Signed, sealed, delivered

Sun, 15 Jun 2014
2 min read
Add Comment
Signed, sealed, delivered (PHOTO CREDIT: Pet Piggies)
Signed, sealed, delivered (PHOTO CREDIT: Pet Piggies)

So I’ve just submitted separate Presentation and Participation grant applications for two publications I’ve been working on:

  • The Zookeeper’s Boy and Other Poems, a collection of 30 poems which I’ve written over the last six years (inclusive of my time at Toji – in fact, the bulk of the poetry was written while I was at Toji); and
  • Standing On The Shore, a graphic novella that I wrote last year, and which will be illustrated by a Singaporean artist.

I know we’re only at the applications stage, but I’m really so proud of how everything materialised and coalesced.

From the project management i.e. coordinating meetings and pulling together the team, to getting quotations, to calculating the budget, to figuring out how to fill out the forms, and – allow me this moment to humblebrag – all while having to work on the documents during pockets of time at night when I got home from the day job, or on weekends, or during my days off.

But the going was really made easier with the encouragement I received from the different people who provided active constructive responses at all points of the journey, such as how to improve my work and, at the very minimum, acknowledging and indicating – verbally or otherwise – their support for my artistic goals.

Suffice to say, I’m pretty pumped and looking forward to finally publishing my work – if I secure funding, that is.

Keep your fingers crossed for me and wish me luck!

Stuff you must read today (Fri, 13 Sep 2013) – The Literary Edition

Fri, 13 Sep 2013
2 min read
Add Comment
  • David Ferry’s Beautiful Thefts | The New Yorker
    “One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable”.

  • Poet’s Kinship With the President | The New York Times
    “‘Richard was always a complete engineer within poetry,’ Professor McGrath said. ‘If you said it needs a little work here or there, a whole transfiguration of a poem emerged. He understood revision not to be just a touch-up job but a complete reimagining, a reworking. I know that’s connected to his engineering skill.'”

  • The pun conundrum | BBC News
    “The late William Safire, the New York Times’s long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun ‘is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay – a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure'”.

  • Samuel Beckett meets the Teletubbies | Improbable Research
    A possible reason why the Teletubbies always had that element of “[n]othing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”.

  • “Jane Austen, Game Theorist”: Full Transcript | Freakonomics
    “…in Pride And Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is not a very sympathetic character, and she seems to be very foolish. But if you look at what she accomplishes it’s pretty good. She gets Jane married and she even sort of incentivizes Lydia…the younger sister, who in a very sort of crisis-y kind of way…runs off with Wigham without being married, which is a scandal. But I argue in the book that maybe she does that because she realizes the only way she can get some money in her marriage is to marry somebody who is not necessarily super committed to her…to create [a] crisis situation so the richer members of her family will then solve the problem for her. And that’s what happens”.