Beth Yahp Writes to PM

Malaysian novelist and Off the Edge fiction editor Beth Yahp writes an open letter in support of journalists to the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, on The Other Malaysian website.

I didn’t wear yellow on the march because even though I’m a sympathiser with the struggle for electoral reform, I’m also a witness to both sides of the story. But I wore my yellow ribbon of “press freedom”, proudly, even though I’m not a journalist. I’m still wearing it now, with the poignant realisation that I can only write this letter, without fear or favour, precisely because I’m not a mainstream Malaysian journalist. Of course, whether any of your editors will publish it or not is entirely a different matter.

That little scrap of ribbon, like the seemingly frail ribbon of marchers patiently weaving their way from all over the city to the Yang Di Pertuan Agong’s palace last Saturday, is symbolic of something far larger and far more important than our aching legs or bruises or our shivers caused by sitting uncomplainingly in the rain while the leaders delivered our memorandum to the King.

It symbolizes what you have encouraged us repeatedly to celebrate and embrace: our “Merdeka Spirit” of independence that causes the rakyat to come out, in spite of fear and intimidation, to show their grave concern when the state of things seems very wrong indeed. This is, despite attempts at historical revisionism, a part of our Malaysian culture.

Much needed words, but will they be listened to?

Update:

In response to the comments (below) that the letter needs to be in BM as well, Beth says (by e-mail):

hi everyone,

thanks for your comments. points taken, and yes i do agree the letter should be available in BM, and even perhaps written in the national language to start with. however, my Malay is lamentable and it would have ended up quite a different letter entirely - probably unintelligible! i'm sorry, but i can only write in english. i greatly admire writers who can cross language borders by themselves, but as for me i need a guide...

while i do think it's essential to focus on the issues raised, it's true many people are excluded from the debate by language... that's why translators are so important, and invaluable in a multi-lingual country like ours. i feel we should be sharing our skills in tackling issues like this, where it's important to get alternative information and viewpoints out to as many people as possible. everyone contributes what they can - writers write, as they have been doing, bearing witness in an exciting and heartening plethora of voices. others pass the messages on. yet others, translate them, in order to reach a wider audience.

i've put out a call for the letter to be translated - since it's something i can't do myself - and not only into malay, but chinese and tamil as well. hope someone/s can help out with this!

thanks & cheers,
beth

Beth Yahp in Penang

This should be good news for those of you in Penang desperate for a creative writing workshop. Please pass the news on:

FIRST TIME IN PENANG! Award-winning author Beth Yahp's popular creative writing workshops:
1. The Journeying Self: Travel & Identity (on travel writing and memoir), 2 full days: 15 & 22 Sept 2007
2. Creative Writing Workshops for Students (writing about People & Places), 2 four-hour workshops: 23 & 29 Sept 2007, 9 am - 1.15 pm.
For more info and registration, please contact: Michelle, jesangel@gmail.com; 016-4720911

MPH Goes Spotty!

I stumbled upon yet another local litblog a week or two ago but was sworn to secrecy until the bloggers decided that it was time to launch the site officially. Now I can link it in my sidebar and invite the rest of you to take a look.

Redwhite Spot is written by the staff of MPH Bookstores and features news of events and book reviews. Welcome to the blogosphere you guys!

(I wonder, though, if Livejournal is a good blogging platform, particularly as it can be slow to load ... and WordPress and Blogger are whizzier ...)

Meanwhile there are a couple of MPH events this weekend. The Hi-Tea for Authors is happening this afternoon at MPH 1 Utama, and since the readings planned for today aren't happening, I will be there and on the panel.

The Breakfast Club, usually held on the last Saturday of the month, has shifted this month to a Sunday! Tomorrow in MPH Bangsar Village 2 you can catch up with Crocodile Fury novelist, Beth Yahp, and Yvonne Lee, author of the hilarious collection of mile-high anecdotes: The Sky is Crazy: Tales from a Trolley Dolly.

And the younger writers among you shouldn't forget that the closing date for MPH's Search for Young Malaysian Writers is 31st August. Screw your patriotism to the sticking place, as Billy the Bard might have said.

The Journeying Self

Beth Yahp's Creative Writing Workshop will be running again in August and I've heard very good reports about it from former participants.

Here's an edited version of the information I received. If you would like me to forward the full notice to you, please send me an email - sbakar at streamyx dot com or contact Mien Lor (details below).

The Journeying Self: Travel and Identity
A creative writing workshop © Beth Yahp 2007

This practical writing course takes the journey as its starting point. It is interested in how journeys shape identity: how the self observes, reacts, transforms or even reinvents itself as we travel through space and time, and how to capture these observations, reactions etc. on the page. This course is for anyone interested in travel writing (journey narratives) and life writing (memoir) that is reflective and engaging, utilizing the skills of both fiction and personal narrative.

The course will consider both the outer and inner journeys of the self: through space, time, heart and mind. You, the traveller, will focus your seeing eye, your heart’s ear. You will share tips, techniques and practices to help you capture their fruits on paper.

The course combines short presentations, writing exercises and class workshops to explore memoir, journal, travel and life writing, and the ways these genres can intersect and enrich each other.

There will be selected readings of hit-and-run travel tales, border-crossing stories, as well as accounts of inner journeys to generate ideas for your own writing, and launch your journeying self on the creative trip of a lifetime. Basic writing craft will also be touched upon: description, character, point of view, writing emotions and states of mind.

The course will run on 2 consecutive Saturdays, 18 & 25 August 2007, from 10.00 AM - 5.30 PM (7.5 contact-hours, with lunch and tea/coffee breaks).

Cost: RM450 (inc lunch & tea breaks); RM350 fulltime students/ unemployed
Venue: To be confirmed (PJ New Town)
Pre-requisite: adults with Proficiency in English
Number of Participants: 10 – 15. For more information and registration please contact: Mien Lor: ly_mien@yahoo.com

About the Teacher
Beth Yahp, an incessant traveler, has published short fiction and travel/ memoir articles in Australia, South-east Asia and Europe. She is the award-winning author of The Crocodile Fury, a novel, as well as a libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, which won the Australian APRA award for Best Classical Composition in 2002. Beth is Fiction Editor for Off the Edge in Malaysia, where Five Arts Centre recently presented the play, That Was the Year, based on one of her short stories. She is currently undertaking her Doctorate of Creative Arts in Sydney, Australia, and will be in Malaysia for a short visit in July/ August 2007.

Bringing Characters to Life

First I'm going to rap some knuckles.

Sad it was indeed that so few people turned up for the MPH Writer's Circle* meet on Saturday even though so many people SAY that they want to write the great Malaysian novel!

We were talking fundamantals really - how do you craft great characters and make them live on the page? We had three very good speakers, one academic, two published authors and the dialogue flowed between them.

Professor Lim Chee Seng of Universiti Malaya (below) spoke more broadly about how writers bring their characters to life through names, dress, physical features and drew on the writing of Balzac, Shakespeare, Lawrence Sterne, Tolstoy ... and even the bible for his examples!

Nizam Zakaria (below) has now turned full-time writer. He reckons that characters will die if they are not close to what readers can relate to. He writes for TV and is often asked if his script is plot driven or character driven: but he finds it impossible to separate the two things out - they really go hand in hand. Some of his characters, he says, are based on aspects of himself. He also said that he describes his characters minimally, but likes to reveal his characters through what other characters say about them.

Kam Raslan (below), author of Confessions of an Old Boy, not to be out done by Professor Lim's literary references very nicely drew on examples from Jackie Collins and the film Titanic to show:

the ancient tussle between character and plot ...

Good characters create the plot and must relate to events in:

predictably unpredictable ways

and must be able to justify what they are doing. No character can ever be simply a foil for the main character.

The conversation was opened up even more when the audience joined in. It was really great too to have yet another very successful Malaysian novelist come along to the session, Beth Yahp, who talked about how her characters emerge from scraps of conversation recorded in her notebooks.

A couple of issues came up in conversation which interest me greatly:

Why don't Malaysian authors don't reflect the racial diversity of the country in their fiction, seldom creating characters from other racial backgrounds in their writing?

Should Malaysian authors use of Malaysian English in dialogue. (Prof Lim believes there is:

no need to mangle our English and make it laughable ...

while I'm pretty undecided on the issue.)

These are questions are v. much on my mind and the desire to write a thesis to explore them (and other fascinations) in an academic context grows ever stronger.


*Didn't know about it? Perhaps you should contact MPH to be put on the mailing list. (Call up the Marketing Dept @ (603) 7781 1800 or the Customer Service Hotline @ (603) 2938 3818 for more information.)

Local Writers' Manifesto?

Trawling through the Sun online the other day for the feature on Kee Thuan Chye, I realised that there were some other excellent interviews with local writers archived. Beth Yahp talks about the writer's life, how her first novel The Crocodile Fury came to be published overseas but found a long time to make it to these shores ... and about the local literary scene.

I agree wholeheartedly with what she says about where the Malaysian creative writing scene is headed:

I think just from readings that I’ve gone to and the classes that I’ve run that there’s some interesting work being done here. Real interesting work.

And I think there’s also an energy here, an enthusiasm. And it would be good to see that kind of energy and enthusiasm and the kind of work that is already being done, kind of, harnessed and see it result in something… I’m not sure what that thing is, actually.

I mean, we can’t help talking about markets and publishing, but I’ve just been encouraging everybody to self-publish. Coz, like last night, we were talking about outlets for people writing fiction — there are not that many in Malaysia for writing in English. And yet, the students have a lot of energy and are keen to write and keen for their work to be heard or read. And, so for me, you know, it’s like, ‘Okay, if you’re keen on getting read, just do something about it.’ I mean, that’s how movements get created, when people have the energy to actually start things and keep it going.

And now, with the means of production [that we have], producing is actually much easier because you can practically do it all with your little iBook. Distribution is still a problem, but there are various means of getting around that.

I think there’s a lot of potential. I think people are probably not so sure about how to go about things. And again, my comments are based on [a] very narrow experience; I haven’t actually looked at the literary scene as a whole.

But, I have a sense that the idea of writing and being a writer, and kind of leading a writing life, is so new here to most people. Most people here are at a stage where it’s a dream, you have a dream of being a writer but you really don’t know what the steps are that need to be taken to get there. And so, what we probably need is a sharing of information. And also a kind of sharing of possibilities.

And what I’m really comparing this to is when I was a student and learning the craft of writing but also kind of learning how the writing scene and the publishing scene and the small magazines scene worked. And so, we were doing things like producing work ourselves and writing stuff, and then sending it off to small magazines. And there were a lot of small magazines around. And that’s the thing that I’m asking myself. Where are the small magazines here which are run by students? You know, because they are really the training ground for new writers and also they are the means by which new writers get their work seen. Where are all the readings with open mike sections where the new writers can go up and listen to established writers and read and be heard on the same platform? Because we used to do that. Famous writers or people who were more experienced would be reading on the official list and there would always be an open mike section where students could go up. And then you have the experience of reading your stuff in public and then you get to talk to the more established writers and a connection gets made. And then you go and listen to authors speaking, um, you do writing workshops, you send your stuff out. So, there’s quite a lot of turnover with all this stuff happening…

It’s not just like kind of dreaming about it, sitting in your room by yourself, in isolation. That’s very hard! I mean, I think that’s very, very hard, to begin writing, in isolation. So, that’s the kind of stuff I would love to see happening here.

I'd love that too. We gotta get off our bums and make some of these things happen!

Point of No Return

Beth Yahp was reading from a work in progress at Universiti Malaya this evening. Just a small group, not amounting to a crowd, made it over there. The rain belting down outside didn't help.

Beth talked about how the story Point of No Return came to be written.

Last year, she returned to Malaysia after 20 years away, and saw a country which embraced modernity and westernisation, with huge development projects, and a new rhetoric of openness and anti-corruption with its new Prime Minister. On the surface, there seemed to be widespread hopefulness.

However, reading the newspapers she saw that there was a darker undercurrent. Whole pages of rape reports and high profile murder cases, as if "the media was feeding on a lurid collective psychosis".

While the men involved in these cases (ranging from young boys to grandfathers) were presented as anomolies, she says, the burden of guilt appeared to be onto the female victims: with questions asked about the way a woman dressed, or whether she had been sexually active.

Beth cited two articles which had particularly sparked her imagination. The first was an article which appeared in The Sunday Times: Vice and Virginity by Sulaiman Dufford (Feb 8th 2004) which talked about the pressures of modern life on young people and suggested that because of Malaysia's strong culture of virginity, because hormones were raging more than ever at age 18-19, and because it made economic sense, young people should be encouraged to marry in their late teen years.

The other was a Dear Doctor column which appeared in Berita Harian where a young wifer wrote in to ask for advice on dealing with her husband's premature ejaculation (the "point of no return" of the story's title). The letter was answered in an extremely detailed and open way - surprising in a society where sex is little talked about in public. (But we see these contradictions all the time, don't we? The Gardner & Wife letter I pasted up the other day also illustrates this nicely.)

So Beth's story deals with teenage sex, a topic generally swept under the carpet, frankly and head on. She read a longish extract - beautifully crafted - of the story in progress which she says keeps growing.

A relevant story. A story about issues which people in Malaysia really face. A story which will for sure stir debate.

And that's what great writing is all about.