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Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of fourteen books in Chinese, including six novels. She has received numerous awards and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into eleven languages, including English, French and German. The latest English translation of her novel, Strange Beasts of China, was one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2021. 

Yan’s English writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Irish Times, TLS, Granta, the Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/19. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere was published by Faber in the UK and Scribner in the USA in summer 2023 and was named a New Yorker book of the year. Image © Ken Chen

Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and her first nonfiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, was released in 2024 as part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series.

Her next novel, Carrion Crow, is forthcoming via Doubleday in Feb 2025, to be followed by a short story collection in 2026. Image © Robin Christian

Lisabelle Tay is the author of Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). She writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays. Her work appears in Bad Lilies, Sine Theta Magazine, and elsewhere, and she was part of the 2023 Black List Feature Lab.

She is currently virtual writer-in-residence at the National Centre for Writing (UK), supported by the National Arts Council (Singapore).

Writing the Monstrous Body Transcript

YAN: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Meet the World, brought to you by the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, the UK, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Today we’re going to talk to two extraordinary writers, Lisabelle Tay and Heather Parry, respectively based in Singapore and Glasgow. My name is Yan Ge, I’m based in Norwich, and we’re going to be talking about those two writers’ writings while circling around the theme, hopefully, of grief, the body and derangement. I’m going to introduce our amazing panellists, the two writers. Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and long-listed for the Polari First Book Prize. She’s also the author of a short story collection, This is My Body, Given for You, and her first non-fiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex, Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism – I really want to get this book – was released in 2024 as part of 404 Inks’ Inkling series. Her next novel, Carrion Crow, is forthcoming via Doubleday in February 2025, to be followed by a short story collection in 2026. And then we come to Lisabelle. Lisabelle Tay is a Singaporean writer and poet. Her poetry appears in Anthropocene, Bad Lilies and elsewhere, including New Singaporean Poetries. Her debut pamphlet was Pilgrim. Her fiction appears in Sine Theta Magazine and elsewhere, including No Flash. She was part of the 2023 Black List Feature Lab with her screenplay Momo, which is currently in development. And my name is Yan Ge and I’m a writer in both Chinese and English. I am currently based in Norwich and I’m working on something that I’m not super proud of. So, shall we start our conversation after my super clumsy opening? I feel like reading other people’s bios is quite difficult. It’s the most challenging part of being the chair. I actually practiced reading out your bios before this event and all the rehearsals turned out to be a lot better. You just get tripped over. I’m so sorry. But I think I’m just going to fully embrace my clumsiness. This is going to be my strategy. So let’s kick-start our conversation with some fun, casual or general questions. First, I’m going to ask both of you to tell us one thing that is not in your bio. Tell us something we haven’t already learned from your bio about yourself.

HEATHER: Sure. I think you did the bios beautifully, by the way. It’s a really difficult thing and you realise you’ve made them about a thousand words long. When the other person’s reading it you think no one needs to know all this about me. But a thing I don’t put on my bio is that I used to run a drum and bass club in Sydney, Australia, very briefly. That’s a random fact about me.

LISABELLE: Gosh, I was not prepared for random facts. Random fact about me. I live right in the centre of Singapore. Singapore is a very small island. It’s tiny, you can get around it in a couple of hours and I live smack in the centre in this place called Bishan. Any Singaporean listening to this now is going to be laughing. The most boring thing I could possibly have chosen, but there you go.

HEATHER: Now we know exactly where you are.

YAN: I almost wanted to say ‘Could you describe the room you’re in?’ I’m not going to do that. Let’s go to our second casual and fun question that I’m going to ask you. It’s a bit of a cliché but I think it’s quite useful for everybody to know, actually. What brought you to literature in the first place? Heather, would you like to go first?

HEATHER: I didn’t really admit to myself that I wanted to write fiction until I was in my late twenties and I think that’s because I was so terrified of it. You know, the thing you want most in the world, you often don’t let yourself look at it because it’s so scary. From about the age of sixteen I knew I wanted to write but I thought I wanted to be a music journalist. Specifically, I wanted to be the music journalist Lester Bangs, who was a 60s/70s era white, male American music writer who used to take a lot of drugs and go on these unhinged, semi-fictionalised interviews with people like Lou Reed. I thought I wanted to kind of be him for a long time. I do write non-fiction now, as well, but when I first started thinking I wanted to really take fiction seriously it was when I moved to Scotland about ten years ago. I just didn’t grow up in the kind of place where we knew anyone who wrote for a living or you knew a writer or you knew anyone really working in the creative industries. So I think moving to Scotland, with her amazing literature scene, really helped to convince me that maybe I could.

LISABELLE: The same for me as well. I started writing quite late, like in my mid-twenties, even though I had technically been writing very bad poems since I was a child. But I always told myself, no one’s a writer in Singapore, no one grows up thinking I’m going to be a writer. Maybe more so now but definitely not when I was a kid. Everyone was like, yeah, you’re going to be a lawyer because you can’t do maths, so you can’t be an economist, can’t do science, so you can’t be a doctor, you’re just gonna be a lawyer. And I think in my late twenties I started taking writing a bit more seriously. I fell very ill so my typical government scholarship plans had gone out the window, so what else could I do? I started writing poetry and then The Emma Press picked up my pamphlet, which was really a great experience for me and I think that was when my writing really started.

YAN: I heard that being a lawyer is not too dissimilar to being a fictionist. I don’t know, this is what I was told. Practicing law is basically telling stories and I was like, okay.

HEATHER: A lawyer who wrote a non-fiction book told me that as well and said there’s a lot of crossover because you have to be interested in everything, you have to be really dogged about finding the details of something and you have to have a wide range of knowledge. So maybe as a fallback career we can have law, right?

YAN: I don’t think it can go the other way around. I know a couple of lawyers-turned-writers and they’re doing extremely well and I don’t think you can go the other way around. My back-up plan is to be a typist. If I completely run out of ideas to write, I would just become somebody’s secretary. I’m very good at tidying up places and typing fast. Shall we go into the things we’re going to talk about today and maybe unpack today’s theme a little bit? Lisabelle came up with the theme, I thought it was extraordinary, and the juxtaposition of the three ideas: grief, the body and derangement. I think in this set of notions, this is just my own take, the body is definitely the central pivot. It feels to me that when we talk about the body in the context of literature, it often kindles a female body or a female point of view associated with themes of oppression and objectification. So I just wanted to ask, what’s your take on the body and how significant would you say the notion of the body is to your work? Who wants to go first?

LISABELLE: I’d go far as to say all my work so far has been about the body. My first pamphlet, the one with The Emma Press, I wrote it when I was very ill and that definitely comes through. A lot of the poems are about the sick body. My first short stories were retellings of really classic Southeast Asian folk tales, specifically horror tales with female monsters, and I think the monster’s body is very key to its monstrosity and perhaps especially so the female monster. My first short stories were about the pontianak and the penanggalan. The pontianak is what we call hantu. It’s a female ghost and you kill her by driving a nail into the back of her skull and she appears beautiful, except when she appears decayed. And the penanggalan is another monster whose head detaches from her body at night and her head flies around with the entrails dangling and so, obviously, these monsters are very embodied in their horror. So I think from the very start there was a preoccupation with the grotesque body and the abused body and the sick body as a sign of disruption and transcendence. And my current work is also preoccupied with the body, although perhaps in a different way. My new pamphlet manuscript explores coming back to one’s body after a period of dissociation from it. So how does one feel and locate joy in the body after pain or absence and how does one learn to feel pleasure relatively late in life? So a lot of the poems deal with sex and the experience of one’s body in relation to another, which is quite new for me. The short story collection I’m building also hinges on the transformation of the body. So, basically, it’s crazy women turning into things. You have a woman turning into a plant and then another turning into a foot. Another woman gets divorced and starts vomiting pearls and I think this just generally reflects an interest in the thought process of reinventing yourself through transformation into versions of yourself you want to become, through creative repetition and transfigurative acts.

HEATHER: Despite being from very different backgrounds, Lisabelle and I have the exact same interests. Very similar thought processes around our work as well because I can really relate to a lot of that. My short story collection was also a lot of people turning into things or things coming together. For me, I don’t know a way to write that’s not writing from the body. I can think of it as writing from the body rather than writing about the body now. I think part of the root of that is when I was really, really little I had really quite severe eczema. So, immediately, the skin of your body, which is supposed to be the thing that is the barrier between you and the world, is very damaged and a site of pain. But also, when I was really little, a chubby little baby, they used to have to wrap me in bandages every night so I didn’t damage myself in the night. So then there’s this idea of you as separate from your body but also your body as something that can damage you, but you can damage it at the same time, and I think that kind of rooted me in a really specific way of seeing the world. The novel that I have forthcoming, as you mentioned, Yan, people keep telling me they have almost thrown up reading it and I’m kind of like, oh, okay. It’s telling me something about myself because it’s so visceral, I think. But then also, someone told me they cried reading it, so I think I can’t really get away from the sight of the body. All our emotions I think of as embodied and when you grow up as well, especially if you grow up as a woman or you become a woman, the sight of your body then is so politicised and if you’re a woman of colour, if you’re a disabled woman, if you’re a black woman, if you’re a sex worker, all these things politicise your body further and further. And as you mentioned, Lisabelle, illness is a very particular axis on that and I just find these intersections tell us so much about the world we live in and about the power structures and about the history. So, for me, everything we deal with can be seen through that lens and it’s one I’m stuck looking through, apparently.

YAN: That’s so beautifully said. I definitely relate to this. The tension rises between our head. I think for so long I thought I was just a brain and then, gradually, I think my journey of being, quote–unquote, radicalised as a feminist is still realising my position in this world as a woman and how that has allowed me for various exploitations and also empowered me is my transformation going from my head, from just the head, to the body and then to find that tension that you have with your body and the tension your body has with the world and how to translate or transport that into my writing. I think it’s been something that’s been looming larger, especially in recent years, so I am resonating with what you both just said. Shall we hear a little bit from your writing? Heather, would you like to go first?

HEATHER: Sure. I’m going to read from Orpheus, which you’ve already mentioned. I’ve been reading loads about cryogenics lately, the idea that you can freeze a body after it dies and keep it stable in the hope that in future years, however many they are, you can then bring that body back to life, and I’ve been reading this really crazy book from the 60s called The Prospect of Immortality, which is the text of cryogenics, and while I’ve been reading it, it reminded me how much of an influence that way of seeing the world had on Wilhelm. I have two protagonists in this book and Wilhelm is the Gothic villain kind of one. So I thought I would read a little bit that made me think a lot about the cryogenics book and kind of sets up his actions in the book and gives his reasons for doing what he eventually does. So this is after his beloved grandma has passed away and he’s the young child.

‘There she was, the woman I loved, so similar to how she was in life. For a moment, I forgot that she had passed away and reached out for her hand as if she could reach out and take mine in turn. Her skin, dry but rubbery while she lived, had remained as such and while desiccation had occurred, there was no visible evidence of putrefaction or excessive rot. She had dried rather than decayed. It was only then that I recalled the pictures in my grandmother’s books. The monks who claimed to have transcended the very concept of death, who were rendered as artworks, as things to be worshipped for millennia. I touched her body, felt her achievement beneath me. She was glorious. It is now of course accepted that the surrounding environment has an enormous impact on a body, as does the pre-death diet and lifestyle of the dead. Yet we have previously failed to understand that by treating a dead body as a spent thing, we have robbed our loved ones of any chance they have of returning to their physical form after death. For we have not just discarded it but have in fact placed it in the worst possible conditions to delay its decomposition. Indeed, by throwing bodies into the pyre, we remove their existence on this plane entirely. Ash cannot support life and so these souls are destined to expire on whichever plane they exist post-death. Increasingly, it became clear to me that we are engaged as a race in a type of genocide, a grand theft, and that we steal from the recently dead any chance they might have of returning to us. We kill our dead for a second time. In this, we are all guilty.’

YAN: Lisabelle, would you like to read a little bit from your story as well?

LISABELLE: Okay. I’m going to read from a short story called Bodies of Water and it’s about a man whose wife is a selkie. Basically, they live in the UK but they’ve come back to Singapore, where the guy, the narrator, is from and that’s the context. They’re back in Singapore now.

‘Sometimes we lay in bed and her strangeness would wash over me. She clung to me now and then, like a pet nosing for affection. Other times I looked at her doing the laundry or reading a book, utterly contained within herself, and I knew without a doubt that she could leave me and never look back. There existed within her a certainty that she could survive anything. This drew me to her. It also made her a flight risk. Once, driven to consuming nervousness by this self-possessed freedom, I talked to a therapist. There was an online form for this and I felt a little ridiculous referring myself. There was no section on the form that asked you for details, only a series of drop-down demographic questions and finally a box for any other relevant information. I put down, “I’m afraid my partner will leave me, though we love each other and have no major problems. I’m very anxious that I will self-sabotage. Above all, I want to be with her, ethically.” A few weeks later, I had a video call assessment with an NHS-assigned mental health professional. He looked at something on his screen, my form, I assumed, then blinked at me with clinical interest. “What do you mean when you say you want to be with your partner, ethically?” he asked. “Well,” I said, hesitating. “I don’t want to force her to stay with me. I want her to belong to me of her own free will.” “When you say ‘belong’?” That was the wrong word. “I mean I want her to be with me of her own free will.” The therapist raised her eyebrows. “Is there anything that would make you think this isn’t the case,” she asked. “Well, no.” I said, probably too quickly. It felt as if I was digging a hole for myself. All I wanted was actionable advice on how to love a woman whose departure was inevitable. “Why do you think you feel so anxious that she will leave?” asked the therapist. “Have her actions indicated as such?” I thought of the way Ellie stepped out of her skin on the riverbank and walked into our house, dripping. A wild creature domesticating herself, ostensibly out of love for me. “Well, no,” I said again. “So perhaps this has more to do with how you see yourself than the reality of the situation.” What was I supposed to say to this? I shrugged, then nodded. “Perhaps,” I said. “I want to be careful with how I say this,” she said, “but some research indicates that men of East Asian descent have trouble with self-image and sexual relationships.” I looked at her. “Can you feel these feelings you have without attaching them to the future?” she asked. This might have been a helpful question for her other patients but my wife wasn’t human. We were fundamentally an accident. If I didn’t do something drastic, one day she was going to leave me. That was just a fact. “Yes,” I said. “Feelings aren’t facts,” said the therapist. “Yes,” I replied. Up close, the skin had a sheen to it, undulating and nacreous. It smelt faintly like iodine. No matter the weather, there was a damp limpness to it. It never stopped shining, succulent and mucosal, even hung outside in summer on the hook I made from a bent nail. Its contours haunted the edge of my consciousness and its weight when I took it in my hands was surprisingly vast. Sometimes I held it to my face and kissed it. Sometimes I spoke to it, telling it things I could never tell Ellie.’

YAN: Thank you. That was amazing. I read it a couple of days ago but I think hearing you reading it, it’s kind of like I learned how it sounded in your head, Lisabelle. I think the humour really comes through. Maybe I was in a sombre mood when I read it. I loved it but I think now your reading makes me see it in a different light. It’s brilliant. I particularly asked you guys to read from those two pieces of work because I felt in a strange way they are kind of in conversation with one another and about well-intentioned men, maybe. Like the woman’s body being colonised by men. Heather, in your novel you provided the voices, the stories from two sides, whereas I think in Lisabelle’s short story, it’s obviously a much more compacted space. I was so struck by the tension between this really smooth obedience and this resistant-free surface and then all the surging undercurrents that were warring underneath the narrative and surface that I almost felt a bit creeped out by it. We’re not going to talk about it now, hopefully we’ll be able to talk about it later. First, I’m going to ask you guys about the voices in your story. Both of you have crafted distinctive and convincing voices in your story. Heather, you have your narrator and Lisabelle the male narrator/protagonist. How did you immerse yourself in these characters and bring their voice to life so vividly and authentically on the page? How do embody those characters and the voices and make them so distinct. I’m asking this from a very silly place, really. It’s as if I were saying, as writers we are only able to write from our own places, from our own identity, our own experience, using our own voices. Obviously, it’s not that. Maybe that’s a common myth believed by other people and I guess, especially for women writers, very unfairly, people view whatever a woman writer writes as autobiographical and they always ask you questions about how your personal experience is related to that. I was really struck by how different your characters and your voices were from you yourself, your ostensive self, anyway. So that’s why I asked this question, although I do understand it is a bit silly for me to ask this, but I’m just going to put on the hat of a silly audience, if there’s such a person, and please indulge me and answer this question. Would you like to go first, Lisabelle?

LISABELLE: Unfortunately, I am one of those writers who is quite autobiographical. But this story, specifically, was an experiment in writing in as close to my own voice as possible, which means there’s a difference between his inner voice, which is reflected in the narration, the voice of his interior monologue, how he speaks to his British wife in standard English, and then later on in the story how he speaks to his Singaporean parents in Singlish, which is basically a creole with its own grammar and vocabulary. How I write and how I’m speaking to you guys now is different. They’re also different from how I speak to my closest friends or my parents. So these are all different kinds of English that exist in my head and they’re all different parts of the same consciousness and I think this story was an attempt to bring those voices together in a short, compressed form. I don’t know if that answers the question. How did I immerse myself in that?

YAN: No, this is so interesting. Obviously, I did notice the differences when he’s with his parents and they will say something that’s more like Singaporean. I was thinking about the polyphony and the different voices and happenings that were going on in all your stories, I’ve read several of your stories now, and then I was kind of thinking of that bigger picture of the short story clash and I never realised that in this very conscious way you are trying to bring different voices and different Englishes into the story. It’s so interesting, thank you.

HEATHER: That’s making me think about my answer as well. You’ve made me realise that people often talk about the different voices in my work and I really don’t tend to write in my own voice very much and I don’t really feel comfortable doing that. Also, I grew up speaking a very different kind of English from what you hear out of my mouth now. I’m from South Yorkshire and we have a very, very distinct way of speaking and a very distinct accent, really flat vowels, and I kind of learned to speak like this. I’ve lived in a different bunch of countries, so how I spoke changed all that and that’s making me think, maybe it trains you in a way to then be able to take on these voices in your fiction as well and I haven’t really thought about that. So thank you, Lisabelle. Orpheus has two protagonists, as you mentioned. One is Wilhelm, who’s German, originally, and moves to the States, and one is Gabriella, who grows up in Cuba and then moves to the States. If I’m honest, there was no Gabriella in the first book. In the first version of the book, there was only Wilhelm’s narration because what I was really interested in is all the things that are bound up in Wilhelm, which is white privilege, male privilege, the fascist mindset or what happens to you when you’re brought up thinking that you are the pinnacle of humanity and how a person can bring themselves to both do and excuse their doing of the most heinous things in the world. Of course, Gabriella was within the book, in the narrative, she’s Luciana’s sister, Luciana being the victim of Wilhelm, and I found his voice so easy to write in because you know this guy. He’s kind of like a classic Gothic villain in a way. He speaks in this highly scientific language, in a very formal type of English. Once you drop into it, if you’ve read Wuthering Heights as many times as I have or Dracula, it’s actually quite easy because you know it and you know how they put their sentences together and you know that they’re trying to tell a version of the truth that benefits them. So, actually, people ask if he was a horrible character to get into. In a way, it was quite fun. Although he’s awful and he thinks and he says awful things, it was very easy to write because we grow up in the world of these people, they control things. And I’m really lucky to have a great workshop group with a bunch of very talented writers and they said it’s just too bleak, nobody wants to be in this man’s head for a whole book. My tolerance for awfulness is very high and I started to think, they’re right because there’s not enough love in this book. There’s love within the narrative but it’s too hidden, it’s hidden in Lucy’s experience of the world and she doesn’t get a voice in this book and then I started to think, okay, well what would it be like to have this voice who stands in opposition to Wilhelm and what he’s saying and brings a completely different personality to the book. It actually makes him more tragic, I think, when you have that real love, when you have real affection and we get the other side of the perspective. I’m really glad she’s in the book but I found her voice a lot more difficult to write.

YAN: It’s so interesting because I was about to ask you, but now you’ve already mentioned it yourself, which one of those two voices is more challenging?

HEATHER: I don’t know what it says about me that I found it easier to write the horrible fascist guy.

YAN: I worked on a structurally similar thing in Chinese. Last year I had a novel come out in Chinese, which I’d been working on for eight years, and it’s exactly the same structure – interwoven dual protagonists. One is a serious-sounding old man and the other is a young woman and I found it horrifyingly easy for me to get into the old man’s head and I really enjoyed writing his chapters in this pathological way. I began to feel worried about myself. But then the young woman’s voice, exactly what you were saying, it’s supposed to bring a hope, this lightness into the narrative, and it’s so difficult. The young woman, who’s supposed to be around my age – the story didn’t take place now, I’m not young, like about 20 years ago. Anyway, it was so difficult to write her and I was like, what is wrong with me? I had the same thing when I came out of it. I was like, Oh, I need to go see my counsellor to talk to her about it.

HEATHER: It’s hard to be sincere. It’s actually really hard to write in a way that’s interesting about love and affection because what can you say that’s not been said about these things? When we talk about love and we talk about family, we talk in clichés and they don’t really translate that well to a book. When you’re a writer and somebody gets married and they ask you to write something to read at the wedding, every time I just want to walk into the sea because I’m like, No, I can’t, it will be awful in the end and I will cry and no, I can’t do it.

YAN: I think you’re absolutely right. Eccentricity sort of goes with writing. If you have an eccentric character, an eccentric voice, it is relatively manageable to grip, whereas if you want to do something that is slightly uplifting, it’s almost the antithesis of literature as I understand it. I’m just like, Oh, I can’t do this, this is too positive. I completely feel what you’re saying. Let’s move forward. I sent all the questions to you guys beforehand. I always have to tell people we have a script but I think I’m gonna jump. I’m very bad in that I could pretend something is not there when it is there, so I would just immediately come forward, although nobody else has asked me to, nobody wants to know this, they don’t really care but I’m like, Okay, I’m going to confess. This is what happened. I prefer the questions that I’ve sent to you. But I’m looking at the time. I thought maybe we should skip the next one. I just really wanted to talk to you about this one thing that really struck me when I was reading your stories and novels and it is that you’re both writing in different ways and to a different extent about and from other places. Of course, I have to say this ‘other’ is predicated on the presumed centre we’re speaking from, which in this case is the anglophone world. So, Heather, when you decided to work on Orpheus Builds a Girl were you at all intimidated or actually intrigued by the challenge of portraying a Cuban family and the German doctor in 1950s Florida? What was your process for capturing the essence of that time and place and these characters’ lives so brilliantly? And Lisabelle, in our previous tutorial, we touched on your intention to depict a different Singapore and Southeast Asia in your stories, pushing back against the prevailing stereotypes often associated with this region. Would you expand on that? Because I thought it was really interesting what you said last time we spoke. How does being the writer from elsewhere shape the decisions you make in your writing and the stories you choose to tell? So, Heather, would you like to go first?

HEATHER: Sure. What a great question. I really was intimidated. So there’s three places I’ve written about: one is Florida, one is Cuba and one is Germany. I have lived in North America and I have lived in Central America, so these places weren’t completely alien to me. But I didn’t live in Cuba and I didn’t live in Florida and similarly haven’t lived in Germany. But what was complicated for me was that the story is based on a real thing that happened in 1920s Florida and I heard this story on a podcast in 2017 and I was so consumed with rage about how it was told because it was told as if it was a love story and it still is told. The podcast didn’t tell it as a love story but a lot of people who lived in Florida spoke about it as if it was and to me it was so obviously a story of white privilege and racism and how immigration works differently for different people, but also racialised bodies, female bodies, where the female person is situated in the wider world. So I really wanted to tell the story in a way that challenged this way of seeing it and made us see that you just can’t assume possession over a person in this way, but our systems all do encourage this and allow for this and men get away with this all the time. So I was kind of caught between being true to the story and also writing about things that I felt I could do well. For me, yes, it was a challenge to write an immigrant experience, two different immigrant experiences, but had I changed that detail it would not have been emotionally true and it would have been doing a huge disservice and then it would have been a different thing and I would have been trying to talk about the same thing but in a much less powerful and less true way. I had a lot of help in things. I had my German friend read over the book, I had my Cuban friend, who moved to the States and then moved to Central America, I had her read over the book, I got help with the names and I got help with the details and I went to Dresden and I went to Cuba. The old town of Cuba that I write about is very much like the old town of Panama that I lived in, so I tried to draw out the similarities between things I had experiences with and focus on them. I also really immersed myself in the history of both situations but I really did make it difficult for myself in a lot of ways. I just think, as a writer, you kind of have to take that risk sometimes if you’re trying to make impactful work that really speaks to the reality of the world. I don’t know how you feel, Isabelle.

LISABELLE: I’m just absorbing, to be honest. You’ve said a lot of brilliant things, my mind is expanding. I agree.

YAN: I find that what you’re saying, Heather, and also reading this novel, it’s extremely empowering and inspiring for me and I’m sure it’s going to be for a lot of writers because we kind of live in an era of ‘Whose story are you allowed to tell?’ To the point that is really comically restraining and it’s almost like a new censorship. I think it is absolutely right that one can tell whatever one wants to tell, one can tell from wherever one finds the emotional truth. So I think that is absolutely the ethos behind the novel, behind your practice of writing this novel. And I also think one thing that really worked for me is that we’re looking in at this world, 1950s Florida or Cuba and Germany, from the character’s point of view. It’s not from a third person, so the world is not being exoticised. They’re talking about the world they are most familiar with. They’re talking about their everyday, they’re talking about their life. So they don’t need to particularly highlight or say, ‘Oh, look, this is…’ and so everything was being treated in this completely mundane, internalised, normalised way and I think that is hugely helpful for me as a reader going into the texture of the story, believing in the texture of the story because the character believed in it so sincerely, so movingly in their own way and then that just completely erased my potential suspicion, like you have when you get into, as a reader, a novel narrative and you’re like, Oh, where am I? Do I trust it? and I think the narrators’ voices are so convincing because they trust their reality so much and that completely erased all the questions, the suspicions I would otherwise potentially have. I know this is not my time, I feel like I’m talking too much as a chairperson.

LISABELLE: You’re saying many great things. What you said about voice, if there’s any concrete thought in my head now it’s that the voices in Orpheus Builds a Girl are so distinct and I feel like the emotional truth that you talked about is so tight to your voice and it was the voice that just kept me reading, all of it in one night. I think because the voice was just so strong, or rather the voices, they were so specific and they were so emotionally true and just on a word-by-word level, which is very key to me in how I immerse myself in the truth of a story, that’s how you build the sentences, word by word. That rang true. Which is why I suppose I’m having trouble responding to the bigger picture part.

HEATHER: I don’t know if you guys agree but I think if you are going to write from a perspective that is not your own, which is for most of us the vast majority of what we write – I have also never lived in London and I have never been locked in an attic by my mother but that’s the conceit of my new novel, and I have never been a Victorian woman – we’re always playing ‘what if’ games, games of what if this was my experience, what if that was the life I was living, and I do think you can do things poorly and I think you can do them thoughtlessly and I think you can do them in a way that perpetuates the worst kind of structures of the world, so I do really think we have to be thoughtful and careful about these things. But also I think the idea that you can only write your perspective actually hurts marginalised writers more than anything because there’s an idea that you then have to write about your experience, you have to write about this, you have to write about that and I find that can be very limiting for everybody.

LISABELLE: Yes, 100%. That’s exactly what I was thinking of when Yan sent us these questions. I’m not necessarily trying to depict a different Singapore, just my own experience of it. And just by existing as a voice, as a Singaporean voice in the anglophone world, I think by definition that they tend to be different. A lot of people still think that Singapore is in China, for example. I think stereotypes of Southeast Asia are still quite present with us. I don’t know if you guys watched The White Lotus, the HBO series, it’s brilliant. The first season was set in Maui and the second season was set in Sicily. It’s a huge show, won lots of awards and stuff like that. The third season, which is coming out next year – and to be clear, I love this show – is set in Thailand and if you’ve seen the promos for the show, suddenly, mysteriously, in Thailand there’s a yellow filter that appears. Like films set in Central America, there’s a filter, a very visual filter to signal we are not in Europe and we are not in North America. There’s a similar filter in the third one and I was just thinking, what is the literary equivalent of this yellow filter? And I think the market often encourages writing about certain subjects in certain ways that are palatable and appealing to anglophone readers because they are different enough and they are signalled to be different in a certain way. And so there’s this expectation, like you said, Heather, to write from this narrowly defined cultural well and I feel that as a Southeast Asian, as an East Asian writer, it’s easier to sell myself, to sell my writing if I write about these things. And sometimes I feel it’s easier these days for me to tell my story about pontianaks and penanggalans. If I wanted to write a Dracula story, it’s probably easier for me because, Oh, I’m Southeast Asian, I know all this folklore, here’s my pontianak story, probably easy to sell. People want to read about the Japanese Occupation in World War II in Southeast Asia or, if you’re Singaporean, you’re writing about authoritarian government, oppressive education system, racial tensions and everything set in a HDB. HDB is our public housing. 85% of Singaporeans live in public housing. All these things, if done well, and there’s obviously so much good work out there about all these things and I’ve also obviously written about them myself, if done well, it’s great, but my own personal obsession includes just very not typically Southeast Asian things. I’ve subjected Yan to a lot of Catholic stories, all my Catholicism has come on full force and I’m sure she must be thinking, why is there always a priest or a nun involved? I really love things like the female involvement with medieval textual culture. I want to write a Gawain novel but these often feel like spaces that don’t have room for voices like mine. I want to write a Gawain novel but I do wonder, first of all, who’s going to want to read a Gawain novel? And secondly, realistically, who’s gonna want to read a Gawain novel written by a Singaporean? I can easily say, ‘Hey, here’s my World War II Japanese Occupation story. I’m Singaporean, my grandmother lived through this, buy my book.’ If I’m like, I’m going to write a retelling of Gawain, and I’m Singaporean, people don’t really see that. But by God I’m going to do it anyway. I can write whatever I want.

HEATHER: I will be at the front of the queue for that book.

YAN: Yes, absolutely, and do it. Like I was saying to you when we last spoke, Lisabelle, yes, write Singaporean Catholic stories and I think, very often when we think there’s no space for things like that it’s because we haven’t tried ourselves to stretch out the space and I think a lot of things were written into existence and we talked about this. I don’t want to turn this into our mini-chat but just to say quickly, as writers from elsewhere, really, and I think even in the anglosphere, where we see if you’re a working class writer from England, there’s always this sense of not belonging, of trying to assimilate yourself to the power centre and then to try to submit yourself, to kind of coerce yourself into mimicking the imagination of you and your people coming from the power centre. But I think, fundamentally, everybody should write against that urge, that kind of calling from the power centre because it is decentralised. Maybe this is my wishful thinking, considering where we are now with what’s going on in this world, still singing this optimistic song seems maybe a bit silly, but still I believe we are living in a decentralised world and we are on the way to establishing multiple centres, even in the English world. I do think it’s so meaningful that you are doing what you’re doing.

HEATHER: Reading both your short stories lately has actually been really centring for me again because I’m currently writing a short story collection and I had kind of forgotten how to do it and I had also become overwhelmed with this idea that I wasn’t doing it right because I wasn’t writing the kind of short stories that would be winning the BBC Short Story Prize. You know, two people are having a tense conversation about their relationship and then that’s the story. Mine are much more concept-driven, they’re much more weird and reading the two of yours’ work lately has been like, Oh yeah, I can write. I can say what I’m trying to say, I can come up with these strange concepts and I can write into them. It’s really funny how people link you to other writers. I’m really obsessed with J.G. Ballard at the moment, the 60s British writer who grew up in Shanghai and had these fascinating views of technology. I’m actually so much more inspired by him right now than Angela Carter, who is the person that always gets brought up if you’re a woman of a certain age in the UK. I like the writing pushing away, I like that idea, writing to push away from what you should be writing.

LISABELLE: I also see it as a reverse plundering. Singapore was a colonial subject, right? We were a British colony and I do feel this sense of ownership. I’m going to reach down into this history that’s not my own but also kind of is because I’m claiming a past that has been unnaturally given and has effaced a past that otherwise might have been. But what are you going to do? They colonised us and so I feel I have a right do whatever I want with these medieval English.

YAN: That’s absolutely the spirit. I think I mentioned this in a lot of places but I do think the world, when we talk about the concept of literature written in English, previously that might have been called English literature but nowadays, because of the colonial history and how English is becoming this lingua franca and having different versions of English in different parts of the world, and really now it is the the world of literatures in English, it’s different kinds of literatures but written in English. So, in that sense, I don’t have zero urge to want to fit into writing into English literature because really it’s literatures in English, so I completely agree with what you’re saying, Lisabelle, and I think you’re doing great, you’re having some great work delivered. I thought I would like to end with, again, fun questions. I don’t know if you guys want to ask each other a question or have you already done that? Do you want to do that very quickly? I know Lisabelle really admires Heather’s work. I’m also a big fan of both of your work. Do you want to do this? Do you want to ask each other a question?

LISABELLE: I have already told Heather. Before you joined the call, I got all my fangirling out of the way. Okay, my real question is how has your process or your experience – although you kind of answered this a bit – changed from writing Orpheus Builds a Girl, which was your debut, to Carrion Crow? Do you feel your process has changed at all?

HEATHER: Not really. It’s kind of a cheat second novel. You know everyone says your second novel is the hardest. I wrote this before I sold Orpheus, so I actually wrote Carrion Crow in lockdown in May 2020 and then finished it. I think I sent it to my agent the week we were sending Orpheus out on submission, which is so not the way you’re supposed to do anything. She couldn’t do anything with it for two years. And I wrote that from a real place of rage and anger and fear and all these kind of things. My actual process, what I’ve realised now, we mentioned this a little bit before, Lisabelle, I think, when writing novels, you have to try on so many different modes that you learn from other people and so few of them actually work for you that you have to go through these horrible processes to figure out which one is yours and mine is that I have to absorb so much over the course of years. I think of it as magpieing. You magpie little things of real life and history and facts and you put them all in your little brain nest and then when you’re eventually ready to sit down and hatch an egg, it will actually happen for me quite quickly. I like to try and write a first draft within six weeks. And then really get out of your own way, as well, because you can obsess over everything. You have to write some rubbish in the first draft. I mean, it’s mainly rubbish but it’s there then to work on. That was kind of the same for the two books for me. So the third novel, it’s going to be awful because I’ll have all my second novel drama but in my third novel, I think. So, yeah, it’s going to be awful.

LISABELLE: I have not written a novel and I don’t know if I have one in me but I work very much the same way. I ecrite a lot and then just vomit. It builds and it builds and I just get it out.

HEATHER: My question for you is about process but a little bit more broadly. I know you’re working on a short story collection right now and so am I and I think you write short stories so beautifully and so convincingly, each one convinces you so much of itself. So I was just wondering if you can give me any advice. How do you sit down and write a short story? Because I have completely forgotten how to do it.

LISABELLE: I love your work so much. I don’t know. Have either of you read Zadie Smith’s lecture on writing stories where she talks about building a house? She says that there are two kinds of writers, the architect and the micromanager, and she talks about herself as a micromanager where, instead of building the whole structure, she’s just going to obsessively build one room before moving on to the next, and the carpet and the draping and the art and everything has to be there before moving on, and that’s just kind of like how I write, just on a word-by-word level, which is utterly useless to you because, like I said, your word by word is already so brilliant. I love, personally, building a story word by word and by ear, which is then why Yan has been so helpful. Yan has been my residency mentor and has been asking me really simple questions to which I have no answer. Like, when did this happen in the timeline?

HEATHER: Or the classic question for a short story, which I used to get from my mentor back in the day, was, what is this really about? And I used to hate that question because I could never answer it and that was the problem with the story.

YAN: If I can expand on that, I don’t know if we have time. I’m going to say this, then we’re probably running out of time. I have regularly discussed the idea of the aboutness with other writers, especially working on short stories, and I would often say, first you need to understand what the aboutness of your story is, as in what their story is about, and second you need to resist the aboutness of your story because if the actual story, the finished story, ended up being able to be summed up by aboutness, then that story fails because a short story, fundamentally, needs to resist that aboutness. So I feel like that’s a two-faced process. I think George Saunders might have said something similar along the lines of you sort of hatch your idea on this one platform and then finish it in a completely different place, on a completely different platform, and I think if that doesn’t happen then you’re not doing it right. I think this is probably along the similar line of you understanding this aboutness and then you completely shatter, destroy and disrupt, deconstruct it in your actual finished story.

HEATHER: That’s brilliant. I’ve been reading Elsewhere and really loving it.

LISABELLE: I could have sent you a copy!

HEATHER: So now I’m just thinking of all the stories with that context and it’s such a brilliant book, I’ve been really enjoying it, so I will take that with me, both pieces of advice, into my trying to write this book.

YAN: I think now we’re officially out of time, so we’re going to wrap this up and thank you, everybody, for tuning in and thank you, Lisabelle and Heather, for joining me for this brilliant, reinvigorating conversation. And thank you to the National Centre for Writing and the National Arts Council of Singapore for supporting this event. And thank you, Ellie and Martin, for being our guardian angels throughout this whole process. Thanks very much.

HEATHER: Thank you, Yan.

LISABELLE: Thank you, it was brilliant.

Supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore