The Places You Will Go

An Unusual Connection

By DAPHNE LEE

FORGOTTEN Letters is an anthology of poems, letters and essays by popular and critically acclaimed dyslexic writers. It is collected and produced by RASP Books (www.r-a-s-p.co.uk), an independent publishing initiative that specialises in promoting and publishing dyslexic writers and aims to “to (re)discover and promote writers who write differently”, “raise awareness of dyslexia” and explore dyslexia as a difference, not as a problem.

In an interview conducted via Gtalk, anthology editor Naomi Folb said, “I think that people assume you have a really hard time and that you find everything very difficult, whereas I don't see dyslexia in this way. For me it is just a way of thinking.”

Folb, 32, herself dyslexic, is currently based in Århus, Denmark, where she is a PhD student, researching dyslexia.

“For my degree, I have interviewed writers and journalists, and also mathematicians and engineers because I want to know how dyslexia is ‘used’ in different professions and how dyslexics perceive dyslexia, in different contexts,” she said, adding that she notices that what dyslexics have in common is the ability to “generate ideas quickly” and “not follow conventions”.

Folb said the work that will be published in Forgotten Letters reflects the way dyslexics communicate ideas and emotions through words. She said, “It is the book I always wished I could have had. It was the book that didn't exist and because of that, I didn't know I was not ‘less’.”

Cartoon Diary

From StarMag

Real life incidents, narrated with humour and lots of cartoons, make up a series of books that has touched a chord among the kids.

IN 2009, Time magazine named 39-year-old children’s book author Jeff Kinney one of the world’s 100 most influential people. That’s because children hang on his every word, or at least every word from the “pen” of Greg Heffley, the wimpy hero of the series that has taken the middle-grade reading world by storm.

Kinney has written four Wimpy Kid books in total since 2007 and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid film was released this year (it’s currently showing in local cinemas nationwide).

Entertaining Emily

From StarMag

Her picture books offer everything from peep holes and postcards to wordplay and humour. No child would ever be bored with one!

EMILY Gravett must be the most prolific picture book creator in existence. In five years, the 37-year-old Brighton-native has produced 10 books – nine wholly by her, the 10th, a collaboration with Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo and many other much-beloved picture books).

Picture Book of the Month: The Blacker the Berry

October 2009

The Blacker the Berry
Author: Joyce Carol Thomas
Illustrator: Floyd Cooper
Publisher: Amistad, 32 pages
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-0060253752
Malaysians, taught, from the cradle, to value a fair complexion, may be surprised to encounter a celebration of dark skin. Different shades of African-American skin are lusciously and sensuously described by Joyce Carol Thomas, and then rendered just as sumptuously by Floyd Cooper's illustrations, making it abundantly clear that bitter chocolate is as beautiful as vanilla. The Blacker the Berry won the 2009 Coretta Scott King Book Award. This book was part of What a Wonderful World: A Multicultural Journey Through Text and Pictures, held at Kinokuniya Bookstore Suria KLCC, Kuala Lumpur from 1st-31st October, 2009.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination: An Interview with Shaun Tan

From StarMag

Interview by DAPHNE LEE

MOST people tend to associate picture books with simple stories, illustrated with simple, brightly coloured pictures. Of course, those with a more intimate knowledge of this medium of storytelling know that there is more to picture books than just pretty pictures that simply offer a visual description of a straightforward, basic text.

Picture books may deal with complex and difficult themes and subject matter, and this may be reflected in either the text or the art, or both.

Shaun Tan is a picture book artist whose work is definitely more complex than what the average person might expect to find in a alphabet or counting book. I know people who started collecting picture books after they read one of Tan's. The Melbourne-based 35-year-old started his career drawing for science fiction and horror novels. His art appears in picture books written by John Marsden (The Rabbits) and Gary Crew (The Viewer and Memorial) and he also illustrates his own books (The Red Tree, The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia).

Tan's art is striking and detailed, rather surreal in content and style. The richly tinted, deeply unsettling images in The Red Tree manage to convey the idea of that small glimmer of hope that keeps many people going through the worst of times.

In The Arrival, the pictures are sepia toned, alternating between panaromic views and personal studies that relate the story of a man as he attempts to make a living and home in a new land.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is a collection of 15 short ... I hesitate to even call them stories. Some seem like fragments that have no beginning or end. Most tantalise the reader, offering glimpses into strange worlds or strange views of this world.

Tan's father hails from Ipoh, Perak, and met his Australian wife when he was an engineering student in an Australian university. Tan was born in Perth and visited Malaysia when he was a boy but doesn't remember much of it.

Apart from writing and painting, he has worked as a theatre designer, and did concept art for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E.

An Interview with Shih-Li Kow

From StarMag

A local author who was shortlisted on Monday for a prestigious international literary prize shares aspects of her writing life.

IN 2007, Silverfish Books published News from Home, a collection of short stories by three Malaysians, Chua Kok Yee, Rumaizah Abu Bakar, and Shih-Li Kow.

The writers were participants of the Silverfish Writing Programme, and had been chosen to contribute to the anthology because they showed promise and commitment. Each had a different style of storytelling, but Kow’s stories stood out as the most original and interesting, and also because her voice was the most confident and natural of the three.

A year later, Kow published Ripples and Other Stories, a collection of her own, to critical acclaim locally. On Monday, that acclaim became international when Ripples was shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The winner of the ‚35,000 (RM175,000) prize will be announced on Sept 30, at the culmination of the annual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, which begins on Sept 16.

The other titles shortlisted are An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower; Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy; Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw; and The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

In an e-mail interview, Kow, 40, talks about being shortlisted and other aspects of her life as a writer.

Kampung Man

Stories by DAPHNE LEE

From StarMag

A Briton encapsulates his love for the local landscape and the enchantment of rural living in a beautifully illustrated book.

IT all started more than 40 years ago, when, as a young man, Iain Buchanan came to Malaysia and Singapore to lecture on geography.

According to Buchanan, he was a "callow academic" with minimal local knowledge. He thinks his students must have found him annoying - "presuming to teach them about their own country". However, Buchanan fell in love with Malaysia, especially its landscape, the memory of which he took with him when he left for his land of birth, Britain.

Poetic License

I interviewed the poet Bernice Chauly several months ago for StarMag and the article is out today. Unfortunately, it's a much shorter version than the original piece I submitted - a real shame as Chauly's answers would, I believe, interest anyone who enjoys her work and also anyone interested in creative writing and in the local literary scene. However, you can read the full, unedited interview below:

Bernice Chauly

Interview by DAPHNE LEE

SOME of her poems make me feel uncomfortable,“ said a friend of mine to whom I’d given Bernice Chauly’s poetry collection, Book of Sins.

She didn’t mean that the poems were bad, simply that she felt that they revealed things about her - secret, painful things that she never thought any one else would share let alone understand.

Chauly’s poems are deeply personal. They may or may not be autobiographical in detail, but the stories they tell feel like they were shaped by real, not simply imagined emotions, and of course memories. They are Chauly’s emotions, memories and stories, but they also speak to and for women the world over. They are familiar tales, but, filtered through the voice of an individual, they defy the cliches of everyday experience and become significant, compelling and unique.

This is Chauly’s second collection of poems. Her first, going there and coming back, appeared in 1997. More than a decade between books isn’t surprising when you consider what a full and busy life Chauly leads. She juggles motherhood, teaching (at the School of Performance and Media in Sunway University College), writing, organising spoken word events and the occasional acting gig. No wonder she often looks tense and tired.

Chauly supports her life’s passions (creative writing, photography and her two daughters) by taking on more practical assignments. Although romantic, she’s too smart and too responsible and loving a parent to consider going the route of the tortured, starving artist. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t suffer for her art. In fact, as a woman and a mother, I found many of her poems painfully touching. I can only imagine what she must have felt writing them.

She confirms that “Some were easier to write than others …. It’s cathartic most of the time, a release of many sorts and levels. It's like ‘Ok, I've written about it, now its done, I've let it go, I can move on".

Of course, Chauly is not the first writer whose work is in some way a result of conflict. Many of the world’s finest artists led turbulent lives or lived during turbulent times. Chauly talks about Aristotle's Poetics, which “discusses tragedy as one of the fundamental cores of poetry.” She says, “Artists are inspired by their own conflicts and tragedies - whether it rages within the depths of their hearts or whether it rages on the streets. Conflict creates drama, if there is no conflict, there is no drama, no story.”

Axel Scheffler: The Interview

My interview with the illustrator of The Gruffalo and other books by Julia Donaldson could not be reproduced in full in StarMag today because of the lack of space (books don't get many pages and I think that's not just in Malaysia).

Anyway, it's just as well that this blog exists.

Tales of the Unexpected

"In an attempt to change the tide of Malay fiction, Sufian Abas' debut collection of stories boasts simple language and tales that will appeal to the average Malaysian."

That was the standfirst for my interview with Sufian (StarMag, 30th March, 2008), but I'm not sure about the "average Malaysian" bit. I think the stories in Kasut Biru Rubina might lead most average Malaysians to conclude that Sufian Abas is a madman. They wouldn't be entirely wrong. However, insanity is, I've always believed, an asset when it comes to creating art.

Sufian's stories are modern art, urban fairytales that shock, inspire and amuse. They've got me thinking that I might write in Malay myself - the sort of Malay that I speak to my children's nanny and the bloke who sells goreng pisang down the road from my flat. However, please, don't hold your breath waiting for my first Malay short story ...

Kasut Biru Rubina is available at MPH Bookstores, Borders Bookstore and Silverfish Books.