By Yeow Kai Chai

For Esther Vincent Xueming, picking up meditation was timely, coinciding as it did with the onslaught of the novel coronavirus.

"It has put me in touch with a part of myself that had been lying dormant all this while," she says. "I'm slowly embarking on a spiritual journey of healing and energy work, and I've had some wonderful experiences, which attest to my belief that existing on the physical plane of consciousness is only one way of being."

Meditation aside, Vincent has been occupying herself with editing The Tiger Moth Review, Singapore's first eco journal of art and literature which addresses nature, the environment and ecology. It has gone from strength to strength, chiming with the increased attention on climate change and ecological destruction, particularly in the wake of the viral outbreak. 

As she witnesses "the world reacting in fear and anxiety, which manifests in hoarding and other ugly behaviours (and now the racial unrest in the US)," she finds herself calm and at peace. "I strongly believe that we all have our time, that our journey on earth is temporary and the question we should be asking ourselves is not how long will we live, but how are we spending the time that we have?," explains the literature educator by profession. "To live as best as we can, doing as much good as we can while we're alive and able to do so."

To that end, she has been spending her time fruitfully. Besides co-editing two poetry anthologies, Poetry Moves (Ethos Books, 2020) and Little Things (Ethos Books, 2013), she reads for Frontier Poetry. Her poems have been published in QLRS, The Stinging Fly, About Place Journal, Split Rock Review, Ghost City Review and Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore, among others. She was a Best New Poets 2019 nominee and a finalist for the Singapore National Poetry Competition 2019 (English Language). She is prepping her debut poetry collection for her MA in Nanyang Technological University under the supervision of Boey Kim Cheng.

1) What are you reading right now?
Carolyn Forché's In the Lateness of the World and Anodea Judith's Eastern Body, Western Mind.  

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I don't really care for fame, but I'd like to be all the blackbirds in the poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' by Wallace Stevens. To be "the only moving thing" "[a]mong twenty snowy mountains", to "mark[] the edge / [o]f one of many circles," to fly, I think, is better than being any famous literary character.  

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm unapproachable? I have a facial expression some people might interpret as being aloof based on first impression.  

4) Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I identify with the recently deceased Eavan Boland in her search for a woman's place and voice within a patriarchal Irish literary canon and landscape, her philosophy of turning and returning in her writing, how she creates narrative, shape and form from "fragments and guesswork," the way she strives to be a voice for the silent female Other by writing the woman into Irish history and the natural landscape. Her contemplations in Object Lessons, especially, offer me much comfort and hope, to know that out there, in a different part of the world and in a different time, there was a woman poet who thought and wrote about the same issues that I now think and want to write about, albeit in a varying context.  

As for a living writer, I think it would have to be the Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols, whose work I Have Crossed An Ocean moved me deeply. Despite the differences in our cultural backgrounds, 'Hurricane Hits England' was the hurricane that hit me when I read it the first time a few years ago. Something about its "gathering rage / [l]ike some dark ancestral spectre" resonated with me, and I think our shared cultural legacy of British colonialism erasing "old tongues", and the symbolism of the hurricane following the speaker to her new home, refusing to be forgotten or buried, "unchained" my heart as well. In some ways, I consider her my literary mother, my "Tropical Oya" "[r]eaping havoc" in my psyche, birthing in me a "blinding illumination," offering me wisdom that "the earth is the earth is the earth."  

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Yes, I think that writing does not always come, and that it is not something one can will at whim. At least, not for me.

I overcome it by listening. If I sense that the words won't come, I don't force it. I believe that my poetry is already there, within me, but it only finds a shape and voice, or materialises when the time is right, when things align. I've found that if I try to force it, the work is forced as well. So, the best way for me to write is to listen to the work, be patient, and let it speak when ready.  

6)  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
I have quite a few. In a way, these are qualities I hope to embody myself:   courage to be honest and vulnerable, humility to accept that one does not know many things, that one cannot know everything, and that that is the finite human condition, curiosity to look at things with wonder and new eyes, empathy to write from a place other than the self, patience to know that writing gets better when aged like wine, willingness to be open to feedback and critique, a desire to learn – about her self, the world she inhabits, the worlds she cannot begin to imagine to inhabit – and always hone one's craft.  

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
  Arrogance.  

8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
  Can I share three?

  "Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one…" – Matsuo Bashō

  "Attention is the beginning of devotion." – Mary Oliver

  "We all must find our own way home." – Nahko Bear    

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
  …used to be crazy over the Japanese anime Hana Yori Dango when I was in my early teens. I remember how my older cousin and I saved up money when we were in Secondary school and went to a video store together to buy the entire television series VCDs, and watched all the episodes in Japanese with Chinese surtitles at home. We couldn't understand Japanese (though we picked up simple phrases there) and both of us couldn't read the Chinese surtitles well either as they were the traditional, not simplified, scripts, but somehow we got the gist of the overarching plot and the relationships between the characters in the story.  

10) At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
I love a good romance, but if I had to choose between the three, I'd pick a tragedy.    

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
My favourite word is the Hawaiian word "kuleana." It loosely translates to mean responsibility, referring to a "reciprocal relationship between the person who is responsible, and the thing in which they are responsible for" (Hawaii News Now). I first learnt of this word through Nahko Bear's song 'Aloha Ke Akua.' Singaporean poet, Aaron Lee, who is also our New Pages listing sponsor, introduced me to this song to encourage me when I was feeling particularly helpless and discouraged by all the negative news I was reading about the climate and environment, and I've remembered it ever since.

Least favourite, "religiosity."  

12) Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: fracking, emission, silent spreader.

To write new life out of the whirlpool of fracking and carbon emissions, I dream
a silent spreader – bats drinking nectar, sowing seeds. Trees rooting downstream.      

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Well, I write/type with my laptop, so I guess that's it. Also, a hot cup of coffee.    

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?
It depends. Sometimes a poem comes to me late at night when I'm in bed. If a line or image lingers in my mind, I get up and write it down. As for editing my poems or critical writing, I do it in the day when my minds feels clearest.  

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Sappho, Rumi and Bashō. Sappho because I consider her to be the mother of the lyric, writing against the epic and liturgical; Rumi for his spiritual mysticism and transcendent ways of thinking; and Bashō to learn from him the Zen ideals of wabi sabi in poetry.  

16) You founded The Tiger Moth Review in 2018 in order to engage with nature, culture, the environment and ecology, with a commitment to creating a space for minority, marginalised and under-represented voices. With four issues done and dusted, what primary concerns and issues have you gleaned from the contributions so far?
In general, submissions from Singapore tend to be more critical and negative, perhaps partly due to socialisation, censorship and our overall lack of autonomy in active political citizenry, which could explain why we turn to art and literature to speak out.

That said, I've found that we are all the same. We share the same hopes, and the same fears. We want the same things – to live and die with dignity on a land that will continue to flourish and sustain our children long after we're gone. No matter where we're from, what languages we speak, the colour of our skin, which gods we pray to, our social class, we all want to live in a world of beauty and hope, we all seek comfort in times of pain, grief and hardship, and we write to imagine and re-create goodness in the face of fear and chaos.    

17) What would you write on your own tombstone?

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

– 'Late fragment,' Raymond Carver  

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