By Yeow Kai Chai

Among the Singaporean writers of her generation, Grace Chia is unmistakable. Her poetic sensibility is sensual and unsettling, visceral and formally adventurous.

She is best known for a trifecta of poetry collections—her debut, womango (Rank Books, 1988), established her as an original voice; the follow-up, Cordelia (Ethos Books, 2012), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize (SLP) in 2014, ventured into fantasy and mythology as crucibles for identity and gender interrogation; and Mother of All Questions (Math Paper Press, 2017) delved into childhood and matrilineal kinship.

Right from the start, Chia has put gender and self-affirmation under the microscope, often tapping on her own experience in her literary forays.

She spent 13 years outside Singapore in the 2000s, following her then-boyfriend and now-husband who worked for Cirque du Soleil across Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, before returning home to take up the inaugural Nanyang Technological University(NTU)-National Arts Council (NAC)'s writer-in-residence position.

Her journalistic observation has paid off in her creative prose. Her first novel, The Wanderlusters (Math Paper Press, 2016), is a sneak peek at life behind the curtains of a travelling circus community. Her short-story collection, Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food (Math Paper Press, 2016), is a globe-trotting romp about emigrants, culture shock and concepts of consumption.

Her second novel, The Arches of Gerrard Street (Penguin Random House, 2021), is a coming-of-age story of a Malaysian woman who investigates the unsolved murder of her childhood friend in London's Chinatown. Its germination began 17 years ago in London where Chia lived for six years. It is inspired by news reports on the 2003 shooting of a moneylender in Gerrard Street and the 2004 drowning of at least 23 illegal immigrants who were picking cockles in Morecambe Bay.

Aside from her own poetry and creative prose, Chia is the editor of the prose anthology, We R Family (Math Paper Press, 2016). Besides NTU, she had been writer-in-residence at University of Macau, Toji Cultural Centre and Seoul Art Space Yeonhui in South Korea. She taught creative writing at NTU and DigiPen (Singapore), and currently teaches at School Of The Arts Singapore (SOTA).

1. What are you reading right now?
Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and Han Kang's Human Acts. I buy more books than I read, and I've had these two for a few years. For Noah's book, I am halfway through and actually saving and savouring it slowly because I like him as a comedian and the book is written and edited so excellently. I wanted to read more of Han Kang's books as I devoured The Vegetarian in less than two days.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Titania in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She's queen of the fairies who lives in an idyllic forestland. She is strong-willed, independent, likely immortal and embodies magical powers. And she has divine, ethereal dresses.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That being prolific comes easy for me. I'm a workhorse with a clinical focus and I can work across genres at any one time so I'm able to finish different manuscripts in spurts. After, the well dries up and I hit a drought and I'll wait for as long as it takes for the rain to wet the ground again.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Milan Kundera for his themes on dislocated identity, existentialism, memory and the solitude of modernity. Sylvia Plath for her imagistic, passionate and courageous poetry.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Before the pandemic, I would be filled with ideas and was easily inspired by people and my surroundings. But since the pandemic has dragged on longer than usual, my perpetual state of ennui has led to a dearth of a good muse. Stasis is poison for creativity, so to overcome writer's block, I have to keep my mind and body active, so going for long walks and exercise oil my engine to keep the words flowing. And reading helps too, even a page or two of any good book picked at random—just getting into the rhythmic flow of a well-constructed sentence and paragraph can jumpstart a rusty cog.  

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

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

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
From Sylvia Plath's poem 'Lady Lazarus' (and this is pre-X-Men's Jean Grey's Phoenix):
   
Out of the ash
    I rise with my red hair
        And I eat men like air.

Either this or Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret:

I must, I must, I must increase my bust.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
…am actually a vampire. (How do you know I'm not?)

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
A dark-humoured action thriller. Tom Cruise's Edge of Tomorrow comes to mind.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite is 'Mummy.' Least favourite is 'loose' misspelt from 'lose.' It makes my eyes twitch when I see this ­­on social media.

12. Compose a short-short story in three sentences that includes the following three items: contortionist, ticket stub, palimpsest.
She was a palimpsest of her former days. The contortionist waits daily for the man who once tamed lions exit the cinema with his new love. He neither sees nor remembers her. Picking up from the ground his ticket stub, a souvenir now filling jars, Olga relishes the stolen moments they once shared in a cinema not unlike this.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Tea. The type I drink depends on my mood – green tea of the Japanese variety or Chinese, such as pu erh, bi luo chun, long jing, jasmine or Taiwanese oolong.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Morning, after a cup of tea.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Miss Marple, for she must have fascinating crime stories to tell (and is possibly less obnoxious than Hercule Poirot). Yeong-hye from Han Kang's The Vegetarian, because she's eccentric and says things like "all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters" and she won't eat much since she's on a food strike so there's more to go around. And Marianne from Sally Rooney's Normal People as she is worldly, witty and urbane – the perfect conversationalist for a soiree.

16. It's been 23 years since you burst onto the scene with womango in 1998.  Your omnivorous and cross-disciplinary interests mean you have gone on to venture into short stories, novels, and occasional film reviews on social media. How do you think you have evolved as a writer, and what lessons, literary or otherwise, would you impart to an aspiring writer starting out in 2021?
Embrace difficulty and thrive in the challenge of doing something you are uncomfortable with. You are your best teacher and your worst critic, so teach yourself new tricks and be honest with your own work. If it's not working out in whatever genre you are uncertain of, accept that you might be facing a failure, abort, grieve, and then try again. Genres are mainly different ways of telling stories. So if you have a story you want to tell that is too small for a novel, try it as a short story or a poem. If you have something that is abstract and hard to articulate, perhaps write it as a poem. If your story is complex and has room to grow, it might be time to plan a novel.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?

Smells like teen spirit
Ages like fine wine

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