We ended up at The China House in Georgetown Penang, celebrating poetry and performance where Alvin Pang, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Jennifer Down and Bernice Chauly read and performed poetry. It was a triumph.

But the day began as it has always has begun here in this place of charity, love and compassion at the Ren i Tang Hotel on the corner of Lebuh Penang and Lebuh China with its twin butterfly windows over the entrance (famously, a Chinese Medicine Hall for many years – the oldest trading hall of its kind in all of South East Asia). It began with writing, writing, writing: silent writing, writing in our own way in our own time at our own pace. Writing in the fellowship of other writers. Writing in this, a collaborative residency. Writing writing to share.

And we did. We gathered again around the table in the afternoon, all twelve of us, to hear the final three.

I literally just wrote it for something to do this week.

This ‘something to do’ was marvellous, raw, edgy, breathtaking. As we all leaned in, drank in each word, we all knew we were on sacred ground here – the story, the writer, the generosity that comes with sharing. A gift. To take a risk to share our work while it is raw and in-progress is a gift.

We spoke truths, gathered up in the words of other writers we knew, those we’d heard of, those we’d read:

The stronger the story, the more detail you need to use.

With writing there is only pleasure in retrospect. 

Being a writer is like having homework all your life.

We all laughed. We know.

You can trust what you want.

Then later over dinner at the Tsunami eating crab and prawns and cake at The China House and poetry and music and cards around the table again (playing a game called Cheat which we renamed Fiction), we agreed that it is time to grow up. We need more of this. This shared, collaborative, multi-country, multicultural residency of exchange and fellowship needs to be a staple of our writing life. Our region needs these conversations, our languages need to be shared, to allow the ripple and purl of our imaginings and deepened understandings fan out through our writings, in our stories, in gifts to our readers.

– Francesca