By Yeow Kai Chai

At first glance, Jon Gresham may appear as somewhat of an outlier in the Singaporean literary scene – a post-national scribe equally at home, and observing from a distance.

Born in English, raised in Australia, and having lived in Singapore and Thailand for the past two decades, the writer – who was adopted at birth but knew his father was Hong Kong Chinese and mother English – has shown an acuity in exploring complex, interstitial spaces, physical and emotional.

Angus Whitehead, in a review of Gresham's debut short story collection, We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press, 2015, 2nd edition), praised him for providing a "uniquely weathered and maturely distanced literary lens trained on Singapore, contrasting fertilely with much of the comparatively more instant writing generated here in the last few years." (Asiatic, Vol. 11, No. 1, June 2017)

In We Rose Up Slowly, Gresham parlays his own background and cosmopolitan experience – having worked in finance, software, and investment banking and travelling all over the world – into stories set in Singapore, Jakarta and Australia, which flit between genres, moving from social realism to folk mythology to horror.

His writing has appeared in various publications including The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 (Kitaab 2020) and Best Singaporean Short Stories 1 (Epigram Books 2020). His story 'The Visit' was shortlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/Essex University Prize and included in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volume 5 (Epigram Books 2021). He also co-edited In This Desert There Were Seeds (Ethos Books and Margaret River Press, 2019), a collection of stories by West Australian and Singaporean writers.

A co-founder of Sing Lit Station, he currently runs the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and the National Arts Council (NAC), and which is a reboot of the NTU-NAC Writing Residencies. He is working on two novels, a memoir, a haiku, several tadpoles and a small child.

1. What are you reading right now?
I tend to read a lot of books at the same time, dipping in and out as the mood takes me. Here are some books I'm reading now:

Blob by David Walliams
– With my six-year-old daughter.

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum
– Brilliant on the art of 'problematic' artists and the response to #MeToo.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
– Nowadays, I am into tree stories.

The Situation & The Story by Vivian Gornick
- "To fashion a persona out of one's own undisguised self is no easy thing."

Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate by Gwee Li Sui
– Wah piang!

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Fortinbras (from Hamlet). You come in at the end – after the killing is done – and clean up.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
I am a guud spella and a niece parson.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
JD Salinger. Alienated, disaffected writer interacting with precocious children, ladies with "lovely, awkward" smiles, tormented by phonies.

Jackie Kay. Post-colonial, mixed race adoption.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
If by 'writer's block' you mean an inability or resistance to writing then 'Yes. I believe'.

Like I believe in unicorns.

Writer's block is overcome by attitude, technique, process, hard work, perseverance, acceptance, doing something else, relaxation, meditation, yoga, actually writing, et cetera.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
The ready appearance of their credit card, and the ability to procure a steady supply of bon mots, bitchy gossip, chocolate, and red wine.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Bud spulling, uncorrict grandma, the cheap prevalence of fragmunted sintunces. That Trail.

Off.

Into nothing.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Goodbye," Esmé said. "I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact." – from J. D. Salinger, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
…worked in a lobster factory with ex-convicts when I was 18.

I used to be really thin (my fringe weighed more than the rest of my body combined).

And I had a bodyguard for three years when I lived and worked in Thailand at the turn of the 20th century.

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 would choose a fantasy drama, like Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders 1987).

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
My favourite word is "unheimlich". Don't we all possess eery, inherent contradictions?

My least favourite word is "liminal". Overused and misunderstood.

12. Compose a short-short story in three sentences that include the following three items: igloo, levitation, darkroom.
I left the warmth of my igloo to rise above the ice and into the starry night; glowing and floating, worrying the love we shared would last forever.

Beyond the tundra, in the darkroom of memory, I developed a tumult of those sudden sensibilities in the congealing light.

Something cold this way comes.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
May I offer several in order of priority?

My right index finger, my brass Kaweco Lilliput fountain pen, Scrivener on a functioning MacBook Pro, and at least two packets of M&S Extremely Chocolatey Milk Chocolate Orange Biscuits.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
720am when you get back from walking the kid to school. You haven't touched the internet. You're still half asleep. Your mind is relatively untainted by the day. Your unconscious is still lost in dreams, and you're grateful.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Seymour Glass – to complain about the kids these days.
Celie – to discuss the triumph of love over sexual and racial oppression.
Mao Zedong – to talk about his poetry.

16. You have been involved in some of Singapore's pivotal literary initiatives in the past decade. You co-founded Sing Lit Station with Joshua Ip and Daryl Qilin Yam in 2016, and  currently help run the Asia Creative Writing Programme (ACWP). The latter is aimed at addressing "gaps and needs in the Singapore literary community." Can you elucidate on specific gaps and needs the Programme hopes to address, and how the literary scene has evolved during your time in Singapore?
Specific gaps and needs the Programme seeks to address can be found [in the link on the right]. These were summarised after seeking input from more than 50 people involved in the Singapore literary community over the last few years.

Over the next few years we plan to bring writers to Singapore to help develop Malay and Tamil writing, how to write creative criticism from a non-academic perspective, how to teach creative writing, and more courses to encourage inter-lingual collaborations and experiences, cross-media writing and genre fluid text production.

I've been in Singapore since 2002 and read my story, 'We Rose Up Slowly', for the first time at SubTEXT at the Book Café around 2003, thanks to Yong Shu Hoong. Since then the scene has become more diverse, more part of Singapore's mainstream, and more supportive of writers with more independent local publishers, book stores and spaces to develop the craft of writing. I'm very proud to have helped run Writing the City over six years and to create Book a Writer to place Singapore writers in Singapore schools.

I don't think we should be self-congratulatory though. Community should never be taken for granted, COVID has set us back, the industry remains obsessed with US and UK publishing trends, independent publishing in Singapore is as hard as ever, not enough people read, there are increasing authoritarian trends everywhere, and there is too much of an obsession with the cult – as opposed to the craft and hard, lonely work – of being a writer.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
"Please look after this bear. Thank you."

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