Connect with Writers Connect

Writers - here's somewhere you might like to send your writing.

Writers Connect is an online literary arts portal designed to connect writers to writers and writers to readers. It is owned and managed by Word Forward Limited, a non-profit literary arts company based in Singapore.

It welcomes quality creative works in all genres (fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, book reviews, essays, and interviews) from all corners of the world but works on and about Asia are especially welcome. Submission guidelines can be found here.

I don't know how this online publication slipped beneath my radar (it could well just be a case of me being as confused as the proverbial cuttlefish ... yes, I knew about WordForward the organisation, knew they had regular gatherings for writers, but hadn't realised they had got this together!).

Anyway, I would like to point you in the direction of some excellent fiction, some of it written by folks who are friends of this blog. The story of the week this time is Elmo Jayawardena's Tsunami. (You may remember this author from his visit to KL last year.) Other contributors you may know include local mat salleh Yusof Martin and Singaporean journalist and blogger Zafar Anjum. More stories here.

I also need to play catch-up with the poetry, interviews and reviews (the latest of which is Zafar's discussion of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin.)

Elmo's Story

I'm just a very ordinary man who wrote a book and they called me a novelist after that.

said award-winning Sri Lankan author Elmo Jayawardena very modestly at the MPH Breakfast club last Saturday.

I finished Elmo's first novel, Sam's Story a couple of day's back and very much enjoyed it. The story is narrated by a young man called Sam, who is mentally slow and illiterate, and who finds employ as a domestic servant with a family at "the river house". Alternating chapters unravel the story of Sam's growing up in a village in the rural Kalutera district where the poverty is absolute, and the only jobs to be had are tapping rubber or digging sand ... and for the young men, joining the Sri Lankan army to fight the on-going civil war.

The novel is largely based on real life. There actually is a Sam and he still works for Elmo (who "drives areobblanes" for a living) and his family, and many of the incidents described in the book with such humour and affection really did happen. (Elmo took out his family photos to show me Sam and the house by the river before the event began.)

The background about Sam's family and childhood which real Sam was unable to tell him, he filled in from his own experiences of growing up dirt poor, often going without food, and from his charity work with the poor.

There is reality in the real sense of it ... when a person is poor they don't have hope.

In the book, Sam's voice is convincingly realised and his quirky way of seeing the world acquires it's own logic. (Why have a statue in the garden of a boy pissing into the fish pond when he can do it just as well? Why pack away the Christmas tree when it will only need to be brought out again next year? Why isn't the dog his when he loves it most?)

He's aware of the ironies too. The family dog gets the best medical treatment and a stream of visitors when he gets food poisoning. Sam's mother has to walk miles and wait hours for medical treatment, and is prescribed medicine and an improved diet which they can't afford. His master's family have two children who are educated overseas and who barely think about the civil war. Sam's brothers are conscripted, and one killed while the other becomes a deserter.

The war enters the household in the form of conversations between the master and his friends over drinks - everyone expounds on what should be done, but no-one really has answers. Meanwhile in the kitchen, there is enmity between Sam and the two servants Janet and Leandro. Sam doesn't know what the war is about but he knows that the Tamils are supposed to be the enemy of the Sinhalese.

But as the Masters wife (hey, this is my friend Dil!) says, sadly shaking her head each soldier in the conflict is some mother's son and really it is as simple as that.

As Elmo said at MPH :

We hate because we do not know them, and we will not know them because we hate.

I find it really interesting that Elmo the author is so easily able to slip inside another skin, and see himself too through that person's eyes. (He isn't always complimentary about Elmo the character!) The ending of the novel, thank goodness, is fiction.

The real Sam is unable to comprehend that he has become the hero of a book and that a lot of people travel to meet him, but in the pages of this book he becomes the perfect vehicle to explore the effects of poverty and war on the the ordinary Sri Lankan citizen.

Award Winners and Joget in June

It was a huge turnout for Readings@Seksan yesterday despite the other exciting things going on in town (KLue's Urbanscapes, and the poetry slam later the same evening at KLPAC) and despite serious traffic disruptions caused by the trimming of trees in the area.

As you can see - our readers shared quite a number of literary awards between them!

Sri Lankan author Elmo Jayawardena started us off reading a (very) short extract from Sam's Story - his Graetian Prize winning novel told from the viewpoint of a mentally-retarded young man who came to work in Elmo's household. He had to hurry away after the reading to get back to the airport where he is training pilots on the flight simulator!

Most of us know Lydia Teh as a non-fiction writer, and indeed she recently won the Star-Popular award in that category for her hilarious take on Malaysian life Honk If You're Malaysian. But today she read a short story she had written, a very beautiful and magical tale called Moon Scars which was originally published in Yellow Post.

Award-winning journalist Jacqueline Ann Surin read from her new collection of her columns Shape of a Pocket, one of several opinion pieces that had been "spiked" i.e rejected by her editor for being too controversial.

The piece opens with a personal story about how she has to argue to get the words "No religion" on her MyKad, in a country where all citizens are expected to be neatly pigeonholed by religious belief and race. She then goes on to talk about the difficulties faced by Muslim Malaysians in changing their religion if they so wish, taking in, along the way, of course, the famous Lina Joy case.

The second half of the afternoon was nicely bracketed with some traditional music with attitude from the lads of Dewangga Sakti. Was it only me who wanted to get up and joget?

I really would like musical interludes like this to become a regular feature, so if you are a (good!) musician and would like to play for us, unplugged, get in touch with me.

I was so glad that Shahriza Hussein felt well enough to come along. I've just started reading his historical novel Legacy and am greatly impressed with its ability to transport me back to (19th Perak. The research is impeccable and the writing very good indeed. (Will let you know more about it when I'm further along.) Shahriza did correct me with a twinkle in his eye when I said (based on the press coverage so far) that this was a novel partly based on his own family history. It is entirely fiction, he declares. Which is fine because we really only need to enjoy the book!

(I still have some copies for sale for just RM30 - let me know if you want one.)

Koo Yew Lie did the reading for Shahriza as he had a bad cough. She read an extract from the beginning where British Resident J.W.W. Birch and his party are taking a break (complete with china teapot!) on a journey up the Perak River in a small flotilla of three boats. The next day they will be in the territory of a certain Datuk Maharaja Lela ... (Malaysian readers know what comes next!)

Two little asides here :

1) Yew Lie was a friend I made when she came over to the U.K. college (Marjons) where I was teaching, and until yesterday we hadn't seen each other for 18 years. She's now an associate professor at UKM.

2) It's interesting, isn't it that both Shahriza's book and Chew-Siah Tei's Little Hut of Leaping Fishes open at virtually the same point of time (Autumn, 1875)?

I was extremely grateful to Clarissa Tan for making this long journey up by bus especially for this event. She is an amazing young writer and a couple of my friends afterwards confessed that they had felt themselves tearing up as she read her piece, The Visit, that won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize : the absolute honesty of the piece touched hearts.

Clarissa says that she is now at work on her first novel and I am really look forward to seeing that.

Star-Popular Award runner-up in the fiction category for Confessions of An Old Boy: The Dato Hamid Adventures, Kam Raslan has been continuing the stories each month on the pages of Off the Edge. He had us all laughing again at Hamid's musings on the Tin Mine disco (which was at the KL Hilton and the place to hang out in the '80's).

Kam is soon off to the Byron Bay Writer's Festival, sponsored partly by the Australian High Commission. (Bless 'em.) The world needs to meet Dato Hamid.

It was a great afternoon. I really thank all who came and cheered on writers, all who read their work, all who played wonderful music, all who helped set up and clear up. I particularly thank Seksan for use of his lovely space, and Shahril Nizam for designing our blog poster.

Our next Readings@Seksan will be July 26th, and the line up (I hope!) will include Fahmi Fadzil and Azmyl Yunor performing their famous Wayang Buku.

Elmo - The Everyday Hero

Yes, a writer, who started off by writing between flights. Watch the simplicity again. "An apple (the fruit not the brand), a laptop, a do not disturb sign," was all it took to get him going. He'd write anywhere in the world. Unlike many other writers, he wasn't bound by the constraints of the study or the desk. Work was done wherever his flight took him, and where he has been, recognition has followed him. The former Singapore Airlines Captain, current pilot trainer for Sri Lankan Airlines-cum-award-winning writer - and as he reminds me, a grandfather too as well - has been pronounced an 'Everyday Hero', for when he wasn't writing or flying, he was steering the Association for Lighting a Candle (AFLAC) in Sri Lanka, a charity that has drawn the attention, funds and time of people from all over the world.

Deepika Shetty catches up with Capt. Elmo Jayawardena who will be appearing at MPH's Breakfast Club in Bangsar Village 1 at 11a.m. tomorrow and at Seksan's in the afternoon.

Singapore Stories Part 2

A second dose of stories from the Singapore Writer's Festival.

Yesterday, I talked about out blogging panel. I realised just how skimpy I'd been when I read Ivan's account and he's recorded pretty much everything everyone said! The guy is nothing if not thorough.

Sharon essentially explained that she had a compulsion to write and blogging was her outlet. She often had to tell herself to stop posting (and occasionally feed her husband, she says).

How true!

I first met Captain Elmo Jayawardena (below) at the Ubud Writer's Festival last year, and he's one of the people who most gives me warm fuzzies of the heart.

Not only an award winning novelist (Sam's Story, based on the life of one of his servants, took Sri Lanka's Graetian prize in 2001) but also a great humanitarian, raising funds for tsunami victims and the destitute through his Association for Lighting a Candle (AFLAC). He has also been a Singapore Airlines pilot, and will be in KL soon running pilot training courses for Air Asia (at which point I promise I shall nab him for one literary event or another here!)

I went along to his session with Deepika in which he talked about his books and the project he's working on at the moment (a novel with a crow's eye view of humanity! He's even threatened to have a Sharon crow in it), and his new collection of short stories Rainbows in Braille, which was launched later in the afternoon. (In typical Elmo style, all proceeds from the sale go to charity).

Zafar writes wonderfully about Elmo and the launch, and if you aren't in love with the man before you reach the end of the post, I don't know what's wrong with you!

After that, I did a quick dash over to catch the last quarter of an hour or so of Malaysian laureate A. Samad Said's poetry reading with his son Az Samad playing jazz guitar. Excellent stuff, and I was sad that I hadn't been there for the whole thing. (That's the thing about writers festivals, you have to keep making tough choices when things you want to see are scheduled against other things you want to see!)

I did though catch a full session with Pak Samad (above and below) on the Sunday. He talked (among other things) about his connection to Singapore, his early influences, and the politics of being a writer in Malaysia. (I've bought a copy of his most famous work, Salina, in Malay, so wish me luck!)

I also went along to hear Czech Jewish writer Arnost Lustig (below), who has written about his time in the concentration camps. (He survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.)

I learned about the nature of man. Not everything, but enough ...

he said.

And told us a couple of very moving stories, about his early life and time in concentration camps.

One about how his friend stepped in to save his life when he was about to be shot for stealing bread, and another about the necessity "to become a man" even in the shadow of the camps with the ever present threat of death.

It could always have been much worse ...

he said, adding that the main quality in life is luck, and you also need to have luck as a writer to find editors and publishers. And publishers it seems are:

...the most brutal and cruel people.

So that was my Singapore Writers' Festival. As in the famous blind men and elephant story, I only experienced a little piece of it. I am still sad that I wasn't able to be there for the whole thing, but thoroughly enjoyed the sessions I did go to. The whole thing was very well organized and the programme wonderfully varied so as to provide for all literary tastes and language groups.

There were of course the writers who got away. I spotted Jung Chang in a white suit disappearing down a corridor and almost gave chase. I wonder if that thoughtful young man standing by the staircase was Su Tong? I was too shy to ask.