Forward! (A Foreword).
Click on the picture (or here) to read the first issue!
The first issue of InkLink, a new student-run litmag, launched this week! I can’t claim any role in its birth, except that the editors very kindly reached out earlier this year with an interview request – and subsequently asked me to contribute a foreword and a new poem as well (thank you!).
Writing this took me right back to my own school days, when some friends and I put together our own bootleg magazine with the help of the neighbourhood photocopy auntie. With the editors’ permission, I’ve decided to share my foreword (and publishing adventures) here too. All credit to my erstwhile co-editors for any shards of wisdom it contains:
“When did we stop relishing the fact that we were dreamers?”
The answer comes to me in a flash, waving an accusatory finger. I am sixteen again, literary and self-conscious, and together with some friends, have just launched the second issue of a bootleg school magazine we call re!magine. (Reader, I assure you: punctuating the title in this manner is in fact very cool, this being the early benighted 2000s.) As is the nature of all second issues, it turns out to be far less ambitious – though longer in page count – than the first, a fact we don’t even try to hide. “Time has played its hand”, my teenage self writes wearily in the editor’s note, “and ahead of us lies a greater unknown”.
If memory serves me right, the cause of my flagging enthusiasm is a shortage of neither funding nor goodwill. After all, we have hit on a financial strategy of which we are justifiably proud. Each issue printed and stapled at the photocopy shop near Bishan MRT station sets us back by 80 cents, so every six copies sold for a dollar allows us to buy one contributor a plate of chicken rice (at $1.20 in the school canteen). With a print run of one hundred we can easily feed fifteen writers, who naturally also receive comps: a better rate, I should add, than what the official school newspaper is capable of offering at the time.
Covers of the (only) two issues we published before closing the magazine.
No, the real strain on my spirits is nothing so material, merely the dawning realisation that to keep any publication going requires idealism in heaps and a swimmer’s stamina. What I discover – perhaps too early, perhaps not early enough – is that proofreading, pagination and all the other minutiae of production are simply not tasks that can be sustained on the steam of enjoyment alone. Even the momentary thrill that comes from being the arbiter of literary excellence can only take you so far. Never having been one to let hard work get in the way of inertia, I am quite ready after two issues to call it quits.
And yet, and yet.
Five years later at university, I find myself ready to take on the challenge again. This time the financials are decidedly wobbly. My co-editor and I shell out for a domain name, knowing it isn’t money we’re likely to get back. There is just no way to pay anyone who writes for us, they are nearly all students and so are we. But we launch our first issue anyway, having no real sense of when or whether the next one will happen. Both of us are due to graduate, and I may even move halfway across the world. All we know is that a chance meeting at the Poetry Café has brought us here, with a name for a magazine and some seriously good poems, as well as a vague sense that we owe it to the universe to put them online.
The Kindling runs for nine issues before it peters out, on the verge of a triumphant round number. As far as stamina goes we have fared decently well, pulling off several long-distance launches including two amid a pandemic. We are proud to feature some big names – of the poetry world, that is – and equally proud to give some brilliant writers our age the chance to have their work published for the first time, at least on the Internet. When we eventually decide to stop publishing, we can’t say exactly that we have no regrets (there are always regrets!), only that we’ve both moved on, and our little magazine has run its course.
The Kindling’s calls for submissions over the years.
I am painfully aware that committing these misadventures to print in the foreword of a fresh young magazine has a definite flavour of “when I was your age…”. But my intention is not to sully these pages with anything so boring as advice. All I will say is that you already know what it takes to begin, and now what it will take to keep this thing going is an ability to hold off your answer to the question I posed at the start (from Luei En Le’s poem, ‘fourteen, through a DSLR’). Much like the act of reading itself, this suspension of disbelief will require a shot of courage. Don’t let that stop you. Keep relishing the fact.
You have wisely included an interview and afterword from Daryl Li in this issue, both gems. As meditations on your chosen theme of ‘motion’, they refract and accentuate the glow of numerous other pieces: from the real-time geographical journeys charted by Tong Yang, Ryan Ler and Amelia Pek, to the invisible migrations – into history, into the afterlife – that form the subject of poems by Meng Xiaohan, Cheryl Tan, and Phua Jiang Ni. Re-reading these last two sentences, I realise I have subconsciously borrowed the metaphor of jewellery and light from Gu Hao Gen and Shru’jay Ramango, though the most memorable visual perhaps comes from Woon Tien Eu’s ‘penguin rolling down a hill somewhere in antarctica’.
I trust readers won’t just take my word for it, but see for themselves. You, I’m afraid, must trust the same. After all is said and done, you see, after every comma and apostrophe has been picked over, all we can do is trust that these contributions (which somehow tempt us, after each last issue is done, into the unimaginable work of doing it all over again) will also compel others to embark on a similar journey, to release themselves into the seductive pull of language and be borne away. For reading, too, demands a sort of movement.
An openness, at least, to being swayed by the dream – no, the relish – of someone else. We all know this to be true. After all, that is what it means to be moved.
Read InkLink Publication’s full first issue here.