By Yeow Kai Chai

By his own admission, Barrie Sherwood is uncertain about his positionality in the literary scene in Singapore – or anywhere else, for that matter. Asked in an earlier interview where his work fit in the contemporary Singapore literature, his answer is revelatory:

"I don't consider myself a Canadian writer, and though I have the passport I'm not a French writer either. I've lived in Singapore for seven years: is my writing Singaporean? I would hesitate to accept any of these epithets. (I love it when Flaubert writes in his Correspondences that he feels as Abyssinian or Greek as he does French!)."

His hesitancy is not that surprising considering the richly peripatetic life he has led.

Born in Hong Kong, he grew up in rural Canada before moving to Japan and United Kingdom. In Canada, he studied at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, Concordia University, and the Universite de Montreal. He leaped across the Atlantic pond to complete his PhD in Creative Writing and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2010; and was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John for five years.

Sherwood's novels include The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa (DC Books, Montreal, 2000), and Escape from Amsterdam (Granta Books, London, 2007). His short fiction has been anthologised in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volume 4. His fiction and non-fiction has been published in journals such as Stand, The Istanbul Review, Matrix, Lighthouse, QLRS, Writing in Education, Asia Literary Review, and TEXT.

His debut collection of short fiction, The Angel Tiger and Other Stories, was published by Epigram Books in 2019; and his latest novel, Speed of Lightness, which is a revised edition of Escape From Amsterdam, was published by Penguin Random House SEA in 2021.

He is currently Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University. His research and teaching interests comprise a broad range of contemporary fiction, including narratives of photograph and text.

1. What are you reading right now?
Gawain and the Green Knight. For the umpteenth time. I'm not sure why. The language and pure strangeness, probably.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I'd be Wall in the play-in-a-play of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Because fulfilling its potential involves doing exactly nothing.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
By who? Nobody knows who I am. Can there be a misconception without an initial conception?

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I don't identify with anyone. "Identification" implies something more holistic and somehow – to me anyway – adulatory than any thoughts I've ever had about other writers. When reading of other writers' lives – something I don't actually set out to do, but you do pick up things in introductions and forewords – I experience brief moments of recognition; it's a bit of a thrill because the distance imposed by time disappears momentarily. And then we go back to being very different people, thank goodness.     

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
No.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Ability to make me laugh. If a writer gets me keeling over with laughter, they have my thanks and admiration.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Wow, "deplore" is heavy. There are some political leaders I deplore, but I can't think of any writers off the top of my head. Maybe I don't read widely enough. I'm sure if I went looking on the Internet for writerly traits to deplore, I'd find lots.  

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
At the moment I'm writing a novel whose protagonist is multi-gendered – kind of like Orlando, but not really – so the first thing that comes to mind is Virginia Woolf: "one must be woman-manly or man-womanly."

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Write songs and sing in a band called Free King Cadence. Dunno about the audience for QLRS, but if there are any producers out there, we're looking for a record label…

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
Comedy, no question. Nine times out of 10, they're not funny, but it's a hopeful exercise. And hope needs to be exercised.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite word: Barrie
Least favourite: Barrie
In turns.

12. Write a short-short story in three sentences that include the following three items: buoy, HAL 9000, plankton.
  I'm not sure I want to do this task you're imposing on me but I guess there are no bad reasons for writing something if it ends up being entertaining – writers come up with all kinds of contrivances to buoy their literary processes – and there's no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a "short story." There's a Da Vinci line that goes something like "Art thrives under constraints and withers in liberty," but I won't admit to knowing the HAL 9000 reference – some '80s sci-fi thing? There, I've managed the first two, but fitting "plankton" into this and then engineering some kind of satisfying conclusion is going to be next to impossible.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A pen. And a notebook that doesn't get used for other things. Mixing diary entries with fiction is highly counterproductive.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Mid-morning. Two coffees in. No pressing engagements, no sense that this is time snatched away from something else.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
What are the particular rules about this supper? Can we all magically speak the same language? It'll be a bit weird if – let's say I pick Omar Khayyam, Jane Austen, and Sei Shonagon – the only one I can actually have a decent conversation with is Jane. While I'm talking to Jane, are Omar and Sei just sitting there looking at one another wondering what's going on?

But if we all speak the same language, which will it be? Will we all speak English, or will we all speak Persian? Can I even say the things I really want to say in Persian or old Japanese? And what are we going to eat? And how? Do I have to teach Sei to use a knife and fork? Does she have to teach Jane and Omar to use chopsticks? Hmm, did Sei Shonagon actually use chopsticks? When were they introduced to Japan? This question is so fraught with potential pitfalls!

And where, by the way, does this dinner party take place? Are they transported to my time, or are we all located in a kind of in-between place, outside of time? And what does this place look like? It makes a difference if our supper is held at my favourite streetside taco joint in Vancouver, for example, with all the Denman Street traffic going by and the guys in the kitchen yelling in Spanish. Or if it were the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Or Chomp Chomp. I think, ideally, we'd need to be outdoors. At a table set in a glade of some tree species that grows across Europe and Asia. (Maybe poplars?)

Back to the meal itself: I think some kind of fish will be best – just grilled or roasted – with no creamy sauces or like, Cajun spice or anything. And here's a really nice thought: I think all four of us would appreciate a nice white. Maybe a Jurancon Sec or Sancerre. I really think Sei, Omar, Jane and I could bond over a good bottle of dry French white. For dessert, we'll stick with fruit. Play it safe with apples or pears or persimmons.

16. British author Hanif Kureishi once said that creative writing courses were a "waste of time," adding that "a lot of my students just can't tell a story." Do you agree?
I'm guessing there's more context to this statement that, were it included, might make Kureishi's stance seem more nuanced, but as I said before, writers come up with all kinds of contrivances to keep themselves writing and to clear a space for writing in their lives. In this regard, the ends justify the means. If a creative writing course works for you (as it did, for example, for Ishiguro, who happened to win a Nobel Prize), go ahead and do it.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Argh, this question includes too many presumptions. I've got to clamber through a thicket of complications before I can arrive at this supposed tombstone. And I don't even want a tombstone. I don't want a particular place associated with me in that way: a place where people go to be somehow more in touch with me or with anything I represented. Unless, perhaps, it's the mountains. Okay, I've changed my mind, I would like to have one square metre of snowy slope in BC consecrated to me. And in that moment of consecration, that square metre would already be changing – skimmed by the wind, warped by the shifting movement of snow beneath, stretched, going trapezoidal, then replenished in a blizzard, but ultimately melting, running downhill, to the Pacific Ocean. That way if you really wanted to commune with my spirit, you could just do something fun like go skiing or surfing.

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