The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with David Wong Hsien Ming

By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

To testify to the beauty and truth in moments, feelings, persons.

Tell us about your most recent book project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

My debut collection, For the End Comes Reaching, just had its launch at the Singapore Writers Festival. It’s a dossier of elegies; I wanted to explore what I see as the paradox of possession, the sense of loss that pervades each having, the sense that to live or to love is to simultaneously partake in the eventual loss of it all.

Describe your writing aesthetic.

The idea of the volta in sonnets is something I use a lot; I’m preoccupied with turns of phrases, dualities and contradictions. I also draw from the lyric tradition, and am fond of half-rhymes, hyphens, and creating portmanteau words.