Alison Clara Tan
ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?
Alison Clara Tan: Stuff that’s interesting. I guess you can say I’ve always loved a concept. Years ago I read an article by the poet Theophilus Kwek. I remember he wrote that with enough craft and thought, you can write a poem about anything. (I’ve looked and can’t find it, so I hope I didn’t make it up.) That stuck with me because at the time my main poetic influences wrote mainly confessional, personal poetry. I laboured under the impression that a ‘proper poem’ had to look a certain way and address certain subjects. There were a lot of things I couldn’t imagine myself writing a poem about. Reading that article must have knocked something in me loose, because now my inspiration comes from anything that scratches my brain. Completely fictional scenarios (there are a lot of these), a mundane incident or observation, an interesting idea for a title, highly personal experiences. A mixed bag. But even if wildly different on the surface, I find that most of my poems end up speaking about the same themes: memory, solitude, plurality. That small tug of compulsion is pretty unmistakable to me. I never think it will, but following it keeps bringing me to similar places.
ORP: What does success as a writer or artist mean to you?
ACT: I’ve had a slightly kooky theory for a while now that the essence of a poem does not come from within the writer. I couldn’t say where they come from. I guess they all float around in an amorphous void or something. There are infinite ways to bring an idea into the world, and the job of a writer is to use their command of craft, voice and skill to be the clearest conduit possible between the idea and the knowing. I like this theory of the writer as a sort of medium or archaeologist, because it takes the focus off me and my ego (relieving much anxiety in the process) and turns it to the work. When I finish a poem, I get the sense that I have managed to uncover something foreign. Something that came from me, but is not entirely of me. Success as a writer to me means continually being able to transform into a reader of my poems. That’s one way I know a poem is finished, when the light shifts and a poem starts telling me things new to me. It’s like translating a language you barely speak: there is the impossible work of translation, and then - suddenly - there is the message. But that’s only on my more virtuous days. Mostly I’m dreaming of prestigious journals and a published collection!
ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?
ACT: I am one of those writers who hate writing. You will not believe how disappointing this is to me. Exhausting does not begin to describe it! I’d compare it to running for hours, blindfolded, in a foreign landscape, beating bushes with sticks, searching for something I only have a vague idea of. It genuinely feels like a physical struggle. Willingly steeping myself in the unknown is a wretched feeling for a person like me who likes certainty. But then sometimes, I catch the scent of a poem and it starts to quicken and take within me. My mind quiets and I feel this wonderful, strange sense of being in total accord with myself and everything around me - even if I’m just slouched in my bed at midnight. It’s a rare but gripping rightness and quite addictive. When I finish a poem, I’m physically and mentally spent, but my world has moved. Just a little bit each time, but that’s what keeps me writing. Knowing I’ve been the vessel to bring a new thing to shore, that I’ve followed the poem to what it wanted to say.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
ACT: You must be brave enough to trust your inner voice. This was something I said to another writer years ago. I don’t know what spirit spoke this pearl of wisdom through me because at the time I wasn’t writing much at all myself, so I’m counting this as advice I’ve been given. Since then, I’ve come to realise that it encompasses so many things. To follow what a poem wants itself to be, rather than forcing it to be what you want it to. To let go of the string of words that you know deep down are aesthetically lovely but don't have internal logic. To sniff out your own dishonesty in a poem. To back yourself and keep writing and sending work out, even on days when everything seems a mess. That still, small voice! Other than that, a game changer for me was getting comfortable with rejection as the norm. Lots of journals and readers won’t like your work. The magic won’t come most days I try to write. It’s a bitter pill, but as was preached to me by a drunk guy at the house party I was at last Friday, ‘Get a grip’. You either show up, or you don’t. Stand at the door long enough and something will, eventually, find you.
