5 Questions with Khin Myint
Khin Myint grew up in Perth in the 90s. His father arrived in Australia from Burma in the 70s and his mother was a ten pound pom. Khin and his sister's childhoods were marred by the anti-Asian sentiment in their suburban surroundings.
Khin went on to teach refugees in Australia and on the Thai-Burma border. He is an award winning singer-songwriter, and in the 2010s won the Perth Poetry Slam and began publishing on masculinity and race.
No.1
How did you come to writing as a form?
I was getting bullied at school so I started skipping it. I would leave with my schoolbag in the mornings, but I just caught busses around town by myself and hung out in parks, smoking cigarettes and people-watching. That’s when I started writing.
It gave me a handle on my emotions. I wrote about anger and frustration and shame. I don’t know if you’d call it poetry, but that’s how I started. It was a sort of coping strategy.
No.2
Tell us a bit more about the project you’re working on under the Next Chapter scheme.
My sister euthanised herself when I was going through a messy breakup in the US. I was inadvertently caught in a legal problem there too. Then, the day before my court appearance, she killed herself. After that [happened], I was just absolutely lost, frozen, unable to trust myself. I needed to make sense of things, and that process ended up as the memoir I’m working on now.
Writing it has made me think a lot about how society categorises people. Binaries like mentally/physically ill, or white/Asian often cloud complex realities. My sister and I grew up mixed-race in a racially tense school during the Jack Van Tongeren era. Racists here in Perth were overt and plenty. White kids at my school were defining their own sense of self by Othering the Asians, and my sister and I didn’t fit the accepted categories properly. That irked our bullies. Theda (my sister) then found herself in a similar situation when she was an adult. She fell ill, and her illness confused the mind/body binary in medicine. That sort of thing creates trouble within a community—it challenges accepted knowledge in institutions, and it fractures families as well. It leads to polarisation.
I’ve been writing about that, about how certain identities challenge the way a society is understanding itself, and what that does to them as well as what it reveals about our culture.
No.3
What was your first response upon receiving the email confirming your acceptance into the program?
I was stoked. I called my mum.
No.4
What will the Next Chapter mean for you and your practice?
I want to strengthen my voice. Some voices pull you into their story with a certain grip; I want that in my own writing. I’m getting there, but I’m still learning and improving.
This program will also connect me with publishers, which is great. I have something I want to say, [and] I was initially worried about how I would get noticed by publishers. This gives me a much higher chance of being heard.
No.5
What are you reading at the moment? What authors or books inspire your work?
I’ve just finished Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir (The Hate Race) about growing up brown in Australia. She and I grew up in the same era of Australia’s history. Things she describes in that book are so familiar to me from my own childhood. I liked the experience of reading her. I had a lot of shame admitting what happened to me when I was younger, especially what happened around race. Reading her gave me confidence that I should speak about it.
I’ve also just started The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. Her voice seems pitch-perfect to me. There is vulnerability mixed with strength and flaws in her characters. I want to capture that about myself too when I write.
I also read a few Danzy Senna books this year. She is an American who writes about mixed-race experiences. I tend to pick books that highlight people who trouble the society in which they move. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides was my favourite book for a long time because of that.
Find out more
The Next Chapter is a scheme that gives writers time and space to craft a voice and a career—offering them support from mentors and peers, and the opportunity to experiment and develop their writing. It’s also about investing time and expertise in writers who reflect the diversity of Australian identities and experiences, and offering opportunities to writers from marginalised communities.
Find out more here.