The Kuching Writing Workshop, Dec 17, 2011

Last Saturday was the “Turn your Personal Experiences into Published Articles” workshop in Kuching.  The turnout was about half of what we had in KK due to it being a last minute arrangement and too close to Christmas.  It also fell on finals day at Open University (and at least one other university); so many people who had expressed an interest couldn’t attend.  Those who did make it, including Charles from Miri, got a lot of writing done.  In fact Charles, who had attended the same workshop in KK in August, felt this one was better, maybe because he completed his first draft. 

In KK, like many writers who only write on computer, he seemed to have trouble writing longhand.  Writing longhand, however, can be liberating.  You just keep going to the end instead of reworking the beginning over and over to perfection (some never get to the end and just give up on the story.)  At the workshop, after all the pre-writing prompting that we use on your story, by the time I let them write, after they had already been thinking about narrative for about an hour, they were raring to go.

Charles did bring me another story to edit, which is the best way to improve as a writer.  Get some direct feedback, some guidance to take your writing to the next level. Consider it an investment into your writing future.  When I began, I hired someone to critique my first 20 or so stories, and the better ones ended up in that original collection Lovers and Strangers (1993 Heinemann Asia). 

Also attending the workshop was Allen, a photographer interested in travel writing, and Jasmine who has an interest in copywriting and who first came across me on a Malaysian airlines flight when she read my short story, “Merdeka Miracle” that I wrote with Lydia Teh and Tunku Halim.  Brenden, who’s studying in KL, was the youngest, who I first met at the 2009 MPH Short Story workshop in Kuching.

In the afternoon session we had Edrow who not only came with his 18-year-old daughter Joan, but had already completed a novel and had even been submitting it to UK agents!  After the workshop we talked about the whole finding-an-agent process and some alternatives.  It can take some time and plenty of rewrites.  Then there was my French friend Annie, who wrote a nonfiction manuscript about her experiences in Borneo, and writes a blog.  She has already blogged about the workshop, which she called “so refreshing; a tonic boost really.”

As I told the participants at the beginning of the workshop, you may know the beginning of your story as you begin to write today, but you may not know the full ending—where that story will take you years from now.  I used the “Mat Salleh” story from Lovers and Strangers Revisited as an example.  That story had its beginning when I visited my ex-in-laws in Malaysia for the first time while still living in the US.  I then took two correspondence courses offered by Writer’s Digest, one on the Short Story and the other, Advanced Short Story. 

Getting some helpful feedback, I kept reworking the story, glad that I had kept a journal and took a lot of photographs.  When I moved to Malaysia, “Mat Salleh” became not only my first published short story in Malaysia, but also my first published short story in the UK—in My Weekly (they even ran the story with colour photos).  When it was published in Lovers and Strangers (1993 Heinemann Asia), I thought that was the end of the story, especially after a pair of publishers bought out the publisher and dropped its Writing in Asia series. 

Twelve years later “Mat Salleh” and the revised collection, Lovers and Strangers Revisited (2005 Silverfish) was taught at USM in Penang.  The collection was republished a third time by MPH in 2008 and even went on to win the 2009 Popular Reader’s Choice award.  I thought that was the end of the story—a rather nice ending, too.  But Lovers and Strangers Revisited got translated into French as Trois Autres Malaisie.

Then I got an email last week and that old version of “Mat Salleh” in that original collection caught the eye of a film director at Ohio University in the US and they wanted to film the story.  After talking to the head of the film department, I suggested that for their purpose, the revised version of “Home for Hari Raya” might be a better choice, and they loved it.  So you never know the full ending of your story, where it’ll take you over the years and even decades, but the beginning you can start at a writing workshop.  You just need to get it started and see it through completion, draft after draft.

So, what have you written lately?  If you lack the discipline to start something new on your own, then sign up for one of my workshops.   Or any workshop that just happens to be in your area.   Good luck with your writing!


*Announcement latest workshops:  Writing Your Life Stories Workshop—Kuching! 23 June 2012 (with links to other workshops and writing tips!) and also a workshop KK on 17 June 2012!

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

The Expat - July 2009

Interview by Gigi Ivanna



Click on picture to read.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

“Mat Salleh”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

If I have a favorite story in Lovers and Strangers Revisited it would have to be “Mat Salleh” for sentimental reasons. It’s my first short story, written back in 1984 while still living in the US, my first published story (in the New Straits Times, January 28, 1986), my first story published overseas (My Weekly, May 23 1987, in the UK, with color photographs of my first wedding!), plus it’s fine memory meeting my former in-laws and extended family for the first time, with a surprise wedding.

The original title was “Mat Salleh: A Malaysian Encounter”, and I didn’t even know the story was published until a relative contacted us the following week. I had to go from house to house asking if any of my neighbors had the NST! In the UK, the editor changed the title to “Meeting the Family – The Malaysian Way”. By the time it appeared in Lovers and Strangers (Heinemann Asia, 1993) I had shortened it to “Mat Salleh”.

“Mat Salleh” is a non-fiction narrative that I crafted into a short story; however, I kept to the truth thus making it a non-fiction short story, the only one in the collection. This story has remained a favorite for a lot of readers, particularly the Malays, as well as those married to Malaysians, or even those who have a Western relative in their family and have shared a similar experience of everyone in the family coming out to meet the new mat salleh for the first time.

I first wrote “Mat Salleh” while still living in the US after I took a correspondence course, on writing the short story from Writer’s Digest, so a lot of the initial details were fuzzy. The photographs I took and the diary I kept were a big help. Once I moved to Malaysia and visited the kampong again, I was able to add in more ambiance and some details I had overlooked, as well as finetune the rest, making the descriptions less general and more specific to the kampong and to Parit, Perak. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, being at the physical location does wonders for the writer.

By beginning the story on the drive to the kampong, I was able to work in a little backstory and contrast not only the climate and scenery but also my former wife’s first visit to the US to meet her in-laws, and also our reasons for coming back (her father’s lingering illness) so by the time we arrived, the story is ready to move forward. One of the problems I had initially was there were two many immediate relatives involved, three elder brothers and elder sister and their respective spouses plus several uncles and aunts who lived nearby or even across the street, and all those nieces and nephews! So I focused only on a handful necessary to the story.

In the original published story I added an epilogue stating that my father-in-law had passed away two months after I had left and that a year and a half later, we had moved to Malaysia. In Lovers and Strangers, I worked the fact that he had passed away into the final sentence, by saying “Although he died shortly after…” In the Silverfish version, I left that out, because in an earlier paragraph it was implied that he would soon die, when I stated, “I knew he would never get a chance to spend…” so I felt that would be sufficient. I didn’t want the story to end on a negative note. Instead I focused on his positive reaction to my small monetary gift and my feeling like one of the family, which was the thrust of the story.

By the time I revisited the story in 2005, I had been divorced from my ex-wife for seven years and remarried to someone else from Sarawak for three years, so revisiting all the kampong-based stories were a bittersweet experience, especially “Mat Salleh”. As I wrote in the forward to Lovers and Strangers Revisited, “Still, I kept faithful to the original story and to the other stories, recalling how I felt back when I first created them. I came to appreciate these memories, particularly the kampong visits to my then mother-in-law’s house, as privileged experiences.”

I expanded the kitchen scene by including the monitor lizard and Yati reminiscing about the time she and her brother had killed a cobra. I felt, however, that I needed a new scene, a transition after the wedding, something that would show my efforts of trying to fit into the family. While thumbing through the photographs of that first visit, I came upon a photograph of me holding a long bamboo pole. Then I remembered the time that I learned how to cut down a coconut with the nieces and nephews, who played an important part in the story. This would also show another side to them, as well.

The actual wedding itself was on Christmas Day, which made the event for me even more memorable. Ask me the one Christmas that I would never forget, and it would have to be this non-Christmas event in a Muslim country that I wrote about in “Mat Salleh”.

As a footnote, one of my former nieces that I wrote about all those years ago, recently contacted me out of the blue, after having come across my website. I’m sure she’s going to love this story, and perhaps share it with her own children about that time her uncle from America came to visit the family, a memory that goes all the way back to 1983.

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here is a review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited: The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited in Borneo Talk, Oct-Dec 2008

Borneo Talk, Oct-Dec 2008:

Lovers and Strangers Revisited
MPH (228 pages) Paperback RM32.90

Robert Raymer lives in Sarawak where he teaches creative writing at University Malaysia Sarawak. The American-born Raymer likes to write short stories that give people a truly personal glimpses of Malaysia. With his keen observation to detail he is able to capture the nuances of the locals from a foreign perspective, and in doing so he helps Malaysian readers
understand what the "Mat Salleh" sees in us and our country. There are 17 stories that deal with love, family, and culture with a few being semi-autobiographical in nature.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited in Cleo, November '08

On Thursday, 30 October, I had heard about the review in Cleo from Shirley at MPH, and that afternoon while getting lunch at Unimas, I noticed that the lady I was to pay money to was reading a magazine. I thought what are the odds that she's reading Cleo and the latest issue? But curiosity got the best of me and I asked what she was reading. Cleo. Then I noticed the month. November! This must be The Secret -- The Law of Attraction -- at work. I mumbled something incoherent about wanting to look through the magazine to see the review for my book and she gave me this, "Huh?" look. Finally on page 283 I found it and showed her the review. "That's me," I said, and pointed out my name, paid for my food, and left.

I have a feeling the next time I go back there, she's going to have a copy of my book, waiting for me to sign, and that's all right by me!

What the Cleo review says:

Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Robert Raymer

(MPH Publishing)

After chalking up more than 20 years as a resident of melting pot Malaysia, transplanted American Raymer merges observation and personal experiences in his latest book, which is really the third revised editon of his collection of short stories Lovers and Strangers Revisited. With two new stories, Raymer has revised the earlier written tales to give them a timeless feel. Ours is a unique scenario - various races living next to one another, interacting daily, each with its own endearing and most certainly annoying idiosyncrasies; it's no wonder we captured this Mat Salleh's imagination. Raymer's stories remind us that, nosely or nice, Malaysians are an undeniably colourful bunch!

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I