Asian
Books Blog is based in Singapore. Our regular column Lion City Lit explores
in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Lucía Damacela launches
an occasional series highlighting Singapore online literary magazines. She’ll
be talking to founders and editors about the workings of their respective
magazines: In this first installment, her focus is on Softblow.
Background
There is a worldwide boom in literary journals and magazines: those
pages - on print or on screen - devoted to poetry, fiction, creative
non-fiction, essays, and reviews. This surge has been facilitated by the
availability of tools to open a shop, so to speak, and start-up an online venue.
Pre-internet era magazines have followed suit and currently most print journals
have some online presence as well. A search for lit mags in heavily U.S.-based
sites like Poets and Writers yields more than one
thousand entries. In Singapore, the universe of online literary journals is
also expanding.
With the exception of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, or QLRS, launched in 2001, and Softblow, whose
first issue was published in 2004, the lit mags currently active in the Lion
City have been launched in this decade: Of Zoos (2012), The
Eloquent Orifice (2013), Junoesque (2014), We are a Website (2015), and
Swag (2016). This
list is by no means exhaustive, as there are other magazines targeting specific
segments of readership, such as students, or which include substantial amounts
of non-literary-related material. Nonetheless, this list encompasses the array
of literary options on offer for both readers and writers in Singapore.
Softblow
Softblow, issued
monthly, is dedicated exclusively to contemporary poetry in all its forms, and
publishes poets from all over the world. Created with "unswerving lovers of
poetry" in mind, it accepts submissions on a rolling basis. Its latest issue
features collaborative works and prose poetry from international authors.
Cyril Wong
I spoke to
Cyril Wong, the founder and editor of Softblow, and a
leading Singaporean poet and wordsmith.
So, over to Cyril…
“Softblow started in
2004 and the only other web magazine I knew at that time, which started even
earlier, was the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. It's still going strong.
The 2nd Rule existed too, but it petered out after putting out many strong
issues online. I think whether a magazine survives or not is not really a
matter of enforced survival or competition; probably the editor had decided to
move on to other priorities and ventures. Even if a literary magazine appeared
for only a short while here, it still made a tangible contribution to our literary
culture.
The webjournal started
at The Substation where I worked and while other writerly
friends and I were having lunch across the road from the Arts Centre, and I
just wondered if there were any webjournals centered solely on contemporary
poetry and based in Singapore. Basically, I decided I wanted to start an online
space where I could collect and read poems from other poets that I'd love to
enjoy in both an enriching and sustained way.
My readers are from all
over - the States, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, etc. Notable poets featured
include our very own (the late) Arthur Yap, American poets like Jenny Boully
and Sherman Alexie, South African author Ingrid de Kok. I was looking for contemporary
voices, full of relevance and the occasional inclination to test the limits of
what a poem could be.
I see myself primarily
as a poet, but only because I think the word can be very expansive and
inclusive. Even as I write ‘prose’ elsewhere, I never quite see myself as a ‘prose’
artist: everything to me is a poem; sometimes with line-breaks, a plot,
character development, but still a poem - just longer or shorter, really.
I think the only
challenge for any journal is just a sustainability of interest. It's always
easy to get readers. I prefer to think in terms of quality of readers, not
quantity; not that I'm a snob, but it's just that since we are talking about
poetry here, the form itself already assumes a much smaller audience that for
fiction.”
As to Cyril’s opinion on
the diversity of good lit mags in Singapore? “It simply provides a greater
democracy of readership, and the opportunity to reach out to, or to take in,
voices seldom heard by more mainstream media and publishers.”
Meet Lucía Damacela: Born and raised in Ecuador, Lucía moved to Singapore
with her family in 2013, after many years of living in the US and the UK. A
social psychologist and researcher, Lucía also enjoys literature, the visual
arts, and their intersections. Acting upon these interests, she became a
Friends of the Museums docent at SAM (Singapore Art Museum), and joined writers
groups soon after her arrival. Her work has been published - in English and
Spanish - in the US, the UK, Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore. Two of her stories
have been included in the collections published by the Singapore Writers Group: Rojak in 2014, and Tales of Two Cities in 2016. More information about her literary pursuits is available here. She tweets as @lucyda.
