By Yeow Kai Chai

Before she made her literary debut in November 2016 with her feted fiction collection Dream Storeys, Clara Chow has already made a name as an arts correspondent with The Straits Times.

For those who have followed her personal column in My Paper from 2008 to 2013, they would have noticed, too, her funny, relatable accounts of being a young parent, raising two sons and dealing with all sorts of family shenanigans. It's in these weekly pieces that she first honed her narrative gifts – a conversational tone, a great set-up, and an economy with words.

Even then, Dream Storeys (Ethos Books) was a lovely coming-out and an artistic step-up. Leveraging on well-earned journalistic skills, she interviewed 12 Singaporean architects and asked them to conjure up their dream buildings. She then wrote nine stories in and around these edifices – a tree house, a revolving jail, an underground city, among others – and populated them with vivid humanity.

Her forthcoming collection, Modern Myths (forthcoming from Math Paper Press), sounds equally intriguing, adapting Greek mythology into contemporary Singaporean settings.

Besides running WeAreAWebsite.com, a literary and art journal she co-founded, she has published short stories in various publications such as Asia Literary Review, Blunderbuss Magazine, CHA: An Asian Literary Journal, Cheat River Review and The Stockholm Review of Literature, as well as QLRS.

1. What are you reading right now?
I'm re-reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in preparation for an e-course I'm about to teach. It's work, but also pleasure: I read and loved it as a 17-year-old, and appreciating it more older but not much wiser.

I have a terrible habit of leaving half-read books all over the house. Right now, I've got fingers in The Matchmaker, The Apprentice & The Football Fan by Zhu Wen (translated by Julia Lovell), Volume 1: Plays in Chinese – The 1960s and the 1970s by Kuo Pao Kun, and Monstress: Volume 1 – Awakening by Marjorie Liu. Communally, my husband, our elder son and I are reading the same copy of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (multiple bookmarks sticking out from it), before we watch the movie.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I've always wanted to be Death in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but she's not strictly speaking from a novel, play or poem. In my 20s, I wanted to be Midori from Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood and save various hapless, over-sexed young men from themselves, but in middle age, I'd much rather just be myself – even though it's hard, it's quite comfortable. Maybe one of the witches from Macbeth might be fun. (There, I've cheated and named three.)

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm a fully-functioning adult.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
If by "identify with" you mean "really, really want to be as good as", it'd be Margaret Atwood, for her ability to predict the ways in which the ills of and inequality in contemporary societies haunt our futures, and for her power with words; Virginia Woolf, who took control of her own literary output by, first, having a room of her own to write in and, later, setting up her own printing press and typesetting her own books.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I used to think that you could banish writer's block by sitting down at your desk each day from 9am to 5pm, not getting up until you bashed out a set number of words. That writing fiction was a job like any other, and one needed to be committed and professional about it. But life has a way of thwarting you and your schedules: I've had to take months 'off' from this job, to deal with external irritants or regain inner peace. Not being in the right frame of mind to write means I get depressed when I try and try and nothing comes. Sometimes, there's no point in forcing the issue. Might as well go out and live a little.

6. What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Optimism.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Lack of grace and/or economy. (Only in writing; writers can be as awkward or spendthrift as they like as people.)

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." – Anne Lamott

Also:
"The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. &, remember,
loneliness is also time spent
with the world"
– Ocean Vuong, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" (copied out and pinned next to my desk)

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Sleep with the lights on when I'm alone.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
An action-thriller in IMAX 3D, because I can get everything else at home.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
"Inexorably": Wendy Matthews has a lovely song named "Inexorably Yours". Plus the word looks both elegant and tragic – that 'x' anchoring it marks treasure and crosses things out.

Least favourite: "Monetise."

12. Write a short-short story in three sentences that include the following three items: funicular, omakase, speakeasy.
Suzy was counting on riding the funicular up Penang Hill, but it broke down halfway and she had to walk the rest in her best dress – the white peasant with the broderie anglaise hem. By the time she got to the omakase restaurant on the peak, run by three brothers dressed as rabbits, her skirt was grey, her date had left, and they had run out of scallops and sympathy. "What kind of speakeasy do you think we're running?" sniffed Harold the eldest in his pink plushie suit, wiping his knife behind the pinewood sashimi counter, when she asked for a glass of iced water.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A smartphone, computer, or pen/pencil and paper. Anything else is just a nice-to-have. I do a lot of thinking in the shower, so a waterproof slate might be useful.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
When the kids are in school.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I once dreamt that I met Kurt Cobain in the afterlife and he granted me an exclusive interview. I'd finally worked up the nerve to ask him why he killed himself, and he was about to tell me… when I woke up. I suppose I'll invite him, to continue our chat. Don't tell me he's not a poet. I'll invite Ulysses, for a lark – a bit of a wise ass, but always fun, clever company. And the Princess Diarist herself, Carrie Fisher, to keep the men in their place.

16. You have been delivering a seminar titled How I Became a Liar. In this age of #FakeNews, how do you negotiate between creative fiction and journalism? What does truth mean to you?
The seminar's cheekily titled, because I don't see fiction and non-fiction in terms of a dichotomy: a lot of real-life experience and research go into creating characters and settings; while non-fiction is inexorably (that word again!) tinged with subjectivity, shifting shape depending on where you're standing. It's responsible to be aware of this, regardless which side of the arbitrary divide you see yourself on at the moment. Knowing the limitations of each mode also helps to ward off grandiosity.

At the same time, one must not wilfully mislead others by passing off fiction as fact.

These days, I write mostly fiction and personal columns, and leave the news reporting to others who are abler and more dedicated, so there's not much to negotiate: You don't have to believe anything I publish, unless you want to. And if I accidentally hit upon something that chimes all too true about the world we live in, I claim plausible deniability.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
"Oh, well – She tried."

But I'd really rather have my ashes kept in a small jar on top of the fridge at home. I could come with a sign that says: "Dust me."

_____