I'm sure you're already aware that Dzanc Books and guest editor Lee K. Abbott has released the solid anthology, Best of the Web 2009, featuring eclectic fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and un-labelable writing. Among the hotshot contributors are Jeff Parker, Terese Svoboda, Roy Kesey, Stephen Dixon, Michael Martone, Peter Markus, Michael Czyzniejewski, and Blake Butler.
As well, Philip Holden's short story, "Two Among Many" (originally published in Cha) is featured in the anthology as one of the best pieces of recent fiction culled from the lively online literary world. Here, in an Isak guest post that's part of a larger Best of the Web internet takeover, Holden discusses the writing of "Two Among Many."
By Philip Holden
Guest Writer
Writing "Two Among Many" was an unusual experience, and an important transition for me. I’d been trying for some time to write about Singapore in a way that drew on my experiences of living here for what is now the majority of my adult life. There were some things I wanted to explore in the story: how initially when I came to Singapore I’d been disturbed at the death penalty and the high rate of executions, and yet how in my own life I’d become habituated to this, so that I stopped asking questions. The line between genuinely responding to the complexities of a different society and becoming part of it, and fudging important personal principles is always a fine one. Reading Singapore history and participating in NGO work, I was struck by a series of incongruities. Many draconian laws and procedures, including the procedures associated with execution itself, were inherited from the colonial state. The decade or so before Singapore ’s independence in 1965 had been marked by intense idealism, in which people hoped that they could create a new, equal society that would leave the inequalities of colonialism behind. Certainly Singapore’s economic progress since 1965 has been astonishing, but I--and I think many people who live on this island--also had a feeling that Singapore’s current modernity is in some way empty, based on new hierarchies of control and sanctioned violence that we are habituated not to see. Singapore ’s not unique in this respect, but perhaps its location—a small, rich island in a much poorer region—makes issues like this more pressing than in North America .
I wanted to explore these issues in the short story, but in a different way from the way I’d approach them in the research I write as a scholar. The story grew out of a real situation: a Vietnamese Australian was about to be executed in Singapore , the case got an unusual amount of attention, and one of the local newspapers tracked down the executioner and interviewed him. I was curious what would happen if I placed two very different people on a story trajectory that would intersect, framed by a memory of colonial violence. The executioner in particular intrigued me: how one could do something horrific on a regular basis, but become habituated to it so that it became simply a “job”? Yet it was too easy to simply condemn him in the story: instead, I wanted to develop the uneasiness the characters’ self-justification caused me, and, by extension, my readers. I tried to put the two characters on intersecting journeys that met only in the future to see what would happen: unusually for me, I simply followed them, and didn’t plot the story out.
For a long time I held on to the story and didn’t send it out because I didn’t feel the voices were right, particularly the voice of the woman, whose gender, nationality, and background I kept on changing. I put it aside for a couple of years. Then I was in Hong Kong , visiting the University, and Tammy asked me if I had any fiction I’d like to submit for the excellent online journal Cha. I went back to the story, re-read it, and liked it more than I had done when I wrote it two years previously. I worked on it again, and gave her the story, rather nervously—was it really any good? One of the things I’ve realized through this process is that stories are parts of larger conversations, and that they need to be published and read, even if they aren’t quite perfect, rather than lurking on hard drives. Now I’ll try to tell myself that repeatedly, when I look again at all those other stories I write that never seem quite ready for publication.
Editor's Note: If you're in the Detroit area on August 5, be sure to head over to Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck at 7 pm for a reading from five Best of the Web writers.
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