By Toh Hsien Min

Right, let's get it out of the way first. QLRS has just completed ten years of existence as an independent literary periodical serving the Singapore literary community.

Oh, alright. It isn't a terribly exciting story though. Young graduate student is done with afternoon naps in the library and returns to Singapore having picked up a taste for claret, back issues of the Times Literary Supplement gathering dust under the bed and some HTML code decides that he would give a go at setting up an internet literary journal that would focus on Singapore literature. Being the sort that takes a long time to arrive at a decision because he knows that his decisions once made tend to be stuck to for the long haul, he nevertheless doesn't think of the new project as being anything more than a lark and a use for some free webhosting space that he then had access to - in other words he never really sat down and thought through what he was doing and made the decision to do it consciously - and now ten years later he's still living with the consequences.

You might also guess that I've never really been one for milestones. For me, the word is only one letter removed from millstones. Milestones are never destinations in their own right but indications of how much distance you've covered and how much more distance you've to struggle through to get to where you want to go. When I received my first long service award with my present employer, I looked at it once and put it in the drawer, where it still sits. And as for birthdays, well that Larkin poem 'On Being Twenty-Six' comes to mind:

I thought: this pristine drive
     Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.

Still, I suppose there are candles to be lit and cakes to be cut. QLRS has since its birth gone on to publish works by writers from a non-exhaustive list of countries that includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan, besides Singapore. It's served as a launchpad for a number of writers who have gone on to their first short story or poetry collections and even in one case a novel after exposure on the site. The editors helped to curate a book of short stories drawn entirely from the site and translated into Italian for a major Italian publisher simply titled Singapore, while other publishers and even examination boards have also come seeking to reprint work. There has been a film screening, a short story writing competition, a media project with the Singapore Arts Festival, and now another short story writing project with the Singapore Writers Festival. A bit of a party is due, and as such we're putting together a small celebration as part of the Singapore Writers Festival on Tuesday 25 October 8pm at the Singapore Art Museum. Whether you've contributed to or followed the journal over the past ten years or only with this issue do please come and crush a cup of wine.

I wasn't sure that this issue itself should have been any different from any other that we have done. We didn't quite want the idea of the 10th anniversary issue to get in the way of the issue itself, and yet even at the last hours of putting it together the issue banner was something that made us wonder what was both appropriate and visually attractive. Even if the Concise Oxford definition for ten coming in as the title to the issue was supposed to be a nudge in the direction of a studied insouciance, the issue is nevertheless clearly different from the dozen or so that have come before it.

The keynote seems to be that this issue has for the first time in my recollection featured more short stories than poems.  The main reason for this is the PasSAGES project that we had set up with the Singapore Writers Festival. This was a curated writing project whereby a number of Singapore writers visited HCA Hospice Care, SWAMI Home and senior citizens' flats to hold conversations with the residents and discover some of their stories, which may otherwise have gone unheard, to use as base material for the crafting of short stories. In addition, the pipeline of regular submissions remained strong, as a result of which we are able to offer a heaped plate of short stories from Aaron Lee, Stephanie Ye, O Thiam Chin, Heng Siok Tian, Chang Ya Lan and Genevieve Wong (in whose short story age is clearly more than just a number), among others. The poetry this issue is anchored by new piece from Singapore emigré Boey Kim Cheng, and works by Filipino poets including Marjorie Evasco, Charmaine Carreon and Lolito Go, and yet we manage to find space for another new writer, Tan Wei Ning. We introduce the QLRS Proust Questionnaire as a new feature, and that with someone whose name is very much of people's lips as the Festival Director of the revamped Singapore Writers Festival.  Then we also have a sweeping essay and a photo series on Istanbul to round out the issue. Here's to a good one, and the next ten.

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