Writer's Takeover, BooksActually

Writers' Takeover was held on 24 to 26 August 2015 at Books Actually for Singaporean writers to show their appreciation for Kenny and Renee’s tireless efforts promoting Singapore literature. The writers took over the bookstore for three days so Kenny and Renee could grab a short break.

This year the event was organised by Sarah Tang. I dropped by to catch Jennifer Champion typing away and Ange and Qingyi selling books. Jennifer will be introducing an online archive of Singapore poets at SWF later this year.

Girl with a Pez Dispenser

“Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know."

"The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write."

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

We Rose Up Slowly

"She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.

She said, your father stepped from the veranda to recover the recalcitrant chook, only to find the soles of his feet missing the ground, landing on thin air, and the chook drifting higher. 

He couldn’t let the chook go, but with each step he found the chook rose higher. And of course he had to follow. She told you it was like watching him walk a stairway to heaven. Your mother said, he did not appear to be flying, more like floating, like someone rising from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sea.

Your mother watched from below until your father and the chook became flecks in the sky. She rushed inside and grabbed the brass navy telescope. She saw him and the chook slowly ascending. She saw him wheeze and hold his chest. She could just see his head turning from one side to the other in wonder, marvelling at the view. He appeared to turn towards her. He was white and he coughed violently. But he did manage to stiffly turn around and, ever so slowly, raise his arm in a wave. And she believed she saw the chook, rising up slowly beside him, its neck outstretched and its scrawny beak open in a silent chicken scream. She squinted through the telescope and thought she saw the frost fur crystallising about his eyebrows and his false teeth chattering so hard the blood ran from his gums to warm his mouth. His arm stopped moving and she knew he was hard as a block of ice."

Excerpt from the title story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

Between 1998 and 2010 I did not write a single story. I was to busy pursuing my career and trying to fall in love. My enthusiasm for writing was rekindled in 2010 when I walked into Books Actually, then at Club Street, and saw a copy of Ceriph Issue Zero. I decided to submit a story written in Sydney in 1997 called We Rose Up Slowly. Much to my surprise, the story was accepted for Ceriph Issue One (Math Paper Press, 2010). This story leads my debut collection, We Rose Up Slowly.

In this story:

• As gravity leaks away, a young couple need to decide whether or not to follow her parents and rise up slowly
• The mood is sombre and elegaic
• The protagonist tries to remain grounded as the world falls apart around him.
• Everything is in a state of flux. This is the end of an era - perceptions, assumptions, core beliefs, the consensus are all up for grabs.
• Time spent with each other is precious, memories are slipping away.
• Secrets remain unspoken. What is in the silver locket? What does the silver locket represent? Note: I was thinking of the hidden secret self in Lady with the Lapdog but from a female perspective
• Do the characters change? Is there an epiphany? In the end there is only the relationships you have with the one you love - even if they don't love you as much as you love them
• There are passing references to Spam, Two Fat Ladies, goitres, a Jona Lewie song, another 80's pop song, the Roy Lichtenstein painting.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea

"She said, “You need to be shocked into seeing things as they are. I think what you need is a long bicycle ride into the sea.”

I looked at her, puzzled. What was she on about?

“It’s like an extreme cold shower. But you do it fully clothed. The resistance. The pressure. Your trousers balloon, fill up with air, and you try to trundle onwards. But your wheels sink in the sand, the water rises around your waist and your balls shrink to the size of peas. And then you end up falling sideways, plopping into the sea.”

I sat there thinking, what kind of a challenge is this?"

Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011). 

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:

• is about a young lawyer, coasting along in privilege, who is challenged to get wet to prove his love 
• examines unconscious assumptions, and how a sense of entitlement and the shallowness of one's gaze obscures self awareness, intimacy and growth
• shows the effect of this on relations with others
• contains passing references to small law firms in shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, Prada suits, Raoul cuff links, Lloyds shoes, Louboutin heels, silver charm bracelets, Benny Hill flirting with Emily Dickinson, Halal eating houses, a HDB flat in Clementi, a Hokkien Sponge Bob Square Pants, Lau Pa Sat, Billy Wilder films, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres, Amitabh Bachchan and Maggie Q, Kong Hee and Lawrence Khong, Ai Weiwei, Miroslav Tichý, Henry Darger and Beatrix Potter, Justin Bieber and Taufik Batisah, the planet Zog, and the song 无条件为你. 
• Why so many names dropped? I wanted to show the pretentious superficiality of the narrator and how this obstructs his ability to achieve deeper relations with others.

Happy Birthday

The Ragged Wood

O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images -
Would none had ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood? -
O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurty to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry -
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

William Butler Yeats
 

Other People's Cats

‘I hated the cats. The cats with their rasping, delicate coughs and furballs. Slinking about haughty and cocky, not needing anyone else at all. How could any creature be so arrogant and superior and also tongue its own butt? I spent my childhood feeding them and replenishing their cat litter. I hated them. There were just too many of them all over the place. Nettie brought home strays and kept the small, ragged, lonely ones. Once, she saw me kick a cat. She was horrified and slapped me and told me I would never grow up to be nice unless I treated cats decently.

I did not want to grow up to be nice. 

I did not share these particular thoughts with you. I expected you’d find them distasteful.’

From ‘Other People’s Cats’, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

On Saturday 29 August 2015 at Company of Cats Cafe I’ll be reading from a story included in the anthology, From the Belly of the Cat, to celebrate its new reprint. Several of Singapore’s leading, award winning and exciting writers will be reading at the event: Dave Chua, Amanda Lee Koe, JY Yang and Jemima Wei. My short story collection, We Rose Up Slowly, also features this story. 

My story, Other People’s Cats, is set in Australia with two students driving back to a small country town where they both grew up to attend the funeral of the narrator’s great Aunt Nettie.

Other People's Cats:

• is about looping back, returning home after a long time away and finding something new 
• has a narrator who behaves like a cat. He is arrogant, aloof, entitled, detached. As the story progresses he understands more about himself and his past with Nettie.
• explores some of my contradictory feelings for the small town, parochial aspects of Australia: a mixture of affection, nostalgia and embarrassment.
• touches on Singapore as a sophisticated, corporate, desirable place a long way away from the provincial, quiet Australian country town where the narrator grew up.

Come along on 29th August to Company of Cats if you are in or near Chinatown.

A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night

'“There’s this roti prata place on Kampong Bahru Road opposite SGH. It’s always open. We can go there.” Ling knows the place well. She’s been there many times and taken her murtabak beside the girls and their punters from the karaoke lounges, and eaten with the taxi drivers, police and nurses, relaxing after their shifts at the end of night.' 

From A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore)

I wrote this story during the latter half of 2014.

I started by ‘splurging’ all I felt, and knew, about the factual event at the foundation of this story - this event is well known to people living in Singapore in mid 2012. I wrote in a fast, haphazard, chaotic manner. I focussed on emotion and the action. I did not concern myself with grammar, spelling or proper sentence construction. I just wrote.

I developed the story by writing a detailed imagined backstory for fictional participants. I explored their motivation, their history and the conflicts between characters. I tried to articulate my understanding of their dreams, how these drove their actions, and how these actions changed them.

I wrote several different versions. An initial draft was written in first person POV - in a pale imitation of Rashomon. Then I decided on a third person POV. I changed the protagonist and wrote several alternate endings.

I submitted the story to a few literary magazines in early 2015 without success. 

In A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night:

• There is tension between the romantic dreamer and practical realists limited by their desire for wealth and social acceptance through conformity.
• The heroine/protagonist yearns to find an unconditional, passionate, deep, instinctual love. She refuses to accept practical realities and longs for something more.
• The tension between non Singaporeans and Singaporeans is also touched on, including PRC mainlanders who work in Singapore, and their awareness of how they are perceived by ‘the locals’. 
• The collision of different world views is played out with tragic consequences. The ‘final event’ represents a form of judgment, the intrusion of chaos and coincidence. 
• Ultimately, the romantic soul is the only one who survives: The dreamer survives reality.
• I chose the name Jia Bayou for the Lamborghini driver initially. Stephanie Ye, my brilliant editor, pointed out this was like calling a character Hamlet - a burden to heavy for any character to bear. So we tossed around Yang Liu or Liu Wenhui, and ultimately ended up with Lang Zheng based on a chinese footballer who plays for Beijing Guoan FC.
• There are passing references to Zouk, a jelly girl, Hyperdub, roti prata, a black Lamborghini Aventador, the National Museum, baozi, Boey Kim Cheng's ‘lost in the swaying sense of things’, Bai mu, a Jimmy Choo shoe, rambutan, voles, SGH, murtabak, Kent Ridge park, Tanjong Pagar Railway Station marshalling yards, the Police Cantonment Complex.
• The story is dedicated to all those who have tragically lost there life on Singapore’s roads.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea

"She talked about the ways in which everything is connected to everything; that the lungs are an extension of the air in which you live and move around. She said no person is an island. So I asked, “What are we then? Continents? Planets? Solar systems?” Later, she told me we were car parks, where the self is just a little bit of grey concrete marked out by painted white lines and we define ourselves by who we let drive in and how long they stay."

Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).

This artwork was created by Jonathan Leong for the Synaesthesia exhibition organised by Ceriph and The Substation in April 2011. Synaesthesia was a group show featuring 16 pairs of writers and visual artists, with the visual artist interpreting and creating a typographic piece out of a Singaporean writer’s poetry or microfiction, encouraging dialogue between the two mediums of expression.

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011). 

A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:

• is about a young lawyer, coasting along in privilege, who is challenged to get wet to prove his love 
• examines unconscious assumptions, and how a sense of entitlement and the shallowness of one's gaze obscures self awareness, intimacy and growth
• shows the effect of this on relations with others
• contains passing references to small law firms in shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, Prada suits, Raoul cuff links, Lloyds shoes, Louboutin heels, silver charm bracelets, Benny Hill flirting with Emily Dickinson, Halal eating houses, a HDB flat in Clementi, a Hokkien Sponge Bob Square Pants, Lau Pa Sat, Billy Wilder films, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres, Amitabh Bachchan and Maggie Q, Kong Hee and Lawrence Khong, Ai Weiwei, Miroslav Tichý, Henry Darger and Beatrix Potter, Justin Bieber and Taufik Batisah, the planet Zog, and the song 无条件为你. 
• Why so many names dropped? I wanted to show the pretentious superficiality of the narrator and how this obstructs his ability to achieve deeper relations with others.

A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang

"The café-bar-restaurant on Jalan Kemang Raya rests like an elegant fish tank above the bookstore. It has large windows through which you can look down on lounging tukang parkir as they laugh and suck on their clove cigarettes. If you sit on the retro living room ensemble in the right place at the right time and look beyond the car park, you can watch all of Kemang creep by in one long neverending traffic jam. This is the story of the origin of that traffic jam; at a time in the distant past when the traffic used to roam free and a trip from Blok M to Jalan Kemang Selatan used to take ten minutes at most."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Available online with free shipping in Singapore

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang is a story from my book,  We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2012 and published in Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books, 2013, edited by Ng Yi Sheng & Amanda Lee Koe). 

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang:

• is based on the Javanese legend of Sangkuriang
• retells this tale in a contemporary setting based on the cafe above the bookshop, Casa Kemang, in Jakarta that my wife and I try to visit whenever we are in Jakarta
• is about a young man who serves a lady in a cafe in Kemang, they touch, and she flees. A connection is made and they find out a lot about each other in a Kijang in the cafe car park.
• Laramy Lee sees a critique of 'female entrapment in society' and an exploration of sexual taboos in his reading of the story in this wonderful review of Eastern Heathens in QLRS
• is also about suppressed memory, the hidden secret self and the perils of traffic
• includes passing references to tukang parkir, clove cigarettes, an Elektra coffee machine, bengkoang masks, Marjinal, anak punks, Akira, Anthony Burgess, pengamen, Iwan fals singing “Kamu Sudah Gila”, and Pekalongan batik.

The Finger

'“Now put your finger in the hole. Which one are you willing to lose?”

Julia paused and thought about all the poking and scratching she did, all the finger licking, wagging and waving of small goodbyes. The picking of the nose, the dragging of her fingers through her hair, giving Peter the bird, holding him tight in her hands and squeezing and pumping it up and down. She remembered drawing a house on Teddy’s back and asking him to guess what it was. These things would never be the same again. She imagined life without an index, trigger or ring finger. Julia checked herself, laughed and thought: it’s only a trick, there is no risk.

Julia took the guillotine from him. Her fingers felt like sausages and she didn’t seem to be able to work the pegs.

He saw her hesitate and she let his hands guide her.

“It’s just a trick, isn’t it? Nobody has ever lost a finger... have they?”'

Excerpt from The Finger, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Available online with free shipping in Singapore

The Finger is a story from my book, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2014 and explores themes of privilege. expatriate family life and the treatment of domestic workers amidst a marital crisis.

In The Finger:

• The protagonist, Julia, is grieving for her lost relationships and is very lonely.
• There is a need for Julia to cut things off, to separate, to see things as they are if she is to achieve real change
   
• (*** Spoiler alert ***) 

My intention was to build sympathy for Julia in her conflict with her husband while keeping her domestic worker, Maria, in the background always as a tool, a slave, an object, easily manipulated because of class & money differences. Then at the end after Julia has bested her husband, to jolt the reader and have Maria reject Julia to show she is just as shallow as her husband in the way she regards Maria. 

• That is, despite making a significant decision to achieve freedom and end her relationship with her husband, she remains alone at the end of the story because she needs to move beyond self pity and privileged, self centredness. 
• She needs to cut off from her materialism and privilege not just the male in her life.
• There are passing references to one of my favourite meals: chicken and broccoli lasagna, Michael Jackson, a magic shop in Peninsular Shopping Centre, Paddington party small talk from the late 1980s, the VIX-CBOE Volatility Index, Diane Arbus’s photograph child with toy hand grenade, Billie Holliday etc.

A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang

"One day when her son was twelve years old, all three of them piled onto the family scooter to visit relatives in Bandung. But her son was difficult, laughing at passing truck drivers, squirming about, distracting her husband who was concentrating on the traffic. In hindsight, she wonders whether she should have asked her husband to stop at the side of the road while she disciplined their son. As they rode up the steep hill to Bandung, her husband suddenly swerved to avoid a bus. They were not travelling very fast but he still lost control and they all toppled from the scooter. The next thing she remembered, she was next to her son at the edge of the road, with passing motorists taking care of them. They had only minor grazes and bruises. Her husband wasn’t beside them. At first, she did not see him. Then she saw him lying on his side in the middle of the road. He was still moving a little, slowly beckoning with a loose arm in her direction. She watched several cars manage to miss him but then a large truck didn’t see him until it was too late."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly online here (free shipping in Singapore)

This story was previously published in Eastern Heathens by Ethos Books in 2013. Thanks to Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi Sheng for publishing this anthology of subverted Asian folklore.