Jason Erik Lundberg is a Literary Fiction Editor at Epigram Books, one of the bigger publishing companies in Singapore. He is also the Founding Editor for LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. Being one of the more prominent writers in Singapore with many publications doing well across bookstores in Singapore, Jason is one of the people we got in touch with in order to better understand what drives him. Turns out, doing an interview with him helped us to better understand how different spaces in memory and experience are crystalised in writing!
What would you say
your reason (or motivation) for writing is?
It's the best way I know of to make sense of the world
around me. I'm also not half-bad at writing, so it makes sense to keep at it.
You seem to write a
lot about the local context and Singaporean society. What is it about the
culture here that you feel is worth exploring or voicing?
Singapore is in a truly unique situation in that it comfortably
embodies a confluence of both East and West, so that what may be familiar to a
foreigner such as myself is often put in an unfamiliar context, and vice versa.
This is also what the best kind of speculative fiction does, and so that
mirroring is a very rich vein to mine in my writing. It is also a culture that
is largely unknown to readers in the USA, where I'm from, and part of me feels
like showing off this cool place in which I live.
Besides this, what
are some of the things that your writing deals most with, and why?
I try to continually bring up the question of what makes us
who we are, as well as the factors that lead to an alteration in identity. Not
that I have the answers, but I think it's important to keep the questions
alive, whether this is done through the mouthpiece of an alcoholic, talking
wombat or a steampunk re-envisioning of the Lady White Snake legend.
You studied English
and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. What was it like to
study Creative Writing? – I ask this because personally I’ve always been
curious about how something like writing could be quantified and taught in
lessons.
The craft of writing can be taught—the mechanics of
sentences, the application of pacing, the layering of imagery—all of which is
important especially for emerging writers. You can have the most imaginative
ideas in the world, but if you can't string a sentence together, no one will
want to read your work. So the creative writing classes I took in high school
and as an undergraduate were very helpful in showing me how to hone those
skills.
But writing is not just about craft; a story can be
perfectly sculpted but completely lack soul. There must be an alchemical fusing
of craft and talent in order to elevate a piece of fiction to art, and very
often, the discovery of this admixture can only be done once the fundamentals
of craft are in place, away from the classroom, in that quiet place in which
the writer puts one word after the other.
As an editor, would
you say that the things you edit or come across in your job have any influence
on your own writing?
I would like to say no, that I safely partition my book
editing and anthology work from my writing side, but I can't deny that anything
we read seeps into us, even if it’s just a little bit. I don't know of any
overt influence, but I'm sure that small, subtle things have crept into my
fiction without me knowing.
Tell us about how you
conceive some of the ideas for your books.
This changes depending on the book. My 2011 collection Red Dot Irreal compiles my Singaporean
short fiction; my 2012 collection The
Alchemy of Happiness gathers three linked stories, and puts them together
with a hybrid-essay on the impact of speculative fiction and a wide-ranging
interview; and my brand new collection, Strange
Mammals, is a representative accounting of my past decade as a writer.
My novel, A Fickle and Restless Weapon (which I am currently
revising), came about when I started to consider the nature of terrorism and
the insidious insistence on governments stripping away civil liberties in the
name of security. My upcoming novella, The
Diary of a Man Who Disappeared, is a close examination of the influence of
culture on identity, and the porousness of reality.
It's all quite varied, and there's no systematic way in
which I've come up with each project. Coming up with the ideas is not even the
point; it's how you execute those ideas through the writing itself that
matters.
Which authors most
influence your work?
This is always a trap of a question, because I read so
widely and have so many favorite authors. But the ones from whom I've taken
direct influence over the years are Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Kelly Link,
Italo Calvino, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, and Salman Rushdie. All of these
writers have worked within the realm of the fantastic, and created works of
literature that have taken up residence inside of me, infecting me with
virulent narratives that have forever changed the way I see the world.
