ON THE COUCH WITH ... Wena POON

SINGAPOREAN WRITER WENA POON is the refreshing new voice who is bringing Asian writing to a new place. She was born in Singapore, and has lived in Hong Kong and the U.S. She read literature and law at Harvard University, and is currently a deal lawyer in San Francisco, California. Her début, Lions in Winter (MPH Publishing, December 2007), is a compilation of short stories, some of which have been previously published in journals and anthologies around Asia. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been widely anthologised and published in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Lions in Winter was recently longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Poon recently spoke to Eric Forbes and Tan May Lee in an e-mail interview from San Francisco, California.

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How did you find out about the longlist?
My husband registered my name on “Google News Tracker” to alert me of any new articles about me. He then Blackberry’d me and said “FYI.” And I was like, Huh? What’s this?

What was the first thing you did when you found out you were longlisted?
I bought a bottle of Prosecco and some peach juice and mixed two Bellinis by myself to celebrate. Yes, it’s a disgusting drink, but I like it because it makes me think of sunshine and Venice.

What do you think of the other titles on the longlist? Are you familiar with any of them?
I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s work because she captures the pathos and pain of Indians coming to America, in the same way I try to do with my stories about Singaporean Chinese people. I haven’t read Unaccustomed Earth, but I saw Mira Nair’s movie of The Namesake. That movie captures some of the themes I tried to bring out in Lions in Winter, especially the scene of the new Indian bride in a brutal, snowy East Coast environment, struggling to bring laundry to the laundromat and shivering in her sari. I can totally identify with that! The longlist has introduced me to many writers and their work. I am keen to read Tubal R. Cain’s Dandaula and Other African Tales (Nigeria) and the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera’s Ask the Posts of the House (New Zealand). I loved Whale Rider the movie and would like to read more of Ihimaera. You can tell I love films—I cannot talk about literature without talking about films; to me they’re inextricably linked.

How familiar are you with the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award?
I’ve heard of it, as it is usually enumerated in an awards list in some famous author’s biography, but the editors of MPH Publishing told me it is famous for the large cash prize. Frankly, I would be thrilled to get any prize, cash or no cash, for my work. I’ve struggled for many years to get respect for my fiction, so to be recognised internationally alongside famous authors really means a lot to me.

What is the difference between writing short stories and full-length novels?
Writing a book of short stories is like taking a stroll through a zoo. You look into every cage and see the different animals, you pass through “Tropical Zone” and “Arctic Zone” and have all kinds of different experiences, but they are still related by the confines of a zoo. Writing a novel is like spending a lot of quality time with one particular dog and taking it on a long hike. In order for me to write a novel, I have to really love the material (or this hypothetical “dog”), as it takes a longer time. I didn’t write a novel for 13 years, and the first one I completed (I started out a few that I abandoned) was Biophilia in 2005 and I wrote its sequel, Cryptic Tonic, in 2007. It’s remarkable that I finished them both but that’s because I am propelled to completion by the sheer fun of the story. There’s also the pragmatic aspect. I started out by writing novels as a teenager, instead of short stories. Nobody took me seriously or wanted to publish them. Then someone told me it’s easier to get publishers to publish short stories because publishers don’t want to take a huge financial risk by bringing out a whole novel on an unknown writer. That turned out to be true in my case.

Short stories appear to be getting more popular. Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Anne Enright published their short-story collections after their award-winning novels. What are your thoughts on this?
Actually Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, came only after her first short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was published and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. This may prove my theory that it’s easier to début with a collection of shorts than début with a novel. I have a theory that short stories will indeed experience a comeback because of our escalatingly fast-paced lifestyle. For example, I never write an email that is longer than the Blackberry screen. A 10-minute phone call, to busy lawyers, is a huge investment of time, and we learn to get a lot of information through in those 10 minutes. Youtube movies are just a few minutes long. Our attention span is being crammed into smaller and more compact units. Short stories fit into our dense and abbreviated lifestyle. How many of us started reading a novel that we never finished? In order for busy readers to invest time in reading a whole long novel, it better be good—a gripping pageturner.

What is your personal favourite short story or short-story collection?
Most of the fiction I love are linked to the movies. If a story is very good and the characters come alive for the reader, the reader will be able to envision the movie right away and the material-hungry studios will definitely exploit it. Therefore, I love the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, who’s one of those authors that translate into film easily. I’m biased because he wrote about Singapore and I love reading about early Singapore through the viewpoint of British authors. I love the films of Alfred Hitchcock, many of which were based on short stories, such as The Birds (based on a short by another one of my favourite authors, Daphne du Maurier) and Rear Window (based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich). But the best short story of all—actually a one-act play by Noël Coward—that was ever made into a film was David Lean’s Brief Encounter. I adore that story. It’s about how two people accidentally meeting, have a brief experience that lasts a lifetime. For me, that is the quintessence of a short story—fleeting, but infinitely memorable.

The six-book shortlist for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award will be announced in mid-July 2008