Rima, Shopping, Mongkok, Hong Kong 2005, Rolleiflex
The Turkey City Lexicon is a manual tailored for science fiction writing workshops produced during the birth of cyber punk in Texas in the '70s. 🦃😁🦃
You may find it useful ... or your stories may be dead before they’ve even hit the floor. 🦃😳🦃
I am putting together a version for Singapore and South East Asian writers.
Can you think of any suggested additions, especially those relating to Singapore & South East Asian stories? 🤪🤓🛀
Kid, Hari Raya, Jakarta Selatan, 14 June 2018
On the power of photography
“I don’t need a picture of the daughter no longer breastfeeding or the toddler pounding her fists in a cage either. There are enough photographs now. We can see the reality and the need to act.
Yes, migrant children also slept in cages during the Obama administration. Yes, there are problems with making the plight of children the primary justification for immigration justice.
But right now, photographs seem to be catalyzing political action in a way they do not often do. And it is time to be the grown-ups.
And then, demand immigration justice and foreign policies to ensure that no one—of any age—ends up in a cage.”
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, excerpt from Songs of Myself from Leaves of Grass
On 10 March 2018 the Singapore edition of Clarissa Goenawan's Rainbirds was launched at The Arts House by Math Paper Press.
Clarissa was a member of Writing the City and will be appearing on 21 July 2018 at Writing the City at Sing Lit Station at 3A Jalan Kubor. I hope to see you there - where I will be talking with Clarissa about querying agents and the publishing process.
For more details about Writing the City we have a Facebook page here that you can join
Images from a trip to Shanghai in 2004.
Goodbye Artistry and goodbye Speakeasy. It feels like the end of an era as Speakeasy and Artistry finish up in March 2018 at Speakeasy: One Last Dance. A large amount of gratitude to Pooja and Prashant for their courage and vision in running Speakeasy at Artistry over the years. Hopefully, the start of something as wonderful as Speakeasy will happen again soon.
Here are some of the highlights I managed to witness:
Speakeasy #16 George Szirtes & Ng Yi Sheng
Speakeasy #17 Banglar Migrant Worker Poets
Speakeasy #18 Valentine’s Edition 2015
Speakeasy #19 Deborah Emmanuel
Speakeasy #25 Valentine’s Edition 2016
Speakeasy #28 Antoine Cassar & David Wong
Speakeasy #29 Tania De Rozario, Alfian Sa'at & Cyril Wong
Speakeasy #30 Valentine’s Edition 2017
Speakeasy #31 Yong Shu Hoong & Will Beale
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved.
Prior permission is required for approval to use any image - please email me at jongresh [at] yahoo.com. Attribution after written authorisation should be ‘Copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. www.igloomelts.com'.
Kid, People's Park Complex, Chinatown, Singapore, 2011
“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.”
Kids, Bangkok, Thailand, 2006
“But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.”
John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye
