Eastlit Issue Seven

Editorial June 2013 is going to be a short one.

I am not sure of the garish yellow writing on the cover of the June issue of Eastlit. However, my wife said it looked good, so I will trust her better artistic judgement. I hope it does not spoil what otherwise is a nice cover.

In this issue we have mostly new writers and an artist. Plus in the editorial June 2013, I also feature a few pictures by Thai student photographer Papimol.

Pictures and Art

We are still looking for more photographs, pictures and pieces of art or any form of artistic media we can display in accessible form. The aim is to juxtapose the visual art on their own pages with the written word of the poems, fiction and non-fiction we regularly feature. If anyone can give us a hand in spreading the word for this kind of submission, please do. We aren’t bad at hitting the literary contacts, but this is a whole new aspect and it seems there are divisions in the written and visual art fields, which in my humble opinion are pretty artificial. They remain however, divisions and obstacles of reality and need to be overcome.

Journeys

by Papimol

Tomorrow is time for me to find myself on the infamous VIP bus of the 407 company from Chonburi to Nong Khai. Tomorrow is the start of something new in another side of my life. It starts with a journey like many things in life. Journeys it seems have been the seed for many a great story; the American road movie is its own genre. However, for me the romanticism of setting of alone for a multi-day journey has never inspired more than a half written autobiography and a short story of a train journey. One remains unfinished as being honest to yourself is hard enough. Being honest publicly is a whole different level of fear. The other remains unpublished and unlikely to ever see the light of day. Although meant to be a piece of fiction, it remains too highly personal.

For me more recent trips hold only vaguely amusing but uninteresting anecdotes. It has been long enough to forget the sensation of long legs crushed against the seat in front as a sleepless day or night is spent with 30 or so sleeping people on a ten hour marathon. That is probably why I have opted for a route I swore never to repeat again. Whether the same holds true for the return leg remains to be seen. But the memory of a final 20 kilometres on the back of a small 125 motorcycle at 4 AM is still there. That it was driven at speeds of over 100 kilometres an hour by a man on a drug induced state of waking reality down a potholed 8 lane highway as I clutched my bag closely is seared into my mind. Whether or not I was overcharged at the end of the windswept gallop, I am less clear on. At such times lesser issues such as money become rather unimportant. This time I am not sure it will be an experience worth repeating.

by Papimol

The long and short of it though is, I will not be around as much replying to things in the next few weeks, and if you choose to find and inform me of the (deliberately placed to check you were reading) typos in this issue, it will take a little longer for me to correct them. In fact being only on tab power, I am not sure I can. It will though be a learning experience to see exactly what can be done in terms of website control from life’s more modern pieces of technology. In the meantime, enjoy the Eastlit June issue. It does have some good pieces. As usual I hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did. Thanks to all the contributors to the June issue of Eastlit. Thanks too, to all of you reading it and supporting the writers.

Cheers

Graham