Archive for the 'Highlights from Previous Posts' Category

Poet James Wood has donated three signed copies of his new poetry collection “The Theory of Everything” for the Fusion View prize draw.

Click here, to find out more about James Wood and listen to my podcast interview with him.

Three winners will be picked at random from the list of email subscribers to Fusion View. To get a chance to win a copy of James’s book, subscribe to this blog. Subscribe now.

Subscription is free and you will receive free email notifications once a week with the latest updates on this blog. You will automatically be entered into the prize draw to win a copy of “The Theory of Everything” and also all future prize draws (unless otherwise stated). For more about how to subscribe/ unsubscribe and my subscription policy,click here.

The closing date for this prize draw is Friday 16 February 2007. You can still subscribe after that date and you will automatically be entered into the next prize draw.

Please read the Rules of the prize draw below.

Yes, please enter me into the prize draw - I want to subscribe now. Click here to subscribe now.

The Rules for the prize draw
1. The closing date for this draw is 16 February 2007. Within two weeks of that date, 3 winners will be picked at random from the list of subscribers.
2. I will notify the winners by separate emails and ask for your name and land address to which to send the prize. I will be entitled to assume that the name and address given is the name and address of the winning subscriber and I will not knowingly post the prize to any other person.
3. When I receive a winner’s land address, I will post the prize to them and delete their land address from my records.
4. I will post the name of the winners on this blog (but not the land address or email address) .
5. I will not enter into any other correspondence or discussion regarding the winners or regarding this or any prize draw and my decision on the winners and prizes is final. You may not substitute the prize offered for anything else.
6. I will post the prizes by the public postal system. I am not liable for any acts or omissions of the postal services in the UK or any other country.
7. Where the address is not in the UK, I am not liable for any taxes, duties, or customs or excise or import requirements that may be applicable in the country of receipt nor for ensuring compliance with any other laws, including but not limited to laws relating to copyright, censorship or any other matters that may arise regarding or in connection with the prize. These remain the liability of the recipient and it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure compliance with the laws of their country.
8. By subscribing / entering this prize draw, you are confirming to me that you are over 18 or that you are over 13 and have the permission of your parent or guardian to subscribe/ enter this draw.
9. Your email address will remain on the subscription list (unless you unsubscribe) and will be entered into all future prize draws (unless otherwise stated). For my subscription policy, click here.

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The 1950s was a golden age of repertory theatre in the UK. That was a time when an actor might be playing Shakespeare one week while rehearsing for a Noel Coward play the next week and audiences might see Laurence Olivier in the lead role one night and as the second spear carrier the next night. It was also a key transition point as John Osbourne’s kitchen sink drama Look Back in Anger burst onto the scene to the challenge the established expectation of what theatre should be about. What was it like working as an actor at that important time in English theatre?

This is a special Fusion View podcast for the London Theatre Blog. To hear first hand about life in the theatre in the 1950s, I’ve coaxed actor Walter Plinge out of retirement to tell us about his experiences in repertory theatre during that golden age.

You can listen to the podcast interview by clicking on the grey player at the end of this post.

Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

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The London Theatre Blog was created by Andrew Eglinton and is full of information, reviews and opinions about all aspects of theatre, with a special focus on the London theatre scene. To find out more, go to www.londontheatreblog.co.uk.

Photo: scene from Look Back in Anger, thanks to www.gre enspot.info

Listen Now:

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I’ve been blogging here at Fusion View since June this year - and before that at a blogspot site. In the few months since then, I’ve been very fortunate to have had many diverse visitors and contributors from all over the world, helping me build a cross-cultural community. I’m delighted to share with you some very generous reviews about Fusion View… See the links below:

“an incredibly rich and inspirational literary site that has gained recognition from fellow artists, writers and the literary web community in general” - 9rules Network

“A truly cross-cultural blog on writing and a whole lot more” - Imagined Community (http://imagined-community.com/blog/?p=29)

“Yang-May Ooi’s excellent East-West writing blog. Well worth a visit.” - Will Buckingham

Photo: from flickr thanks to Pete R

I was interviewed by Elizabeth Tai of The Star newspaper, Malaysia on Friday for an article on writing and blogging. She asked for an update on what I’d been doing since my two novels were published (answer: taking a break from serious writing, changing jobs and moving house) and also if I was working on a third novel (answer: yes, very slowly. It’s called “Tianming Traviata” and is an off-beat family drama told in the first person by a feisty, old lady - and is mostly written in Malaysian English). I also talked about Fusion View and the joy of blogging (creating an online community of international writers and artists, including Malaysian writers Lydia Teh and John Ling, to name a few well-known names). She asked what advice I had for Malaysian writers (answer: read widely, keep writing and keep learning. Also, I referred them to my Getting Published series on this blog, which I started when a Malaysian writer asked me how to get published in the UK - although it gives advice to anyone wanting to be published in the UK, I try to focus on issues that would be of particular interest to Malaysian writers).

Elizabeth asked me for my reaction to the statistic that apparently, Malaysians only read two books a year. Well, as a writer, it makes me depressed. But after I came off the phone, I wondered: can that really be true? There are lots of bookshops - and they are big, too - in all the shopping malls in Malaysia. Can they really be doing hardly any business?

I estmate that I read more than 20 books a year, both fiction and non-fiction - although this year, non-fiction seems to have dominated. How many books do you read a year? Let me know, especially if you are based in Malaysia. Can we prove this statistic wrong?

Even if you’re not Malaysian, please try out the poll below (it’s anonymous) and add your comment as well, if you’d like to share more details about what you are reading or if you have views about reading. I am really curious now to get a sense of how much people are reading - all the more interesting in today’s world of video games and home entertainment centres. Are Fusion View visitors more likely to read books or less so?

I’ll review the results in a couple of weeks and report back.

PS. Elizabeth couldn’t confirm when the article on Fusion View would appear in The Star - if you are based in Malaysia, can you keep an eye out for it and let me know when it comes out? I’m curious, naturally, to know what the article says.

I was listening to The Food Programme on Radio 4 the other day and they had two experts on who were debating heatedly about the date when the potato first came to England. They also featured a Slovenian group of Chefs called The Association for the Recognition of Saute Potatoes and Onions as a Main Dish, who travelled round Europe to Potato Festivals cooking up their signature dish. Having a preference for rice generally, I had no idea that people could get so passionate about potatoes.

And then I started thinking about all the recipes that I knew for different types of potato dishes and realised that, for someone who claims to be not so fond of potatoes, I knew quite a number dishes involving the spud. So here is the first in a series of posts all to do with potatoes.

This is a recipe I invented one frosty November lunchtime. It was a Saturday and I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, revelling in the heat and atmosphere of the Deep South, while outside, it was grey and chilly. By lunchtime, I was starving and longing for something hot and warming that I could cook and eat quickly so I could get back to my book.

We looked in the fridge and there was very little food. Damn. I needed to go to the supermarket later that afternoon. In the meantime, there was some cheese, a few peppers and onions, a few slices of ham and frozen chips. Everything apart from the frozen chips were ideal for pizza - but I couldn’t be bothered to get the flour out and make the base.

Wait. What about chip-pizza?

1. Lay out the frozen chips on a baking tray as you would normally
2. Sprinkle on top of the chips chopped peppers and onions (and in fact, any vegetable that would go well on pizza) - and garlic
3. Tear up and sprinkle the pieces of ham on top (or any other meat that you might put on pizza eg salami, pepperoni etc)
4. Grate the cheese (cheddar works well) and spread evenly over the top of it all
5. Bake in a medium oven for 30-40 mins

When you take it out, you will have melted bubbling cheese over the chips and pizza ingredients. Serve with tomato ketchup a la Jackson Pollock squirted all over the tasty pile.

You could bake the chips bare for 20 mins first to get them a bit browner and then take them out and action items 2-4 above. Then put it all back in for another 10-15 mins.

Either way, you end up with a quick, yummy dish that’s great to eat on your own or for sharing with friends (especially while watching a DVD at home) - but hideously naughty if you are worried about your figure…!

My father has recently been inspired into a spate of creative activity. He submitted a Fusion Story a little while back, about his first experience of coming to study in England. He is of that generation of men - particularly in the Chinese tradition - who were never encouraged to share personal moments publicly. And he has never been known to write much creatively. So I am really touched that recently, he has been sharing his personal reminiscences with us in writing - and really proud of him.

This piece about his grandmother also gives us a flavour of a Malaya of a different time - before the freeways and high rise buildings and Starbucks.

He writes:

My earliest memory of Grandmother was when I was four or five when we moved to Cheras. I had gone with her to clean the house before the family moved in. Some day she would buy durians from the Malay vendors who came with a huge basket of the fruits stacked on the back of his bicycle. We would eat them squatting at the front door. She was very fond of durians.

In the little garden in the front of the Cheras house there was a pomegranate tree to which she seemed very attached. She would water it with water which had been used to clean fish and would hang empty crab-shells on the branches because they would help the tree. It seldom bore fruit and when it did she was very pleased with it.

She doted on his grandsons and I think particularly me. She would make sure to buy Nyonya kuih from the Indian vendor who would come around with his 2 huge baskets on a pole across his shoulder hawking his wares. And very often he had a pot containing assam curry with a charcoal stove underneath it - for making assam laksa. A word about this Indian gentleman. He was already quite old then, I would say at a guess about 50 years. He would carry these two baskets and the pot and walked many miles a day to sell his food. It must really be a very hard life. I still remember his gaunt but cheerful face wearing a brown felt hat like an inverted flower pot. He would disappear every now and then for 3 months or so and then he would appear again saying that he had gone back to India.

There are two things which Grandmother wanted me to do which caused me some pain - as little boys would have when they are asked to do things which caused them to stand out amongst their peers. The first was to part my hair on the right side because she said that if I used the left side all the time, the hair along the line would drop out. The second was to wear braces to hold up my shorts. It was, of course, a sensible thing to do but little boys did not do sensible things when the others do not do it. I can’t remember how I got her to allow me to revert back to normal. May be I complained to Mother who must have stepped in.

She would tell very earthy stories to AHC and I heard some of them which I can still remember but it is not suitable for re-telling as my secretary types all my letters.

When Mother went out with Father she would bring back Hokkien mee about 11.00 at night and Grandmother would eat the mee with me in the bedroom. As far as I can remember my brother BT never joined in the eating. Was it because of my known greedy nature that I was that she woke me up. Grandmother was full of common sense and it was she who told us that Queen Victoria had lots of children whom she married off to all the royal houses in Europe and thus she was related to them making the likelihood of disputes or war less likely. (Although it did not prevent the First World War.)

I had always thought she had a noble face with good cheekbones and bone structure. She did not chew betel nut but she smoked self-rolled cigarettes but did not have the dirty habits of the smoker. I remember using up my savings of Japanese paper money to buy her, just before the Japanese surrender, tobacco in packets and the cigarette paper.

Later on when we were in secondary school she lived in the Imbi Road temple and we would see her when we visited the temple on the first and fifteenth day of the Chinese month and other feast days of the Gods. Still later on when she lived on top of the dispensary we would see her on Friday evenings after going to the Rex and Madras cinemas.

She was so effacing that she would not stay with anyone of us for fear of disturbing our lives. I remember saying to myself on her death which occurred on a Saturday that she is so understanding that she would not want to inconvenience anyone and have them to take leave to come to her funeral.

Written by Guestblogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

As part of my series on Getting Published, I spoke to UK Literary Agent Lucy Luck about the process of submitting your manuscript for publication. She gives her advice and answers questions emailed by Fusion View readers and listeners about how a literary agent can help an author, what to put in your covering letter, what’s hot in the publishing world right now and much more.

Listen to our conversation using the embedded player below.

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Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

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If you would like to submit your manuscript to Lucy, go to her webpage at www.lucyluck.com - please mention Fusion View in your covering letter.

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To enable as many of my readers and listeners to benefit from Lucy’s advice, this post will headline Fusion View until Thursday 24 August 2006 8.30am (GMT+1) when the next post will be uploaded.

When I was growing up in Malaysia, we always had tasty, spicy, aromatic food. Day in, day out. Garlic. Chilli. Turmeric. And for fruit we always had delicious, flavour-ful mangoes, papayas, rambutans, starfruits. Dripping and juicy with taste. So far so ho-hum.

What we craved was really exotic and exciting foreign food, dishes that were really difficult to achieve in the humid tropical heat. Tastes that involved dairy and foodstuffs that would go off in the rank mugginess. Fruits that were from a cooler climate.

Like lemon meringue pie. Specifically, the home-made lemon meringue pie made by Koo-cheh, my little aunt. She was my father’s youngest aunt and came to live with us with my grandmother when my grandfather died. Kooch was only ten years older than me and she was my favourite aunt. The family called her Mary Poppins as she could always be relied on to keep an eye on us kids.

Making lemon meringue pie in a hot sticky kitchen in the tropics is no joke. It was hugely labour intensive because you had to make each of the three components from scratch. Once a year, for a special occasion, Kooch would spend a whole day in the furnace to make this exquisite dessert. She would make the shortcrust pastry base and bake it blind, with a layer of grease-proffo paper and dried beans to weight down the rising crust. Then she would make the lemon filling, grating the rind of two lemons and boiling it up in their juices, adding sugar and egg yolks and cornflour. She would fill the cooked pastry base with the gluey liquid and let it set.

Finally, she would beat the egg whites with sugar to form a thick, mountainous white fluff that she spooned over the whole lot and the pie would go into the oven to brown the meringue. Later, it would cool on the counter, protected from flies by a half-domed basket and then go into the fridge.

That evening, we would all be abuzz, my parents, grandmother and us kids, saving space for dessert. She would finally bring out the pie and and slice into the soft cloud of meringue, cut down into the rich yellow of the lemon and at last, into the crumbly crustiness of the base. No shop bought lemon meringue pie has ever compared to this home-made tangy, fresh taste blended with the bubbly yet crunchy yet chewy foam of meringue and the bland buttery taste of the baste, all cool and fresh on our palates.

We would regularly beg Kooch to make the pie but she would refuse. When I thnk back on it, she would have been around 17 or 18 and with better things to do than spend hot days cooking for her greedy family. We were lucky she made it for us once a year! But, this reluctance made her a legend in the family at that young age, like a five-star Michelin chef who would only occasionally deign to make her signature dish - and then only when the whim struck her.

Kooch now lives in Canada with her own kids who are around 17 or 18. I have the old Penguin Cookbook of hers, the pages brown and fragile and falling apart. I’ve made lemon meringue pice form there and it always, consistently tastes just as good as if we were tasting it for the first time. This is partly because I’ve only ever made it once every 8 years or more - it is that labour intensive. Or perhaps I’m that lazy…

Still, no matter if I make it or anyone else does, to my family and me, it will always be known as Kooch’s lemon meringue pie.

As part of my exploration of the writing process, I talk to Terry Bailey, lecturer in scriptwriting at the University of Aberystwyth, where he teaches scriptwriting at undergraduate level and also at Masters level. What are the elements of a good story? How important is structure in a novel or screenplay? Terry outlines the key principles and recommends some good guidebooks on writing and story. I describe how I structured my first novel, The Flame Tree, using post-it notes and a blank wall!

Listen to our conversation with the player below.

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Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

In my post At Home in the World, I wrote about my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, the Runaway Boy who became the first ancestor that we can remember.

THE GRAVE

When I was a child, I remember being told that his grave was in an ancient Chinese cemtery up on a hill in the jungle outside Taiping,
Malaysia. He had died in Malaya, never seeing China, his homeland, since he ran away from the bandits who had captured him. Only a few men in the family knew how to find the grave in the jungle. No women could go and visit the grave because the jungle was too dangerous - and certainly I would not be alloed to go as a little girl. The location was handed down to my second cousins, however, father to son, man to boy.

THE RAID

One night, a hundred and fifty years ago, in Southern China, bandits raided my great-great-grandfather’s village. He was a boy and somehow, escaped the carnage. Some versions of the story in my family say the chief bandit felt pity for him and took him away with the bandit gant. Another version says that the gang rounded up the boys of the village to be their boot boys or to sell as slaves.

THE BANDITS

The boy spends many years with the bandits until he becomes a grown man. Some say the bandit chief took him as a son and groomed him to be his successor. Others say the boy never forgot the night of the raid and the murder of his family - he silently vowed vengeance and bided his time. Yet another sotry goes that the boy had been a prince and one day, somehow, he discovers his true identity while part of the bandit gang.

ESCAPE

In any event, when he was a grown man, he ran away from the bandit gant and made his way to a port on the coast. There, he boarded a junk to Malaya, paying his passage as an indentured labourer. One story says that he made his escape on his eighteenth birthday. Another says he killed the bandit chief to honour his vow of vengeance - even though he had come to love the chief as his father. And, well, the prince version is just to silly to even continue… Whatever the trigger, at any rate, he had to escape the country for fear of his life or to forever forget the tragedies of his past.

THE LEGACY

When I look at the generations of the family that came after this boy, the descendants of this bandit heir apparent, I do not see fighting men or thieves or murderers or soulds tortured by dark memories. My family are all responsible, sensible, law-abiding and well, rather boring citizens.

When I was twelve, I interviewed my grandfather, the grandson of the Runaway Boy, and he told the story into my tape recorder. His version is straightforward, without the glamourous embellishment. My grandfather died the next year and the tape is our only recording of his voice. I had had the intention at that time to write a book about the family. There is a handwritten exercise book with my childish version of the story, full of pawing horses and flames and screaming villagers. There is also another version, written in my twenties, that I abandoned just before writing The Flame Tree - fifteen years had passed and this version was still full of thundering horses hooves and a boy scooped up while running to hide in the fields.

The manuscript is still unfinished after thirty years. People tell me I should finish writing that book - Chinese family sagas have been all the rage; here’s my chance to launch my Wild Swans out into the world. But I think I like the myth - or the many myths - too much to bring myself to write the definitive story. The myths make us dark and glamourous - the lawyers and accountants and doctors and teachers that this boy’s DNA came to create. It’s cool to know, in my modern, city-bound life that if armageddon came I have inside me the genes to swash and buckle my way to survival and escape, bandit-style…

At any rate, whatever truth or otherwise lurks in those myths, they do tell us one true thing about my great-great-grandfather - whether he had really been a bandit or a prince or a murderer, he was certainly a heck of a storyteller.

pic courtesy of peter.macdonald @ flickr; no derivations permitted