Collaborations

  • "The Story of Body"  - Adelaide Fringe Festival (Feb 2024)

​Theatre performance of an essay, "The Story of Body", from my memoir The Story Game. 

This showcase was first publicly rehearsed at Centre 42 in Singapore, then performed at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia.

Directed and performed by Lim Shien Hian, managed by Jasmine Liu, with sound design by Bryan Leong. Thank you for taking my writing across the world!
  • "Unlock Your Block: Text and Body Rituals to Reignite Your Creativity"  - Corporeal Writing Online (Forthcoming - Oct 2024)
This upcoming workshop is a creative collaboration with the Edinburgh-based dance artist Lauren Mc Gonagle, exploring the interplay between the body/movement/physical expression, and writing/text/linguistic expression.  Participants will devise one text-based ritual and one movement-based ritual under our guidance, to help alleviate creative block.

As artists, we believe in the importance of play! This class will be an experimental, generative, and judgment-free space, in which we hope to use our words and bodies to reconnect with the inventive spirit of childhood. 

Find out more or sign up here.

Listening

One of my current writing goals is to get better at listening to others. In that spirit, I am actively conducting interviews with fellow artists whose work feels like a doorway to new insight. Wherever possible, I like these connections to happen organically so that I can feel my sense of self light up, unprompted, in response to the other.
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  • With Alvina Chamberland (author of Love the World or Get Killed Trying)
    • On not shying away from showing messiness in one's work: "I feel literature can capture the complexity, battles, and contradictions going on in our inner monologues... I find this especially important in today’s social media world where Twitter allows 240 characters, Insta-success comes from establishing a simple and consistent brand, and activists are seen as the most radical and worthy of visibility if they present themselves as 100 percent certain. The thing is though, most of us are neither simple nor consistent nor completely sure"
 
  • With Ameera Aslam (author of When You Think You Are Falling)
    • On being a religious writer in secular, Western-leaning Singapore: "In my publishing career, I just never even considered that there could be space for someone like me.  I've attended the Singapore Writers Festival several times, I've watched a bunch of plays in Singapore, and I don't think I ever heard or saw someone talk about loving God or being happily Muslim. I feel like it feels acceptable to be doubting faith, but if you are sure or settled, you are unintellectual."
 
  • With Mhani Alaoui (author of The House on Butterfly Street)
    • ​On how magic and politics are intertwined: "I think about this question a great deal, these days, especially in light of what is going on right now in the world. Much of the commentary on social media seems to me to be of a magical streak, hoping and wishing for an end to an unjust Occupation, but also an end to impunity, to injustice, to dehumanization. The comments are conjuring a better world... Magic, magical realism or magical thinking are the ultimate expression of powerlessness, but they are also holders of the possibility of a better, more just, world."

Career-building links

This is a list of all the organisations that have supported me, and given me a circle of writing friends and mentors over the last few years. I have created this section with the aim of acknowledging the path I've taken and making it as transparent as possible to others.

These community groups were all very welcoming and kind to me, a "global majority" writer who was looking to forge more networks in the English-language publishing industry. As a whole, publishing is still very much influenced by old and unequal legacies. But my hope is that with a little bravery to claim space on our parts (and occasionally, intrepid timezone-hopping), many different people's voices from around the world can be heard.

WORKSHOPS
WRITING/EDITORIAL MENTORSHIP
RESIDENCIES
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