Author: Rebecca Toh

You’ve received messages from people around the world seeking to replicate Casual Poet Library in their own neighborhoods. What do you think is the universal appeal of this library, and what advice do you offer to those inspired by this model?

I think the library offers a fresh way to rethink one of our oldest problems—how to connect with other people. Having your own shelf means you get to share not just your books but also pieces of yourself. It’s like sending messages out into space. We don’t know who’s at the other end, but we’re hopeful. We’re also a little desperate because we don’t want to be alone in the universe. In the end, our oldest pain is disconnection. The universal appeal of Casual Poet Library is that it helps people alleviate some of that pain.

How do you envision the concepts of ‘nurture’, ‘community’ and ‘third spaces’ evolving in Singapore? Are you noticing a shift toward grassroots movements or collective action? How does Casual Poet Library fit into this larger ecosystem?

I do sense Singapore is shifting quickly, based on the conversations here. There’s a lot of energy. Many grassroots projects are happening everywhere; the library is just one of many. I think people are realising they can take control and build things themselves and that the only resources they truly need are conviction, willingness, a few friends and time. Money, on the other hand, can always be found somewhere, somehow.

Special thanks to Ee Ming and Mekong Review for this interview and feature.

I started the library thinking it would be all about books, but really it’s about community.

Specifically for me, it’s meant working with more than 200 people – 180 bookshelf-owners and 60 regular and ad-hoc librarians – and countless other people who’re interested in the library, who want to work with us, or who’d like to use the library to connect with their communities.

Even though I sometimes believe I stumbled into this community-building thing with the library, I realize it’s what I’ve been doing since forever.

In 2012 I was hosting a weekly two-hour radio show. The listeners of my show and I were passionately – if quite introvertedly – organized around our shared interests of music, literature, the beatniks, Leonard Cohen’s poetry and his glorious mysticism, and the cozy can’t-quite-put-your-finger-to-it magic and liminality of late-night radio. We connected in those days through, of all things, our radio station’s SMS system. It was an archaic but oddly moving way of communicating with each other.

The cafe I started as a 20-year-old also attracted a certain group of people. I think many of them were seeking out alternative spaces in which they could be more themselves, whatever that meant, during a time when Singaporean society was shifting beyond survival. The young people of that time had a lot of burning new questions that needed answering, and they were hungry to meet people who could even begin to understand these questions.

But this library, as a community, is a little different. I think it’s got to do with the stake people have in it. Our volunteer librarians can shape how the library is run. Our bookshelf-owners alter the experience of the library every time they remove or add a book or a note to their shelf. We’re playing and creating together in real-time. Not only that, we have to work, and it’s this effortful, again, can’t-quite-put-your-finger-to-it thing of having to give of yourself, that creates a strong community.

I don’t mean that this community sees each other every day. But they nevertheless feel a sense of belonging to the space and to what has been built. They don’t want to see it disappear, and they will do quite a lot to keep it going. And the more they give and help, the more fulfilling it is to be part of this community.

To quote social explorer and committed community-builder Cormac Russell, community is indeed a verb, not a noun.

Having said that, all communities are important and much-needed, regardless of how they’re built. After all, everything is community-building. Even if I were alone in this world, I’d be building a community with my mind, my soul, and the trillions of cells in my body.

The desire for communion seems to be burned into the blueprint of our being, and maybe it’d be a mistake, for most of us, to not answer this call.

I’m working on a few new projects. A few, because I am a passionate and impatient human being who wants to do a lot and a bit of everything, so every day I am learning new lessons about patience and presence, but there is a strong life force inside of me, that for a long time I tried to suppress (for reasons I won’t go into right now). I’m refusing to do that now. I want my life force to express itself fully and strongly, and for it to become a force in this world and not just a numinous light inside of me.

We all deserve to impress upon this world the imprints of our life force!

(The other day in a discussion about ghosts with my friends, we talked of ghosts being possibly just leftover energy by the living, like imprints left behind on a pillow after we freshly get out of bed. There is so much we don’t know about everything!)

One of these projects is about creating a “school” for people who dream of building a better world. What can a school be? Who can teach? Who can learn? The keyword is “can”. “Can” is a hopeful attitude, and about walking up to a wall and searching it for a door, a way to get out of the room we’re currently in, no matter how large it might seem.

This school is called OTHERWISE. It is a school for the new world. After all, a new world requires new ways of being and learning. This project will be both a response to the world we currently live in and a love letter to the human spirit – its curiosity, openness, grit, empathy, imagination.

In order to create this school, I’ve been going around talking and listening to people and learning from them. I realised I only know enough to take about two steps forward. I am therefore fully relying on the second step to take me to the third, and the third to the fourth, etc etc. That’s how most things get built no? Or least this seems to be the only way I know how to build…

I am also building a small, a tiny publisher born out of the library. It shall be called Casual Poet Press. I’m excited about this project because I’ve always wanted to be a publisher, but will I enjoy being a publisher? That’s something I will have to find out. Failure is always an option.

So that’s a quick update. How are you? Are you working on any cool projects?

“After I was attacked, I became hypersensitive to all forms of violence. I’ve never told anyone this before, but I remember a few days afterwards, I watched an animal documentary where a group of fish were captured in a huge net, and I started crying and cried for two hours. And I thought to myself: frankly, when you see the violence of the world – the migrants who die, the working class who are persecuted by people like Macron or Theresa May as they insult them, make them out to be lazy, cut the little they have …

“When you see that and the transphobia, the black people killed by police, I just think it would be indecent these days for writers to talk of anything else but violence.”

– Édouard Louis

It’s strange. We live in a very violent world, but this same violent world is also filled with so much kindness and beauty and countless things worth living and dying for.

Our life is lived in the heart of a giant, impenetrable paradox. A blackhole, a mysterious place. I almost want to say… and there is nothing we can do about it, things are weird and difficult and we are powerless, but that is just not true. In fact, could it be that we’re exactly here to do something about things?

I suspect we’re not here to build a perfect world; we’re here to build towards a better world. This gives me so much hope. For eg, at 91, Jane Goodall is still flying around the world advocating for conservation. She doesn’t need to do this, and things feel hopeless anyway, but she hasn’t given up because she believes things can be better. Not perfect, but better.

The current state of the world is terrifying, and maybe we’re on the verge of some truly horrific times, but we have to keep going. In the long run, maybe this is what our souls are here to do.

I don’t know if the human race will inevitably evolve upwards – become wiser, more loving, less violent – but I know for sure, that in each moment we are tested we have the option to revert to our basest instincts, to allow our defense mechanisms to cause harm to others, to close our eyes and ears to new knowledge and new ideas and new viewpoints that threaten our sense of self, or to take the other path.

What is this other path?

This other path points to our higher human potential to learn with humility about the things we don’t understand, and to hold wide-open space for the possibility that other people are not monsters, they are just different. And with this humility – this fragility, almost – the heart of the world can crack open, and we can then walk into each other’s lives and offer up the most precious gift possible: Our reassurance to those “monsters” on the “other” side that we believe their stories, even though we don’t understand.

Now is the time to do everything you’ve always wanted to do, now is the time to pursue your dream, now is the time to make art, now is the time to build, now is the time to get lost, now is the time to start a revolution, now is the time to be ridiculous, now is the time to be crazy, now is the time.

If not now, when?

I’m reading Robert A. Caro’s “Working”, a book about his writing process (he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his books). In the introduction he said more than once that he wrote the way he did – slowly, over many years – because “there really was no choice involved”, that he was just being himself, and there seemed to be no other way to be. He also researches his books the way he does because it “just seems to be a part of me… Looking back on my life I can see that it’s not really something I have had much choice about”.

And when he was much younger and writing in school newspapers, even going so far as to start one in elementary school, he had always written in a certain way because he “liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people. It was a vague, inchoate feeling” and that was it – he was and could only be himself, following that vague, inchoate feeling within him to its necessary conclusions.

I can relate so much to this feeling that we are in the end who we are, that there seems to be a certain essence in us that we must allow to guide us through life. If we defy this compass, we can end up in places we don’t belong. But if we trust it, follow it, we might do something as grand as fulfilling our purpose.

*

I remember when I first fell in love hard with reading, I was 17 and in junior college. I skipped quite a few recesses or went to the library almost every break I had so I could hide there and read and read and read. I had an endless appetite for books. But I loved books mainly for their words and not the stories. Words were what was attractive to me; a good sentence was downright sexy. I was crazy about words, I thought about words all the time. I sat on buses and wrote in my head, feeling the shape of my words and my sentences, and I read books and I savoured the words I read, drank, inhaled. It was a kind of pure aesthetic pleasure, quite electric in its own way. Even today it’s not the stories that get to me, but the words and the sentences.

My life is changing. I can feel it. No, in fact it is me that is changing. I am becoming more and more like a tree – stronger, surer, but also lighter at the same time. And at the heart of this tree there is an orb of light that is growing steadily. That’s me nowadays.

I took a sabbatical from my work as a photographer last year but I have a feeling my time as a commercial photographer might be coming to an end. I’ll always love photography and I’ll always be a photographer, but I feel my life force pushing me in different directions. When I tell my friends I might stop being a commercial photographer, they ask, but what will you do! And I realise how interesting that question is, and how we can limit ourselves and others when we think change is hard and things always have to be a certain way. In fact change is core to a vibrant, meaningful life, and we should expect change at any moment, without notice.

There’re many other things I want to do. I really want to share them with you, and I will, after they take on more concrete shapes. For now, know that these things are just parts of myself that have always been there – the truest parts of myself – now trying to find expression in the world as creative work, and even I am curious about the forms they will take when they finally become “real”.

I find myself missing Japan a lot these days. Maybe it’s not Japan I miss but the space and alone-ness I get to experience when I’m there. I think I miss Japan the most when there are ideas in me trying to take shape and become alive, because with all the noise around me in Singapore – both good and not so good – it’s hard for me to create, to give birth to things, or even just to properly sit with them while they grow themselves into some sort of half-way existence.

Happy to be back blogging, but even in this “rather safe space” there are things I cannot write about. How I yearn for a place where I can write about everything with full honesty, but yet still be read. Is that why people become writers? And resort to writing novels and calling whatever they write fiction? And in that way they are known without being seen.

This is very overdue, but I’ll post it anyway.

1. Passion is electricity. Enjoy the feeling of being electrified!
2. No self = freedom.
3. Life is very old and mysterious. This calls for humility.
4. Talk less so you can listen more and learn from others.
5. When you forget yourself, you can better give your time and effort to others.
6. It is better to change your old patterns before big/scary things force you to do so.
7. Although that is not always possible.
8. Everything is interesting.
9. Walking is a keystone habit that powers many good things.
10. When a creative project wants to be born, you must learn to be a good vessel and allow it to be born.
11. Falling in love comes at a cost.
12. We’re utterly alone and we’re utterly connected.
13. Always listen to your body.
14. An open heart always beats a closed one.
15. It’s painful to make mistakes, but it’s even more painful not to.
16. Wanting positive experience is a negative experience.
17. It’s okay to disappoint other people.
18. The only way to transform the world is to transform myself.
19. The world’s problems can only be met by people who genuinely care.
20. Caring is cool.
21. Life and death are a thought apart.
22. Stop trying to understand life fully. There is nothing to understand, and everything to behold.
23. Write with honesty and call it a day.
24. My definition of success – who cares?
Bonus thought: The more I fail the more I learn the more I live.

Also read: 23 thoughts and lessons from 2023 and 22 thoughts and lessons from 2022

“I think stubbornness is actually the important value. I really do. I think the people who make a difference are the ones who just refuse to be deterred, who are stubborn. They can’t be made to stop.”
— Brian Eno