Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Fulbright and Wien International Scholar; Ph.D. Brandeis University) is an Asian American/ Malaysian-Singapore writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and criticism.1 Her most recent collection of poems is Dawns Tomorrow.
My conversations with Shirley are always cheerful and full of energy. We spoke at length at the publication of In Praise of Limes in 2022, and then again just before Dawns Tomorrow in 2024. Both of us come from Peranakan families, and so we muse about cultural inheritances and the act of growing.
Interview conducted 8th November 2023.
It’s called Dawns Tomorrow – in the plural – because despite my age, I’m still learning. And I’m still growing – and not just cancer cells, right? That I don’t want to grow. But, y’know, the brain, unlike teeth, has neurogenesis – that means your brain cells can still grow no matter how old you are – isn’t that wonderful?
So Dawns Tomorrow is that part (the last section) where I’m thinking to myself – y’know Shirley, you have another fifteen years. You’re not going to write the same-old same-old style. All my life practically as a poet I was writing sonnets, and villanelles, and tercets – I was writing in strict ‘English Literary’ poetic style. And in Dawns Tomorrow I decided to let the corset loose. I had been wearing a corset – like the Victorians, remember the Victorians with their corsets?
And it was like, no! you’re no longer young, you’ve got to have a corset on right?
And so I let it loose, and my breath grew easier, my lines grew longer and much more… lucid in some ways.
I’m already thinking about a thirteenth book, which will take me a long time to do. But you know in Chinese the number thirteen is a lucky number.
You know that don’t you, Brandon, you’re enough Chinese to know that.
1. Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and a woman. She’s published numerous poetry collections; three books of short stories; two novels (Joss and Gold and Sister Swing); a children’s novel, Princess Shawl, translated into Chinese; and The Shirley Lim Collection. Her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, received the American Book Award. Author of two critical studies, she edited/co-edited Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Transnational Asian American Literature; The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1990 American Book Award winner); Writing Singapore; and other volumes; edited/co-edited Journal of Transnational American Studies and other journals. She served as Women’s Studies Chair (UCSB) and Chair Professor of English (HKU) and is Research Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. Awarded the Multiethnic Literatures of the United States Lifetime Achievement Award and UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award, she has taught at CUNY, SUNY, MIT, National Institute of Education (NTU), National Sun Yat-Sen University, National University of Singapore, and City University of Hong Kong.
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Publisher: Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne
