By Toh Hsien Min

Every time I have a literary deadline, which used to be the weekly requirement to write an essay over an all-nighter in college and which has since morphed into every QLRS publication day, I choose as my soundtrack Crowded House's Special Edition Live Album, tagged on as the second disc in the 1996 release of Recurring Dream.  I've wondered why it has to be this album.  Possibly the band's infectious energy helps me "get going" and then maintain momentum.  It could be purely psychological - Brahm's Symphony no. 4 is what I put on to get to sleep, because it works, but not because it's boring.  Anything to get an edge eh?  But after the first number on Live, when Neil and team are bantering with the crowd, Neil says "yes, we're travelling in a Tarago minivan, nothing much has changed in fifteen years."

Well, after fifteen years of being able to say a similar thing as far as work is concerned... I've changed job!  Working in predictive risk analytics has been really good to me, not least for the intellectual challenge that at its best made work actually quite fun, but when the front office offered a role leading predictive machine learning work that was closer to the cliff-face of the business, there was only one answer I could give.  

It's been not even two months since my transition, but so far it's been quite a ride.  From being a true subject matter expert and knowing everyone that mattered in risk, I've had to feel my way through those first few tentative steps in a new job all over again, learning afresh how the business does things and trying to build relationships in my new organisation without the easy interaction that comes from people being in the same office and inevitably bumping coffee mugs in the pantry.  Admittedly some of my old projects have followed me and some of my old expertise remains useful, but it's quite the novel sensation to have to remind myself that there are so many things I cannot take for granted.  Oddly, that comes across as a real positive.  It's quite revivifying to not know, and to have to find out.  Whatever might have turned out had I ditched the Tarago minivan earlier?

My day job isn't the only change I have to report.  Also fifteen years ago, only a few months before I embarked on a new career in finance, QLRS welcomed to our editorial team a new editor for Criticism, Ng Wei Chian.  Over the years, she has been invaluable in leading the section in QLRS I have always thought to be the most important among all our sections for its role in helping the Singapore literary community to reflect upon its creative work.  We have only been able to cover a small fraction of the published corpus each year, and that is not a reflection of Wei Chian's efforts so much as that of the overall journal's principle that our sails should catch the wind of what the community values.  Perhaps this signals that the community doesn't actually value its own torrent of work.  Perhaps the community is motivated by solipsism, which at its worst can exhibit itself in an unquestioning faith that one's work is of more merit than that of others alongside what Linda Collins has described as the "venal, competitive process of getting your writing into the world".  Our mild-form evidence for this may be seen in the ratio of people willing to write reviews about other people's work to the requests we receive to have work reviewed.  But all that illuminates why I have personally valued Wei Chian's endeavours.  As someone who is not herself a creative writer, Wei Chian has for the last fifteen years given unconditionally and in an unambiguously unconflicted way to the community, without receiving any payoff in return.  She leaves us after this issue, to focus on work commitments that are taking up an increasing amount of her time, and we shall miss her.

Fittingly, Wei Chian's last issue with us does feature a healthy three reviews, on Koh Jee Leong's most recent book and two anthologies.  We have a decent crop of poems, although putting them together was somewhat complicated by gmail reclassing our notification emails as spam; fortunately we picked this up and managed to get through to almost everyone whose poems we wanted to use.  (If you haven't received a reply from us, please look in your spam folder, and check our email as not-spam.)  More generally, we had some issues also with hosting during production week and are thankful for the efforts of all those who brought things back up and on so that we can share with you a clutch of short stories that all seem to have an element of the off-kilter to them, two more personal essays, two interviews and Shu Hoong's hybrid piece that took some mulling to place in Extra Media.

Now to hope that there might be some change in the US in the coming week...

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