Sharing Stories: Week 3 of the Singapore Writers Festival
Having pondered over how stories can be changed and made, looking into how they are shared now seems apt. More than a week had passed since the end of the Singapore Writers Festival 20222 but still, I thought it would be important for me to put down at least what’s left of my thoughts about the events down less they become words written on the surf, never to be found again.
The highlight of my week was of course, being invited to join in the second session of Curious Chimera’s A Curious Game #2: Dungeons of Manticura which is a Tabletop RPG adaptation of Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper. I wasn’t expecting anything when I first started writing about how much I had enjoyed myself during the festival but I am really thankful for how I had been able to make all these connections with all these absolutely brilliant minds. On the topic of games, this also follows from the wonderful time I had playing board games with spoken word artist Farah, whom I got to know at the Game Writing workshop, where she shared with me her experiences at the wonderfully collaborative [WIP]: Work In Progress, Writers In Process that was held at the National Gallery Singapore’s foyer. Inspired by their attempt to write a story together, she started playing Exquisite Corpse with a friend and even got invited to work with the writers that were part of the installation! Given my ruminations about gaming and its creation of a social space that can lead to the sharing of knowledge the week before, seeing it being put into practice felt amazing.
While I have written much about gaming before, I am completely new to Tabletop RPGs. As my knowledge of it was very much shaped by Stranger Things and the various PC adaptations/imitations of Dungeons and Dragons, I was expecting the session to be filled with elaborate character sheets and monster slaying. This obviously made me very curious as there wasn’t that much action in The Gatekeeper even though it did involve mythical creatures like the Medusa. By a stroke of luck, the session ended up being nothing like what I had expected as two of the attendees were children and major changes had to be made (on the fly!) to keep things age appropriate for them.
Cheeky surprise aside, I stepped away from the session thoroughly enjoying myself but also with brand new insights on The Gatekeeper, which was coincidentally the novel that first got me excited about SingLit, and how narratives can be worked with altogether. This was due to Dungeon Master Shao’s running of the game where he very skillfully invited us to think about the novel’s main themes such as marginalization by taking us on a series of (mis)adventures through our shared vision of Nuraliah’s Manticura. He even managed to weave in some uniquely Singaporean curiosities such as displaced local sages and shrines! What’s interesting is that even though most of the attendees were unfamiliar with the text, they stepped away wanting to read the text. I myself ended up reading more about tree shrines following from the way Shao had shown us how we can engage with Nuraliah’s world building.
Given how enriching my conversations with Shao and Alanna were, and how much effort is put into breathing life into the original text (they were armed with folders of research and branched scenarios), I do feel like corporate lawyer Adrian Tan’s comment at The Text Has Nine Lives when asked about what he thinks about his novel being adapted into a Tabletop RPG game (the “Norm-core” alternative to the Gatekeeper adaptation commissioned by the festival) was unjustified. At the panel which preceded the second running of the game sessions, Adrian talked about how he should be disappointed about his novel being torn apart into something else altogether but he is not because he believes that when it comes to an adaptation, the best author is the dead author. While the death of the author was much discussed by Roland Barthes in 1967, I can’t help but feel like this is a rather limiting view for when emphasizing reader reception, the possibility of the author being a reader as well should nonetheless be considered such that they cannot be said to be completely dead.
In that same panel, investment manager and poet Madeleine and her observations of how she likes to think of how her poems had been interpreted as opposed to being adapted into other mediums such as dance and the visual arts for there is lots of unpacking that needs to be done in the process was a lot more palatable. To her, seeing her work in new angles is a chance for more conversations to be had so that she could find out more about what people thought of her work and the further layers that she had never thought about.
This brings me to the Festival Gala, An(other) Language where Claudia Rankine spoke beautifully about the importance of having conversations. Therein, she laments over how conversations are increasingly regarded as battles and fights due to our desires to be right, down to how rooms, spaces and structures are organised. Instead, she emphasises the importance of having conversations with people we are not comfortable with or we will keep telling the same stories, and with people we do not agree with even, for it is crucial to develop our capacity to keep each other company.
Similarly, at Azhar Ibrahim’s expertly delivered lecture “When Man Writes About Woman”: Emancipative Ideals and Male Writers from Islands Southeast Asia, where he discusses how the consistent and persistent literary acts of male writers support the struggle for woman’s emancipation, he emphasizes the idea of how important writing is for enabling discussion such that things can be done, action taken.
In seeing how this translates into real life, Anittha’s story about her relationship with her readers at Be Like the Cool Kids: Teen Identity in Fiction is both useful and inspiring. Therein, she recounts fondly how those who have read her book would slide into her DMs and confide in her about their sexuality and I was so touched by how she would encourage and support them. While I do feel like this can be a heavy burden to shoulder, it is heart-warming to see how Anittha remains positive and ever loving. The writing process may be lonely but as her anecdote shows, putting pen to paper is ultimately about building communities and keeping in touch with one another.
So even though I try to be as interdisciplinary as I can, the word is still the path that I gravitate towards and seek comfort in when it comes to writing. To elucidate, Occupying the “If”: Embracing the Unknown which brought together writers who work across very different fields into conversation helps. In describing her writing process, Clarissa adorably claims that she thinks about her novels as friendship boxes where she brings in all aspects of herself into the work. That aside, she also talks about how writing is a useful way, and perhaps the only way, she can talk about the difficult past. While the panel had been mostly forward looking in its focus on the future till that point, when faced with the question of history, having such a diverse group of writers sat alongside one another helped. Altogether, Ang Shuang’s framing of herself as a confessional poet and also Jason’s observation of how history will always inform how you view the future as a Speculative Fiction writer made me think about how novels actually function as a mediation between past, present and future.
As we continue to make headways into the future, Merlinda Bobis’ performance lecture, Care for an Increasingly Fragmented World, where she contemplates over the festival’s theme “If” and how conditions and consequences underscores our interactions with the world, is an appropriate way for me to end off on my reflections. In asking Maki Agi Tabi, please may I pass, we are showing that we understand how reciprocity governs our relationship within our world and we are showing that we care. Delivered in-between haunting vocal runs, her emphasis on the interdependence of organic care got me thinking about what’s next. Consistent with Merlinda’s message is the topic of sustainability which frankly speaking, the festival (and Singapore in general) seems to be very much behind on given the proliferation of single-use plastics and how excessive the festival feels at times. Given that we are undeniably living at the brink of an environmental crisis, this is an important issue to write about.
On a similarly Merlinda-inspired note, perhaps we can also look towards music writing, beyond just the many collaborations between writers and musicians, and into the domain were sound itself is being notated and annotated and the impossibility of doing this with accuracy in the festival’s future. Spoken word already features prominently given that Pooja Nansi, the Festival Director for this iteration of the festival is a pioneer in that field but following from Jonathan Chan’s observation on the importance of orality to countries with a colonial background in You’re Up Next: Voices of the Future From Sing Lit, perhaps music writing is something that can be looked into in more detail as well?
Even though much time had passed, I am still feeling bitter about not being able to attend the festival closing events and a few others such as these that I was also interested in:
SWF x MHC: Literature as Learning Resources at Museums
Adapt or Die: Writing That Bends With Time
The Big and Bad: Who Rules The SEA?
As always, reach out if you would like to talk about them. So many other thoughts had already since slipped my mind rso I couldn’t be as thorough as I would have like but still, it would be nice if we could reminisce.
