end of year updates - a-festival

how does one explain the ajar a-festival?

i find myself flipping through my photo roll again. Watch this 20 second video.

random paper planes filled with printed questions being thrown around a hipster cafe while people read poetry in the background and a media projection appears in the background with no lights on.

does that describe a-festival better?

"the festival i enjoyed most in my entire career as a traveling writer". is that better? here, back to random photos.

digital and corporeal men stressed as powerful female moderator Quyen interrogates them

between panels we squat on the streets of hanoi and shovel food into our mouths. kfc lurks in the background.

another video, this one a workshop hosted by Greg Nissan and Jake Schneider, the editors of Berlin-based SAND journal - in which they challenge us to translate the untranslatable! including horrible monsters like Hamid Roslan's "This One Also Sonnet".  (foreshadowing: Hamid's work is actually translated a few weeks later into 6 languages in the Sing Lit Station-Literature Across Frontiers Translation Bootcamp in Malaysia...)

my attempt at another legendary monster - Bok's Eunoia... in Chinese, maintaining constraints!

very possibly the best meal i had in hanoi at Cha Ca Thang Long - Hanoi-style fried fish, introduced by the mythical Lee Yew Leong of Asymptote.

the closing night reading in hanoi

the reading in ho chi minh city

at times it seems like the festival navigated every hipster venue in vietnam possible. not for them the traditional conference room or air-conditioned office space, or even the repurposed black box or school lecture hall. every single venue involved a mysterious street number which showed no signs of habitation from the main road, then a jaunt down an abandoned alley, a twist under an awning or a climb up a hidden stair past old men smoking or dripping rain, and then poof, magic hipster cafe on rooftop. 

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very much the heart of the festival - the amazing organising team of kaitlin rees, nha thuyen, quyen and hai yen. (and yen san, small boy). just in terms of the embrace of multi-disciplinary, inter-language madness that they consort in (while running a multi-city festival), they are so far ahead of singapore writers that i cannot even explain. what is confessionalism? what are our silly forms? these girls are really pushing the envelope of language as art as translation as movement as i do not know what is going on. 

please invite me back please please please please.