Hello everyone,
This is an email to let you know that I will continue to update this newsletter starting November. Earlier this year, I received a Neilma Sidney Travel Fund grant to research PERIPATHETIC, my book-in-progress.
It’s still early days, but it will be an essay collection; whenever people ask me what it’s “about”, I say “unbelonging”—but really it’s more about globalised identities that are always in flux. It’s also largely informed by the fact that my cultural roots stem from Punk and DIY subcultures in both Asia and so-called Australia from the 2000s till now. Its overall contents will contend that trauma and struggle can be equally weird, joyful, humorous and abstract. Within experimental essays that combine autofiction, criticism and memoir, I hope to be able to destabilise ideas around power, identity and capital, as well as recognise my own complicity within these constructs and systems.
But like I said, this is all still quite loose, blurry areas in a Fallout map that still remain to be discovered. This baby is nowhere close to being born or sold, but I’m taking great joy in plodding along. So as is tradition before embarking on a grant-sponsored project, I’ll be reactivating this newsletter to compile my thoughts and observations while I return to Singapore, where I was born and raised, and then onward to Kuala Lumpur, Jogjakarta, Bandung and Jakarta. In the past, artists, activists and other subcultural communities in these locales have played a large part in forming my identity as a young adult, and revisiting them will no doubt help with further coalescing my ideas around this project.
What to expect? There is a sense of diasporic apprehension as I reckon with returning to familiar places I have not had the opportunity to visit for 4 to 8 years, the possibility of confronting changes I am unprepared for—not only because these are cities with rapidly-evolving characters, but also that I’ll have to contend with friends lost to illness, recklessness or suicide, a theme I find recurring more and more in my social circles in my 30s. But I’m certain there will also be pleasant surprises, cynical insights, exciting developments and strange discoveries.
Either way, I will be updating this newsletter on a weekly (or twice weekly) basis, much in the same way I did with MENTAL \\\ MENTEE.
Previous subscribers: I won’t be offended if this doesn’t interest you, feel free to unsubscribe.
All my warmth,
Cher