5 Questions with Joyce Chew
Joyce Chew is a Sydney-based emerging writer born in Singapore. She was the recipient of the Overland VU Short Story Prize in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Emerging Writers Festival’s Monash Prize in 2015.
Joyce was recently announced as one of two recipients of the Opera House’s inaugural Mentorship for Diverse Emerging Writers. Her writing project will be a ficto-critical piece inspired by The Myth of the Fair Go panel, blending confessional fiction with recent histories of Asian Identity and the legacy of colonialism in Australia.
No.1
How did you come to writing?
When I started kindergarten in Singapore, I didn’t talk. My teachers contacted my parents. They thought I was mute. I was just selective about when I spoke—I wrote or drew things out things instead. Shortly after arriving to Sydney, I’d visited an Ann Frank exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum. She had a diary and so I decided to have one too, although I moved more towards fiction. I wrote in many exercise books as a kid—I’d ask my mum to pick them up from Woolies or Officeworks.
I also really loved reading and wanted to ‘make’ my own book. I’ve said before that lifelong readers make for lifelong writers. My mum would take my brother and I on walking excursions to the library of a neighbouring suburb. Back then, her Singaporean driver’s license didn’t carry over here so she was back on her Ls. We would walk, picnic and wheel books to and from the library.
I’ve also lucked out in having great English teachers along the way as a product of the public school system through and though, from a primary school teacher who gifted me a book of poems and my HSC English teachers. I began thinking about writing more critically during my final year of high school. I’d ‘discovered’ modernist fiction and read the opening of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. That was a lightbulb moment. It reframed my view of poetry, prose and ways to play and work with words.
No.2
Tell us a bit more about the work you’ll be developing under this mentorship. What kind of work and research do you think it’ll entail?
I’ll be working on a ficto-critical response to the ‘Myth of a Fair Go’ panel at the Antidote festival hosted by the Sydney Opera House. This panel consists of Bri Lee, Sheila Ngoc Pham and Rick Morton—all incredible writers and thinkers. My area of interest will also be looking at these conversations in line with the #StopAsianHate and #MeToo movements which have opened such important conversations the last couple of years.
I’m interested in intersectionality and gravitate towards things that are interdisciplinary and experimental. I think it comes from being a woman of colour, and also from just wanting to question epistemic assumptions about writing and where one discipline ends and begins. As an English Lit and Philosophy student in another life, I am constantly reminded that our collective knowledge structures about writing (and many other things) are fundamentally inherited from hegemonic powers still at play today. Bri Lee’s Who Gets to Be Smart? deals with this relationship between knowledge and power. When linked to the ‘Myth of the Fair Go’ panel, I can’t help but ask the question of “Who gets to get a fair go?”
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m interested in exploring who is not getting a fair go. So much of fiction is rooted in character and the individual. And representing systemic, inherently problematic issues beyond the individual often requires us to step outside the interiority of character. Ficto-criticism is both confessional and confrontational. I find that even when tucked in a fictional novel, writers have moments of reflection on these issues that often are very lucid intrusions—they’re hard-hitting, not unlike a segment of a personal essay or letter. They take us from fiction to fact, and back again.
No.3
What was your first response upon receiving the email confirming your acceptance into the program?
When I first heard the news: surprised. I’m really grateful for the chance to be mentored by such incredible writers and had secretly been watching the Sweatshop literacy movement on the sidelines. They do such great work. And I’m really grateful that the program and judges (shout out to Declan and Winnie!) were so generous to take a chance on me. My writing has been mostly personal and internal wordplay—I hadn’t thought it carried any commercial or external appeal.
No.4
What will this mentorship mean for you and your practice?
It means taking things more seriously as a writer, and learning to use writing to take a more active part in joining the conversation on things I firmly believe in. The panel topics for Antidote are very meaningful—I’m sure a few others will meander their way into my work.
On my first meeting with Winnie and Declan, I was given the hot tip of getting an ABN. I’d never even thought of setting one up because I felt like I ‘wasn’t a real writer’ or good enough to have one—but was assured (and convinced) that it would be a good way to start things.
No.5
What are you reading at the moment? What authors or books inspire your work?
I’m loving Ocean Vuong’s work Night Sky with Exit Wounds and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—they are beautifully written and poignant. Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence have both been making me think deeply about non-fiction storytelling.
A constant for me over the years is that I tend to like to read slow, meandering, prose. I like thoughtful writers that can sometimes get rhythmic or dreamy: Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (cliché I know, but some lines are just so great).
The Mentorship for Diverse Emerging Writers is the inaugural instalment of a year-round series of mentorships. Launched as part of the Opera House’s Antidote 2021 festival of ideas, action and change, the new mentorship program accepted applications from Sydney-based emerging writers from First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Antidote 2021 will take place on Sunday 5 September, exploring themes including: solutions for the climate crisis, #StopAsianHate, alternatives to capitalism, decolonisation, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the myth of the ‘fair go’, anti-Arab racism since 9/11, Deaf culture, morality in Australian politics, and the quest for meaning in a post-truth age.
Find out more here.