Five minutes with tutor elaine chiew
Elaine is a novelist, short story writer and English teacher. She is the author of novel The Light Between Us which came out last year, and The Heartsick Diaspora, a short story collection. A two-time winner of the Bridport International Short Story Prize, her stories have been anthologised in the UK, U.S. and Asia. She teaches on the two-year Creative Writing Programme. Here she talks about her writing life.
When do you first remember wanting to be a writer? Ever since I was eight, and finished Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree collection and her Mr Pinkwhistle series.
Your first novel The Light Between Us was published in 2024. It weaves Chinese mythology with the history of early 20th century colonial Singapore. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the story and your journey to publication? In 2021, in the thick of the pandemic, I was awarded an Early Historian grant by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre and LASALLE College of the Arts to look at early Singaporean photography and the images of women. I must have looked at photographs in the thousands from the National Archives Singapore, and as those gazes panned back at me, many whose identities are now lost to time, one thing was certain: the past is alive.
I knew then that the story had to feature an early period Chinese photographer. The Light Between Us is a time-travel epistolary star-crossed love story between an early Chinese photographer and a modern-day archivist, a hundred years apart. A quantum entanglement through the mode of photography allows them to write letters to each other. Letters, to me, are one of the most intimate forms of address, almost like writing to oneself because it takes time to reach the addressee, nor can you know the effect it has had until a reply is sent back. Not so different in that a book too has this dissonance in time while creating this intimacy between writer and reader.
Your collection of short stories The Heartsick Diaspora was published in 2020. Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind these stories which are set in different cities around the world, and how your process with writing short stories differs from writing a novel? Miles Davis’ apparently said, ‘It took me so long to play myself.’ It took me a long time to figure out that a diasporic consciousness that had lived on different continents within a lifetime –from Asia to America to Europe – may not have a single authorial voice. What ties a collection that focusses on the Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese diasporic experiences in the West is precisely this identity fluidity – as one of the characters in The Heartsick Diaspora says, “Fluid identities that spill beyond boundaries, running like lines of flight, like ley lines that map and traverse different worlds?”
Short stories take a much longer time to write than novels for me; though they are much shorter, they are denser, and sometimes feel like as much character work goes into each as in a novel. A novel can feel like an extended short story, just one where you lengthen the timeline and plot all that happens in between.
You have also compiled/ edited a non-fiction publication Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World. Can you tell us more about this book? This is an anthology of writings – it includes short stories, flash fiction and an essay – focussing on all the metonymic meanings food can have around the world and features some big names like Ben Okri, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Charles Lambert, Krys Lee and Nikesh Shukla. Quite ambitious in scope, and it’s only through the support of New Internationalist that it became possible.
You have also worked as a visual arts researcher and your articles on arts and culture have appeared in various publications. How does art influence your creative writing? Contemporary art relies very much on hybridity, ley lines and motifs, intertextual references to offer up a multiplicity of meanings, and that has probably been the biggest influence. Nothing is in my short story or novel by accident, from the mention of a place to the casting of a name. For example, in The Light Between Us, the fact that a digital .jpeg is stored as a collection of binary data and that numbers are used in Chinese culture to encode emotional meanings makes us look at numbers a little differently. Archives of history too are stored using numbers. Our experience of history and the story we tell around it can feel intentional and also random at the same time because it depends on what we can find and how we connect the dots.
What are you working on now? I’m at the planning stage for a couple of novel ideas at the moment – I seem to flit between them a lot. It usually takes me a lot of tummy scratching and bingeing on dramas before I write a single word on the page.
What’s the most challenging aspect of writing? Finding time is the most challenging aspect for me at the moment. After a full day’s work, it is hard to find the headspace to craft beautiful sentences and to make weave strands together into a beautiful tapestry.
And the most enjoyable? It can be very ordinary moments when you’re walking by a shop and it has on its windowplate a quote from a poet, and a word catches you offguard. You stop to ponder it, and before you know it, it opens out to this entire revelation of why a character in your head insists on doing something or saying something the way they do.
Can you tell us how teaching creative writing impacts your own creative process? It solidifies the process in chunked ways, but it can also run the danger of being formulaic. For me, researching and constructing the syllabus for any particular course has been hugely rewarding, because it brings me into contact with a host of ‘spiritual friends’ who live and breathe the same joys and struggles – that of rendering the inner worlds of our characters and their stories alive. Teaching too is wonderful – nothing like seeing a diamond in the rough in the stories students write and just knowing how wonderful they will be after polishing.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about writing? I don’t know that there is one best piece, but the one that hasn’t worked is ‘Write everyday’. I tell my students that instead of beating themselves up about that, it’s better to ‘visit’ your work. Open up your story, read your own words, spend time with your characters. Like visiting an ailing relative. Or gardening. Whatever metaphor helps you think ‘care and nurture’ rather than amount of output.
What’s your go-to book about the craft of writing? The one I rely on a lot is Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey French’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. It’s well-researched and comprehensive and studded with lots of short story examples and exercises.
You’re marooned on a desert island with the complete works of Shakespeare and a religious text of your choice. What fiction book do you want to have with you? And would you prefer a notebook and pen, or laptop to write with? The Complete Works of Shakespeare!? What more can you ask for? I would probably ask to have I-Ching or the Analects as a religious/philosophical text. Would a deserted island have electricity? Probably not, in which case, I’d prefer possibly a text or instructions on how to make my own papyrus and pen!
What’s on your reading list right now? A lot of nature writing, such as Robert McFarlane’s ‘Is A River Alive?’ and Olivia Laing’s To The River.
Elaine Chiew teaches on the online Creative Writing Programme. The final taster session for this year’s programme is on Tuesday 30th September. Sign up here.