By Toh Hsien Min

In two weeks' time, I will arrive at a personal milestone.  It is not only the release of a book, albeit that has occurred more infrequently than might have been expected in the life of this journal.  It's a collection of sonnets that has been cooking on the grill for twenty-five years now, and for a decade after my last solo book - so long indeed that I've misremembered when its start point was.  It's been in my head for the longest time that the book starting germinating in 2003, but once I went back to look at my manuscript files I see that I was wrong; the first Word document I have standing apart as a distinct manuscript is dated 26 November 2001, just three months after the inaugural issue of QLRS.  

It's not just personal history that has been forgotten.  In 2001, that first manuscript contained 61 sonnets, a sense of a structure, in seven parts, and also a sense of how much more remained to be written.  There were two people who stalked that first manuscript, wrestling with each other like perhaps Caroline Bingley and Elizabeth Bennet.  Only one of those sonnets has survived in the existing book, and only traces of one person, if one knows where to look.  Two years on, the manuscript that leapt to the forefront of my recall because it was bound as a small pocket book had 75 poems and a somewhat looser structure.  By 2005 it had grown to 106.  My hazy memory has a recollection of there being 150 at one point, but the file record doesn't suggest that; by 2012 it had shrunk back down to 75 poems and my Darwinian instincts in manuscript development ("kill the weakest poems") had started taking hold.  By 2015 the population was down to 55, and the manuscript had clearly lost its original structure and had started to take on another.  By December 2017, when Tse Hao Guang was writing in Axon Journal about "two contemporary books of sonnets by Singaporeans, the only published examples to my knowledge", namely Payday Loans by Jee Leong Koh and Sonnets from the Singlish by Joshua Ip, he felt obliged to footnote his awareness of a mythical other manuscript; at that point it was 48 sonnets long.

What These Things Represent is now just 32 sonnets long.  I often think of writing through the analogy of cooking (as has already been seen in this editorial), and in the last year with the title falling into place it has felt like the blend of egg, coconut cream, gula melaka and pandan leaf has finally snapped together, the egg protein coagulation that transforms a watery mixture into a rich, spreadable custard happening in an instant.  While making kaya, this is a magical moment.  While nursing a book through to completion, this feels more like the flipside of having strained one's biceps to lactic acid exhaustion.  This project started out as a young man's book, in more ways than one.  Along the way, successively older and wiser perspectives have put their hand on the spatula.  The pair of hands that will hold the finished book in a fortnight's time hopes that it is one to take pride in, and yet these restless hands are already looking forward to the next project.  Perhaps it might come out in 2046.

The current issue has also had a more difficult gestation than most.  Usually in the first month of the quarter, I try to avoid any form of travel, but this time out the various demands of my work schedule has meant that I was away for the whole first half of October, and had to adjust some of our otherwise clockwork activities to get the issue out.  It's been worthwhile though; this has been a beautifully proportioned issue.  The harvest of poems has been bountiful, the short stories are solid, and the criticism has been back to rude health.  And even if you might not agree with our editorial choices, it's only three months to the next release.

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