By Yeow Kai Chai

Encountering Samuel Caleb Wee's works is to experience joyful dislocation, or shall we say, decentralisation.

Take his debut poetry collection, https://everything.is, a bilingual oddity with abstract, post-Internet explorations as well as more straightforward lyrical confessions on family histories penned in English (and occasional Hokkien) by him, and translated into Vietnamese by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. Published by AJAR, a Hanoi-based small press, the book has two covers, front and back, providing multiple accesses to the texts, and disrupting notions of chronology and linearity.

This playfulness stems from a healthy scepticism about authorial control. In an interview with editor Nazry Bahrawi, Wee said: "I realised that the opposite of self isn't no-self, but collaboration. It's like a half-image that only becomes legible when you hold it up to a mirror."

This collaborative spirit is evident back in 2016 when he was a co-editor of this is how you walk on the moon, an anthology of experimental fiction. His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals and magazines such as QLRS and OF ZOOS.

As a recipient of Nanyang Technological University (NTU)'s HASS International PhD Scholarship, he graduated with a PhD in English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, researching the impact of social media on contemporary poetry. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at NTU.

1. What are you reading right now?
For love this morning, I read and wrote the ICA PR/LTVP Application Form. I'm a serial polygamist with books though. For my class on pop culture and the Internet this week, I re-read Tavi Gevinson's Fan Fiction: A Satire, which is a brilliantly unhinged work of fan/friend metafiction about Taylor Swift that's also a faint pastiche of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. I've just finished writing an essay about Joanne Leow's Seas Move Away, a poetry collection drifting between Singapore and Canada which left me particularly wistful. I've got some dog ears in Veeraporn Nitiprapha's Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, which is looking to be a magical realist intergenerational diasporic saga, and Raeden Richardson's The Degenerates, which has been terrific so far — lyrical yet propulsive. And finally, I recently rediscovered on my shelf Spencer Gordon's Cruise Missile Liberals, which is chillingly prescient.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
As a kid, I would've quite liked to be an Animorph; in my undergraduate years, Admiral Zheng He from Kuo Pao Kun's Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. These days, Tom Bombadil's life sounds increasingly appealing, though like Tom I would also probably misplace the One Ring if it came to me, on account of my undeveloped object permanence.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm a social butterfly. I'm not an introvert by any means, but I spend more time alone than anyone I know, parasocial relationship with my wife's cats notwithstanding. I have an odd relationship with solitude: I often find it devastating, but also frequently put continents between myself and everyone I know. A fearful-avoidant moth might be the better description.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Can I say kinship? I'm grateful for the living writers I've gotten to share paper and couches with in my life, too many to name, but some I've been missing lately on account of the oceans between us are Divya Victor,  Jasmine An, Carlina Duan, Jenkin Benson, Romane Bladou, and Nivi Thatra. As for a poet I've never met, I've been obsessed with Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth for years.

I also like the dialogue between the living and the dead you're suggesting here, and the implication that writing is the medium. I've been thinking recently about writing as a technology of distance between bodies. Last June I got to visit the archives of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. I was expecting it to feel like a religious experience, but it was almost the opposite. Thirty minutes in I started tearing up reading the back of a folio where she had casually scrawled her name in hanja a few times – I often do that with my Chinese name when I'm bored. That helped me to see the artefacts as they really were: not sacraments, but effects; commonplace stubs of a life spent scratching away at language, made accessible to me because her friend and publisher, Reese Williams, had loved her and her particular nick on the universe enough to hold them for decades. Cha is often read as difficult, but to me there is a powerful faith in her work – that across the difficulty, the reader arrives.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
From 2020 onwards I fell into a long period of not writing. I was grieving the loss of someone whose artistry I loved deeply, and who had had the most unique aperture into the universe. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that I got to continue speaking when he would never do so again. I think I was resentful of my imagination itself for being false, constructing presence and narrative out of something as senseless and absurd as death. It was a friend who later pointed out that that's the good stuff.

I can't say there was a single moment that brought me back to language. Reading and slow jamming without expectation helped. I fell in love with other modalities of creating: music, painting, cooking. I have a vegan maple fried rice recipe I'm pretty proud of.

6. What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
I like writers who lose control and experience rapture. I love when I can sense that the slope away from the writer's original path has been thoroughly soaped down. I'm also a sucker for a voice that breaks the membrane; someone who has definitely shat their pants at least once in their recent adult life, and who will happily tell you about it.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
The belief that being a writer means being an asshole, I guess.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
I held on to the ending of Raymond Carver's "Suspenders" for years, even before I really started reading poetry:

"                                                          [...]      We turned out the lights
and got into our beds and became quiet. The quiet that comes to a house
where nobody can sleep."

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
am a complete fiend for eggs. The best breakfast I ever had was in 2019, when I had to finish a carton of eggs by making a six-egg scramble.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
A sci-fi action thriller, but on my phone, truncated and narrated by an AI voiceover next to a video of Subway Surfers, as God intended.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
I love that Canadian 'eh', which is really a 'hey' West of the Rockies. 'Woke' is a big dog whistle for me.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: PowerPoint, moose, wind-up toy.

As his PowerPoint glitched at the moose anecdote,
the wind-up toy groused: "You murdered the joke."

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Some other task which needed to be finished two weeks ago.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
2am, right as the lorazepam is kicking in.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
If we're talking a proper soiree, I'd like to lose my liver trying to keep up with Allen Ginsberg and James Baldwin, before hitting the rooftop with Ursula Le Guin for some air. The real question, of course, is why is it my last supper? Have I been arrested for claiming to be the messiah? Who snitched?

16. Your PhD dissertation is titled 'The lyric selfie : mediating race and subjectivity in poetry from print to Web 2.0.' What are some literary trends, authors and/or phenomena are you most excited about?
A huge part of my PhD was mourning the death of the Internet's radical potential. For a second, the dream was that the digital could be a democratizing force; my twenties started with Bersih, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and GE2011. I also miss sociality on the Internet in that era, the anonymous poets I used to read on Tumblr who wrote the most devastating, vaporous poems that are no longer available. That world vanished sometime around 2015, but I have a feeling that the North American reanimation of 'identity' over the last decade is now exhausted, and we might see a shift back towards the work of navigating relation and coalition across differences. In Singapore, I've also noticed some younger designers and writers are finding old Web 1.0 era technologies generative to play with — Bao Anh Bui, Chia Amisola, and the good folk over at Feelers all come to mind. It might be the time is right to revive 'cyberspace' as a non-place we can escape to.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I'm not here.

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