Article in The Star

I'm in today's The Star newspaper, talking about the burgeoning (slam/performance) poetry scene in KL. Also interviewed are Nicholas Wong, Priya Kulasegaran and Pat Low. The article, by Syarifah S. Alia, is here.

And Kenny Mah gave me a Thinking Blogger Award, which I'll respond to later!

Happy Blogiversary To Me!

Yay! :)

Starting this blog was life-changing.

Over the last year, I have had hits: playing a role in increasing awareness about a pressing issue which I've become afraid to continue talking about, being asked to edit an anthology and being invited to literary events and festivals as a result of this blog, more fan mail than I used to get, a much bigger presence as a writer, hits every day from all over the world from people Googling my full name. Spelt correctly. :)

And misses: Internet fights, weird emails that I never quite know how to respond to, stalking, insane accusations made by people who by default had to admit they stalked me by making them, hits everday from Googling perverts and other nuisances.

And mixed blessings: Having my family find this blog (hello there!) resulted not in disaster but in them actually becoming more supportive and accepting of my career. Somewhat, anyway.

All in a year's work! :)

On Unintentionally Channeling Farah Fawcett

Because of my photo in I-S Magazine, which is basically a black and white version of this kindergarten-coloured specimen you see to your left here (or somewhere at the top of the browser, if --shame on you! -- you use Internet Explorer), I finally have a good excuse to explain my Farah Fawcett hairstyle.

As anyone who has met me during the last 8 years or so will know (okay, unless I happened to be wearing it up that day/night), I most certainly do have ridiculous hair. But it's not Farah Fawcett-style. It's small-of-back to ass-length good Indian girl hair, i.e. typical oppressed woman ishstyle! It's so long that I can cut it myself... and no one notices that I've taken five inches off unless I say so. I used to be able to sit on it, until I realised what a distraction all that length was. People claim to be able to recognize me from the hair alone. People have asked for spools of it to keep (creepy, yes). I have friends who hate it. I have friends who love it. My mother pesters me with suggestions of how to best trim and modernize it, ahem. My father, each time he sees me rolling off a plane with it all knotted up, asks with an expression of dismay if I finally did cut it off. For such a tiny person, I have stupidly long hair. I am the quintessential little girl with big hair.

Now, if you'll excuse the very shallow turn of things, here's the story of how that self-portrait came about. One night I was having an incredibly boring conversation with someone. So incredibly boring that I didn't even care how rude it was to pull out my camera and say to her, "Go on, I'm listening. Just multitasking!" and proceeded to cam-whore, snapping without aim or ambition. I happened to take a shot with my arm resting behind my head. And I happened to break the convo by exclaiming, "Ohmigod! I love this one!". In the image, however, especially once edited, it appeared as though my hair jutted upward like the curl of a wave. The little yellow bit is my elbow. The self-portrait itself was purely accidental, and I do kind of like the way my hair looks in it, although not really for keeps.

Here's a good example of what my hair actually looks like: that's me in last Sunday's edition of The Star newspaper talking to Brian Castro at the KL Lit Fest. And another: with the awesome poet and dear friend Nicholas Wong in Telok Ayer Street, Singapore. (Okay, I confess, I really like this pic so please have a looksie. Teeheehee!)

I-S Magazine and How To Cook A Wolf

I-S Magazine, the Singaporean lifestyle/entertainment weekly, chose to feature "How To Cook A Wolf", the two-day women's poetry session held on April 13 and 14, in an interesting way: by featuring a poem I wrote inspired by the event's theme ("How To Eat A Wolf", mine's called, since I got it confused!) and a pic of me (but why's my hair been cropped in such a funny way? :P ). The article is in their arts section, under "Scene Stealer", the issue for the week starting April 13.

I'm still green enough to have gotten excited to see that The Substation had clipped it and posted it on their bulletin board, but what really rocked my boat was to go to Possibly Evil Coffee Franchise after last night's event and see people reading I-S. Those surreal moments have been more frequent lately. That thrilling, stolen anonymity: the knowing that if s/he just looked up, they might recognize me, but oh so wonderfully, don't!

Thanks, I-S!

Will update with pics, etc! Off for day two's event, after which I'll write about the whole thing.

(Updated)

Firstly, a big thank you to Kenny and Karen of Books Actually -- from a business sense, what I probably love most about their enterprise is how young they are. How open to ideas, voices, different ways of doing things. They decided to take a chance on me not once but twice (by stocking the old chappy and by inviting me to read at HTCAW), and hopefully it pays off for us both.

I feel honoured to have read at How To Cook A Wolf, mainly because of the amount of amazing writing to be heard! It made me wish that one could have a KL audience for a Singapore reading and vice versa. In KL, you get onstage and get treated like a rockstar; in Singapore, the audience is so terribly polite, a challenge of a different sort, a different sort of dynamic. It's so easy, now, to get heard and be applauded in KL, which leads not only to the plus point that is the number of opportunities available to anyone, but also to a pretty indiscriminating set of standards. I know some will disagree, but as a reader, viewer and organizer, I know I speak not only for myself when I say that it's highly unlikely that anyone who wants to read will be unable to find a venue or event to take them on, simply because it isn't in the best interests of a budding scene to stultify its options so early on. That's a good thing, of course. But once in awhile it's nice to see a sense of discernment, something which KL may not be ready for yet, and I say that with no intention of snideness.

And I have to put in a nice word for the nice treatment -- a rose for each poet at The Substation! As someone who, sadly, has never received flowers except at performances, I'm just a sucker for them. Sigh...

Blasts From The Past

*Puthandu valthukkal!* (That would be Happy Tamil New Year)

In the last few weeks, old poems have emerged anew in places I had forgotten they had headed to.

Poetry Chain, the Indian journal, featured five old ones in a special issue on Chennai poets. This was such a long-ago submission that I had to email back and ask what the poems actually were.

From The Web, a women's political poetry anthology that was years in the works, is also finally out, and features one poem from me. I wrote "Tigerlily" when I was 16, and remember almost nothing about it except the last two lines on which it ended:

You can crush all my bones

but you can't break my heart.

How To Cook A Wolf: A Two-Step Women's Poetry Session

Please click to enlarge.


HOW TO COOK A WOLF: a two-step women's poetry session

"But even the wolf, temporarily appeased, cannot live on bread alone." - MFK Fisher

How To Cook A Wolf is a two-part collective poetry session celebrating the women poets of our time. The technique of fashioning mere words into the linguistic art known as poetry is very similar to the culinary craft of food preparation – a skill commonly associated with the female – requiring both creative and stark virtuosity. (Its namesake is a book of the same title written by the respected female author, MFK Fisher, published in 1942, How To Cook A Wolf – about the clever art of milking scarce supplies in producing palatable [even delectable!] meals during the World War II food shortage.)

Co-organized by BooksActually and The Substation,this is the first time a literary assembly honouring women poets has been organized in Singapore.


Part I
Venue: The Substation.
Date: 13th April 2007, Friday
Time: 7.30pm
Admission: Donations are welcome.
Wine will be served.

Line-up:
Sharanya Manivannan
Angeline Yap
Kristina Tom
Koh Tsin Yen
Rachel Au-Yong
Teng Qian Xi

& Heng Siok Tian (as read by Jasmine Seah)


Part II
Venue: BooksActually. 125A Telok Ayer Street.
Date: 14th April 2007, Saturday
Time: 2.30pm
Admission: Free
Tea will be served.

Line-up:
Laksmi Pamutjak
Lee Tzu Pheng
Leong Liew Geok
Madeleine Lee
Ho Poh Fun
Hazel Lim
Heather Chi
Jasmine Seah

This Is Not A Classifieds Ad

Seeking:
* Female
* Indian or South Asian/descent (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and British Indian Ocean Territory -- according to Wiki!)
* age between 18 and 24

Email me - sharanya(dot)manivannan(at)gmail(dot)com

I have a goooooooood reason. I really, really do.

Learning To Say No

Can be harder than the process of getting to that place where one actually has the choice, the power, to.

I want to tell you I'm full of regret, but to stay closer to the truth would be to tell you instead that I'm full of curiosity as to what's around the next corner.

I will not be going to the festival in Chicago this month. I am so grateful to the folks who are organizing it for giving me the chance to, particularly Ramona Gupta, who sourced me out from the wilderness of Myspace and seemed to go out of her way to try and get me there. I am enormously grateful to those who responded to my call for sponsorship -- particularly Enfiniti Productions and Antares -- with a generousity that I didn't know a plea as selfish as mine could elicit. I'm sure that the festival will be a blast, and I know that among the people I would have met there, there would certainly have been a few who could have set my career on a different trajectory. Logistics and instinct -- if I wasn't the sort of person who followed my heart, it would be a bloody kamikaze, this no.

But I am. And so it isn't.

Literati 4Wah! in Singapore this Saturday

The first of two events I'm doing in Singapore this month. Click to enlarge.

Recap: KL International Litfest, 1st Cross-Causeway Slam, Poetry at NBT

The Kuala Lumpur International Literary Festival 2007 - March 28th, 29th, 30th

I don't feel like bitching, so I'll just tell you what the highlights were for me.

Sumithra Rahubadde: I thought this Sri Lankan writer was such an unpretentious person, someone who seems incredibly strong and uncompromising despite her soft-spoken and almost simple manner (working as a civil servant while writing subversive prose, dealing with office sexual harassment when she was widowed -- what guts!). I was enormously touched when I spoke to her after her lecture and she said, gasping and grasping me with both hands, "You are _____'s granddaughter? He was one of the people who really fought for the country, to not separate our country." The burning question: why is her writing not available in English?

Brian Castro: I cannot wait to get my hands on his novel Shanghai Dancing (they had no copies - shame!)! What a wonderful, wonderful writer... I am so glad I went to his session, during which he read from the novel and had a discussion with Eddin Khoo. The discussion was as interesting as the excerpt, and I was really inspired, because there are some similarities between the novel I am writing and the autobiographical fiction that is Shanghai Dancing.

[Update, sourced from my notebook and forgotten earlier] Choice cuts: "Everybody's writing about their families these days, prostituting their grandmothers." - Khoo. "William Faulkner said you should sell your grandmother for a story" - Castro. I agree with both!

Benjamin Zephaniah: Mad props, full stop! I thought his performance at Marmalade on Thursday was better than his Friday night show at The Annexe. He seemed much more in his element during the former.

The 1st Cross-Causeway Poetry Slam - March 31st

I came in second place, losing to Singaporean Marc Nair by just 0.04 points! :) It was a really fun event, although I expected to hate it, because I'm not a very competitive person (kinda signed up without fully realising what it was!). Eleven contestants in all battled it out at Seksan's -- it was the first time I've been to a proper slam, the kind with (yes, Lara) finger-snapping and foot-stomping! I like Pooja Nansi's work, and thought she was the best among the Singaporean contestants. And Fynn Jamal has the most beautiful pet python!

Poetry at No Black Tie - April 1st

Was very very nice, I think. Cyril Wong and his partner Sheo were absolute gems to come up from Singapore for less than 24 hours just for this reading, and for treating Nick and I to dinner. I was reminded yet again how much I admire Cyril's poems to Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai performance artist who sings to corpses, and reminded yet again how I wish I had heard of her before reading his poems, because then I would, unquestionably, have written to/for/about her too. Bernice Chauly's new poems, written just prior to her mother's death only days ago, were particularly strong and beautiful. I owe alot to Jerome Kugan -- not just professionally but also as a friend -- and I am glad he has rekindled the urge to create and share poetry. His chapbook Imaginary Poems is great, and he tells me he's thinking of putting out a new one every month (that would be his managing editor persona kicking in!). Last night's reading, featuring these three fine poets and yours truly, was the inaugural event in a monthly poetry series -- the first Sunday of every month is officially now Poetry Night at No Black Tie.