novels by a schoolmate’s devout hippy parents. At their house, I worked my way through the Elric series as the smell of incense and marijuana wafted under my nose.

At that age it was the post-Tolkien high adventure that drew me in, but as I got older I saw new and more sophisticated things in Moorcock’s writing. I learned that in 1963 he had become editor of the trailblazing New Worlds magazine which published the early stories of J.G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Barrington J. Bayley and M. John Harrison. These writers were all zealously committed to finding new ways of expressing the increasingly strange world they espied around them.

The genre they created was an avant-garde form of science fiction characterised by philosophical enquiry, experimentation and controversy. This would become known as the ‘new wave’ and, I would submit, its influence lives on in such modern writers as Haruki Murakami, Martin Amis, Will Self, William Gibson, China Miéville, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore.

Thus it was with great interest that I learned that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Brian W. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head and J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, key texts of the new wave. I first encountered Ballard’s anti-novel on the cusp of the new millennium while studying at the University of East Anglia. I continue to be shocked, impressed and influenced by it today.

Originally published as a series of vignettes (which is almost certainly too pleasant a description) in New Worlds and other journals, perhaps its most memorable section is ‘Why I Want to F— Ronald Reagan,’ a parodic scientific report on how images of the future US President induce psychosexual fantasies in people. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it became the subject of an obscenity trial when it appeared in pamphlet form. One imagines that the establishment was piqued by lines such as: “In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection.” Aside from his shock tactics, Ballard’s point about the aestheticisation of politics by the mass media was prescient and certainly meant a lot to me when I came across it in the wake of Tony Blair’s heavily spin-doctored election victory. Amusingly, pranksters distributed the story at the 1980 Republican Convention that was to approve Reagan’s presidential candidacy. According to Ballard, the less clever delegates missed the irony and took the story to be an endorsement of their nominee!

So what was the historical context of the new wave? In Conversations, Ballard describes post-war Britain as “the triumph of bourgeois values and conservatism ... a sort of deadness in the air.” The writing of that period—whether parochial social realism or the commercialized last gasps of modernism—was, by the 1960s, unable to comprehend the immense changes sweeping through society. A new technological landscape was being formed by the advent of space travel, Concorde, colour television and video conferencing. Relations between young people were altered forever by the legalisation of abortion and the contraceptive pill. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s claim that “You’ve never had it so good” ushered in an era of social mobility and the expansion of university education which exposed a whole new generation to progressive ideas, political and otherwise. The use of psychotropic drugs amongst the youth also became widespread.

Travel, for me, has always been something of a mind-expansion project. So it was apt that while I was in Bali in 2007—the furthest I’d ever been from home—I discovered Brian W. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head in a backpacker’s bookshop. The novel is set in a near-future Europe that has been carpet-bombed with hallucinogenic drugs. The experience of those affected is aped by the very fabric of the novel, its language slowly breaking down into a kind of fragmentary poetry. I thought it interesting that I was reading this while all around me full-moon parties and round-the-clock debauchery was going on.

However, Barefoot in the Head isn’t just a frenzy of flip hedonism; it was written at a time when there was a great deal of faith in the intellectual possibilities of drugs. Aldiss suggests that those affected by the drug bombs have attained a fuller, more nuanced picture of reality than was previously possible. For example, in one sequence, the protagonist Charteris is able to perceive alternative futures for himself playing out all at once.

Although this article focuses on the British scene, at least one American new wave writer must be discussed: Philip K. Dick. I first became aware of him after falling in love—at a (probably) inadvisably young age—with the film Blade Runner, which was based on his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Formally, Dick was very much the pulp storyteller, but his ideas were just as outré as his British counterparts. As Emmanuel Carerre’s excellent biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, explains, Dick suffered from paranoia all his life caused by mental illness and compounded by external events such as McCarthyism and the later FBI surveillance campaign COINTELPRO. Unsurprisingly then, if there is one recurring theme throughout his fiction it is a constant obsessive questioning of the nature of reality.

In The Penultimate Truth, American citizens have relocated to an underground city in the belief that they must build armaments for a world war that is happening above ground. In fact, that war ended a long time ago but it suits the cynical aims of the elite powers to sustain the fantasy of its continuation.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, another world war has wiped out almost every living thing on Earth. As a result, businesses have begun manufacturing robot simulations of animals for human survivors to keep as pets. However, there are also simulated humans (androids) who are out of control and pose a criminal threat to society. Extremely dark and, in places, extremely funny, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? explores what it actually means to be a human or indeed any kind of being. In this novel as in his others, Dick toys with the reader’s expectations, setting up a situation or presenting a case which at first seems absolutely convincing but is later revealed to be a conspiratorial lie or subjective misperception.

Although I wasn’t around at the time, I am certain new wave transformed science fiction from a generally conservative and melioristic genre into one of the truly progressive movements in modern letters. Over my lifetime I have seen the literary profile of science fiction rise to a point where it can no longer be criticised for low-brow escapism, mainly because it tells us so much about our inner and outer lives. As our world becomes weirder, more volatile, more unpredictable, the visions of Ballard, Moorcock, Aldiss and others seem more powerful today than ever before.

Reproduced from the October-December 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... M.J. HYLAND

MAKING THE BRAVE LEAP TO FICTION
ERIC FORBES talks to the former lawyer M.J. HYLAND who has made a courageous and successful leap to fiction with three critically acclaimed novels, one of which garnered her a place on the 2006 Man Booker Prize shortlist

Photographs by Rory Carnegie

M.J. HYLAND was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin, Ireland. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and practised as a lawyer for several years before taking the leap to fiction.

Her first novel, How the Light Gets In (2004), was shortlisted for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book, Eurasia Region), the 2004 Age Book of the Year Award, took third place in the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and was joint winner of the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Award.

Carry Me Down (2006), her second novel, was winner of both the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize in 2007. It was also shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best Book, Eurasia Region).

Hyland lives in Manchester, where she teaches a class in creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. Her latest novel, This Is How (2009), is a psychological exploration of an outsider at odds with the world, described by The Times Literary Supplement as “a devastating portrait of a mild-mannered psychopath.” The New York Times called it an “an unflinching, absorbing, morally complex portrait of one life gone suddenly and terribly awry.”

Hyland wrote from her home in Manchester:

EF: You were a commercial lawyer for seven years before making the brave leap to fiction. Tell me something about your legal career and why you left it.
MJH: That’s right, but I was a mediocre lawyer at best, and I took a half-hearted approach. I knew that I wanted to write stories and my consciousness was torn, split, divided. When I was in the office, writing letters of advice, or letters of demand, or preparing witness statements for court hearings, I wanted only to rush home to finish reading Kafka or Flannery O’Connor. However, I loved studying the law and if I’d stayed in the profession, I’d have taken the academic road. I taught law briefly—criminal law—and, of the seven years I spent in the law, this was the most enjoyable time. I liked teaching law very much. But I quit not long after my first novel, How the Light Gets In, was published.

EF: When did you know you were going to be a writer? Was it something you had always set your heart on?
MJH: I had my first short story published during my final year in high school—one of my teachers typed it up and sent it off to a magazine—and I knew then that I would be a writer. But I didn’t have any sane or rational grounds for knowing this. I had very little discipline and my character wasn’t compatible with the job. A writer, especially a novelist, needs extraordinary patience, a supreme doggedness and, of course, the writer must stick to a single idea for a long time, and hold his nerve. He must sit in one place and assiduously move words around on the page, and he must do this hermetically. When I was in my late teens, and through all of my twenties, I was far too distracted, too drunk, too stupid, too jumpy, too impatient and worse, I had no stamina for the craft.

EF: You teach creative writing at Manchester University. In what way does teaching influence your work as a writer?
MJH: I’m not sure that teaching influences my writing in any direct way, but I’m sure it doesn’t do it any harm. While this isn’t true for many writers, I like the way talented students remind me why I bother; the way their unabashed passion, their excitement, reminds me that this is a pretty blessed way to spend a life. To read, to love the art of conjuring vivid fictional worlds, and to write stories, and get paid to do it.

EF: Could you tell me a bit about your latest novel, This Is How? What was the seed of the novel? How did you go about creating a protagonist-narrator like the murderer Patrick Oxtoby? Did it evolve into a work different from what you imagined it to be? If so, how? What are some of the themes you dealt with in it? Were you conscious of these when you first set out to write the story?
MJH: The idea for This Is How comes from Tony Parker’s wonderful book of interviews, Life After Life: Twelve Interviews with Twelve Murderers. I read the interview—upon which the novel is loosely based—in 2004, and I made a note in my notebook: Must write next novel about a gratuitous criminal act, and must set the story in a seaside boarding house (however, there’s no seaside boarding house in the original story). And then, in late 2005, I began writing. I wanted to write something in the territory of Albert Camus’s The Outsider and Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and, of course, André Gide’s The Vatican Cellars.

It took me three years of slogging it out to get Patrick’s voice in tune and for a long time the book didn’t work at all. It had no traction, no pulse, the images were too dilute and fancy; there were too many characters, too many redundancies and it was full of falsehood (both in terms of character motivation and movement). For several years, Patrick wasn’t credible.

As for the themes, there are too many to set out here, but one of my abiding preoccupations at the time of writing, was to argue with (and perhaps against) Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of radical freedom, and to explore Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s response to Sartre. Of course, none of this thinking is apparent on the surface of the story. It shouldn’t be.

I was also keen to see how much emotional effect I could create with seemingly unaffected prose. The impulse here was to create a fictional world stripped of artifice; a plain authenticity of tragedy; an apparently artless and ‘true’ first-person account, and I wanted to make the author invisible. I wanted, also, to explore moral confusion and I wanted to resist diagnosis or pathology. I wanted to skate on the very thin ice of an unsympathetic narrator and yet find a way to make it difficult for the reader to judge Patrick, to round him off, to make a sensible neatness of his world. I wanted a moral mess. Like life. I wanted to make both condemnation and pity difficult.

I also wanted to evoke an idea—in vivid and dramatic terms—of platonic love between men, and the nature of our neglect of freedom, and loneliness and ... well, the list of themes is too long.

EF: In This Is How, you explore the relationships between prisoners in a claustrophobic environment, and the fact that many convicts are much happier within the cloisters of the prison walls than without. What attracted you to the idea of setting your story in this enclosed world?
MJH: If it can’t happen in a cave, then I’m not interested. I’ll always put my characters in close proximity, and the prison cell is a fantastically claustrophobic and appealing set for drama.

EF: What are your thoughts on the death penalty?
MJH: I think—if you’ve read the novels—you’ll know that I’m not only against the very idea of the death penalty, but I want to show, in dramatic terms, how easy it might be for somebody to be falsely accused, and how it pays to see the shades of grey; to stretch to compassion. Have you seen Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line? It’s a wonderful documentary, a case study, a case in point. And I’m very pleased that organisations like Reprieve do what they do. If I had more guts, if I was a little less selfish, I’d take a year or so out of writing and go to the US and work for Reprieve. Small, guilty donations and my feeble attempts in fiction to make my point against the absurd absolutism and futility of the death penalty don’t seem enough.

EF: I am always interested in the kinds of books writers read during their early or formative years. What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up? Who are some of your literary heroes, so to speak? Have they, in any way, contributed to the making of who you are as a writer today?
MJH: There’s a play, which I first read when I was about 16 (it’s still amongst my favourites) and it’s called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel. I saw the film by chance not long after I’d read the play—the film based on the play—and the effect of this film was so strong it seemed to rewire my brain, to rearrange me. Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie had a similar effect, as did Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Gogol’s short stories and Kafka, and much later, Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever.

The most difficult part of my job now is to face knowing that I’ll never come close to writing as well as the writers who caused me to want to do it in the first place.

THE WRITING LIFE ... Tom CHO

LOOK WHO’S MORPHING
TOM CHO is a 34-year-old Melburnian artist who writes short fiction and performs them onstage. His book, Look Who’s Morphing (Giramondo, 2009), is a collection of stories was shortlisted for the 2009 The Age Fiction Book of the Year recently. TAN MAY LEE spoke to Cho over a series of emails in May 2009.

Your book cover is so bright green it might glow in the dark. This looks like Giramondo’s most colourful book cover! Why so? How did the idea come about?
The idea to put myself on the cover was mine. I wanted to have a fun cover that extended some of the teasing and play in the book. Basically, putting myself on the cover plays with the idea that, in writing the book, I have—in multiple senses of this phrase—“made it all about me”. The cover extends the idea that as the author I have ‘intruded’ upon the text for my own purposes—for example, that I have imposed my desires upon the text in writing some of the fantasies that are depicted in the stories.

I was also aware that authors rarely appear on the front cover of their books unless they are famous. So I thought it would be fun to challenge that convention, too. I approached Owen Leong, an artist I know, to do the cover. We jointly came up with the basic concept. Owen had made use of liquid on skin in some of his previous work, and this was something I wanted him to draw upon again. In doing the cover, he was quite interested in the rockabilly look, particularly photos of Harajuku rockers. He chose all the colours. He wanted to use a green background because the ‘green screen’ is often used in visual effects and computer-generated imagery to transform reality into illusion. I was initially concerned that the green would be too bright and dominating, but now I see that he made absolutely the right choice and I’m glad that I trusted his judgement.

Let’s talk about the publishing process. Since this book is part of your PhD thesis at Deakin University, is your editor someone from the university?
Although my book manuscript forms the creative component of my PhD, the book and PhD are separate projects. For example, Giramondo was already interested in the manuscript before I decided to undertake a PhD. However, quite early in the process of doing my PhD, I knew that I wanted to bring someone with specific expertise in fiction into my PhD supervisory team. So as it turned out, Ivor Indyk, who is the publisher at Giramondo and also a Professor at University of Western Sydney, became an external research supervisor for my PhD.

Within the context of the PhD, editing responsibility for the creative work was ultimately shared between Ivor Indyk and Robin Freeman, who was also one of my supervisors. Robin has an extensive background in editing (primarily nonfiction). In fact, I first knew of her when she was an editor at HarperCollins. So I was very fortunate to have access to the combined expertise of Ivor and Robin.

Once again, though, the publishing process with Giramondo was quite separate from my PhD. In fact, even before I submitted my thesis, the book had already been printed and been in bookshops for a couple of weeks.

Were you trying to capture the quirky side of life in your stories?
Well, I probably wouldn’t articulate it quite like that, although my fiction is sometimes described as ‘quirky’. The book is an investigation of the theme of identity. Identity is underpinned by all kinds of assumptions and forms of logic that I find very rich material to play with. For example, the theme lends itself quite well to linguistic play and undermining narratorial expectations. I think this produces the ‘quirky’ effect of my fiction—that it draws out and amplifies existing absurdities relating to the theme of identity.

Can unpredictability be predictable?
Well, unpredictability is ultimately evaluated by the reader; so, in terms of the unpredictability of my own work, I wonder what my readers would have to say. In writing the book, I did enjoy exploring many different ways of teasing and surprising the reader—and I sought to be inventive in doing this. However, unpredictability wasn’t a goal in itself. At any rate, unpredictability and predictability are mutually dependent. For example, in order for me to undermine narratorial expectations, I had to draw upon those very expectations. The first story in my book is called ‘Dirty Dancing’ and it loosely follows the storyline of the film Dirty Dancing. Part of its power to surprise is in how it both follows and deviates from the film and its conventions. So, ultimately, unpredictability and predictability are somewhat entwined.

Are your stories a reflection of your personality?
They probably are—and yet I wouldn’t put much faith in the idea of fiction as a straightforward reflection of anything. This certainly seems the case with my work, in which distortions—distortions of logic and of language—are prominent.

Why did you choose to write short fiction? Most people say that short stories are harder to sell than novels. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s interesting that you should ask that, because during the writing of my book, the pieces began to get longer. This largely explains the variation within the book in terms of the length of pieces. The shortest piece, ‘A Counting Rhyme,’ is exactly 100 words, and the longest piece, ‘Cock Rock’ (which also is the book’s finale), is a little under 9,000 words. The increase in the length of my work really made me question how distinct a genre the short story actually is. Brevity is ultimately a relativistic property. There is also no consensus on a minimum or maximum length for a short story—so the parameters of shortness are arbitrary, too.

Of course, within the systems and institutions that I as a writer engage with—such as publishing—there is such a thing as a ‘short story.’ And you’re right in saying that, at least among larger publishers, it is a commonly-held belief that short story collections are more difficult to sell than novels. However, the commercial success of a book is subject to so many different factors that I am sceptical of pinning things down to purely a question of form.

What does a PhD in Professional Writing involve? How does it expand on an MA in Creative Writing?
A PhD is allocated a longer project timeframe and requires a longer thesis than a Master’s. So the scope of a PhD project is bigger. In Australia, a PhD by research that is in a creative discipline has two parts: a creative component and a theoretical component (which is sometimes called an exegesis). In terms of my own PhD, my creative component is my collection of fictions, Look Who’s Morphing. My exegesis analyses an issue that affected the creative process of developing my collection. So my PhD thesis comprised these two documents.

What got you fascinated with Sweet Valley High? They might be blonde and tan, but they lived in an era of no mobile phones, no iPods, no internet ...
I think I was drawn to the characters of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield—the fact that they were twins but were so different. Jess was portrayed as a ‘bad girl’ and Liz as a ‘good girl’—and I’ve always been delighted and intrigued by that dichotomy. But perhaps I’m over-analysing it. Ultimately, the Sweet Valley High series was a fun read that was full of plots that I really enjoyed—for example, Jessica entering the Miss Teenage Sweet Valley contest, Jessica and her friend Lila becoming roadies for a rock band, etc. Also, like Liz, I grew up wanting to be a writer—it’s just that my writing is very different from what I’ve read of Liz’s writing.

What or who else do you read?
In the last few years, I haven’t had much time for leisure reading due to my PhD. But some of the texts I have enjoyed reading are the Sweet Valley High books, the comic prose of Woody Allen, the fictions of Donald Barthelme, zines and comics of all different kinds, friends’ blogs and many other texts on the Web. I submitted my PhD thesis recently so, as of late, I have had some time to do more leisure reading. I’ve started reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight in the hope that it’s the new Sweet Valley High. I also have a book on Hinduism that I want to read, too. So you can see that I have pretty varied tastes as a reader.

Please share with us your experiences at Deakin University.
I had already spent about four years working on my manuscript when I decided to incorporate it into a PhD. I had interest in my manuscript from Giramondo and a strong record of publication of pieces from the manuscript—and yet I realised that I had to do a PhD. One reason why I decided to do the PhD was that the book’s theme of identity was large, mysterious and daunting to me. I was also incorporating a lot of popular cultural references into the book but with a very unclear sense of what role this incorporation had in terms of the whole project. So I primarily did my PhD for the knowledge. I wasn’t very interested in an academic career and I certainly didn’t do it for the title. I wanted to immerse myself in some theoretical writings and learn from them. I wanted to illuminate and influence the directions of my creative work.

The PhD certainly improved my creative work. I have also become a better reader and writer—not only of creative works but also theoretical writings (if that distinction between theoretical and creative works can even be reliably upheld). Ironically, identity is still a mysterious subject for me, but I have a deeper appreciation and awareness of its mysteries.
Overall, my PhD went fairly smoothly, partly due to having good and stable supervision. Once Ivor Indyk was appointed as an external research supervisor, my supervisory team remained unchanged. All of my supervisors have been very helpful and supportive of my research throughout my degree.

What is this about your track record for writing successful funding proposals? How did you discover this strategy, and how many grants and funding have you been awarded?
I’ve received around 13 grants of some type (e.g. project funding, fellowships, etc.) for my own artistic projects. Not all of these projects have involved my practice as a writer; some have been for my work as a producer of artistic projects. I have also written many successful proposals for arts organisations. In relation to my track record for organisations, it’s probably more meaningful to measure it in terms of the different types of funding programs that I’ve had success with—because I’ve had repeat successes with some of the same programs over the years. According to my records, I’ve written successful organisational applications for at least 18 different types of funding programs.

I first began writing funding applications for my own writing practice in the late 1990s. In working for arts organisations, I soon found that it was very useful to have skills not only in producing projects but in writing proposals. Eventually, I began to move away from programming and producing projects for organisations, and into writing proposals for them. A lot of people detest writing funding applications but, for some mysterious reason, I have a ‘funding fetish’.

Just how influential do you think popular culture is?
In my book, I never sought to depict popular culture as an all-dominating force that is imposed upon a passive audience of dupes. In the very act of writing my book, I refute this anyway: I think that my book is testament to how we can creatively (and playfully) engage with popular culture. At the same time, while my own personal engagement with popular culture has resulted in a lot of enjoyment (for example, reading the Sweet Valley High books), it has at times been a bittersweet experience. The experiences and desires rendered in popular cultural texts can be painfully incongruent with my own experiences and desires. But then, I think the range of emotional responses that we can have to popular culture is one of its most compelling aspects. We can react to popular cultural texts with pleasure, distaste, reverence, disgust, guilt, pain, etc.—and quite often many of these reactions simultaneously. I tried to make something of this fact in my book.

Do you see yourself as an extension of popular cultural figures?
I thought I was a popular cultural figure.

What’s your background? Tell us a bit more about yourself.
Here’s a little collage of phrases to contemplate. In no particular order: private-schooled but Sweet Valley High-educated; Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games; Tom/boy; Bachelor of Arts (Professional Writing) graduate and Honour’s degree dropout; Tom of Melbourne/Tom of Finland; pop music and cock rock; comic writing and comic books.

What is it like being Asian in Australia?
The presence of Asians in Australia is certainly not new. It’s often been viewed in terms of various waves of migration—particularly the influxes of Chinese migrants during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s and Vietnamese migrants after the Vietnam War. But I’m not a migrant—I was born in Australia. I didn’t have to experience the difficulties of learning English, for example. At the same time, sometimes people nonetheless assume that I am a migrant—that I’m someone from some other place.

It is probably best that I answer this question in terms of my own particular experiences. As a child, I was initially surprised by the attention that my ethnic background evoked and the instances of racism—sometimes quite explicit, often more implicit—that I experienced. The evaluations and judgments that I experienced seemed so arbitrary and absurd to me, even as a child—the idea, for example, that my eyes would be considered ‘slanted’ and, by extension, a reflection of my inferiority. Perhaps these early experiences laid the foundations for me to write a book that (playfully) challenges such absurdities and false logic. Having said that, the book doesn’t especially bring issues of ethnicity into the foreground—well, no more than any other facet of identity. In a similar vein, my ethnic background isn’t isolated from other facets of my self—rather than isolation, there has always been a lot of interplay.

If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?
I’d probably be pursuing another career path that I had contemplated towards the end of secondary school: working in fine art and design. I’ve had rock star fantasies though.

This year’s theme for the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is Compassion and Solidarity. What does it mean to you?
The writer Audrey Lorde once said: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Lorde herself was black, a lesbian, a poet, a mother, a feminist, and much more. Her observation makes a lot of sense to me because, as I mentioned earlier, there has been an inevitable interplay between the various facets of my self. As a result, I have always been interested in issues such as how racism and sexism interrelate. This is a tension I’ve attempted to negotiate in my book, too—that tension between paying attention to specific concerns while also seeking to see the interconnectedness of things.

Striving to see the interconnectedness of things seems crucial to fostering compassion and solidarity. Artistically and personally, this is very important to me: that I not only see the interconnectedness of issues in terms of my own life and identity, but am able to translate this into compassion and solidarity for others.

Have you been to Ubud before?
No, I’m afraid not. I’m really looking forward to it!

What are you looking forward to experiencing at the festival?
Being exposed to different literary practices and traditions, meeting new artists, and, more generally, experiencing the flavour and atmosphere of the festival, which I’ve heard many good things about. I have a feeling that the festival is going to be really good for me as an artist and I really want to immerse myself in what it offers. That’s a great feeling to take to the festival.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Alison LESTER

THE FREEDOM TO DREAM AND IMAGINE
ALEXANDRA WONG speaks to ALISON LESTER, one of Australia’s most popular and well-loved authors of children’s picture books and novels

ALISON LESTER is a leading Australian author whose picture books such as Clive Eats Alligators, Tessa Snaps Snakes and Rosie Sips Spiders, among others, are known to a whole generation of Australian children—acknowledges that there is a perception that picture books are “all bubsy stuff and therefore anybody can do it” but points out that a skilful illustrator has to be able to combine line, colour and observation very subtly in order to pull the reader into the book.

When it comes to producing a fabulous picture book, it isn’t enough to be a spectacular illustrator, or a great writer. In a picture book, both text and illustrations share the task of telling a story equally: one tells or shows what the other is silent about. Through pictures, a whole gamut of subtext has to be added to the words: the size, shape, colour and position of an object, its cultural and symbolic implications, a specific attitude towards the subjects being depicted and the relationship of the pictures to each other. Or as Alison Lester would put it: “In a picture book, any weakness stands out and can kill it.”

In between offering intriguing insights into a genre that’s somewhat of a dark horse, this Australian author offers glimpses into her incredible journey—in the most literal sense—from a happy, dreamy child growing up on a farm, to a best-selling author whose own adventure-filled life is worthy of a movie. Then again, perhaps it is to be expected from one who is often heard saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

Today, you are one of Australia’s most popular and best-loved authors. Your books have been published in many languages around the world. Did you ever imagine that you would reach this point in your life?
I guess I always hoped my books would be successful and I think I would have given the game away if they hadn’t been. It’s very pleasing that so many people love the characters and stories. My daily life is pretty normal but I get to travel to fabulous places (like Bali) through my books.

You began your career illustrating children’s books and wrote your first children’s book in 1985. What prompted you to make the leap to writing? Was it a natural progression or did a particular incident nudge you in that direction?
I was illustrating a book for a bossy author who was driving me crazy. When I complained to my editor she suggested I write my own stories, and it took off from there. Clive Eats Alligators doesn’t have many words, so it was an easy start.

What kind of difficulties did you encounter (if any) in the process of making that transition, and how did you overcome them?
I had a wonderful editor who steered me in the right direction, so it was very straightforward.

What was the path to publication like for you? Was it difficult securing a publisher for your first book?
Because I was already working as an illustrator, it was easy. I told my editor the idea for my book and she told me to go for it.

You’ve mentioned that often truth is stranger than fiction and that many of your books grew out of things that really happened. It must certainly help that you have led a pretty colourful life yourself. Not many people would have had the chance to travel to Antarctica as an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow, for instance. That must have been an amazing experience! Could you share some of the highlights of that trip, and talk about the resultant works that stemmed from it?
I became instantly addicted to Antarctica on that first trip and have returned four times, working as an artist or photographer on tourist ships. The project that I did for my fellowship, Kid’s Antarctic Art, became an exhibition and has had numerous shows in Australia and two books—Snoopy Sparks Goes South and One Small Island—inspired by the trip are underway. I loved the wild ocean, the ice, how remote it was, and travelling with a gang of strangers, some who became my friends.

The Antarctica trip inspired thousands of schoolchildren to make drawings of the South Pole based on your online diary and photographic journal. It must have been gratifying, to know that you had such a massive impact on children! When did you realise you had the gift of communicating with children through your stories and pictures?
I had a wonderful time working with kids and I am constantly blown away by the beautiful things they create. I don’t talk down to kids and maybe that’s the secret.

You have said that your heart is always with the little kids, but as your own children get older you find yourself more and more interested in novels. How has your writing style evolved over the years, and what do you see yourself working on in the next few years? What other genres would you like to try your hand at?
I have a couple of adult novels in my head but I’m not sure if I will ever write them.

I understand that picture books are very different from illustrated books, where the pictures take a back seat to the text. With picture books, both text and illustrations share the task of telling a story equally.
I try to use as few words as I can in a picture book and I try to make them as perfect as possible. The book I’m working on now (Running with the Horses) has heaps of text as well as pictures, and it’s tricky getting it right.

In the process of creating a picture book, how do you ensure that you devote equal weightage to both the writing and the illustrations? Do you ever find yourself feeling more inclined to labour over one or the other?
When I’m writing, I think all the time about how nice it would be to be drawing, and when I’m drawing, writing seems like a nice thing to do. Generally I find writing much easier than drawing, but I think I’m a better artist than I am a writer, if that makes sense.

You write chapter books, picture books and children’s novels. How do the creative processes and challenges differ?
The idea is always the easiest thing and the writing is straightforward, though I am the Queen of Procrastination. Picture books take me ages because I am such a perfectionist.

Author and book critic Karla Kuskin has said that “A picture book is a complicated form of collaborative art. When it is very well done, it is an artistic achievement worthy of respectful examination and honour.” Conversely, I’ve read that picture books tend to get sidelined because some people believe that they are of inferior literary merit. What do you think?
I think a picture book has to be fabulous to be worthy. Any weakness stands out and can kill it. There is also a perception that it’s all bubsy stuff and therefore anybody can do it. There are some truly horrible picture books around that give the genre a bad reputation.

Good illustrations are not just a literal translation of words into pictures. If this is true, what sets a skilful illustrator from a mediocre one?
It’s a very subtle combination of line, colour and observation that pulls the reader into the book. If the pictures don’t engage the reader, it doesn’t matter how beautiful they are. On the other hand, sometimes my kids loved illustrations that I thought were ordinary. I think it’s a bit of luck, really, whether your illustrating style is what people like.

Your picture books mix imaginary worlds with everyday life, encouraging children to believe in themselves and celebrate the differences that make them special. How can good children’s books develop a child’s psychological and emotional faculties?
Kids can travel in books, away from whatever their life is. They can see bits of themselves and their lives reflected, take heart from a character they identify with and be inspired. For those of us who live large portions of life inside our heads, books are a framework for our fantasies and dreams.

You grew up on a farm overlooking the sea and first rode a horse as a baby in your father’s arms. How has your childhood influenced your growth as a writer and illustrator?
It was a childhood full of adventure but also responsibility and it gave me a basic belief that if something needed to be done, I could do it. It linked me firmly to landscape and the ocean and I don’t feel happy being away from either for too long. I spent a lot of time alone and I think that gave me the freedom to dream and imagine.

What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up?
Anything I could get my hands on. I recall my mum telling me I shouldn’t be reading James Bond when I was in the sixth grade, but I wasn’t going to stop. I thought that’s what my life would be like when I grew up.

What is the most memorable feedback that you received from a child reader?
I get very sweet letters and drawings from kids. One picture showed a glamorous me in the Antarctica, in a black cat suit with Barbie hair.

What would be the ultimate prize as a writer—the Nobel Literature Prize, maybe?
The prize would be nice, but the money would be even better. A big readership is a nice reward.

Which author occupies the most space on your bookshelf and why? Who is your favourite Australian author?
My house is groaning under the weight of books, but I can’t think of one particular author. For a long time I was crazy about Cormac McCarthy but I’ve gone off him a bit since he stopped writing about horses and cowboys. Books I love are Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Augusten Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and recently, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, but there would easily be a hundred books that I like as much as these. My favourite Australian book is probably Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon’s Jackson’s Track.

What are you reading at the moment?
Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, and the latest Janet Evanovich.

Who are some of your biggest literary influences?
William Steig, Chris Van Arlsberg and Dr Seuss.

Lastly, how would you encourage young writers who want to follow in your in footsteps?
Have faith in your own voice and your own drawings, observe, listen, read, take advice and be persistent.

ALEXANDRA WONG, a former corporate sales manager, took a leap of faith to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a writer in 2005, and since then her works have been published in more than a dozen local and international publications. Wong, whose motto is “carpe diem,” writes passionately about people, places and life, and believes there is always a fascinating universe waiting to be explored and shared, even in the tiniest grain of sand.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

The Elements of Writing

FOR THOSE OF US who enjoy reading about the writing process (and the elements involved), here are two books in a new series written by published authors and put out by Graywolf Press that will surely delight you:

1. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Graywolf Press, 2009) / Ellen Bryant Voigt
2. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long As It Takes (Graywolf Press, 2009) / Joan Silber

LEE Su Kim ... Words Amidst Beauty

Once again, writers and readers from around the world gathered in beautiful Bali to share their thoughts and experiences.
Story and photo by LEE SU KIM

FOR FIVE DAYS last week, a gathering of writers from 25 countries discussed the great themes of our time. Censorship, colonialism, ethnicity and identity, exile, gender issues, human rights, identity, literary expression and the state, race, religion, the postcolonial voice, they were all debated at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia, from October 7-11, 2009.

This literary festival was conceived in 2004 by Janet De Neefe to counteract the disastrous effects of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people and led to dwindling tourists and a sinking economy. Since then, the festival has become “one of the six best literary festivals in the world,” according to the British magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and it continues to attract world-class writers from around the globe, as well as an international audience.

The theme for this year’s festival, Suka Duka, loosely translated as “Compassion and Solidarity,” comes from Bali’s ancient communal wisdom that focuses on the balance between good and bad, sadness and joy, suffering and compassion. This principle, one of the main pillars of Bali’s traditional institutions and communities, has guided its people to act as one single entity in dealing with life’s hardships and blessings.

Writers who attended this year’s festival include Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (Nigeria); Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A, the book that was made into the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (India); Hari Kunzru and Jamal Mahjoub (Britain), Fatima Bhutto and Mohammad Hanif (Pakistan); Lloyd Jones (New Zealand); Julia Leigh, Sonya Hartnett and Anthony Loewenstein (Australia); Bejan Matur (Turkey); Thant Myint-U (Burma); Seno Gumira Ajidarma and Cok Sawitri (Indonesia); Woon Thai Ho, Wena Poon and Shamini Flint (Singapore); Stephen McCarty (Hong Kong); and Sushma Joshi (Nepal). All together there were more than 100 writers—a truly diverse gathering. Two writers had been invited from Malaysia: short-story writer, essayist and award-winning indie filmmaker Amir Muhammad, and myself, author of three best-sellers, Malaysian Flavours: Insights into Things Malaysian, A Nyonya in Texas and Manglish: Malaysian English at its Wackiest.

Among the many interesting and diverse panel sessions the festival offered was one that delved into the festival’s theme directly with a discussion of The Future of Compassion. Wole Soyinka, the first African to receive a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1986), made a telling point of having compassion for his jailors but being less forgiving of those who made the decision to imprison him for his expressions of dissent (in 1967-68, he was placed in solitary confinement for 20 months in Nigeria). Soyinka also talked about the need to be true to one’s own values rather than choosing political opportunism over the freedom of expression. His sentiments were echoed by Indonesian writer Seno Gumira.

Among the many In Conversation sessions I enjoyed were those with Lloyd Jones, who read from his highly acclaimed novel, Mister Pip, a heart-wrenching military fable set in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea; with Soyinka and his protegee Tara June Winch, a young winner of numerous literary awards; and with British novelist Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist and My Revolutions.

Genres such as the novel, short story, non-fiction, essays, political discourse, poetry, humour, translation works, travel writing, biographies, narratives, creative nonfiction, blogging and even food writing were covered during this very complete festival. Panel sessions had interesting themes such as A New Frontier: Blogging Dissent and Solidarity; Bali: A Paradise Questioned; First Person: Finding the Voice; Global Nomads; Interplay: Words, Music and Pictures; Lit Chefs: Passion, Food and Words; Literature and Activism; and Writing the Subcontinent.

I took part in two panel sessions. One was entitled Wanderlust: Travelling Stories and featured Aussie outback traveller and writer Andrew McMillan and Brian Thacker, who specialises in travel off the beaten track. In the other panel session entitled Across Genres: Identity, Family and Place, I talked about multiple identities and shared stories and identity experiences from my Peranakan and Malaysian heritage.

I was invited to do readings from my books with other selected authors at a Literary Lunch in a beautiful setting amidst emerald-green rice fields at John Hardy’s unique estate and at a panel session entitled Dangerous Women held at the magnificent Alila Ubud Hotel, which is dramatically set on a cliff overlooking forests with two narrow gorges running through the lush valley below. I must say that, apart from the attraction of meeting writers from all over the world, another pulling power of this festival has to be its ambience. The settings were superb, rich with the natural beauty of Bali.

Apart from the three main venues, the Neka Museum, the Indus Bar and the Left Bank Lounge, other settings ranged from candlelit dinners at Ubud’s elegant hotels and gracious homes; poetry recitations and readings under the stars in grass-roofed venues amidst rice fields, in the woods in Ubud’s sacred sanctuary, the Monkey Forest, or in Ubud’s grand palaces and temples set in frangipani and lotus gardens amidst waterfalls and fountains ... it was easy to be inspired by words when they were uttered in such wonderful venues!

Workshops were held on how to write for the screen and on subjects like food, sport and travel; there were also sessions on poetry, memoirs, and editing in between book launches, performances, art exhibitions, parties and celebrations. The festival was open to the general public as well with children’s workshops and a street festival at Ubud’s well-known Jalan Kajeng featuring poetry, gamelan and performances.

As a non-profit event that receives no government funding, the festival relies on the generosity of corporations, international funding bodies, and especially individuals. The international festival is the major project of the Ubud-based Mudra Swari Saraswati Foundation.

The festival has today become one of the largest and most prestigious literary gatherings in Southeast Asia and, indeed, the world. I consider it a great honour to have participated in this festival, and plan to return again to the magical isle of Bali to renew my ties with this beautiful land and its kind and gentle people who have succeeded in keeping their culture alive amidst the challenges of globalisation.

LEE SU KIM is an Associate Professor at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Reproduced from The Sunday Star of October 18, 2009

Annabel LYON ... The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009)

HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS to Canadian short-story writer Annabel Lyon for being shortlisted for both the 2009 Giller Prize for Fiction and the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. The Golden Mean is her first adult novel and it is a fictionalised account of the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s childhood. Aristotle is of course the teacher to the boy who would grow up to become the famous Alexander the Great we read about in our history tomes. Lyon has also been shortlisted for the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Shortlists & Winners of Major Literary Prizes

SCOTTISH POET Don Paterson has triumphed over one of the strongest poetry shortlists in years to take the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection with Rain. Paterson, 45, beat a line-up of acclaimed poets including Peter Porter, Sharon Olds and Glyn Maxwell to win the £10,000 award for Rain, a continuation of his personal and philosophical exploration of the world around him. Emma Jones’s The Striped World, inspired by her home country of Australia, was named winner of the £5,000 Best First Collection Prize. Both collections are published by Faber & Faber.

OCTOBER 27, 2009: The following books have been shortlisted for the 2009 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The £5,000 prize goes to the best work of literature—including fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction—by a UK or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under. Last year’s prize was taken by Henry Hitchings for The Secret Life of Words—the first nonfiction book to win in six years. This year’s winner will be announced on November 30, 2009.

1. Between the Assassinations (stories) / Aravind Adiga
2. The Striped World (poetry) / Emma Jones
3. Six Months in Sudan (nonfiction) / James Maskalyk
4. The Thing Around Your Neck (stories) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Waste (nonfiction) / Tristram Stuart
6. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (novel) / Evie Wyld

OCTOBER 15, 2009: The following unpublished novels have been shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize:

1. Jimmy the Terrorist / Omair Ahmad (India)
2. Day Scholar / Siddharth Chowdhury (India)
3. The Descartes Highlands / Eric Gamalinda (Philippines)
4. Residue / Nitasha Kaul (India)
5. The Boat to Redemption / Su Tong (China)

OCTOBER 15, 2009: The finalists for the US’s 2009 National Book Award for Fiction were announced on October 15, 2009. These are the shortlisted authors and their books:

1. American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009) / Bonnie Jo Campbell
2. Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009) / Colum McCann
3. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton, 2009) / Daniyal Mueenuddin
4. Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Jayne Anne Phillips
5. Far North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) / Marcel Theroux

The winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction will be announced in New York on Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

OCTOBER 14, 2009: 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction Shortlist
The Canada Council for the Arts has announced the finalists for the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards. The authors shortlisted for fiction include:

1. Galore (Doubleday Canada, 2009) / Michael Crummey
2. The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009) / Annabel Lyon
3. Too Much Happiness (McClelland & Stewart, 2009) / Alice Munro
4. The Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Company, 2009) / Kate Pullinger
5. Vanishing and Other Stories (Penguin Group Canada, 2009) / Deborah Willis

This year’s Governor General Literary Award will be announced on November 17, 2009 in Quebec, Montreal, Canada.

OCTOBER 6, 2009: 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist
The 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist was announced on October 6, 2009. The jury, comprising Russell Banks, Victoria Glendinning and Alistair MacLeod, chose five books out of a list of 96 books. The shortlisted authors are:

1. The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2009) / Kim Echlin
2. The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009) / Annabel Lyon
3. The Bishop’s Man (Random House Canada, 2009) / Linden MacIntyre
4. Fall (Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2009) / Colin McAdam
5. The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart, 2009) / Anne Michaels

This year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced on November 10, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.



SEPTEMBER 30, 2009: Established in 1997, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize recognises Canadian writers of exceptional talent for the year’s best novel or short-story collection.

1. Fences in Breathing (trans. from the French by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood) (Coach House Books, 2009) / Nicole Brossard
2. Generation A (Random House Canada, 2009) / Douglas Coupland
3. The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009) / Annabel Lyon
4. Too Much Happiness (McClelland and Stewart, 2009) / Alice Munro
5. Eva’s Threepenny Theatre (Gaspereau Press, 2009) / Andrew Steinmetz

The prize will be awarded on November 24, 2009, at the Writers’ Trust Awards.

ESSAY ... Kate GRENVILLE

ON RECREATING THE PAST IN FICTION
The past may be a foreign country, but we can all try to learn its language, says KATE GRENVILLE

IN 1788, A FLEET OF BRITISH SHIPS arrived in Australia to establish a penal settlement: around 800 prisoners and some 200 marines to guard them. One of those marines was a young lieutenant called William Dawes. Although nominally a soldier, he seems to have been a scholar rather than a fighting man—an astronomer, a mathematician and a linguist. He set up an observatory on an isolated point of land, and the local indigenous people—the Gadigal—visited him there. He began to learn their language, recording what he learned in two small notebooks.

When I came across an extract from these notebooks in 2003, I was galvanised by the amazing story they suggested. Dawes seems to have begun his language studies with scientific precision, listing verb forms (“I eat, thou eatest, he, she or it eats ...”) and pages for alphabetical word lists. But these grids remain largely blank. What happened instead is that he began to record entire conversations between himself and the Gadigal people, and particularly a young girl named Patyegarang. Scientific detachment was swept away in something much more personal.

Between the lines of those conversations, an astonishing and perhaps unique relationship is recorded. Dawes and Patyegarang clearly enjoyed each other’s company and the play of each others’ minds. Across gulfs of culture, language, age and perhaps even personality, they forged a friendship that was affectionate, playful and witty.

The emotional intensity that emerges between the lines of the conversations is so powerful that some have thought that their relationship must have been a sexual one. For various reasons, my own feeling is that it was not. Dawes was in his middle twenties: Patyegarang’s age is uncertain, but she was probably between about ten and fifteen. My reading of their conversations is that they enjoyed the kind of friendship that sometimes happens between a clever, subtle, confident child and an adult.

At some point in their friendship, one of the settlement’s ‘gamekeepers’ was fatally speared. The governor sent a party of soldiers out to punish the tribe from which the attacker was said to come—neighbours of the Gadigal. Their orders were to capture and bring back six indigenous men, but if this proved ‘impracticable,’ then six were to be killed and their heads cut off and brought back. Hatchets and bags were provided for the purpose.

Dawes was one of the soldiers ordered out on this expedition. He refused to go; was warned of the consequences of disobeying, and agreed to go; but on his return (the party having not made a single capture), he announced that he would refuse to obey any similar order if it were given. For this insubordination he risked court-martial and severe punishment.

He had earlier expressed a wish to stay in the settlement beyond his tour of duty, but he was sent back with the rest of the marines and never returned to Australia. He spent the rest of his life working for the Abolition movement in London, Africa and the West Indies. When slavery was abolished he set up schools for former slaves and died in Antigua.

So much for the historical record, sketchy and partial as it is. As a novelist, I was gripped (as Jane Rogers and Paul Carter had been before me) by the human drama of what’s suggested by it. The rapport between a young indigenous girl and one of His Majesty’s marines was an extraordinary one—reading about it, it’s impossible not to wonder what these two people were like. They spring off the pages of the notebooks not as historical figures but living, breathing human souls.

The choice that Dawes made when ordered on the punitive expedition—a choice between his future prospects and some emotional or moral imperative—is richly enigmatic. Why did he risk severe punishment and disgrace, when doing so made no difference to anything?

Reading the notebooks, there’s a strong sense of a person being transformed before our eyes. A man of science discovers another, more fluid way of engaging with the world; a detached observer becomes deeply involved not just intellectually but emotionally; a lieutenant in His Majesty’s service decides he can no longer be part of the imperial machine. In coming to know the Gadigal people, Dawes was irrevocably changed.

All this, then, was the raw material I had to work with in writing a novel. Without the notebooks I would never have thought to imagine a friendship like the one between Dawes and Patyegarang. Even if I had thought such a thing might have happened, I wouldn’t have attempted to write it. How would you even begin to invent those unimaginable conversations?

The notebooks excited me because, for all their gaps and mysteries, they recorded, verbatim, conversations around which I could build a story. I’d have to invent the context for the conversations, and I’d have to speculate about the people who spoke the words, and I was uncertain about how appropriate it was to do that. But in the end I felt it was important to try, because this story was one that recorded an aspect of our past—shared between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians—that was hugely important. It records a moment in that shared history where mutual goodwill and generous curiosity created real understanding.

The relationship between this novel and the real events that inspired it is complex—as the relationship between any work of imagination and the world must always be.

For the first several drafts, I stuck closely to the historical sources and used the names of the real people. This was partly because the real story was more intriguing that anything I could have invented, but also out of a sense of respect for the real people and the real events. It was important to me to go as far as I could in understanding what had been recorded before branching off into speculation.

I found as many references to Dawes as I could in the historical record, and researched his life as far as I could. I read his meteorological journal and his letters to the Astronomer Royal in which his voice could be heard. I researched 18th-century telescopes and rain-gauges, examined engravings of marines’ uniforms, read a blow-by-blow account of the Battle of Chesapeake Bay.

While in the UK on other business I spent time in Portsmouth, where Dawes was born, and at the Greenwich Observatory. I spent a great deal of time on the point in Sydney where Dawes had his observatory (long since vanished, but an archaeologist showed me the rock wall where it had once been). I retraced on foot most of the path the punitive expedition had probably taken, and spent time by night as well as by day on the shores of Botany Bay, where the soldiers had tried to ambush “the Botany Bay tribe.”

To try to feel something of the texture of life for the First Fleet, I pored over objects in museums—a pencil repaired with string, for example, or a chipped enamel basin—and asked a botanist friend if he could find the plant called “sweet-tea” by the first settlers. Drinking the tea I made from the leaves he sent me, with its delicately astringent aniseed flavour, made 1788 very real.

But ‘real life’—whether in 1788 or 2088—is not the same as a work of literature. Life is full of gaps of time in which nothing much happens; events which lead nowhere; events which are woven in with other events in a dense inseparable mass. To make this story work as a novel, it would be necessary to streamline, focus, and omit. It would also be necessary to go beyond the record, inventing events and imagining characters.

In moving from the historical record into a work of the imagination, I set myself two broad guidelines. The first was not to invent any dialogue between the Gadigal people and the lieutenant. I would use only what was recorded in the notebooks. The second was—as far as my knowledge went—not to invent out of nowhere. I would omit events that had really happened, I would adapt and alter real events, and I would invent beyond what was recorded, but I would—as far as possible—take the historical record as a starting-point.

So, for example, I telescoped time considerably (the main story in the novel takes about two years while in reality it took about four; the real expedition took three days where in the novel it takes two). I made no mention of important historical moments (the spearing of the Governor or the arrival of the Second Fleet, for example). I moved events that had happened at one time or place to another (the first encounter between black and white is based on an encounter that happened in Botany Bay, not in Port Jackson). I speculated about characters, taking what was known about them as a starting-point but imagining beyond what was recorded. Readers familiar with the accounts of first settlement may recognise aspects of real people in many of the characters and will recognise some recorded events.

As a novelist I have latitude to speculate, to add, to omit, to guess and even to invent. But I also have available to me all the richness of the historical record. In a tradition that goes back to Homer and beyond, I’ve taken events that took place in the real world and used them as the basis for a work of imagination.

This is a novel, then, not history. But I hope that it might encourage readers to seek out the history of those extraordinary years of first settlement, and to see the continuities and discontinuities between that time and our own. The past may be a foreign country, but we can all try to learn its language.

KATE GRENVILLE, one of Australia’s leading contemporary novelists, was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1950. She worked as a journalist in London and Paris and studied creative writing in the US before becoming a full-time novelist. The Secret River, her story of early Australian life through Aboriginal history, was based on the life of her ancestor, a Briton transported to Australia as a convict. It won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction for The Idea of Perfection in 2001. Grenville, whose latest novel is entitled The Lieutenant, is also the author of Dark Places and Lillian’s Story.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Fatima BHUTTO

TOO LEGIT TO COMPETE
Being the voice for change is a common cliché in the post-Obama world of politics. But ironically for FATIMA BHUTTO, a niece of the assassinated former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, change is exactly why she stays out of politics. SHANNON TEOH finds her readier to document rather than represent

WHAT’S IN A NAME? In Pakistan, damn near everything.

If you thought having Bush, Sr. and Jr. as presidents was something, the unauthoritative but extremely useful Wikipedia actually has a page dedicated to “Political families of Pakistan.” There are 14 of them, and under Bhutto, we find 21 names said to be “in politics.”

One of them is Fatima Bhutto, who, once she finds out about this, will probably protest her inclusion.

The Bhutto name needs no introduction to an international audience, let alone to 180 million Pakistanis brought up in a democracy which makes no apologies for its dynastic inclinations. Such is the grip of this mindset that on various internet forums discussing interviews where Fatima rejects suggestions that she gets contest in elections, Pakistanis are extolling her virtues and stating openly that they would support her wholeheartedly.

Pointedly, some will even go so far as to say that it is Fatima’s destiny, and not that of her 20-year-old cousin Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to inherit the family’s political leadership. One rationale is particularly illuminating—Bilawal is not a real Bhutto but a Zardari.

So the apologies are left instead to the 27-year-old poet and journalist.

“My decision not to take part in parliamentary politics is absolute,” she said in a telephone-interview from her home in Karachi.

“You can quote me on that, Shannon,” she added for emphasis, clearly frustrated at constant speculation that she will eventually make a tilt for a top role in government and in at least once case, she claims of rather mischievous reporting.

I was referring to a news report where Fatima had appeared to leave the door open should birthright politics be dismantled and an open field established, but Fatima claimed it was a case of “two separate things being pieced together.”

“It was a separate question asking if I lived in a country without a feudal background and I didn’t come from a dynasty. So I said that if that was the case, in an ideal situation, then of course, it’s an entirely different proposition,” she explained.

Fatima has been critical of birthright politics for as long as she had a platform to do so and today does so in Pakstasni media as well as columns in The Daily Beast and New Statesman, and commentaries in The Guardian. In our interview, she decried as “farcical” that Pakistan has been “devastated” by the idea that “all you need that qualifies you to rule is a name.”

“It can even be an add-on name, somewhere in the equation and you are suitable,” she scoffed.

Instead, she has been pushing for, mainly through her writing, the voiceless to be empowered and have Pakistanis being represented by members of their own constituencies and communities.

“I am happy to play a role from the sidelines, to write and support causes I believe in and speak out against those I feel are dangerous and leave the actual politicking to someone else,” she said.

But the irony in her quest for a change to a democracy based on merit is nearly tragic in its immensity. She even sounded like she was tasting it as she said “it behooves me—(she pauses for an exasperated chuckle)—to say, I will not participate.”

Because the fact is that she does come from a dynasty and the Bhutto name is an inescapable soapbox for her. Fatima also helps her stepmother, Ghinwa Bhutto, to campaign during elections—although it would be unfair to say that Ghinwa rides on the Bhutto name given that she heads a dissenting breakaway party from the Pakistan People’s Party, which is practically a Bhutto heirloom. Fatima’s highly recognisable profile, is as much due to her surname as it is her columns in various newspapers, multiple appearances on television, two books and, well, the loud whispering in the gossip rags featuring one George Clooney.

This is not to say her work has no validity once you cut the cords of family, but it is undeniable that it is a key selling point and gives Fatima greater relevance. She must know this, of course. Next year, her third book will be published and it is about “the violence that connects Pakistan and my family.”

“It weaves itself between this country and this family, making it part historical, part journalistic and also part personal. It’s my way of trying to understand the violence that I‘ve lived with personally and as a Pakistani,” she said and at the time of the interview, she was still being kept up most nights by the lack of a title.

It becomes obvious that any naivety in her cause or work so far is only due to the very nature of her social and political activism. Hope—usually against all hope—is what keeps the underdogs going, after all.

But again, it is cruel irony that hope is probably why Pakistanis want to see her in government. Fatima agrees that it is difficult to blame Pakistanis for what is essentially “hope and expectations” derived from “a relationship with the family.”

“You can’t eliminate hope, as Barack Obama would say, there is nothing false about hope,” she said, quoting the US president.

The problem with hope in Pakistan, she believes, is that it creates a situation where “they just decide, we don’t like Musharraf (the self-appointed former president who led a military coup d’etat), we want someone else and we’ll take just about anybody at this point.”

Her hope is that all this can change and is reflected in her pursuance of what she calls “the hidden transcript.” She related her first visit to Malaysia a year ago, saying she found the people “very warm and open, eager to share, talk and discuss.”

“The same is true in Pakistan, but when you open the newspapers, none of that is reflected in them. It is as if the people in power are on one side, and the people you meet everyday are on the other. You feel there is a disconnection,” she mused.

“I think of what I do as citizen journalism. I’ve never liked the idea of being a columnist or commentator. Instead, I wrote about things I was living in and witnessing but not seeing on television or reading in newspapers.

“I liked the idea of coming from inside a society, of it being rogue in some kind of way—what I was doing was to archive and catalogue. So there are two transcripts out there of what is recorded. The established transcript in state newspapers and TV, and then the hidden transcript of how people live and what life is like and their struggles,” she explained.

This was the motivation behind 8:50am 8 October 2005, published three years ago about the earthquake in Pakistan’s north that killed some 80,000 people. The fact is documented well enough, but Fatima found that the stories that needed to be told were those of the survivors.

“When I went to the earthquake area on personal trips to distribute aid to women and children, I was shocked that the things people told me were news I hadn’t heard on the TV or newspapers. There was a lot of attention but it was always politicians or newscasters speaking for people portrayed as silent victims.

“But the people I met were not victims at all. They were survivors and they were resilient, very gutsy and impassioned about what happened and what needed to be done. I wasn’t seeing that anywhere else,” she recalled.

It would be easy to psychoanalyse Fatima and say that this is simply a typical condescending upper-class reaction to her privileged upbringing where her first book was a collection of poetry written in her pubescent years. That may not be a completely invalid point, as Fatima herself admitted, but it would be one that is completely unsympathetic to the (c)rude interruption of those pubescent years by the death of her father.

It was half a life and while she still writes poems—a full collection remains unpublished—she has found a modus operandi and a purpose that she has utter belief in.

In hindsight, Fatima believes that her citizen journalism is when she really found her voice as a writer and “started to write as an adult; the poetry was from when I was a child, really.

“Nobody was talking about what it was like on a daily basis, living through something. For me, as an adult, by the time I started to work on the earthquake book, I knew that was what I wanted to do. If there was a way to uncover the hidden transcripts, then I wanted to be involved in doing that.

“I didn’t want to put myself necessarily in the front—I wanted to share my experiences and what I thought about things, but I didn’t need them to be about me. Coming from a political family and that kind of background, it was an important realisation for me to make and that was really when it became clear to me that I wasn’t going into politics, that I had more of a role to play through writing and activism,” she said.

Time will tell if her efforts will prove to be wanting or even in vain in the context of Pakistani politics. But insisting that journalists and writers, not politicians, were her heroes while growing up, her presence at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 is a testament to a larger truth, that even if journalism or literature may not always change the destiny of the world, it can change the destiny of lives.

Even if it’s only the life of the writer.

SHANNON TEOH, when not pretending to know everything, busies himself trying to have a laugh. Some might argue they’re both the same thing. However, this winner of several Boy Scout badges would argue that the first provides him with a salary at The Malaysian Insider and the latter ensures he never gets a second date. Or was it the other way round?

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

What book would you like to snuggle under covers with, and why?

“What book would you like to snuggle under covers with, and why?” A number of writers appearing at the 2009 Singapore Writers Festival in Singapore on October 24-November 1, 2009, disclose what they read for pleasure

JOHN BOYNE ((Mutiny, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas): “I’d snuggle under the covers with Emily Bronte! As a teenager my first introduction to a great love affair wasn’t a personal experience, but in the pages of Wuthering Heights. Although I’d like to think that I am a much nicer person than Heathcliff.”

MEIRA CHAND (A Different Sky, A Far Horizon): “I am soon hoping to get under covers with Jonathan Black’s (The Secret History of the World. This history of human consciousness promises a view of the world previously hidden, and as I find anything to do with the labyrinth of human thought seductive, I am looking forward to its revelations.”

NEEL CHOWDHURY (The Inheritors): “I’d snuggle under the covers with V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, one of my favourite novels, and J.G. Farrell’s wonderful The Singapore Grip. I’d also include almost any fiction written by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy or Henry James.”

MAREE DAWES (Women of the Minotaur): “I cannot choose just one book! At the moment I have a whole basket of books by my bed so I can have the one I want for any occasion. Of course, there are lots of poetry collections—some of them are Over There, Indigo Journal, White Clay (Lucy Dougan), some Dorothy Hewett, Barbara Temperton’s Southern Edge, and of course my own journal so I can scribble away when I am inspired. The latest novels by David Malouf (Ransom) and Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin). I also like to have the latest Delicious magazine and some New Scientist magazines.”

IMTIAZ DHARKER (The Terrorist at My Table): “Staying Alive, the anthology of poems edited by Neil Astley. A wonderful collection of poems for our times: thought-provoking, inspiring and challenging. A treasure of a book, it makes me feel connected to a whole family of poets across the world.”

SHAMINI FLINT (Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul): “Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, of course! Or Gregory Peck who played Atticus in the film version—unfortunately he’s no longer with us …. Atticus is the ultimate hero—good-looking, unassuming and capable of great feats of bravery and sacrifice. Who could ask for more?”

MOHAMMED HANIF (A Case of Exploding Mangoes): “J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World as it hovers between a dream and the real world.”

HYEJIN KIM (Jia): “Once on a Moonless Night, the new book by Dai Sijie, is one that I look forward to reading. I recently read his book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I enjoyed his casual but careful portrayal of a difficult time in China. I liked how he described the period and its people. The ending of the book was the best part. Since I learned of his new book, I have been looking forward to reading it.”

CATHERINE LIM (The Song of Silver Frond, The Bondmaid): “For the generous ‘undercovers’ treat of close, warm, snuggling intimacy with a favourite book or writer, I’ll simply have to be greedy and ask for my entire zoo to be accommodated! They are long-time favourite novelists as diverse in their penetrating vision, creative energy and masterful use of the language as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Penelope Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro and J.M. Coetzee. I would ask each of these marvellous writers in breathless, wide-eyed wonder: Just how do you do it?”

SUCHEN CHRISTINE LIM (The Lies That Build a Marriage, Rice Bowl): “I would snuggle under covers with two, not one, authors. Keep awake with Ma Jian’s epic novel, Beijing Coma, his remembrance of Tiananmen, a significant moment in Chinese history, which the state seeks to erase. Then let John Banville’s The Sea lull and disturb me gently as the sea always does with his beautifully crafted sentences and evocation of a childhood love.”

JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST (Handling the Undead, Let the Right One In): “Right now probably one of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books. I live in the same archipelago as Tove Jansson did, and it can be quite cold. We need the warmth from the Moomin world.”

MA JIAN (Beijing Coma, The Noodle Maker, Stick Out Your Tongue, Red Dust: A Path Through China): “The book I return to again and again is Franz Kafka’s The Castle. I don’t tend to ‘snuggle under the covers’ to read. I prefer to read sitting on my sofa, or best of all at a window seat on a long train journey.”

K.S. MANIAM (Between Lives, In a Far Country, The Return): “The books I like to read are books that take me into the inner man or woman. This is because I’ve always been fascinated by that space within us which I feel, as a writer, as almost infinite. It’s in this inner space of the individual that we find the imagination living to its fullest and most expressive form. A book that puts you on to this imagination is a book worth taking trouble over. I can’t mention specific books but list the authors who’ve written such imagination-expanding works: Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Patrick White, Kenzaburo Oe, to name a few.”

KATE McCAFFREY: “When I was fourteen I read Gone With the Wind; I remember feeling quite empty once I finished it. It was a novel that traced a huge part of history and of course had the interesting, yet dysfunctional relationships throughout the story. It was a novel you could get under the covers with on a rainy day and not want to emerge from until it was over.”

O THIAM CHIN (Never Been Better): “Definitely Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, which is the de facto anthology of 37 of his best short stories, a brilliant culling of his works that spanned his illustrious writing career. His stories might appear deceptively sparse, stylistically simple but each of them possesses a strong, taut finesse that keeps different, and differing, moods, emotions and characters in balance, without over-elaboration or being redundantly lengthy. I have read, and re-read each story, and always discover something new each time.”

WENA POON (The Proper Care of Foxes, Lions in Winter): “I read widely and go highbrow or lowbrow depending on mood. Most recently I found Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, an encyclopedic graphic novel surprisingly grounded in London architectural myths, a rollicking good read. It inspired me to potter about London looking at monuments and led me to write a new story about cenotaphs and Singapore’s colonial past. And people thought graphic novels were ‘just comics’!”

MIGUEL SYJUCO (Ilustrado): “The book I am dying to snuggle under covers with is Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. The idea of ‘being under the covers’ hints at time stolen from daily life, of hiding out, and reading to my heart’s content. Bolaño’s massive tome demands a huge amount of attention and commitment in a world where attentions are too short and commitment pertains to the things we do to make a living. I’m smitten by Bolaño’s work because he holds many clues for contemporary writers from developing countries. He eschews self-exoticisation, finds the humour of daily absurdities, and rejects the staid traditions while at the same time learning from the wisdom of past ages. As a Filipino who, like millions of my countrymen, is at home in the broader world, Bolaño’s life and work resonates with me.”

ROBERT YEO (The Adventures of Holden Heng, And Napalm Does Not Help): “I would like to snuggle up with Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion. It has been sometime since I read an Austen book and her understanding of love and marriage is profound and her style, for what she writes about, is peerless. I watched the movie, Becoming Jane Austen, and Ann Hathaway made her desirable.”

THE WRITING LIFE ... Padma VISWANATHAN

TOSSING THE LEMON
ERIC FORBES talks to PADMA VISWANATHAN about her first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, and how it came to be written

PADMA VISWANATHAN was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, in 1968. A Canadian fiction writer, playwright and journalist, her ambitious first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in 2008 by Random House Canada. Her writing awards include residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Banff Playwrights’ Colony, and first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She received her Creative Writing MA from Johns Hopkins and her MFA from the University of Arizona. and lives with her family in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She lives with the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock and their children in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the US.

Inspired by the history of her family, Viswanathan takes us into the world of a Brahmin clan, bringing to life an India that’s is not often talked about. At the core of the novel is Sivakami, married at ten, widowed at eighteen. As her caste requires, her head is shaved and she wears widow’s whites, and from dawn to dusk she cannot contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her two small children. She dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She returns to her husband’s house to raise those children. Her servant, Muchami, bound by a very different set of caste rules, becomes her public face, and their singular bond holds three generations together through a turbulent half-century of social and political change.

Where were you born and raised? Could you tell me a bit about that slice of the world? And where do you live now? Do you write full-time?
I was born in Nelson, British Columbia, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, all in the Canadian west. It was not that cosmopolitan while I was growing up, and I mainly wanted to leave, and now that I have been gone for 15 years, I am setting a novel in that part of the world. It’s as though I had to move away to see its imaginative potential. I now live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is exactly in the centre of the United States, far from my origins in many ways and yet an oddly comfortable place for me. I guess I write part-time and look after my kids part-time, though both feel like full-time jobs! I will, this winter, also be taking on some part-time teaching work, now that my kids are getting older and the promotional energy required by my novel has lessened.

When did you know you were going to be a writer? Was it something you had always set your heart on?
I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer until I was in my mid-twenties. I finished a sociology degree at 20 and was working in policy research, but feeling dissatisfied. I fell into social action theatre, creating theatrical pieces, often interactive, intended to stimulate dialogue on social issues. This was fun and rewarding, but agit prop necessarily oversimplifies and I grew uncomfortable. Then, I joined a novice playwrights’ circle and wrote the first scene of my first play, a comedy called “House of Sacred Cows.” I felt as though I’d been whapped, gently, on the forehead by the heel of a giant hand: this is what I was meant to do! It was such a relief, finally, to discover my vocation. The play was commissioned, miraculously, for development and production and I started research for my novel shortly thereafter.

What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer? Are there any aspects of it that you do not like?
I love my life as a writer, but I’m exceptionally fortunate. I spend my days thinking about things that interest me and then about how to express them, most often in fiction. I’ve done very little writing on things I didn’t choose to write about. I make my own hours. I often wish there were more hours in the day, but that desire’s not limited to writers! I also love that I have such flexibility: not only do I work on whatever I want in a given day, but I can jettison work if I need to look after my kids when they’re sick, or whatever. And then there’s the work of giving readings and interviews and meeting my readers: although I sometimes resent the time away from my writing, and it can be anxiety-making to meet and talk with new people—and to be away from my kids, when this involves travel—it is also very, very gratifying to meet people who have been touched by my work. Given all this, the fact that writing generally pays little and unsteadily seems a small price to pay.

Could you describe your writing process? What part of the process do you enjoy most as a writer?
I’m not very systematic, and my process seems to vary a lot from one project to another. In most cases, a character or a dilemma pops into my head and takes hold of me and a story starts developing out of that person or problem. I have also written stories inspired by other stories and works of art. In all cases, what I most enjoy is seeing what can evolve, story-wise, from a given set of conditions: what development of plot or character would be most logical as well as most surprising? I also love tinkering with language. A good metaphor, mine, or more often, someone else’s, can send me over the moon ... metaphorically speaking.

What are your “writing” hours like? Where and when do you write best?
I write weekdays, 5:30-7 and 8-12. I’ve always written in the morning, but it used to be 8-2, till I had kids. Now I find I need to get up before the bustle of breakfast and teeth-brushing to make sure my first hour is given to imagination, not organisation. I can write almost anywhere, given relative solitude and quiet, but at home, I write in my study, which was designed by my husband and custom built for me into the attic of our home.

Was it difficult getting your first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, published in 2008? Did you experience much difficulty in finding an agent or a publisher?
Oddly smooth! I became friends with the wonderful Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai (Funny Boy, Cinnamon Gardens) at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, an artists’ retreat in New Hampshire. He heard me read from my novel there and generously offered to introduce me to his agent, Bruce Westwood. I had resolved on not showing the book to anyone in the publishing industry until I thought it was one draft away from publication, and although it took me eight years of writing to get to that point, I think it paid off in speed and ease once I was ready. By then, I was living in the US, and so also approached an American agent. But the Westwood Agency won me over: Bruce is legendary in Canada; they represent many writers I had long admired; and they were passionate about my book. Once Bruce and his assistant Carolyn Forde were on the task, all went quickly! We had several bids in Canada within weeks. When Bruce showed the book to American publishers, we got a preemptive bid from Ann Patty at Harcourt USA within a week. It has also sold in five other countries.

Could you tell me a bit about The Toss of a Lemon? What was the seed of the novel? Did it evolve into a work different from what you imagined it to be? If so, how? What are some of the themes you dealt with in it? Were you conscious of these when you first set out to write the novel?
The novel centres on a Tamil Brahmin woman, Sivakami, who is married at 10, in 1896. Eight years later, she is widowed, with two small children. She observes the restrictions her community demands: her head is shaved; she wears only white; and, most cruelly, she cannot be touched from dawn to dusk, even by her little ones. She rebels in one key way, however: defying her brothers by remaining in her own home instead of going to live with them. Although she basically can’t or won’t leave her house, she raises her children there with the help of a trusted servant, Muchami, her public presence and her closest confidante. Sivakami makes this move in order to give her son, Vairum, a secular education instead of the Brahminic, priestly education her brothers had planned for him. Vairum makes good on her gamble, becoming a successful industrialist, but he also rejects much of the orthodoxy that is Sivakami’s (and Muchami’s) mainstay. We follow this family through 60 years and three generations, mirrored, in ways both subtle and profound, by a changing India. The book was inspired by stories my grandmother told me about her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at 18 after her astrologer husband predicted his own death. In other words, the skeleton of the story follows that of my ancestors, though it departs from the “real” story in many ways.

When I got the idea for this book, I had never written fiction and so had no idea what sort or size of book it would turn out to be, though I did want to fictionalise the stories I’d been given. The central themes seem to be the ways that caste is rigid or flexible, maintained or transgressed; questions of predetermination versus individual will; and the interaction of personal inclinations with societal expectations. And again, no, I had no idea at the start what would surface as most important.

Did the writing of your first novel require much research?
Yes, two years of solid research. First, I spent a year interviewing my grandmother every month or so, and transcribing those interviews. Next, I went to India to do more research, revisiting the places that inspired the locations of the novel, interviewing other relatives, and reading up on the particular history of this area of India. Then, after five years of writing, I returned, to do more intensive research on particular threads and details that I hadn’t known would become important before I started the writing.

In historical novels, there’s lots of historical research. Do you need to be absolutely faithful to history. Should writers use history to their own ends?
I don’t really know what “absolutely faithful to history” means, in the sense that past events, and memories, even more, are always open to interpretation. As for “using history to their own ends,” I tend to think the perceived truth of a piece of fiction is the primary means by which we evaluate it. Fiction is the business of verisimilitude, so we always pick and choose what is useful to us, and build around it to make something that we think might convey an emotional or narrative truth. It happened to me, in the writing of my novel, that I imagined or guessed at events that my grandmother hadn’t told me about but that she affirmed, on reading the manuscript. These ranged from her father’s infidelities, to a conversation she herself had with her husband, my grandfather, to the close relationship between her grandmother and that grandmother’s lower-caste servant. In every case, I was astonished at how my thinking on what I had been told led me to recreate “history” that was unrecorded and unrecounted.

Did you know where you were going with the novel as you wrote or did it evolve on its own volition?
For the first few years, I wrote pieces out of sequence, just working on episodes that interested me from the stories I had heard. When I had a certain amount of material, I started to edit it together, cutting out bits that didn’t seem to fit and writing in to the gaps. At a certain point, I thought, “If this were a big Russian novel, this particular character would figure in the ending.” But it wasn’t a Russian novel, obviously! Still, that character returned, and started to take on a significance I hadn’t fully apprehended in advance. Then the final 40 pages, which are slightly edited, of course, but largely intact, came out in a rush, in two days. I’ve never written so fast. I guess that’s what you mean by “on its own volition!” At a certain point, I could see the logic of the narrative, and my main task was to get it all down. Two more years of editing and rewriting then followed before it was ready.

How do you know when your manuscript is completed? Do deadlines determine this or do you feel a sense of confidence that there is no way you can improve on the text anymore?
I’m generally pretty insecure about that, in fact: with a few exceptions, I tend to think a piece is finished when someone is willing to publish it! At the very least, when a piece is out in the world, it does have a certain degree of untouchability. It assists me a lot in rewriting to have the opinion of a couple of trusted readers. It’s difficult for me, otherwise, to see what I do or don’t need to do.

Now that you have published your novel, would you go back and change it? If so, how?
I remember once reading an interview with Nadine Gordimer, in which she said she wouldn’t go back and change her early books, that they represented who she was then, and deserved to be left alone, or something like that. I was disbelieving: I tended, especially early on, to quickly disown or at least be very uncomfortable with old writing, so I couldn’t imagine not wanting to go back and fix things. But the fact is that, regardless of my first novel’s strengths and flaws, I’m not at all interested in working on it anymore! And I don’t (yet!) hate it! I feel I’m a very different writer in certain ways from the one I was when I began, so my next novel will represent another stage, as will the one after that, and I guess I’m fine with that.

What did you learn about yourself in the process of writing the novel?
That I write primarily to entertain myself and explore my thoughts, and so hope there are enough people out there who share my fascinations, obsessions and sense of humour for me to earn a readership.

What do you hope to bring from the experience of writing this novel to your next novel?
The process of writing my first book was the process of becoming a writer, for me. I hope that I accumulated some wisdom about how to develop characters and how to write the kind of prose I like. But I also don’t want to become self-conscious or overly critical: it’s hard to regain the freedom that one has when writing a first book, completely out of the eye of the publishing world. I am trying, though, as much as possible, to make sure I don’t close any avenue of imagination or thought for fear that it might not work.

How did you decide on the title of your novel?
The title of the novel came very late in the game. My working title, during eight years of writing, was Thangam, the name of one of the characters. It became clear fairly early that she was not central enough to own the title, but The Toss of a Lemon only occurred to me a couple of weeks before I sent the manuscript out! I think I needed to finish the thing to see clearly what it was about.

The title’s significance is this: Sivakami’s husband, Hanumarathnam, is an astrologer. What she doesn’t know at the time of their marriage is that his horoscope contains a prediction that he will die: die sooner, that is, than later. He is hoping, however, that the birth of a son might avert this disaster through the interaction of their horoscopes. Hanumarathnam, as an astrologer, wants to calculate his children’s horoscopes himself and he needs the exact birth times to do this, though he is not allowed to be present at their births. His solution? He gives the midwife a lemon and tells her, toss it out the window the instant the baby’s head appears. Hanumarathnam will be waiting in the garden outside the birthing chamber. The first child is a girl and the midwife does as instructed. Hanumarathnam calculates the horoscope, and while it has enormous repercussions for his daughter, it doesn’t change his own fate. The next baby is a boy ... and a breech birth. (By the way: all this happens in the first 50 pages of the book. I’m not spoiling anything for readers!) The midwife is confused about when to toss the lemon, since the first glimpse she has of the baby is not of his head! Hanumarathnam makes a calculation, but, contrary to his hopes, the little boy’s horoscope confirms the prediction against his father’s life. Much of the rest of the book follows from these two tossed lemons, though we are never sure whether the boy’s horoscope is accurate or not.

As a writer, how much say do you have over the covers of your novel? How much and to what extent are you personally influenced by cover art?
I have veto power but have only exercised it once and haven’t tried to get involved too much. Marketing my book is not my area of expertise. Also, I generally have been very fortunate: almost all of my book covers have been really beautiful. I love, love, love a beautiful book, and it certainly influences my choice of whether to buy.

I am always interested in the kinds of books writers read during their early or formative years. What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up? Who are some of your literary heroes, so to speak? Have they in any way contributed to the making of who you are as a writer today?
My favourite writers when I was a child were probably E.L. Konigsberg, Louise Fitzhugh, P.L. Travers, L.M. Montgomery and Roald Dahl—I can see now that they all contain humour, secrets, and, for me at least, exotic landscapes. I was very influenced by them, and still think about their books all the time. I did read a lot of kids’ books, and the ones I liked, I read over and over and over.

Who are some of your favourite contemporary novelists? What are some of your favourite contemporary novels? Do you have an all-time favourite novel?
The most important contemporary author in my personal canon is Salman Rushdie, though no one would guess that from my prose. Midnight’s Children and Shame break my heart over and over. I also intensely admire Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald, particularly for her hilarious and erudite play, Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, and her novel, Fall on Your Knees. Other contemporary novels I have loved? Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, Jonathan Ames’s The Extra Man, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Jane Gardam’s Old Filth ... God, where do I stop?

All time favourites? Hmm, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for one. Sterne involves his readers by playing with them, and if he alienates others, that’s a chance he’s willing to take. No writer should try too hard to please. And Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones would be my desert island book: it pretty much contains all the fictional lessons and enjoyment I would ever need. Still, it is flawed, which is reassuring: even books I would place on an altar and worship are, much like Hindu or Greek gods, imperfect. Borges inspires me to imaginative daring and also to forgive my own failings.

Could you suggest a couple of good reads that you think haven’t got as much attention as they should?
Hmm ... I’m not exactly a fiction bellwether and don’t always know which books have and haven’t gotten attention, but I’ve recently read a couple of Canadian books that were well-recognised in Canada but that may or may not have made a big splash internationally. M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song was brilliant; the emotional transparency and the cumulative tragedy made me weep at the end. Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault was the other Canadian novel I read this year that I recommended to everyone. It comes out in the US this spring. Also, my friend Catherine Bush’s novels: Claire’s Head, The Rules of Engagement and Minus Time. Another Canadian writer! She writes intricate, intelligent novels that I think deserve a wider readership. Watch out for her next one!

What kinds of books do you read nowadays? Any particular genre? Do you read popular or commercial fiction? What are you reading at the moment?
I dither semi-systematically between novels and literary nonfiction, classic and contemporary. At present, I’m reading Fredy Neptune, a novel in verse by Les Murray, which I picked up during my Australian book tour. I’m also reading The Secret House, by David Bodanis, which is marvellously entertaining, a day spent in the hidden science of an average day, the furniture rebounding from the impact of a foot placed on the floor and thousands of mites also bouncing invisibly underfoot, that sort of thing.

Do you think more competitions or creative writing courses are imperative in increasing the number of good writers and/or improve the quality of writing?
What? Where? Not at all!

In your opinion, what are the essentials of good fiction? What distinguishes the great novel from the merely good?
Literature is, by its nature, an idiosyncratic enterprise. A dear professor of mine, John Irwin, once said that a great book is one that breaks your heart, and that is about the only credo I have found to stand the test of time. A book may break my heart with its daring, its artistry, its economy, its genuineness, but if I hear that crack, that’s my measure.

Literary festivals tend to eat into writers’ writing time. What do you think of literary festivals? How do you decide which ones to go to? Do you enjoy going to them?
Here in the US it’s more readings than festivals as such, but I think we’re talking about the same sort of thing. I have had enough success with my book to receive invitations but not enough to turn them down! So I basically, so far, go wherever I’m invited, schedule permitting. And yes, once I’m there, I enjoy them as much as I enjoyed them before I was a writer, and for similar reasons—it’s wonderful to be surrounded by people who love books and want to talk about them—but it’s much harder for me to leave home now that I have young kids, and that aspect is stressful.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on a second novel, under contract with Random House Canada. It’s called Losing Farther, Losing Faster, and takes place in contemporary western Canada. The story centres on an Indian man named Seth, a devotee of a very popular Indian guru. He became a devotee in the course of comforting a friend through the death of the friend’s wife and son in the Air India bombing of 1985. The story actually hinges, though, on a highly ambiguous sexual misdeed committed by Seth’s guru. Seth must come to terms with his faith in light of that revelation. And there are a few other mysteries, which will be revealed in time …

THE WRITING LIFE ... Usha AKELLA

POETRY FOR THE SOUL
USHA AKELLA talks to G.S.P. RAO about poetry and what it means to her

USHA AKELLA, a multifaceted creative person, lived in various American cities before her husband’s work as a senior IT official brought them back to Hyderabad for a stint. In Greenburgh, a New York suburb, she launched Poetry Caravan to popularise poetry among disadvantaged folks through free poetry readings and writing workshops, which earned her recognition and awards.

She considers Hyderabad as her hometown as this is where she grew up as a child and young woman. Her in-laws and parents still live here—the primary reason for returning to give her child valuable years with her grandparents. Her elegant apartment in Jubilee Hills is still getting the final touches; furniture still needs to fall in place; several paintings—some, her own—lie on the floor awaiting their final place on the wall. I reach her apartment after taking directions a few times to find her busy in discussion with workers and staff. In this busy milieu, we settle down for a conversation. The talk meanders from her experiences in the U.S. and India to her poetry and teaching; to what moves and angers her. She talks intensely and with conviction, amidst diversions from workers.

You have been participating in international poetry festivals. How are they different from writers’ meets in India, content-wise and organisation-wise?
I am afraid my experience of Indian festivals and meetings has been minimal as I’ve been away for the last 14 years. So I am not in a position to comment. I’ve attended a couple, no more, and it seems to me that the meets here tend to be more formal and academic in design, with the customary speeches, presentation of papers and eulogies. We could do better with organisation overall, and focus on poetry and not the poets. However, the blessing through it all is the poets you get to meet and the poetry you get to savour.

You interact with poets and writers from several nations at these international festivals. How does this influence your ideas on poetry and your work?
Poets work with language primarily as you know, and I am constantly thrilled and inspired how poets process experience completely differently depending on their cultural, geographic, linguistic and social background. I was gifted with a CD of the work of contemporary Japanese masters, by Shuntaro Tanikawa, who is considered to be Japan’s Robert Frost. I was taken by the musing aloud quality of the poetry as if the poet speaks to herself primarily, as if the poetry is a discourse with the self, and the audience is incidental. When I read Nikola Madzirov’s poetry from Macedonia, he alludes to absences through what is present. Austrian poet Helwig Brunner is reconciling opposites. Reading different works opens up the mind to newer possibilities of language and how language can harness subtle realities the poet is always trying to grasp. When I was at the Slovenian festival recently I became aware of how newer technologies were influencing creativity. The Medana festival offered a platform for new forms of linguistic creativity—a contest of SMS poetry of no more than 150 characters.

Is poetry and its influence on people and society perceived the same everywhere? If there are differences, what are these and how do you react to them?
I am going to turn that question on its head a bit and say I think poets perceive themselves the same everywhere—alienated, disregarded, mocked, prophets shunned in their land—all the usual complaints. Also heroic when they make it! Does poetry influence society? Does it stop wars? History seems to reply in the negative. But do the arts and poetry have a rightful place in the scheme of things? Yes! And can they affect individuals one on one? Yes! If I had cared too much about what society thought about poets, I probably would have been a doctor or a software engineer!

How has poetry influenced your life? What would life be without poetry for you?
Life without poetry would be a corpse. And poetry without life would be disembodied. You’re asking me what it would be like to be here without breathing.

What have been the themes of your poetry? What moves you the most?
Themes have ranged from feminism to Sufism. I don’t care too much for these labels. At most they point to a direction, and nothing is exclusive to each other. I see poetry as a reflection of the centring self, and the centring self is going to cartwheel around a lot before it reaches this imagined utopic state. I try to remain sincere to the call from within and write about whatever moves me for the moment.

Overall, I’d say there is an Advaitic enquiry of self-search—a quest poetry—a response from within and out. I think poetry is a direct reflection of a consciousness trying to understand itself. Recently, when I read at Madras University, I was introduced as a poet who couldn’t be pegged down into any bracket. I took that as a compliment. I want my breathing space. And I don’t worry too much about apparent contradictions in my phases of work because we are contradictory entities. The mind is anchored on tensions.

What disturbs and angers you the most in the world we live in today? And in India?
The oppression of women, the debasement of sex, abused children becoming the victims of countless acts of adults’ stupidity, the frightening dominance of the media shaping our aesthetic values. In the west I’d say it’s the extreme body consciousness that is the disease and in India, it’s the corruption, and worse, the acceptance and apathy in response to it. I’ve been fighting pretty much everywhere—hotels, doctors’ offices, movie theatres … it’s a disease gone so deep it’s become part of our national sensibility. And now we’re choosing to ape the MTV culture of the West. There is grotesqueness to India’s populist culture today.

In a world taken over by political and social activists or social activism, has the poet become irrelevant?
On the contrary, the poet has become even more relevant and essential. Poetry in its scope moves inward and outward, often obliterating the boundaries between supposedly divided realms. One recent example is the Poets Against the War movement launched by Sam Hamill in response to the Iraq war. The movement began when Hamill declined an invitation from the White House to attend a poetry symposium. The invitation was extended in the wake of George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Instead, a call for submissions for poems of protest went out. There are poets involved the world over in social activism—Alurista the Chicano poet, The Welfare Poets, Robert Hass and his involvement with water projects and environmental issues … it has almost become a natural obligation today to be a social poet in touch with larger reality.

I find it more and more difficult to divide the two. Socially relevant themes creep into my work now and I welcome the enrichment. Poetry is the language of the soul and the poet is interested in everything because the universe is a reflection finally of the soul. But don’t ask me to define what the soul is. That’s the wordless frontier poetry is attempting to suggest.

Going by your own experience, how would you describe the process of poetry creation? Are you always satisfied by the outcome of your work?
There is a moment of inspiration that charges every poem. Sometimes, it is sparked off by an external event, an image, a line or a phrase. There is an emotional energy in response, almost an organic shift within the mind to the perceived stimulus. It stalks you till you pick up the pen and give it form. I know then that something could happen on the page. I can’t predict how far it will go. That’s known only through the process of writing.

Once you start writing, the impulse carries through organically from within the words you start to create with. You write fragments, sometimes a good poem or sometimes a bad one. Sometimes, the charge isn’t strong enough to carry a poem on its shoulders. So you need to be gracious enough to discard it or you end up with a corpse of a poem instead of something taking flight or at least in movement. The critic comes in through the backdoor next to help me shape the poem, editing when necessary.

I trust my instinct deeply. You might ask what instinct is and I might reply it is knowledge cum experience absorbed till its unconscious or some such thing. The creative instinct seems to have this dual personality—the first impulse and a more conscious application of the craft. Every poem for me is an interplay between the two. This is just an attempt to nail an ineffable thing down and it’s probably half successful.

Can creativity in poetry be taught?
Writing is the act of faith in oneself. My writing workshop intends to develop the poet’s sensibility in the student. I teach students how to keep a journal and become alert to stimuli around them. They learn how to proceed from journal writing to the writing of poems. I teach them to trust themselves, their life experiences and writing voices.

Talent cannot be taught. I believe that what can be taught are methods of awareness of the imagination, self and world around us. Yes, there are a number of things a teacher can do to tap creativity, and if the student is endowed with imagination and talent, she’ll take the bait.

In each session, my students practice free writing, read a wide range of poetry in different styles and voices, learn theory, and participate in lively discussions meant to spark off their imagination. I give them language and creative exercises aimed at unfolding their imagination and increasing their sensitivity to language.

G.S.P. RAO is an Information Technology professional turned writer, to whom writing has provided intellectual and creative fulfilment and a welcome diversion from the rigours of a professional career. He has two literary works to his credit—Meghamitra and Other Poems and The Lock at the Gate, a compilation of short stories. He has written on the life of Krishnadeva Raya, to fill the lacuna of an authentic English biography of the renowned Vijayanagara emperor. Over the years, he has had several articles covering information technology, culture and civic concerns published by The Hindu, The Times of India, Hyderabad and Newstime.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... MO Zhi Hong

A CHINA CAUGHT IN THE VORTEX OF CHANGE
ERIC FORBES talks to MO ZHI HONG, a new voice in contemporary fiction

MO ZHI HONG was born in Singapore but grew up in Taiwan, Canada, China, the United States and New Zealand. During the dotcom boom of the 1990s, he worked as a software developer in New York City, and later as an English-language teacher in northeast China, before recently returning to New Zealand. He is 34 years old. The Year of the Shanghai Shark (Penguin New Zealand, 2008) is his first novel, an accessible yet deceptively clever novel about a young boy’s rite of passage in the contemporary Chinese cities of Dalian and Shanghai which recently won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel (Southeast Asia and South Pacific).

Tell me something about yourself.
I was born in Singapore. My family travelled a lot when I was young, eventually ending up in New Zealand where I went to high school and university. After graduating, I moved to New York and worked for a computer software startup company for six years. In 2001 I moved to China where I spent four years, travelling and teaching English. Recently, I have returned to New Zealand and the computer software industry.

When did you know you were going to be a writer? Was it something you had always set your heart on?
I started writing while working in New York. I was doing a lot of reading at that point, and I think when you read a lot of stuff that interests you the writing itch follows naturally.

Was it difficult getting your first novel, The Year of the Shanghai Shark, published? Did you experience difficulty in finding an agent or a publisher for your first book?
From what I know, the process I went through was relatively painless. I tried approaching literary agents and was rejected by a couple before being accepted by Michael Gifkins. After that, I left things in his hands, and publication followed.

I am always interested in the kinds of books writers read during their formative years. What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up? Who are some of your literary influences?
As a teenager I read a lot of science fiction. I didn’t really start reading literary fiction seriously until I was in my twenties and mostly I read a lot of the ‘Penguin classic’-type books. The Russians, Hemingway, Greene, that sort of thing.

The inevitable question—who or what do you read if or when you take a break from writing?
My reading time is quite short these days unfortunately. I do read a bit online when I can—articles, magazines and blogs. James Fallows’s blog is one that a friend of mine recommended and that I look at when I can, and Seed magazine (a science magazine) is another. With respect to fiction, I tend to try to find things that aren’t too hefty length-wise, because of time contraints. I recently read Paula Morris’s Forbidden Cities, a collection of short stories that was recently shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Novel (Southeast Asia and South Pacific), and Saul Bellow’s The Actual, which is a slim, great read. Anything large I want to read I save for the holidays.

Could you tell me a bit about your first novel? What are some of the themes you dealt with in it? Were you conscious of these when you first set out to write the novel?
It’s a growing-up story, set in China (a lot of the action is set in 2003, quite an eventful year there), and the main theme is what effect close, external influences can have in this process of growing up. It’s a theme I definitely had in mind before I started to write, and, through it, I knew how I wanted the story to finish up. The rest of it was all figuring out how to get to the end.

Do you think more competitions or creative writing courses are imperative in increasing the number of good writers and/or improve the quality of writing?
I wouldn’t agree with ‘imperative’. But they do help in a sense I suppose. In that by throwing any spotlight at all on writers and writing it probably gives some sort of numerical participation boost to the ‘industry’ as a whole.

Do you write short stories? What do you think of the suggestion that writing short stories is training ground for novelists?
Like a lot of writers I wrote short stories exclusively when I was starting to write for the first time. It was a good way of working out the mechanics of writing in general.

What are some of your favourite contemporary novels? And why?
‘Favourite’ is a difficult word for me. However, here are some (slightly older) contemporary novels I have taken the time to reread recently: Martin Amis’s Money, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Vernor Vinge’s True Names. I first read them all a while back, and am happy to say that they are all still great reads.

Do you think that not liking literary fiction is simply a matter of preference or does it imply a lack of discernment in the reader?
More the former than the latter. Or neither. I would say that not liking literary fiction is simply a matter of being completely comfortable in your general outlook of both yourself and the world. Some people have that, some people don’t.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on my second novel. It’s a slow work in progress.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Antony LOEWENSTEIN

THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
TAN MAY LEE engages ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN in a discussion about truth and why it matters in journalism

SYDNEY-BASED ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN is the author of the best-selling book, My Israel Question, a controversial discussion of one of the most important issues of our time, as well as The Blogging Revolution, a searching examination of the ways the internet is threatening the rule of some of the planet’s most repressive governments. He actively seeks news on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, two countries everyone knows about but seldom chooses to engage.

Loewenstein’s interest in writing goes back a long time, including being an editor of his university newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, in 1997. He says, “I often liked the idea of provoking and challenging readers, especially about supposedly accepted ‘truths.’ For me, journalism should always be about shining light in the darkness and challenging the establishment, no matter who runs the joint.” This led him to becoming a journalist in 2003 and he has used various media, including the revolutionary transparent media of blogging, to get his reports out there.

“When I first started my blog in 2005,” he recalls, “it was primarily a space to discuss issues related to Israel and Palestine that wasn’t getting adequate mainstream media coverage, namely Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories and the gradual shifts in Jewish opinion around the world. These days, my site has become an important space to air views and news that should receive far more traction.” His blog has become so popular that he has lost count of the number of emails he has received. He takes his blogging very seriously, making sure his reports are credible. As in journalism, his idea of a reliable blogger is one who has “reliable sources, transparency in their methods” and is “not being a propagandist for one side or the other.”

With an endless archive of information, the World Wide Web is chaotic and unpredictable, but Loewenstein celebrates this. “Information overload happens to me all the time but it’s a generally pleasurable experience. The best journalists and writers are always the ones with the most facts and figures at their fingertips,” he states, and believes that readers can learn how to discern reliable and nonsensical web resources. “This is something that one learns over time, though this is no different to trusting certain newspapers and not others.” If in doubt, The Blogging Revolution makes a good reference.

Loewenstein thinks that the biggest misconception about the type of journalism he does is objectivity. He says, “Truth matters. When writing about Israel or Palestine, for example, the reality hits you in the face and you have to report it. Israel is an apartheid state that must be condemned (like any other country that oppresses people). This is not just my view, but the position of virtually every human rights group in the world, the United Nations, leading activists and citizens.”

His preoccupation with the Israeli state led to My Israel Question, which was a significant achievement for this journalist when he got shortlisted for the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. “It was pleasing to be shortlisted for my best-selling book, especially after so many conservative hacks and Zionist lobbyists tried to smear it.” In fact, the criticism of My Israel Question “backfired spectacularly,” as the book has gone on five reprints and two editions. The author is confident that it hasn’t run its course.

For Loewenstein, who bases his arguments on justice and humanity, Israel has been occupying Palestinian land in the name of “security” when the truth about Zionism “has always been about expansionism and conquest.

“The West has stood largely by, if not supported, the Israeli state due to historical guilt (the Holocaust) and strategic reasons. The vast majority of the media coverage of this conflict is nonsense, obsessed with a “peace process” that achieves nothing more than expanded, illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The Jewish state should behave like any other civilised nation, or, as I now believe, face sanctions, divestment and boycotts, until it grows up.”

Aside from backing Israel, Loewenstein feels the West has also fallen short in being a reliable source of news. “One of the great myths of the Western world, of course, is that our media is free and people can and do write whatever they want,” he says, before referring to Noam Chomsky who once stated “the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.”

However, the West also has its advantages. Although outspoken journalists aren’t always popular, they can escape repressive regimes found in persecuting nations. “Find Western allies to cause a noise if you are arrested or intimidated. Remember that your readers value transparency and honesty,” Loewenstein advices.

Constantly fighting against mainstream media has its setbacks and this is all familiar to Loewenstein. “Anybody who dares challenge Israeli policies should expect a barrage of abuse from the usual suspects but the internet has provided an essential portal for more global citizens to witness the reality of brutal Israeli policies against the Palestinians.” He calls himself “an atheist Jew.” He doesn’t practise Judaism, but culturally he is Jewish. As the Israel-Palestinian war has often been viewed as a Jewish-Muslim struggle, Loewenstein receives hate-mail and the occasional death threats. This fuels him though, so much so that even editors fail in censoring his work. And to him, terrorism is any violence against civilians; the only acceptable violence is “resistance to occupation is both legitimate and necessary, from Palestine to Sri Lanka.”

For his research, Loewenstein travels regularly overseas because “far too many journalists and bloggers pontificate from their offices, not realising that often they’re only having their prejudices confirmed, not challenged. Being on the ground is essential to understanding different cultures.” For My Israel Question, he spent two months in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine for research; and for The Blogging Revolution, his research on the web in repressive regimes took him to Cuba, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China.

Being a worldly journalist has certainly taught Loewenstein how to assess the state of affairs in a country. He can guess the motives of media coverage or silence. “I am opposed to media censorship. One can tell a great deal about a country from the ways in which its government treats the media. Censoring information shows a profound contempt for the general public. The internet is one way of challenging this, by publishing blogs, despite the often deep risks in doing so.”

With a multicultural background and being well aware of issues going on in other nations, what is his ideal nation? “No country is perfect, but I think, with all its faults, of which there are many—not least an underlying distaste of complexity, atrocious treatment of the indigenous peoples and occasional bursts of racist fervour—Australia’s lifestyle is pretty decent.”

TAN MAY LEE graduated from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, where she was awarded the Bonamy Dobree Scholarship for International Students to do her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language. She also trained as a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Semantics Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She is the editor of Quill magazine. Her story, “From the Roof,” was recently anthologised in Urban Odysseys: KL Stories (MPH Group Publishing, February 2009).

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Mohammed HANIF

DELICIOUSLY JUICY AND ANARCHIC
JANET TAY talks to MOHAMMED HANIF about his Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a darkly comic attempt at explaining the mysterious death of Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia ul-Haq in a 1988 plane crash

FORMER AIR FORCE PILOT turned journalist and playwright Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan, in 1965. After leaving the Pakistan Air Force Academy to pursue a career in journalism, he worked for Newsline, India Today and The Washington Post. He has written plays for the stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama and the feature film The Long Night. A graduate of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme, he is currently head of the BBC’s Urdu Service and lives in London. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the overall winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel.

Could you tell us a little about your background, such as where you were born and raised?
I was born in a village in central Pakistan. I attended a school in that village and stayed there till I turned 16.

In your article about your experience in the Pakistan Air Force Academy, you said that you come from a farming family. What led you to join the Pakistan Air Force Academy?
Boredom, I guess. There wasn’t much of an education culture in my family so there were no elders around to advise me on what to do with my life. Then I saw this Air Force recruitment advertisement in the newspaper. It looked really exotic, I applied and got in.

After you left the Air Force, you pursued a career in journalism, wrote for the theatre and television, and you are now also a novelist. Do you prefer to write journalistic pieces or fiction, or do you like them equally? Do you approach them in the same way or do you have to put on different hats when you write different genres?
I like doing journalistic pieces when I have something to report or an opinion to share. It usually works well when I travel to a new place and try to understand a new issue. With fiction you have to rely on your imagination. You have to keep going back to it in the hope that a new facet of the story will be revealed to you. You do use a different muscle when doing journalism and a different one when writing fiction.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes was longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for Europe and South Asia, and is also the overall winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. How do you feel about your book being critically acclaimed and noticed by so many book awards?
It feels nice, of course, and you hope that by getting these nominations the book will find a few more readers.

How long did you take to plan your first novel? Did you know that you would end up writing a novel like A Case of Exploding Mangoes?
I had thought about it for a very long time but the actual writing took two and a half years. I had an idea about the tone and texture of the book and I also knew how it would end. But everything else I had to figure out.

You must be attending many literary festivals now that you’ve published your first novel. Do you take to these events like a duck to water or are you still getting used to them?
They all tend to be quite different. I went to some in the U.K. and those were all full of middle-aged, middle-class, polite people. But then I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival which was more like a carnival with lots of young people and celebrity hunters thrown in. In Shanghai you hardly saw any Chinese people at the festival. Most of the people who turned up were expats. So every festival tends to have its own flavour.

Was the road to publishing your novel a difficult one? Did it take you a long time to find an agent or a publisher?
It worked out quite smoothly after I had found an agent. Within a few weeks she had found more than a dozen publishers in different countries. I guess I was lucky.

You are a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme. Do you think this helped to speed up the completion of your novel? Was being in the programme also useful for locating potential agents and publishers? What was it like having to juggle a full-time job and writing a novel as well as attending the UEA programme?
It did give me the space and time to think about my book. It also taught me how to read my own work. I used to be pretty bad at that. I am not sure if it helped me find a publisher but it did give me the confidence to look for one. I think when you are working as well as writing you are better disciplined. You kind of know that you have to try and do a little bit more in your free time. On the other hand, give me a whole free day and I won’t know what to do with it.

I liked your story about the neglected library in the Pakistan Air Force Academy where you got the keys to it from the librarian and chose books to borrow quite indiscriminately, but was nevertheless exposed to a wealth of literature by great authors—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner and Salman Rushdie. Would you say that was one of your first steps towards discovering your love for books and writing?
Yes, it was. There was definitely an element of discovery to it. And it wasn’t just the literary books that I read. I read lots of thrillers, lots of military nonfiction as well. And since I read without any guidance or any critical framework, so there was an element of guilty pleasure in that reading.

Who are your favourite authors and are any of them a great influence on your writing? What book(s) are you reading at the moment?
Too many to list here but I’ll try anyway. Truman Capote, J.G. Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, John Le Carre, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Luis Borges. These days I am reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

You were based in London for 12 years before returning to Karachi. In your article about returning to Pakistan, “Karachi Calling,” in The Guardian of June 24, 2008, you said you call yourself a ‘Karachiite’ because that’s where you “found love and work and the sea.” Are you a ‘Karachiite’ when you write and how important is identity to you as an author?
I don’t think I am much of a Karachiite when I write. I’m a man of a certain age and a certain colour, and was born into a certain faith and in a certain place. My attempt to tell stories is my attempt to find my true place in the world and not bogged down by all the identities I have mentioned above. But I am sure all these identities feed into my writing.

Authors like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi have often written on the issue of identity in their fiction and nonfiction, especially with regard to being a product of colonisation and living with prejudices and preconceptions of Indian identity in British culture. Was this an issue that you also had to grapple with when you were living in London?
I came to London when I was already a grownup, married and a professional. I did confront some of those prejudices that you mentioned but they didn’t affect me the way they affect a person who is born to Asian parents in London or moved there at a very early age.

Does place matter to you when you write? Would it be easier for you to write about Pakistan in London and vice versa?
I think writing is a struggle everywhere and your postal address doesn’t change that.

What is your writing process like? Do you have a designated place or desk, or can you write anywhere as long as you have a laptop handy?
I do have a designated desk but I hardly ever spend more than ten minutes there. I usually end up writing in cafés, airport lounges, or trains. I usually scribble in notebooks and it’s only when I have filled a few pages I move to my laptop.

Are you working on your second novel? If so, would you mind telling us briefly what it’s about?
Yes, I am, but I have barely started, so there is not much to tell. I have no idea what it’s about. I think it’s about a beautiful nurse who is in love with the wrong guy. It’s also about faith and work. I was joking with a friend the other day who asked me the same question: I said it’s The Da Vinci Code set in Karachi’s sewerage system.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 and Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issues of Quill magazine

ESSAY ... Michelle CAHILL

COMPASSION AND SOLIDARITY IN READING AND WRITING
MICHELLE CAHILL talks about what literature means to her

WHAT I REGRET IN LIFE are the books I have yet to read. Good literature takes me to new frontiers, places where my imagination and my facility for understanding the human condition deepens. Reading J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, was a profound awakening to me of the brutal potential we have within our human societies. More recently, Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma speaks to me lyrically and realistically about the stark contemporary history of China from a personal perspective. In a very different way, something resonated for me when, in my teens, I first read the poetry of Sylvia Plath. I felt a commonality of experience, an involvement that makes the intensity of the emotions Plath articulates, such as anger and despair, somehow more fragile and raw. At the same time, I was thrilled by the pyrotechnics of her language. The lucidity and originality of her images was a counterpoint to me for these dark moods. On reading Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, I could identify with the feelings of sexual repression and dislocation, though they were far more extreme than anything I had felt.

The act of reading is one of intimacy; it allows us to enter the voice of another person, to follow the map of that voice as it travels across memories, cultures, languages, and landscapes. Far from being passive, the reader breathes life into a text, transforming the characters and symbols on a page into something vibrant and fluid. The Dominican-American novelist, Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, speaks of reading as a compassionate and creative vocation where the imaginary intersects with the real. “Writers,” he says in a speech at the 2008 Sydney Writers’ Festival, “might be word magicians but we readers are the new alchemists.”

I think of compassion from a Buddhist perspective, and I think of the literary process as being characterised by a sharing, an exchange of experiences. The Buddha, who was, in his time, a social reformer, taught that compassion or karuna is the ability to understand suffering in universal terms. Through compassion we see the world as an endless caravan of sentient beings burdened with sorrow and pain. Our narrow hearts become opened, wide as the world. We are no longer alone in our subjective apprehension of disappointment or loss. Compassion is an informed emotion, one which, to a varying extent, is implicit in the tension between aesthetics and ethics. As a writer, there is an interplay for me between the language, tone, and images of a piece of work, and what it represents. This is not to say that my writing has a message, but there is a sense in which my work is developing as a process of identity, one which attempts to place myself within a syncretic framework defined by historical and cultural gaps. My journey, as a migrant writer from a hybrid background, has been to explore those gaps.

Being able to enter the margins of literature, the memories of oblivion, or the unspeakable is a way that writers and readers can exercise solidarity. Arundhati Roy achieves this so beautifully in her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things. The novel touches on the conundrum of entrenched caste oppression through the affair between Ammu and Velutha, a Hindu untouchable. Roy aligned herself with the Dalit cause by donating the proceeds from her book to the Dalit Sahitya Akademi, for translation into Malayalam. She recognised, I think, the risk of Anglophone writers and intellectuals attempting to speak for those who are marginalised, in the name of solidarity. Perhaps a literary expression of solidarity requires sensitivity to the heterogeneous nature of our collective communities. Or, we might be called to defend the rights of free speech.

There are many books I’ve yet to read. But I also regret those occasions when I postpone my writing, for the quotidian reasons of work, family or society. I write as a way of exploring my consciousness, my identity, as a way of testing my beliefs and values against my experience. Not as a way of replacing experience with something iconoclastic or controlled, but as a heightened way of thinking and feeling. There is this intensity about the process that leads me towards greater awareness and sensitivity to the detailed nuances of living. In such a space I feel more open. Writing is a search for this space. I see it as a journey of resistance, one that absorbs all the daily difficulties, insecurities and isolation of the imaginary life, one that transforms that imaginary life into something palpable and real.

Words are a source of violence to others, and ourselves, but they are also necessary to us as sentient beings. I believe that language and more specifically literature has an essential and ethical value. Writers, more so than politicians, can raise people’s awareness. By reading, we can reverse our own ignorance about some of the terrible things that are happening in our world today. One of the things that disturb me most are the human-rights abuses against the Tamil people in Sri Lanka; likewise the genocide of the Tibetan culture and people under Chinese occupation. Words can address these atrocities, inspire protest through articles and blogs. There are things we get right in language; there are things that we fail in life. Perhaps it is a small compensation that we are able to unlearn. We find imaginary and temporary recoveries in our reading and writing of literature.

POETRY

THE TWO SOULS
Michelle Cahill

My cat cries when I enter the garden, as
if I have aroused her from winter’s dream,
or as if she wants to sing to me, her name.

What do cats dream of Lord Krishna?
A coconut shell of milk, or a glittering fish?
Now her slender limbs complete their asanas.

Now her neck arches, her jaw, an elastic.
The sharp eye constricts, discerns wind
in the quivering grass from a grasshopper’s

camouflage. But there’s no mistaking Maya.
My cat rehearses the accurate lunge of her paw.
She cries, as one compelled; hungry, yet not.

Perhaps my being here, deserves an answer.
For weeks, I too, have watched her, how
she hunts. I’ve heard the moan of her catch

at dusk, which is your hour, Lord Krishna.
Then, no bird sings and only a cat with two souls
dreams of death, her stigma left on a lizard,

or on a butterfly, whatever moves towards
the shadow of meaning. As I am born of fire,
I burn, my Lord, but I sleep in your arms.

I am one Upanishad moon, on fragrant nights.
By day I am the consort of oceans, rice fields,
pale and invisible to you as the sky’s temple.

The poem first appeared in Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies, February 2009

MICHELLE CAHILL is a Goan-Anglo-Indian who writes poetry and fiction. Her collection, The Accidental Cage (Interactive Press, 2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 Judith Wright Award. Cahill edited Poetry Without Borders (Picaro, 2008) and co-edits Mascara Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Muse India, Heat, Meanjin and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. More is forthcoming in Asia Literary Review, Antipodes and Drunken Boat. Her forthcoming collection, Vishvarupa, is themed around Hindu gods, and she is completing a fiction manuscript entitled Riding Without Krishna.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Hari KUNZRU

THE REVOLUTIONARY AUTHOR
SHARON BAKAR engages in a discussion with the critically-acclaimed British novelist, HARI KUNZRU

My Revolutions is in many ways a big departure from your previous two novels not only in terms of theme but also style. Whereas The Impressionist and Transmission were highly coloured, humourous novels, this one feels much quieter, more reflective. What was behind this stylistic shift?
I wanted to see if I could control a tight, realist narrative, to hold the attention without resorting to fireworks. It was a real challenge.

The last time we talked, in Kuala Lumpur back in 2006, you were still working on the novel which you felt was your best to date, and you said that you weren’t sure how it would be received as it was so different from the previous novels. Have you been happy with the book’s reception? You were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize which is important recognition, but it must have been a disappointment to have been left off some of the other major prize shortlists? (I was certainly puzzled.)
I think if you’re given an award, it appears to be the most logical, wise and definitive assessment of your cultural importance. If you’re not given one, then awards are illogical, arbitrary and frivolous. Essentially they’re useful marketing tools, but the assessment of literary value is a much longer-term process. I think we’re just beginning to discern the important books of the seventies. As for My Revolutions, it’s been very well received here in the US—and I’ve been approached by people who participated in the armed struggle at that time, who rate the book highly. That means a lot.

Terrorism and its causes has been very much an international preoccupation since 9/11. Although My Revolutions is set in the past, it clearly has a great deal to say about the times we live in. But why did you choose to look at terrorism in the 1970s rather than in the present day? What was it that particularly drew you to that time?
I have always been interested in that period. For some years I’ve been more interested in the currents of political thought than the music and fashion. I think we’re living in a very conservative time, where alternatives to the current world order aren’t being seriously explored. So it’s instructive to look back at a time when many people were convinced the world was on the cusp of radical change.

A more personal starting point was my own sense that the world is an unjust—even a hellish place for the poor and oppressed, and my feeling that perhaps radical, even revolutionary change is necessary. Now, once you have such an idea, you start to wonder what making such a change would entail. The question of force arises. Then the question of violence. When is it legitimate to use violence in support of a political idea? What if that idea turns out to be wrong?
Against this idealism, I have a second strong sense that it’s always wrong to take an abstraction, an idea, and try to force the world to fit it. The result is always horror and misery. I got interested in the political currents of the 1960s and ’70s, partly out of sympathy for this radical openness and idealism of the era, and partly because of the monstrousness which its political failures bred.

You were born in 1969, and so can’t have very strong memories of this period yourself and yet you managed to get it so right. How did you go about researching the novel? Did you manage to talk to anyone who had been caught up in terrorist activities at that time?
The book is a strange mixture of personal experience and library research. I’ve been on many demonstrations, including some which have turned violent. I’ve participated in political meetings, and the culture of British dissent, which stretches back to the sixties and beyond. But most of my research consisted of an attempt to familiarise myself with the various political currents around at that time. I read widely—Herbert Marcuse, biographies of activists, leaflets put out by groups and sects at the time. I also went to Thailand, to write the scenes set there. I’ve met many people who played their part. They range from those whose lives have been entirely defined by actions they took in their twenties—people who have served prison sentences, or have “enjoyed the attentions of the security services” to those for whom their sixties activities had few consequences. In the UK several government ministers were once young radicals. An amusing moment came when I found a yellowing leftist newspaper with an article by a young writer “In Praise of Mao.” That writer, Jack Straw, became Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair.

You told me when we last met that you would be working on a collection of short fiction next. How far along with that are you? How does the process of writing short fiction compare with that of writing a novel?
Well, I wrote a few short stories, a couple of which have been published in The New Yorker. But now I’m back to writing a novel. They’re very different disciplines.

I heard too that you are considering writing a science fiction novel? Are you able to tell us anything about that at this stage?
It’s not the novel I was thinking of when I met you. I am writing something with a science fiction element, in that it’s set in the Mojave desert, a part of the US which has a long history of UFO encounters. It’s a large-scale story, which is perhaps more reminiscent of The Impressionist, than My Revolutions, though it’s not as slapstick in tone.

You will be at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in October 2009? Is attending festivals and promoting your work something that you actually enjoy?
I like festivals, because I get to meet people I’d never encounter otherwise. It’s also an excuse to travel, which I always enjoy.

You are an outspoken defender of freedom of expression and a critic of censorship in your work for English PEN. Do you see things getting better or worse in the UK at the moment and do you ever feel frustrated?
I’m living in New York at the moment. I’ve spent very little time in the UK during the last year. I have the impression that in small things, this is a very free city—more so than London, in some ways. I think the UK is going through a dreadful phase, and I’m happy not to be there.

What are you reading at the moment?
Recently I’ve enjoyed Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and an extraordinary memoir by a pioneering female anthropologist of the Mojave desert Indians called Carobeth Laird—the book’s called Encounter with an Angry God.

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

Suka Duka: Compassion & Solidarity

UBUD WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL 2009
This year’s theme focuses on the enduring power of the human spirit over suffering and hardship. Five writers share with TAN MAY LEE what they think of the need for solidarity and compassion during a time when the world is impacted by war between communities, climate change, poverty and other profound issues

OMAR MUSA
“Milan Kundera hints in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that compassion is an even more essential emotion than love because it allows us to empathise with our fellow human beings through joy, despair, highs and lows. These insightful thoughts struck me. I have travelled around the world and seen so much anguish and poverty—even in Australia, a first-world nation, there is abject deprivation in Aboriginal communities I worked in. I think that solidarity is the practical manifestation of compassion, a willingness to translate high ideals into reality, and band together with those who have different tongues and stories but share a common humanity.”

RIAZ HASSAN
“To me, compassion and solidarity are key values for building a humane and caring society for the full development of innate human potentials.”

WENA POON
“Genuine compassion and solidarity between East and West only arises when the races are prepared to accept a balance of power. English literature is one conduit for bilateral exchange. For too long Westerners have flocked to Asia and to places like Bali, craving exoticism and history. Today, Asians are visiting the West seeking the same thrills. Will we ever understand each other? Perhaps, but only if we let go of stereotypes, remain open-minded, and be prepared for the most unexpected of encounters. It is only through these encounters that we will realise our intellectual solidarity and, above all, our capacity for compassion.”

TOM CHO
“The writer Audrey Lorde once said: ‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.’ Lorde herself was black, a lesbian, a poet, a mother, a feminist, and much more. Her observation makes a lot of sense to me because there has been an inevitable interplay between the various facets of myself. As a result, I have always been interested in issues such as how racism and sexism interrelate. This is a tension I’ve attempted to negotiate in my book, Look Who’s Morphing, too—that tension between paying attention to specific concerns while also seeking to see the interconnectedness of things. Striving to see the interconnectedness of things seems crucial to fostering compassion and solidarity. Artistically and personally, this is very important to me: that I not only see the interconnectedness of issues in terms of my own life and identity, but am able to translate this into compassion and solidarity for others.”

USHA AKELLA
“I think it is beautiful and relevant in the turbulent times we are in. It ties in with my perception of the greater mission of poetry and all arts. Eventually, all human experience and enterprise must lead to compassion. For me, the practice of poetry accrues to that end.”

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

OneRedFlower Press Picture Book Contest

OneRedFlower Press is thrilled to announce our very first picture book writing/illustrating contest. We hope this contest will encourage authors and illustrators to tell Malaysian stories for Malaysian children.

What we’re looking for

• Original stories set in Malaysia, with Malaysian characters, and that reference and reflect Malaysian life and culture.
• Authors and illustrators who are familiar with and love picture books, and who wish to tell stories in this format.

Categories

• Picture Book comprising pictures and text: In this category a completed picture book should be submitted. It should comprise not more than 1000 words and should be fully illustrated. Authors and illustrators may work together to submit an entry to this category.
• Text manuscript for a picture book: In this category, an author may submit a manuscript for a picture book. It need not be illustrated, but it must be a complete story comprising not more than 1000 words. If an entry in this category is selected, the editors will be responsible for pairing it with a suitable illustrator.
• Textless Picture Book: This category is for picture books that tell stories without text.
  

Rules

• The contest is open to Malaysian nationals and residents only.
• The competition is open to both published and unpublished authors and illustrators. Stories and illustrations must be previously unpublished.
• There is no limit to the number of entries submitted by each writer and illustrator. Each entry must be accompanied by a separate entry form, which can be downloaded here.
• Each story, illustrated or not, should comprise not more than 1000 words, but there is no lower word limit.
• Stories should be written in either English or Bahasa Malaysia.
• For category A, text and illustrations should be laid out as if in a picture book, on any paper no smaller than A3 in size. Illustrations can be in any medium.
• For category B, your manuscript should be clearly typed or printed, using 12 point Times Roman font, on one side only of A4 paper, and double-spaced.
• For category C, illustrations should be presented on any paper no smaller than A3 in size. Illustrations may be in any medium.
• No stories or illustrations will be returned, so make sure you keep copies of your entries.
  

Prize

• Three winners will be selected for publication by OneRedFlower Press.
• The entries in all three categories will be judged collectively.
• The judges will wish to make an unbiased decision on all the entries, so please ensure that only the story title is printed on the story/illustrations.
• The closing date for all entries is 30 April 2010.
• The winners will be announced in July 2010.
  

Selection

• Publisher, Linda Tan Lingard, renowned artist and picture book author/illustrator Yusof Gajah, and OneRedFlower Press publishing editor, Daphne Lee, will select the three winners.
• The winners will be published by OneRedFlower Press.
• The publisher and editor have the right to edit the works selected for publication.
• Authors and illustrators will retain copyright of their work, with publishing rights assigned to OneRedFlower Press.
  

Entry forms

• Entry forms are available at here.
• Entries are to be sent by post to:
  

OneRedFlower Press Picture Book Contest
c/o Yusof Gajah Lingard Literary Agency Sdn Bhd
24-2 Medan Setia 2, Plaza Damansara,
Damansara Heights, 50490 Kuala Lumpur

• Faxed or emailed entries will not be accepted, and manuscripts will not be returned.

2009 Man Booker Prize WINNER

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall wins the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

THE WINNER of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced tonight, Tuesday, October 6, 2009. So, who will it be this time? Will it be a toss-up between Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) and Simon Mawer (The Glass Room)? Or will J.M. Coetzee (Summertime) pull off a literary hat-trick by being the first author to win a third Booker Prize? Or will A.S. Byatt (The Children’s Book) receive her second Booker Prize? What about Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger) and Adam Foulds (The Quickening Maze)? Get ready for some non-surprises.

ESSAY ... Wena POON

THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK!
WENA POON talks about growing up in Singapore, tussling with a heady brew of languages and dialects, and the bittersweet experience of inheriting a colonial language

WHEN BILL ASHCROFT, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s book, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Routledge, 1989), was released, the Star Wars fan in me rejoiced at such a cool title. I take up the cry here with a confident exclamation mark, as befitting a Gen-X Singaporean Chinese author writing exclusively in the English language.

In my college days, it was fashionable for postcolonial English Literature majors to mope around debating the burden of their colonial legacy and the wretched fact that they were operating in English, the language of their imperialist masters. Everybody went around quoting Caliban in The Tempest: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.”

Curse? Who ever said anything about cursing? The Brits taught me English, and I have profited by writing like mad.

In case you think that I’m one of those imperialist master-worshipping, sell out, ABC (American-Born Chinese) “bananas” (white on the inside, yellow on the outside), let me clarify: the very first words I spoke in my life, according to reputable sources, were not English, but Cantonese. Like many Singaporean Chinese kids, I grew up in a heady brew of languages and dialects: Teochew with Grandma, English with Mum and Dad, Hokkien and Cantonese with assorted in-laws. Just imagine, with our multilingual heritage, what wealth we could bring to the English language when the Empire Writes Back!

It was because of my Singapore linguistic heritage that I could write these lines in English:

The word for “adopted” in Teochew was something soft, illicit, illegal even: por, the word for “carry.” Stealthily, in the dark, someone had gone out and taken baby Mina from the arms of her real mother, and carried her away. Mummy was always the first to remind visitors that Mina was not her real daughter, that she was por lai chee, she had been carried back home, and nourished, like a nestling fallen from the top of a tree. (from “The Hair Washing Girl,” a short story in Lions in Winter)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not letting people cast us in the role of that grovelling old slave, Caliban. No, we’re X-Men—culturally fluent, linguistically competent mutants created by an accident of history, back in the 19th century when the British East India Company decided to play SimCity with a sleepy Malay fishing village and stock it full of different races, then (years later) force everybody to take Cambridge GCE “O” Level exams and study Hamlet. By doing so, the British have irreversibly welded the destiny of Malaya with that of all Commonwealth nations. Politics aside, is that so bad for the writer? The Commonwealth was the original Global Village. In today’s culturally-savvy, mixed race, Obamarama world, the Commonwealth is cool.

Why waste time sitting around cursing history and feeling guilty about writing in English? To paraphrase Cecil Rhodes, I’ve won first prize in the lottery of life as a writer: I was born in an exotic region and had many languages thrust upon me. I have so much to say and so many different ways to say it. And if you as a writer believe in this empowering notion, others will follow.

The reason why we have not yet burst upon the world stage in English literature is because we do not believe we have anything interesting to say, and some of us think that our English isn’t good enough for us to be in the business of Serious Literature. It’s true that one’s English must be uncompromisingly good, but that can be acquired through passionate consumption of books from an early age (do you think I learned English in school?), but once you master English, consider how lovely it is to be able to use English to express our mad, mixed-up Malayan world. [The word “Malaya” is deliberately used here to denote the combined literary communities of Malaysia and Singapore.]

Make no mistake: the Western world looks at the colour of our skin and our geographic location and make certain assumptions about how good our English abilities are. They are ready to pigeonhole us into that big old pigeonhole called “Third World Post-Colonial World Literature,” so that nobody would ever read our work. A big-time New York publisher rejected Lions in Winter last year, and politely recommended that my work be sent to another publisher who only does “foreign literature in English translation.” Did they notice I was already writing in English?

Remember, the odds are stacked against us, but therein lies the impetus for the Empire to Write Back!

In order for us to triumph, we must broadcast our heritage. If we read, speak, live, dream in English, then let’s do it loudly and proudly. Let’s do it beautifully, sincerely, and well. We’re not sad little Calibans, struggling to express ourselves, bereft of any identity. We’re not victims, we’re mutants.

Fellow mutants, bemoan not our special powers—remember, the world adores Wizards, not Muggles. People love X-Men, not Ordinary Humans. In each of us is a linguistic and literary destiny that is waiting to be fulfilled. Are you ready to be heard?

WENA POON is a Singapore-born writer of fiction. Her first collection of stories, Lions in Winter, published by MPH Publishing in Kuala Lumpur, was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted for the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize. She graduated magna cum laude in English Literature from Harvard University, obtained a degree from Harvard Law School, and practises law in the United States. She has a new collection of stories published recently, The Proper Care of Foxes (Ethos Press, 2009).

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

TRAVEL BOOKS OF THE WEEK

TRAVEL ... A Haphazard Trip Through Java

TOM SYKES goes on a jaunt into the heartland of Java island