By Toh Hsien Min

One of my customary practices when I'm setting up the new issue of QLRS is to put in a placeholder title, until the contents of the issue become clearer and the editorial either writes itself or struggles into existence like a newborn stuck in the birth canal, whereupon the final title can be chosen. These placeholders are usually facetious in nature, along the lines of "Back to the millstone" or a random line from a song from Pulp or Radiohead that I just happen to have on. This time round, my placeholder was "It's incredible that it's come to dix".

While my penchant for cross-language puns may be roundly condemned, the langue and short of it is that the French word was the perfect encapsulation of my own amazement that we could have got to our tenth volume. Although we clearly have a long way to go to beat the now-defunct Singa, at least as far as calendar longevity is concerned, the literary arts is not a competitive sport and as a literary community we would have been better off had it continued its run. With that in mind, I'm greatly encouraged by the new crop of literary journals springing to life: Ceriph, layang-layang and (since we're crossing languages) Asymptote. Each of these has a different working model from the others; Ceriph, for example, has gone the brave old route of print, whereas Asymptote has taken out advertisements in Granta and the Paris Review as it arguably has a more international focus than all the others. Every one of these efforts contributes to the diversity of the literary scene, and should be supported.

I make this statement knowing that what I call for is neither as unambiguous or unconditional as it may seem. I recently had a conversation with a friend who admitted that she had gone off her supporting-local campaign. What happened, I asked. She'd decided to support quality, she said. I'm not about to pick on the obvious nit, because I don't think it actually does presuppose mutual exclusivity between the two categories. More simply, I would put it that supporting local means watching Peterborough United rather than Manchester United, to borrow from Frank McGuinness, or alternatively that it may find its analogy in why people bother reading literary journals (of any provenance) at all - not that every piece or even most pieces published will be quality. I keep a copy of Asia Literary Review for one stunning story by Xianhui Yang; I keep multiple issues of Acumen because they typically have one breathtakingly good poem, sometimes two. Much of the rest I don't remember, but the individual moment of quality is unforgettable. Secondly, unlike how the media often portrays it, Booker-Prize-winning novelists and Faber poets do not pop fully-formed out of nowhere. They go through their own learning curves, typically in the arena offered by journals. To come back from that loop, not supporting local means not supporting what supports the emergence of quality.

Round the corner from where I live there used to be a small bakery with a good reputation called Mirabelle Patisserie. A friend called it the home of the best ham and cheese croissant in Singapore (for the price), although I much preferred their pain au chocolat. It was not Sadaharu Aoki by any stretch of the imagination, but what it did it did well. Yet I didn't go as often I could have - maybe once a week - because it lay in the opposite direction from how I got to work. Today I pass by where Mirabelle used to be. A new shop is taking its place, going by the inauspicious name of Love Me Bakery Café. That's the cost of not going when I could have.

Supporting the local doesn't have to be at the expense of the international however. This issue contains a healthy mix of both. We publish our first Korean poet in translation, thanks to the good offices of Gwee Li Sui, and we have some returning poets in the form of Bernard Henrie and Kent MacArthur, along with local poets Desmond Kon, Tong Ling Jun and Loh Guan Liang. In short stories, Alfian Sa'at presents another fine quartet of short prose pieces, Golden Point winner Jeremy Tiang contributes a short story that is very much in tune with the tenor of the Singapore property market today, while we also have short stories from other parts of emerging Asia. The essay for the issue looks at a bygone Singapore through the perspective of an old American film (was there a Singapore film equivalent?), while the criticism looks at a landmark Australian collection plus two other recent Singapore books.

We count on your support, however convicted or tenuous.

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