Coming Up!

Here's a quick guide to some of the good things on in KL in the near future, and which I won't get to see as I will be away. First of all, do remember the poetry slam organised for tomorrow, and featuring an impressive line-up which includes Chris Mooney-Singh, Bani Haykkal (B-Quartet), Priya K, Hazlan Zakaria, Dizzy Firefly, the slammers of the night (Illya, Afi, Ayue, Cipta, Fynn, Arzumy, Abdul M.I. Abdullah, Zain Azrai).... and maybe YOU because even if you don't want to be part of the slam, you can take a turn at the mic to read any new work you have. Then there is the KL Alternative Bookfair at Central Market Annexe, held in conjunction with Art for Grabs on Saturday 9th and Sunday 10 May, 12pm to 8pm. There is a programme up on Facebook, with several talks and quite a number of book launches listed. Do check it out - last year the event was great fun and everyone who went managed to snag free books, and I expect this year will be even better. I like the sound of Sisters In Islam's event on the Sunday afternoon celebrating the freedom to read by performing poetry and excerpts from books, plays, scripts, etc that have been banned in many countries throughout history. Chuah Guat Eng's novel Echoes of Silence was the first full-length novel in English by a Malaysian woman, when it first appeared in 1994. Now the book has been republished and in a session called Anatomizing the Colonised Mind, on Saturday, 23 May at Silverfish Books, Guat will read from, and discuss her novel.

Enjoying Dog Hotpot in Bangsar

Yesterday was another of those literary Saturdays in Bangsar.

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MPH's Breakfast Club at Bangsar Village 2 brought together the authors of two recently published collections of short stories, Wena Poon (above) and Chuah Guat Eng (below).

I was very excited to meet Wena at last, after reading her work and exchanging emails with her, and I thoroughly enjoyed her reading of Dog Hotpot, which also appears in Silverfish New Writing 7. She really brought out all the nuances and little touches of irony in this story about cultural values. (Wonder if there's scope for an audiobook? Wena clearly enjoys acting out her characters.)

< After that, Guat read from her story Two Pretty Men - one of my favourites from The Old House and we had a pretty interesting discussion about the gender of some of the characters, where their short stories come from :

... a special place (said Wena) ...

Guat told us that she had had a lot of pleasure writing her stories, although in many ways writing short stories is harder than writing a novel, and she often works on them over a long period of time. She also talked about the little seeds that had started the story she had been reading to us (the title of a nursery rhyme, a puppy which had come into her garden and died in a pool of blood though there was no mark on his body ...).

Wena added her thoughts about writing from a distance - being overseas, she said, enabled her to look back on Singapore more objectively, and she quoted Peter Carey saying that moving to New York had enabled him to write about Australia.

Both seemed quite amused when recalling the difficulty some local readers have with accepting that a writer isn't always putting their own life on the page in fiction, thinking everything in the stories must also have happened to the readers.

(This has happened to me too when a "friend" of mine blabbed the rumour far and wide that one of my characters was actually an ex-boyfriend who broke my heart!)


We didn't actually have dog hotpot for breakfast, but thanks MPH for the curry puffs and sandwiches!

An Outrageous Burst of DIY Creativity

Amir Muhammad's latest project New Malaysian Essays is being launched at Central Market Annexe tomorrow night (16th). I can personally vouch for the book (which contains essays by Brian Yap, Aminuddin Mahmud, Burhan Baki, Saharil Hasrin Sanin, Amir Muhammad and Sonia Randhawa) being mighty good brain food. Amir has tempting glimpses of each of the essays on his blog, and Brian Yap's piece The Trouble With Malaysia can also be read (footnotes and all) in this months issue of Off the Edge. The Sun is also publishing extracts.

A whole lot of other good indie stuff will be launched and sold including Chuah Guat Eng's new collection of short stories The Old House (which I will be writing about later), Bernice Chauly's The Book of Sins, Sufian Abas' collection of disposable (?) pop fiction in Malay Kasut Biru Rubina, and new albums by Jerome Kugan (at last!), Hardesh Singh and the amazing Mia Palancia.

I think Amir (who is proving himself quite remarkably adept at marketing his products) is the very first Malaysian publisher to create a video trailer for a book, and I do hope this is the start of a new trend :



Earlier in the day, Kata-Suara is holding readings at featuring Aisyah Baharudin, Azman Ismail, Azmyl Yunor, Bernice Chauly, Pyan Habib, Razali Endun and Usratika. The event starts at 5 p.m. and the venue is RA Fine Arts, 6 Jalan Aman, off Jalan Tun Razak. (Map here.)

Those with sufficient energy and commitment and a ticket for the LRT should be able to make both events, but do make sure you have deep pockets to buy books and CD's at Amir's bash.

A Post on Kindness and Criticism Written in Horribly Clashing Metaphors

I love having my friend Guat Chuah Eng back and now in the literary conversation in our Malaysian blogosphere, and now she's turning over the stones and debating whether there is a future for Malaysian literature in English.

While the larger question might now seem passe (and surely can only be answered with a *yawn* of course lah!? seeing as how a number of Malaysian authors are producing work of quality both locally and on the world stage) some of the other questions she is asking are very pertinent.

And I've nothing better to do at the moment (no need to cook dinner tonight) so I'm up for a good argue.

In her latest post she writes:

I found particularly depressing the comments on our aspiring writers' poor command of the English language and their lack of writing skills. Depressing, not because it is untrue or because it is all too true, but because--dear oh dear--haven't we been through all this before?

Where, I ask myself, would Amos Tutuola's classic, The Palmwine Drinkard, be today if the editor who received his manuscript had returned it to him for corrections? Where, indeed, would e. e. cummings be if his editor had told him he shouldn't write until he had learned how to punctuate? Wasn't it in 1963, if not earlier, that Raja Rao said, "We cannot write like the English. We should not." (Should there be a question mark here? And where should it be placed? Damned if I know--or care!) And right here in Malaysia, as long ago as 1976, novelist Lloyd Fernando, then Head of the English Department, University of Malaya, reminded us that for local literature to develop, "for some time at least, it would be more profitable for critics and scholars to confine themselves to the less spectacular role of recorders concerned to nurture, rather than critics giving evidence of their perception and integrity."

Are Malaysian writers in English so thin on the ground? Or is the ground in fact thick with writers dead and dying under the weight of hopes dashed and dreams shattered by their critics?

The balance between encouragement and criticism is crucial in a writing community as I've argued before. (My famous fishtank metaphor!) And I've been concerned with the question of when and how to criticise emergent writers since I started the blog and I'm only too aware (as someone who's been a beginning fiction writer, and as a writing teacher) that they need a safety zone and that confidence can be destroyed with harsh criticism too early on.

The dilemma is that (to use a botanical metaphor) with too much early criticism, the tender little plant will wilt and possibly die. But at the same time, without the right kind of criticism at the right point, the plant will grow straggly and no-one will want to look at it.

Where exactly does that right point for criticism come? The best first criticism is from a writing teacher and fellow writers. Possibly from friends you can trust. It should be kind and supportive and stress the positives and help you see the direction you might move your work in. It shouldn't jump up and down on your work wearing jackboots and waving it's own aren't-I-clever flag. (World War II metaphor.)

But I would say that it comes when your work is put between the covers of a book and start to charge the public for it, you have to be ready for critical open season. If you aren't, sit on your manuscript, hide it in a drawer, keep it in a file on the computer that only you know the password for. Being published is the point of no turning back.

This post I wrote on "the gentle cycle" (washing metaphor) says it all I think, and I hope that if you write, you will take a moment to go back to it.

I haven't commented on this blog about the stories in some collections by local writers I've read, and one reason is that I feel that new writers need space to try things out and yes, make their mistakes.

(As a little aside. The Silverfish collection I edited got reviewed very fairly, I thought, in the NST. Just one of the contributors got totally slammed in the piece. She happened to be the youngest writer and one I thought was promising ... but not yet arrived. I never told her about the review and I don't think she saw it. I just didn't want her to be discouraged. Now, years on, I can laugh about it with her because she is proving to be a very successful and in demand writer. Would she have given up if she'd seen the review? Or was she made of far tougher stuff from the beginning?)

I did review the Silverfish collection News From Home the other day (and honestly with trepidation) largely because it was interesting to see how Mr. Raman's new venture was working. Raman (who asked if I would review the book on my blog) felt the comments were fair, but I hope that I haven't stepped too hard on the toes of the writers in question who all have promise ... but like all writers are on a journey.

A good editor will not put out work that is rough around the edges, and will gatekeep so that the writers who are published are ready for public scrutiny and are in that sense protected. And the editor as I've said before has a responsibility not to put crap work before a public paying good cash for their copy. (Remember - a locally produced book generally costs only a bit less than an imported mass market paperback of a top international author which the reader could be enjoying instead!)

Now as a book-buyer, I don't want to see books with a multitude of typos and tense mistakes. It isn't necessary. And this is how painful the reader finds it.

Now about the two authors, Guat mentions:

E.E Cummings' lack of capitalisation (in his poetry though, not his own name) was a deliberate stylistic choice, much like Cormac McCarthy's annoying trickiness with apostrophes.

I love Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard which is written in West African pidgin English as I have loved other books, comics and poems written in that dialect. A good editor will see immediately whether it does or does not work.

So encouragment and criticism - where should one end, the other begin?

I think you do everything possible to encourage the writer, but only publish, in the end, the very best.

Over to you, Guat.

Postscript:

I've put together an index of all my posts about building a writing community in Malaysia, which you can find here.

Asian Story Arcs Revisited

Though you all may be sick of it (haha I don't care!) this Asian story arc thing is nagging at me. So much so, that I decided to enlist the help of a Malaysian literati friend or two I think should know better than me. (And if anywhere is "truly Asia", and thus in the cross currents of story telling traditions, surely Malaysia holds the title ... cue musical interlude).

Well, I mentioned the debate to my friend Chuah Guat Eng the other day when we met for coffee at D'lish. I hadn't seen her for a very long time, as she's been locked away to get her PhD with UKM finished. She was my creative writing guru at one point several years ago, and remained a writing buddy after that (I have happy memories of scribbling away over a bottle of wine at her house). She is also the author of a novel, Echoes of Silence, which cleverly subverts the detective novel genre.

She was so interested in the idea of the different story arcs that she even started a blog so that she could debate the idea!

According to Nury Vittachi, western fiction is based on the "3-act arc" of the Greek drama. The implication is that Asian narratives do not. So Vittachi brings to our attention Indian epics, like the Ramayana or the Mahabharata with "its long list of interlocking tales". He asserts that "the conventions, the structure, the format, are quite different" from western narratives. And he concludes, "To me, Asian narratives are like charm bracelets. Individual items dangle independently and have their own beauty. But a thread links them all together to create a single, larger unified item of beauty." I have two problems with Vittachi's observations.

Go read how she argues the point!

Getting Started

I very much enjoyed Lydia's post about how she got started as a writer and thought I'd respond. I did try to leave a comment over there, but it somehow disappeared into the ether. And anyway I'd rather like to run with the ball!

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to write. At school I had this great running rivalry with my best friend Helen to see which of us could write the best composition for English classes. I ignored all other homework completely to put aside time to write because my poem or story had to be the best. We both wrote well above and beyond the call of duty, pages and pages where one or two would have sufficed. Helen always got a slightly higher grade though (and is now a published poet).

I still have my English exercise books (below) filled with my scribblings. My writing was frequently melodramatic and wonderfully florid! And always full of spelling errors. (Mild dyslexia?) It's pretty embarrassing to read them now.

I also started a diary in 1969 and kept it right up to the time I got married in 1990. (Too much honest writing left lying around probably wasn't a very good idea ... particularly as a diary is always a space for a good sound off! Keeping an online password protected journal was a substitute later on.)

But I digress.

I got my first poems published at 13 in the Coventry Evening Telegraph and my first boyfriend, a gardener called Francis, was one of my fans ... although on the two occasions we actually met up for a date, I was so much taller than him that I walked in the gutter while he walked on the pavement!

Although I'd always told myself one day I'd love to write. I didn't start writing seriously until I was in my 40's. I guess that's a good point at which to evaluate your life since it hits you that the sand is slipping through the hour glass (speeding up, even) and if you don't do the things you want to do now, you're probably never gonna.

But there was always the fear - would I measure up or end up disappointing myself in an area that meant so much to me? My favourite writers like Annie Proulx wagged their fingers at me saying "You'll never measure up." Spoilsports!

I also didn't know how to "get into" writing.

So when I saw an ad for a correspondence course with The Open College for the Arts, I decided to give it a go. I found the materials they sent very useful, and the tutor I was assigned to gave me excellent feedback. But I didn't finish the course because:

First of all, I lost my nerve several units in when there was a big jump from simple exercises involving description to suddenly writing a complete short story. (How the hell do I think up a plot, I thought, in the days before I realised that plots can just happen onto paper if you let them.) Looking back, I think the course was aimed at more experienced writers.

Secondly, because this was in the days before the internet had really taken off (and OCA was a particularly slow adopter!), each assignment had to be mailed to the UK (with an international reply coupon inside it for the postage), and then there was a long wait for it to come back to me. My tutor felt so far away!

Thirdly, only my tutor saw my assignment and (afraid to show my efforts to those close to me)
I had no chance to see how other readers reacted to it. I felt so lonely!

Much more helpful to me was a book I found in a bookshop in London: Writing for Self-Discovery: A Personal Guide to Creative Writing by Myra Schneider and John Killick which is a fantastic collection of exercises for exploring the material from your own life and experience. (The book appears to be currently out of print, but you can buy it from Abebooks for as little as US$1.)

I went crazy, filling notebook after notebook with recollection and thoughts and fiction and dreams. I never knew I had so much inside that wanted to break free.

There were many other useful books, and I should say more about these, but this one was my catalyst, my turning point.

I signed up with Writers Village which offers a whole range of short courses for one very reasonable joining fee and found friends and support. The course material is online, and the work posted to a bulletin board and feedback given by your coursemates rather than a tutor. The atmosphere was supportive and friendly, I made some writing buddies across the world (Most of the participants are from the US.) and the first two short stories I had published grew from assignments I posted there.

I also did a creative writing course organised by author Chuah Guat Eng at Silverfish. This was the first time I'd written with others and my - what a heady experience it turned out to be - with moments of real magic when we read back our pieces. Much much better than scribbling away lonely and alone!

But the teacher/trainer in me said ... hey ho, I want to encourage others to write and think I can do this better ... and that's why and how my own course for beginners was born. (And it sounds as if Lydia is thinking along these lines too ... good for her!)

I've just finished one run of it at the British Council and hope that the next will be in November, when I finish the project I'm currently involved with and have had a chance to rediscover my Mat Salleh roots in the UK for a few weeks.

There are lots of threads here I might pick up on another day.

But like Lydia I'd love to know, what got YOU writing?