We’re back in Vancouver, at that special time of the year. In our first and second week the last wave of cherry blossoms came, the kanzan cultivar, with its thick pom-poms of pink flowers. We had a period of cold, intensely sunlit days, and so the blossoms remained on the trees for a couple of weeks, only finally falling when the rain came at the end of the month. In the meantime, leaves had started to come: the horse chestnuts first, little green tents opening into splayed segments like the fingers of huge hands, then the maples, and finally the linden tree outside our balcony. As I write this, its leaves are still small, not much bigger than coins, and intensely green. Back in Vancouver, we return to a greater sense of connection to the land. In the West End, we can walk to the shops, and cycle on the seawall and to market. Once a week, more if the weather is fine, I’ll ride up the hill to UBC, and pause at the park on Discovery Street to look out over the city. We have a car here, but after a month we haven’t yet used a quarter of a tank of gasoline. We cook for ourselves, using simple ingredients – fish, eggs, vegetables – that have an intense taste that doesn’t need sauces or spicing up. Before I left Singapore I finally had my HealthySg onboarding, and one target I devised with my doctor was to lose a little weight. After a month here, I’ve surpassed my target to such an extent that I wondered if my family doctor’s scales here were faulty. 

In a few weeks we’ll fly off to the United Kingdom, to visit family and my parents’ grave, and also, for the first time for more than a decade, to cross the Channel visit what those parents would, in my childhood, call the Continent. In this in-between time, I’ve been planning, and also revising some of the work I’ve written over the last year. My scholarly article on Rajaratnam came back from the journal I submitted it to with a number of very useful suggestions. At the same time, I’ve been working on a shorter, more journalistic piece for a wider audience, and the editors of the publication also sent me thoughts on how the essay could be improved. In the past, I’ve always found revising one of the most difficult parts of writing. I write slowly, with frequent pauses and restarts, so that my first draft is a very polished product. When I get feedback, often a month or two or more after I’ve finished writing, I’m often struck by the insight of my readers, and agree with them that revisions would make the writing better. But I also find it difficult to return to the process of writing, to re-enter the world of creation that I’d previously inhabited. That world isn’t entirely driven by conscious thought, but also by a series of associations that I follow: I often rework and remould the text not following a rationalised plan, but because it feels right. It’s difficult for me to invite the comments by readers into this world, to rekindle, perhaps, that moment of creative energy in motion. In the past, I’ve found I often made only superficial changes to a text to satisfy readers, but had the vague feeling that I hadn’t fully addressed their comments. Time pressure, too, drove me to rush through revisions and move on to the next project.

In this new phase of life, I have more time, and I’ve belatedly discovered a method of revising that works much better for me. I first look closely comments from my readers. With academic readers’ reports, in particular, there’s some sorting to be done. Readers are generous in giving their time, but one flaw I notice is a frequent attempt not only to locate the weaker points in an essay, but to propose to rewriting the essay as the reviewer would have done, making it their work. In addition, not all suggestions can be taken on board, and indeed reports contradict each other. You can’t satisfy everyone, but I do weigh each comment, and consider it carefully, and decide on the few comments I’ll reject, the suggestions and I’ll accept, and also the comments that locate areas that need work, but indicate problems that I may solve in a different way from those suggested by the reviewer. I make notes. I let things stew. I re-read my original essay. And then I begin writing on the topics identified, freewriting, again proceeding associationally, and following patterns of narrative and metaphor, and not worrying for the moment about how this will fit the essay. The next time I return to the text, I’ll go back to the original essay, and then begin to think about how the ideas, thoughts, associations and felt experience enter the essay. 

This process is much slower. At the end of a few hours of work, I may only have a couple of retooled paragraphs. Yet it’s also worked for me for fiction, which in the past I’ve found particularly difficult to revise. I’m still not quite sure where all this will lead. After my intense burst of creativity in Singapore, there’s quietness here, and I almost feel I can revise and revise forever. In the last few days the Vancouver rain’s returned, bringing a strange seasonal normalcy to a precarious world. We were at our neighbourhood house today having breakfast with other volunteers before doing some community litter-picking, and I found myself looking at a series of drawings children in the playgroup had produced. There were pictures of flowers, and birds, and what seemed to be an otter, although it might have been a seal, yellow suns like dandelions with orange rays radiating out from their thick, over-coloured centres. The teacher had also been trying to encourage the children to write, and had asked them to print out a phrase in painfully-formed letters, which one of the children had transcribed as “spring has sprug,” in a tightly-knitted script that left no space for an added “n.” Oddly, this perfectly described my mood: being moved forward, but with the sense of something missing, still with a second sight, looking elsewhere. So spring has sprug here, obstinately, despite everything that is happening in the world, and after that time of suspension in Singapore we’re back to the rhythm of the seasons, the tall cream pyramids of pink-cored flowers now rising on the horse chestnuts, the little leaves of vine maples like stars against the sky in the forest, the jade-green living fossils of horsetails rising up by the sides of woodland paths in the park as we pass.