I’ve always wanted to become a writer.

In my time writing, I have vacillated between holy shit, this is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing this, it’s the easiest way to be an artist, and portable besides, to, I hate writing this flabby putrid thing.

Much like a clueless sous chef being yelled at in a kitchen, I’ve laboured under misapprehensions to create things of great unpleasantry, and almost cut myself before emerging into a beauty almost monstrous.

The beauty and the sorrow. There are some instruments I often rely on to try to get me to that sacrosanct, profane place again—

What goes in must come out. What I’m ingesting, consuming or ruminating upon passes through my system and I undergo it as much as it undergoes me. The edges of the words shape the blades I choose. The thematic concerns that arise, the narrative arcs in the grocery receipts, the insurance brochures, the evangelical posters, the corporate reviews, the poems written by a spurned hand, the calculating op-eds, the diffident reviews: they all emerge in the poetry. The trouble with wielding words is that they remember where they come from. Beware.

I also seek comfort in writing towards the ugly thing, the horribly tactile, the set-on-edge, the unfurling and uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s a symptom of being a millenial, but I am more reassured when something is peeled back to show the rot. To me there’s nothing more honest than decay. I care not for art that doesn’t understand this. To me, everyone wants to see something real. Everyone wants to know a secret. For me, that’s showing them the festering wart that’s eating an HPV hole in the bottom of my foot and detailing with extreme specificity how it got there. It puts, as they say, the body back into the work.

Edit ruthless. After the overflowing bounty of dumpster diving into the compost, sucking the discarded bones of marrow, growing fat, it becomes time to cut. Sometimes I find it easier to lie to myself that I’m cutting these phrases off and putting them away for keepsakes. Sometimes I find it easier to pretend that this piece was written by someone I detest and I’m looking for every way possible to denounce it. I’m at an interminable spoken word night and the piece in question is being stridently performed in my ear and I’m three beers in and people are finger snapping in the wrong places. And I have to say, you lost me here and here.

Writing is also a collaging of mediums and ideas for me. As a multidisciplinary artist I am suitably promiscuous with every inspiration I can get my grubby hands on. When you lick everything you see, you tend to end up with fascinating flavour combinations. Take notes from divinatory practices and large waterways. I love quoting toilet graffiti and signposts. When the images are superimposed upon each other, we sometimes create a vividness that scans like butter.

‘Take your pleasure seriously.’ This is a quote from Charles Eames I have tattooed on the upper left of my gorgeous pancreas. When everything else fails me I go back to the pleasure, to the love, to the fierce queer joy we can install as bulwark against the decrepitude (as opposed to the gorgeous blooming of rot). You must feed and water your pleasure, meticulously groom what it is that lets you obsess and gives you sweetness and strength again, make sure it is comfortable, bright-eyed, hale, and that it has expanse enough to run in.

Then run it–run it hard.

Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean writer-artist.  Her first child, GAZE BACK (Lambda loser, Singapore Literature Prize 2020), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the abject, vulgar and pleasurable, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Find her in her natural habitat: @marylyn.orificial (IG) & @grinchfucker (twt/X)

We are delighted to host four writers in virtual residence, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Joyce Chua, Marylyn Tan, Lisabelle Tay and Jerrold Yam will be in virtual residence from June to December 2024.