Pleasure and Risk
An interview with Mok Zining
Mok Zining is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her first book, The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books 2020), was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry. Currently, she is at work on an essay collection, The Earthmovers. She is also the Editor at Ethos Books.
What we discussed
‘Pea Madness’ by Amy Leach (from Things That Are, 2012)
Theophilus: I thought we could start with how you approach making in your life, and in your practice of writing more broadly. Do you see yourself as a maker? What does making mean to you as a writer?
Zining: I think I’m a very haphazard person. So for me, especially in this season of my life – I’m trying to adopt an attitude of whatever works, works. Earlier on, when I was doing my MFA, I had a very clear idea of what making was, which was putting disparate things together and making meaning out of that. But now, as a person, I’ve learned to be less controlling about how the making happens. I really had to learn to honour the material, rather than my process, which I used to be very adamant about.
T: What does honouring the material look like for you, or being led by the material?
Z: I think it’s first about spending a lot of time with the material. I guess interestingly, now that you ask this question, it’s also about honouring where I am as a person. The material is not just what I’ve gleaned through research, but what I’m thinking about at the current point in time, and how I’m able to think. So material is not just the content I’m working with, but also where I am right now.
I think honouring the material has to do with spending a lot of time with it, getting a sense of the shape that is in something. And I’m specifically thinking about it from a non-fiction point of view, of writing about factual things. Because it’s very easy for non-fiction, research-based writing to just come out as a factsheet of something. But for me honouring the material means finding the story inside this granular representation of the thing itself.
T: It calls to mind this idea of a sculptor who starts with a large piece of stone and finds a shape within the stone itself.
Z: Yeah.
T: You mentioned briefly earlier that while doing your MFA, you had a clearer idea of this practice of craft. I found that interesting because we often associate craft with formal training or rigour. What role do you think that has played in your development, or how you think about your craft? Do you now feel freed of it, now that you’ve left it behind?
Z: So when I was on my MFA, I thought of craft as curating — such as curating different things and putting them in conversation. Sometimes I wish I could just slot myself back into that state of being, because in retrospect it feels like it was easy, though I’m sure it was not at the time.
It’s not that I feel like I’m freed of craft. I think that I’m actually developing a new understanding of craft that’s still quite nascent, developing an idea of craft as being specific to the material — going back to your sculpting analogy, sculpting plastic is very different from the process of sculpting marble, for example. So the craft has to change with the material as well. I think I’m learning a new language for craft in that way.
T: You also mentioned this idea of material being both outward and inward — research material, as well as your own emotional response to it. Which comes first?
Z: I’m certain actually that the inward thing comes first. My process has always been like, oh, this is interesting. Then after that initial interest, my interest in the material itself takes over, and the material takes a certain precedence over my personal interest. I think my first draft is always much more factual, and contains a lot more research. Then in the second draft I tend to find the story that’s within it, and a big part of that has to do with my own reading of the material, as well as the courage to let go of the factual, solid base.
T: In light of my upcoming Supper House project I’ve been thinking, as you know, about how furniture — as something that’s so mundane in our lives, like a chair or table, that supports our weight — is also the product of craft. And in these everyday objects you may not always notice the craft of the maker, but it’s there.
When you observe pieces of writing, or when you’re engaged in writing yourself, how obvious is the hand of the maker for you? Do you actually notice the workings? I guess I’m trying to come back to what you mentioned earlier about craft as curation. Should I be noticing the curator, or should they be so subtle that I take the curation as a given?
Z: I think of it less as how obvious the craft is, and more as what the craft is doing. Is it self-consciously taking the curation as a process, or consciously trying to hide the curation and for what purpose? It comes back to intention. I’m a very conceptual person I guess, so for me I think that the obviousness of craft is just another tool we have in our writing, that adds to what you want to be showing. In The Orchid Folios, for instance, I think the curation is very obvious. Part of that is because Orchids is also about the process of writing narrative — so it’s very self-consciously affirming that process. I guess I don’t think of it as good craft versus bad craft, but whether it aligns with intention.
T: I want to pick up on what you’ve just said about Orchids, a book that is very much about the process by which narratives form. You said earlier that you approach your work as a writer as trying to arrange disparate things together. Now Orchids is partly historical narrative — narrative about empire — and a lot of that seems tied up with power; the power to bring the story together, and tie the story together for someone else. How do you grapple with that?
Z: Yeah, totally. I was thinking a lot about the crafting of historical narrative, of whom and for what purpose, and by whom. Hence all of this stuff about floristry, you know, the floristry poems are actually about the craft of writing. I feel like that’s very consistent with what we’ve been saying.
T: It’s an interesting metaphor though, especially because flowers and plants often escape the best intentions of their gardeners. You leave them alone for a day, and they take on a life of their own — or perhaps more accurately, the life that they’ve always had!
Z: I didn’t realise until I wrote Orchids that flowers were also instruments of power. What emerged from that understanding was this idea of craft as a way of tracing the power networks, that were involved in turning flowers into these instruments of power. That’s what I mean also by honouring the material — I guess that each topic has its own story that demands its own craft, and in Orchids what I was trying to do, or you could say what part of the craft was about, was trying to reveal the networks that these orchids travelled in.
T: This aspect of orchids, how they play into these networks of power, is interesting because the subject matter that you’ve chosen for your next project — sand — is something that’s also very caught up in networks of power, and the projection of power.
Z: That’s actually what I’m struggling with, and why I feel my craft is changing. The similarity is that sand is also about power, and about things that travel, specifically, within these networks of power. But I found myself very unable to curate things around it, for several reasons.
The first, I think, is that sand is very much the material on which we stand, and curating it in conversation with something more abstract just doesn’t feel right to me. In other words, it doesn’t feel right to use sand to say something else. Whereas in Orchids I use orchids to say something else, and I don’t feel like that is valid with sand. So, I’m still just figuring out what sand is asking me to do, really.
T: If I could just probe that a little bit more — what is it about sand that makes it hard? You mentioned that it’s the material on which we stand, and I guess you’re alluding there to its ubiquity, but maybe also to how it seems irreducible? Is that what you’re getting it — the difficulty of breaking down sand into something else?
Z: I guess the thing about sand is that once it gets reduced to a metaphor for something else, that’s quite a problematic move, because what you’re doing is you’re reducing, like, exploitative practices of sand mining to a metaphor, or reducing the idea of territorial expansion to a metaphor… and to me that feels very problematic.
T: In a sense the things that sand is already saying feel so urgent that they should not be supplanted by metaphor?
Z: Yeah.
T: Have you explored and discarded other topics for similar reasons? Or can you think of other topics that you’ve previously landed on because you were interested in for other reasons, but realised that they were hard to crack?
Z: Gosh, yes. There’s this one poem that I wrote quite early on, and I felt that I kind of got what it was going to be about — but I found that very hard to write and think through. The poem is inspired by a photo of my grandmother and my aunts, except one of my aunts is dressed in the clothes of a boy. This was before my grandmother then went on to give birth to three sons, and this was a practice that was intended as sort of like a prayer for the next child to be a son. With that project, I’ve just never been able to figure it out. I come back to it periodically — it’s been, like, ten years now — and I can’t crack it. It just feels like more and more questions emerge the more time has passed.
T: From what you’ve described about this photo and the practice it depicts, it feels like it demands grappling with what it is, rather than as metaphor? Similar to what we’ve just said about sand.
Z: I’d actually written a narrative poem. It was going to be a narrative project, but there were a lot of issues that I wasn’t ready, and I still am not ready to tackle, I think.
T: I’m getting a bigger sense, from all we’ve talked about so far, about the place of metaphor and comparison in your writing. It feels like that’s quite fundamental to you, as we said at the start — the act of putting things side by side, and speaking of something else that might be more difficult to access initially, through the first image or reference.
Actually, this was the first thing that struck me about the essay you sent over too, Amy Leach’s ‘Pea Madness’. I read the whole thing in one go, and my first thought was, wow, this is such a great metaphor. But then I realised, this is, emphatically, not a metaphor. Because the image is so fine-grained and has so many dimensions — it’s not one single metaphor anymore, I just have to see it as an essay about peas. It resists being seen as metaphor.
Z: I think you’ve really hit the question that, no matter what project, I’m asking: what is metaphor, what does metaphor do?
With Orchids, funnily enough, one of my first goals was to try and depict the orchid as an orchid, rather than as metaphor. Because the orchid has been so overdetermined, in its own way, as a metaphor for hybridity and exoticism, it creates this tangle that I really wanted to get away from. And in the end, the exit I found from the tangle of this metaphor — which is really a tangle of postcolonialism, postcolonial exoticism and all that – the way I exited that metaphor was through fiction. Through writing the story of this fictional forest, which has a very personal relationship with this orchid.
With sand, I think a lot about how sand cannot just be a metaphor, for the reasons we’ve talked about. But I also think about what metaphors enable us to grasp, what metaphors do to our brains and what kinds of thoughts they open up. That’s why I’m so drawn to Amy Leach. There’s a way in which, as you say, her material stands on its own. The essay is about peas. Yet when you look closer, it’s the words she uses that activate certain associations in our brains. So the reading experience is for us, thinking about the pea as a metaphor for something, even though she’s not saying that the pea is a metaphor for longing, or desire. It’s us — we the readers, because of the words she’s using — who are led to then think for ourselves, and the peas are stand-ins, I think.
T: One aspect of this essay that actually reminded me of Orchids was how she balanced the everyday nature of peas, which is for so many of us really the first vegetable you eat as a child, with the more technical and historical aspect of peas. What are your thoughts about the way she does this, and how does this resonate with how you decide to handle heavy material?
Z: I think you were the one who sent me this meme about creative nonfiction — which went something like, “I remember the hamburger I used to have at this stand…” and then the next paragraph immediately jumps to, “the hamburger was invented in this or that year”. I think there is a way of handling nonfiction with these very obvious jump-cuts, that nowadays, no longer feels new. In fact it feels a little corny and clichéd, an easy way to tape two things together.
But with Leach’s essay, there are no obvious scenes in this. The craft that she’s using very much unfolds in the process and there’s a certain amount of courage in that, something I really admire. In a way this essay itself is kind of pea-like, because it’s searching for some kind of unknown meaning out there. It’s very open to new lattices of meaning, to use the metaphor she uses. That’s something I admire about the risks that she takes, craft-wise. It also feels like she’s not doing this as a cheap trick, and it doesn’t capitalise on the relatively unknown history of something.
T: This expression you used, about the risks that she takes — what does risk mean in craft for you? Is it the risk of your experiment not landing with the reader? Or the risk of things not cohering when you bring them together?
Z: I think it’s the risk of not planning, right, and the risk of finding a craft in the process. Obviously, going back to the sculpting analogy, it’s a much bigger risk when you’re carving marble — it’s a much more expensive material. But in writing the risk is lower, in the sense that you’re not irrevocably destroying the material that you’re working on. You’re just finding your way, again honouring that material. So risk is about letting things develop without planning.
T: Very un-Singaporean.
Z: I actually feel that this came up too in one of the first conversations we ever had about writing — I’m just remembering that now! Very un-Singaporean indeed.
T: Actually, how much do you plan — if at all?
Z: Have you met me? In most areas of life, I’m not a planner — in all areas of life, really.
T: I can attest to that! I guess there’s something to be said about craft as a way of responding to accidents, right, or responding to chance. And in a way, the better of a writer you are, the more able you are to land on your feet when you find or confront something unexpected.
I’m thinking about the creative writing kids that we’ve both taught, and how I think, for most of them, the learning of writing is a lot about learning to plan your writing. You are taught to have a head, body, and tail, start with an overall concept, and all of that. Do you think that’s where we all begin, till we slowly get more confident, and leave the lattices behind?
Z: Definitely not how I began! I think structure can be a nice scaffold — and even in Amy Leach’s essay, maybe she didn’t plan everything but she does draw on some formal conventions, like the volta. She has a very clear volta at the end. So not necessarily planning, but drawing on convention. I think for me, my first writing thing was imitation – I just imitated things, chose a part of something that I wanted to imitate, and tried my hand at it. I tried planning Orchids as a speculative poetry project, but it just fell flat on its face, and I thought okay then, back to the drawing board.
T: This idea of drawing on convention or imitating convention, I guess that’s how we learn. Though maybe it’s not so much about planning, but having something that worked before. And having the assurance that if I try this, whatever I write will work too. The irony of course is that writing works best when it surprises the reader, in some unexpected way.
Z: I mean, it’s actually really interesting — it makes me think about why the sonnet endures, while already the creative nonfiction ‘leap’ between paragraphs feels so dated. It makes me think of why some things endure while others don’t.
With the sonnet, we’re all trained to know what a sonnet is now, and part of the pleasure is looking out for where the volta will be. Is it going to be a surprise? Which is why one of the reasons why sonnets are so hard to write, and why I’ve never been able to write a sonnet. But I think that there can be surprises within convention as well, you know. Speaking of sonnets, one has to mention Sonnets from the Singlish, and also UnFree Verse. What that anthology was doing was laying out, or attending to, the ways in which form is not necessarily static in that way.
T: I guess form provides us a staging ground where we can bring things together, form is the boxing ring into which we bring two ideas.
Z: Yeah, and the limitation means that if you’re using a certain form, you’re taking a risk. Because limitations bring risks. They’re not a complete free-for-all, and I think there’s pleasure in that, pleasure in seeing how people navigate those risks.
T: What’s pleasurable for you as a writer — what do you derive pleasure from in writing?
Z: Oh my gosh. So many things. I think with Amy Leach, the thing she makes me feel most is the sense of wonderment. She brings me back to when I was a kid, listening to fables, and there’s so much enchantment and wonder.
There are writers who can enchant a whole form. I was not at all a big fan of sonnets until I read Patricia Smith, and all of her formal poems read so naturally, and she even uses them as narrative poems, using vernacular as well. It’s just shocking how she’s able to bring that into the sonnet form, really integrate the vernacular. So that’s very pleasurable to me… I love long novels. I like things that immerse me in their worlds. These are some things that are pleasurable to me. Weird stuff. Really oddball things.
T: I feel like the thread that runs through all these different examples is surprise — what disrupts your sense of being planned, or expectation.
Z: Yeah, a sense of play as well.
T: When we were talking about things that are hard to make metaphors from, I wonder if that’s because there’s so little room for surprise already? Or because there doesn’t seem to be room for play, with all that you already have to grapple with.
Z: Not that I haven’t tried! With sand, especially. There was a point where sand really became a metaphor for me. At the time I was just, like, not in a good state. And it became a metaphor for me in a way that was not too great for my brain as well. Everything to me began to seem granular and scattered. I think it’s not just that the material itself asks for us to not make it into a metaphor, but also that metaphors themselves can be dangerous — they can take things too far. At some point they either become too much, too stretched, or just venture into delulu-land.
T: There’s something in the architecture of metaphors that require them to still be rooted, or grounded.
Z: I think it was Borges who said “there are no new metaphors”. Maybe not in those words exactly, but he was getting at the idea that the metaphors that are metaphors have already been said. Everything else is cheap. Obviously I don’t think it’s such a stark binary — but essentially, well, yes.
Presented at the Supper House installation at Journey East, Sept 2025.
