By Yeow Kai Chai

Trying to unravel the being called Max Pasakorn is a fool's errand, but what fun you'd have.

In a piece called 'Max' in his debut non-fiction chapbook, A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023), he reveals that his parents "came up with the name Max because one day they were watching the 80s American TV show MacGyver."

In any case, the name is perfect. "Max, like the hundred percent I always put in. Max, a name so gender-neutral it has learnt to shimmer softly, like the rainbow fairy lights strung around the window of a gay bar as it closes for the night," he avers in the said essay.

Selected by American biophysicist and writer Joseph Osmundson as the winner in the non-fiction category of the OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition, the manuscript is so lyrically written – delving into Pasakorn's multilingual, cross-national upbringing –  it may well be verse.

Born in Thailand, based in Singapore, and most recently, having spent some time in the United States, Pasakorn uses the pronouns "he/she/they" and identifies as a queer writer of creative non-fiction and poetry.

Pasakorn's other writing has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Foglifter Press, Speculative Nonfiction, SUSPECT, Eunoia Review, Strange Horizons, Honey Literary and Chestnut Review.

Currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Arts and Humanities (Creative Writing) at Yale-NUS College, he is a founding editor of the Singapore-based poetry journal Kopi Break Poetry (https://www.kopibreakpoetry.com/), which highlights voices from Singapore and the Singaporean diaspora.

A Study in Our Selves is available at Book Bar.

1. What are you reading right now?
Because I'm working on a memoir, I'm currently enthralled by two memoir titles: Jaquira Díaz's Ordinary Girls, about growing up poor and mixed-race in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, and Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, about trans identity explored in parallel with aquatic life. I'm reading these books in parallel partly because Díaz and Horn are married to each other, and I love a good real-life queer love story.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
Given how, try as I might, I'm still trapped within Singapore's rat race and hamster wheel, probably Sisyphus. Poor guy. Poor me.

Also, one of my favourite poems of all time is 'Song of the Anti-Sisyphus' by Chen Chen.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
People often underestimate me because of how young I look/dress. I was born in '96, which allows me to proudly claim the 'millennial' label and pop culture references from the 2000s. My young look just happens to come from my gay genes and an extensive skincare routine.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Living writer: Ira Sukrungruang, a Thai-American writer who writes across genres; he has published a poetry collection, a short story collection and a few creative non-fiction books. He also writes so frankly about his Thai identity and his body image. Reading his work, to me, is reading the work of a literary father.

Dead writer: Anthony Veasna So, a Cambodian-American fiction writer whose posthumously published short story collection was so unabashedly queer. He writes literary fiction with so much attention to his subjectivities. I was genuinely so sad when I finished the book that I am unable to learn directly from this extraordinary writer.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I don't believe in writer's block, but I do believe there are more productive and less productive days for writing, and sometimes unproductive days may look like a writing session spent terrified of a blank page. The life rule I live by is this: if I show up for the writing, the writing will eventually come to me. So, I stubbornly continue to write, even if I feel stuck. I tell myself it's okay to continue even if what I write feels redundant, useless or like gibberish. Eventually, I will find what I need to write for that day, even if it's unrelated to my current project. And that's still progress. And then, there will be better days.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
To call oneself a writer, especially when one is starting out, takes guts and a lot of tenacity, because labelling oneself a writer is not simply a proclamation that one writes (these days, everyone writes emails, at least) but rather that one's writing should be paid attention to. That takes having thick skin and a steadfast belief in one's work. Creative writers have a zest of confidence that one can't really find in other professions, which I admire greatly.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Not a trait per se, but I am a little concerned with how writers today are constantly trying to one-up each other on their projects, especially with productivity concerns such as how many words/poems one has written per month. I think treating writing as a product-oriented profession overshadows the importance of living one needs to write. A piece of writing is always brewing inside us. We just need to let it have the space to eventually come out.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
I've recently been very taken by literary craft advice from Matthew Salesses' book Craft in the Real World. This section on revision resonated with me a lot:  

"The hardest and most useful truth about writing that I was ever told is that when I get bored reading my own writing, it's not because I have read it so many times, it's because it is boring. […] Even if you read over your story a thousand times, you will always be the most invested in it, because it is yours. Excite yourself. If something interests you, you can work with it. If it bores you, it is simply boring."  

Being bored by my own writing is the greatest sin I can inflict upon myself.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Graduated from a science secondary school where I wasn't offered literature as a subject, not even in lower secondary. I ended up only reading Shakespeare in college. Honestly, I don't think I missed out on much.

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! It's been 10 questions already, so can't you tell by now that I love to laugh? Hehe.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
My favourite word is not one in English, but one in Thai: จีบ (jeeb), which approximately translates to the in-between of the English words "flirt", "woo" and "court". It is both used as an announcement of romantic chasing ("I will จีบ you now") and a description of a flirtatious act. I'm a sucker for untranslatable romantic language. Also, if you put the Thai word for "snack" in front, it translates to the Thai word for "siew mai", ขนมจีบ (kanom jeeb).

My least favourite word is "OB marker", an incredibly Singaporean word that I'm surely almost absolutely maybe possibly pretty certain I've violated many times.

12. Please compose a rhyming couplet with the following words: portico, dice, asylum.

How dare the dice. Rolling me into cylinders: rich men's porticos,
coiled bank notes. It's okay though; I've asylumed with their dildos.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Not an object necessarily, but I have a Spotify playlist that lulls me into the mindset to write. It's a playlist of lo-fi Pokemon music, and I always start with the background track to Hoenn's Littleroot Town because that was the first Pokemon region I explored. It's especially useful when I need to write about childhood.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
In Singapore, I write best after 10pm. It's when everyone else has gone to bed and I have the quietness of night to myself. Then, nothing can come between me and the page.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison and Brennan Lee Mulligan. All three have so much wisdom about writing and life despite having very different voices. I also especially love that all three write across genres and represent different demographic profiles. I'm sure our last supper would be, as Mulligan would say, "in-credible".

16. As someone who moves across geographic, ethnic, gender and national boundaries, how has your self-identification influenced your writing? Are there pitfalls you try to avoid in your works?
The more I write about my identities, the more I realise how language fundamentally fails to encapsulate them. When I, for example, tell people I'm Thai, what they imagine to be a Thai person will fundamentally be different from the Thai identity I have internalised. Every label can only be an approximation. Knowing this fact frees me from having to conform to others' expectations of what kind of person I should be, and instead allows me to write into existence who I am. I am always in the process of self-definition. Especially when I write from the first-person, the words I use to identify myself doesn't really matter. What matters is how the literary persona sees, parses, and interprets the world for the reader, which will happen subjectively based on their personal history. That emphasis on the personal perspective, I think, is the true wisdom behind the writing of creative non-fiction, and why I have found my abode in this genre.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
"Huh. Guess I really only lived once." (1996-2082)

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