updated June 2025

The 2014 Singapore Writers Festival is “The Prospect of Beauty”. This year’s program has a schedule of ten days, 138 local and 69 international writers, and 280 events. Aside from attending talks, panel discussions, and Meet the Author (with Karen Joy Fowler), I also bought tickets to dine with with American author and activist Naomi Wolfe and Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

The festival also got me to read and re-read some books, like I did for the previous Singapore Writers Festival I attended. Out of the three books by Naomi Wolf I’ve read – Beauty Myth, Fire with Fire, and Vagina – I re-read parts of the last one. I also added additional books to my shelves, including Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Outside, and Winter Count, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Paul Muldoon’s Poems 1968 – 1998.

I picked up and finished We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves before her event and was glad to have. While the dining event with Paul Muldoon was more intimate, it was also casual and easy conversation. I mostly listened. With Naomi Wolf, it was a luncheon, with some serious topics broached. I did really enjoy both of these festival events and recommend them. This is one of the many things I appreciated about Singapore. As an international city, it continues to bring interesting and fascinating people to our shores while also offering many intimate settings.

Karen Joy Fowler | Barry Lopez | Paul Muldoon | Naomi Wolf

The Prospect of Beauty Brochure

Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez, Nature and Human Nature
National Museum of Singapore, Gallery Theatre
November 9, 2014 at 11.30Am

After attending Barry Lopez’s talk and meeting him, I left with a signed copy of Outside and Arctic Dreams and went to Flutes at Fort Canning for lunch. Barry may be the most famous for this book, which won the 1986 National Book Award. In his talk, he spoke about storytelling and the storyteller. Last year, he wrote what he called his most challenging piece. Published by Harper, Sliver of Sky: Confronting the Trauma of Sexual Abuse [trigger warning] takes us into a part of his world that is not as well known. He spoke about how his “almost daily contact there with wild animals, the physical separation of the house from the homes of my neighbours, the flow of a large white-water river past the property, the undomesticated land unfolding for miles around, the rawness of the weather at the back door – all of it fed a feeling of security.”

I don’t usually research authors as I prefer to read their work separate of their life. Of course, the storyteller is the storytelling. I appreciated even more his insight into our world and the work he had done to heal this unspeakable horror.

We need others to bring us back into the comity of human life. This appears to have been the final lesson for me – to appreciate someone’s embrace not as forgiveness or as an amicable judgment but as an acknowledgment that, from time to time, private life becomes brutally hard for every one of us, and that without one another, without some sort of community, the nightmare is prone to lurk, waiting for an opening.

Barry Lopez, Sliver of Sky

When I updated Here to Explore Our World website, I discovered that in 2020, Barry Lopez died at the age of 75. In an NPR article I read, the writer Dave Blanchard included the following quote from Barry that particularly moved me.

It’s so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable.

Barry Lopez

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The Singapore Writers Festival began as a biennial festival in 1986. It is a multi-day multi-lingual event that has brought to us a variety of events to meet writers and creative talents from Singapore and beyond.

The Singapore Writers Festival 2014
October 31 to November 9, 2014