“Statistics show that states with stricter gun laws and fewer guns have less overall gun violence than those with more lax laws and more guns. Hemenway, who has done extensive research on guns, said it boils down to access to weapons.”
Singapore
Sing Lit Station 2017
Sing Lit Station is a literary community and registered charity based in Singapore. We're really proud of what we achieved in 2017.
In 2017 we helped bring readers and writers together running over 40 free creative writing poetry and prose workshops with migrant workers, dedicated poets and writers, with members of the public at Toa Payoh Library and The Arts House, and with writers when we ran prose & poetry manuscript bootcamps at our office in Jalan Kubor.
We also ran poetry and prose workshops with some of Singapore's finest writers & educators in over 15 secondary schools in Singapore, reaching over 1,600 students and selling over 100 books of Singapore literature.
We ran a translation retreat with Literature Across Frontiers in Malaysia, CampLit - a creative writing holiday program for students, and Sing Lit Body Slam with GrappleMax Dojo combining poetry & professional wrestling. We launched a new prize to promote South East Asian poetry, The Hawker Prize. And we continue to run the things we usually do like SingPoWriMo and poetry.sg.
But we need your help so we can continue to support your Singapore literary community: PLEASE DONATE HERE. We can't continue to do the things we do unless we have your generous support.
And do let us know your thoughts on how we can improve and what you'd like to see in the future at Sing Lit Station.
Singapore Writers Festival 2017 - my first few days
Best New Short Stories Vol 3 & Gull Between Heaven & Earth
On 28 October 2017, Epigram Books launched Best New Singapore Short Stories, Volume 3, edited by Cyril Wong with Jason Erik Lundberg as Series Editor at Kinokuniya. I was very pleased to have a story, Walking Backwards Up Bukit Timah Hill, published in the anthology and another story, The Model, included in the Honourable Mentions. A big hats off to Cyril for reading so many stories & to Jason for having the vision and determination to start the series in Singapore some 4 years ago.
Also, Epigram Books launched Boey Kim Cheng's new novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth. Kim Cheng's Between Stations reprint has sold out!
Sing Lit Body Slam - Even more Poetry & Pro Wrestling from 7 Oct 2017
On 6 and 7 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
And here is the aesthetic case for the event from Hamid Roslan.
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
Sing Lit Body Slam - More Poetry & Pro Wrestling
On 6 and 7 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
And here is the aesthetic case for the event from Hamid Roslan.
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
Sing Lit Body Slam - Poetry & Pro Wrestling
On 6 and 7 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
And here is the aesthetic case for the event from Hamid Roslan.
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
Sing Lit Body Slam - Before the Event
On 6 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
Haresh Sharma at Writing the City
The October Writing the City will be a Playwriting Workshop with Haresh Sharma, presented by Writing the City and the NLB SG Author Series, and will take place on 21 Oct 2017 at 2pm at Toa Payoh Library.
Haresh Sharma has been the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage since 1990. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2015. To date, he has written more than 100 plays which have been staged in over 20 cities. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for 'N' and 'O' Levels.
Haresh has 13 publications of his plays, including Trilogy, Shorts 1, Shorts 2 and Don't Forget to Remember Me. His works have been translated into Malay, Mandarin, Greek and Italian. He was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls at the 2007, 2008 and 2009 The Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards respectively.
He is the first non-American to be awarded the prestigious Goldberg Master Playwright by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2011. In 2014, he was conferred the Southeast Asian Writers (or S.E.A. Write) Award (Singapore), which recognises and honours literary excellence in the ASEAN region.
Singapore Unbound Fellowship
"The goal of the Singapore Unbound Fellowship is to cultivate literary talent and encourage literary achievement by immersing a promising Singaporean author in the cultural life of New York City."
On 19 July at Artistry, the inaugural winner of the Fellowship was announced.
Congratulations to emerging playwright Nur Sabrina binte Dzulkifli. We were treated to the performance of a scene from her play "This is not a Draft".
It was lovely to hear some other emerging writers such as Teo Xiao Ting, one of the six poets chosen for the 2017 Sing Lit Station Poetry Manuscript Bootcamp, and Nuraliah Norasid, winner of the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize for The Gatekeeper.
Larger images are here.
Pink Dot 2017 - Part Two
Pink Dot 2017 - Part One
Compare and contrast to Pink Dot in 2009.